An aircraft on a flight may not maintain the same identifier/callsign for the entirety of that one flight.
Famously, President Richard Nixon departed Washington DC on Air Force One bound for California. In flight over Missouri, his resignation took effect and Gerald Ford was sworn in as President. When that happened, the callsign of the flight changed to SAM 2700.
When Jordan Mechner wrote Karateka for the Apple ][, he used an array of pointers to rows. A team member realized that by inverting the order of the array, all graphics would appear upside down.
Broderbund agreed to ship that "upside down" version on the backside of the single-sided floppy, so that if you booted it upside down it played upside down.
Firstly: I'm a fan of Harbour Air's work and their electrification. Have flown that airline.
Retrofitting electrical flight to a 1950s airframe will be, in the long run, not a great use of the technology.
Those planes were designed around having a single heavy powerplant up front driving the propeller, and fuel largely distributed along the center of gravity (in the wings) so as not to adversely alter flight characteristics over the trip. The electrified Beaver stores its batteries in the fuselage; of course there is no change in mass/CG over the flight with electric, but all that fuel tank space in the wings is going to waste. The fact that these are floatplanes make charging/battery replacement tasks at the dock challenging and restrict options.
A clean sheet design, with multiple distributed smaller motors and more options for battery placement, will be a significant improvement.
I was there as well. I punched the cards and read the core dumps and programmed in machine language using the front panel switches and lights. I programmed the Burroughs machine in Algol, and the IBM in assembly language (BALR, USING); the GCOS operating system which gave the GCOS field in the Unix/Linux /etc/passwd file its purpose and name; and the Univac 494 with the FASTRAND II drums. It was the most fearsome computing equipment I've ever encountered thanks to its spinning tonnage.
The concept of a unified memory for both programs and data has been presented for the first time in a public document in the report written by von Neumann.
It is likely that the Eckert-Mauchly team had arrived earlier at this idea, but there is no evidence about this.
Despite the possible precedence of Eckert, von Neumann is the one who deserves full credit for the content of the report, including the "von Neumann Architecture".
The decision made by von Neumann to distribute this report has provided incalculable benefits for all mankind. The report described how to make an electronic computer in a much more clear way than any of the Eckert-Mauchly team would have ever been able to explain.
The effect of the von Neumann report has been that multiple teams, first in USA and UK, then also in many other countries, have started immediately to work at the development of electronic computers, leading to a large number of successful research projects then to an explosion of the computer industry.
The public distribution of the von Neumann report has annoyed a lot the Eckert-Mauchly team, who wanted to keep these developments secret, because they were preparing the creation of their own startup company, in order to exploit computer technology for becoming rich. Without the interference of von Neumann, the creation of a big computer industry could have been delayed by a decade and it certainly would have been much less diverse.
After the war, the Eckert-Mauchly team has never made any significant technological progress, all the essential inventions that have improved the electronic computers have been made at a great number of companies, research institutions or universities. Had the design of electronic computers remained a monopoly, that would have happened much later.
Moreover, the Eckert-Mauchly team did not have much grounds to consider themselves as the owners of electronic computer technology, because they could not have done anything without a great amount of money from the government, and at the beginning they have also taken useful information about the electronic computing circuits used in the Atanasoff-Berry computer, without later acknowledging any of their sources of inspiration.
It will never be known how much of the von Neumann report has been created by von Neumann and how much he had already learned from discussions with members of the Eckert-Mauchly team. However, this does not matter, because either way the von Neumann report is what has taught the world how to make electronic computers.
Herman Goldstine made the decision to distribute the report. Though Eckert and Mauchly liked to think they came up with the idea before von Neumann came along and that he got the idea from them, it is very hard to know if that is true. Kurt Gödel, who von Neumann helped get out of Austria at the start of the war and come work with him at Princeton's Institute of Advanced Study, had already published the idea of using numbers to encode algorithms as part of his famous 1931 proof. And while Turing Machines use the Harvard architecture, the Universal Turing Machine at the end of Alan Turing's 1936 paper is a von Neumann one.
I'm very surprised to see that Ada was not mentioned in this article despite the fact that they brought up rust noting that it hasn't been proven in space while Ada actually has.
They already had a incredibly readable memory safe language since the 80s.
My first job was in Ada and by then our customer put a clause allowing C to be introduced where it Ada was difficult to introduced. In our case the Issues with Ada was the poor support of the Ada compiler vendor. The kind of granularity on type definitions in Ada is superb. The type checking was slow. A type can be defined with the number of bits and the range during declaration which makes compilation slow.
That's not true for many, many planes, and there are very many private planes that are not jets and the owners are not rich. Thousands and thousands are homebuilts.
Go to https://www.faa.gov, and on the front page there's a place to enter an airplane registration number and get, along with other info, the name and address of the owner.
The vast majority of airspace does not "require very clear tracking of objects", and is less controlled than a highway. It does not require particular permission besides following the "rules of the road", and is free to use with nobody knowing you're there. I must assume you are referring to airspace which is either around busy airports (cities) or very high (airliner territory) - Class A/B/C/D airspaces.
Writing COBOL on the UNIVAC 490 series (30 bit word, FIELDATA character set), our files were on tapes. A tape request was submitted to the tape library, they would pull the tape(s) containing your file(s), and deliver them to the operations floor.
The customer would submit hand-written transactions, which would be sent to the keypunchers, who would punch them onto cards.
The tapes and transaction cards would be sent to the ops floor (where there was the actual computer). The operator would load the first tape in each file onto a UNISERVO tape drive, and go to the patch panel to run wires to assign logical devices to physical devices.
( https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10266686... see page 57)
Then they would put the job deck into the card reader and enter the "UR" (read the Unit Record device) command into the console, which had a spool of paper, not a screen. When the program was awaiting input, they would load the transaction cards and give the console command to continue the program.
We did have a fearsome beast of a FASTRAND drum system for random-access storage, but that was just for executable code and temporary files.
Then you might well get called in the middle of the night, because one of the programs in the job aborted. They called it "aborted" then. Or ABEND (ABnormal END), if you were an IBM person. You would come in, read the core dump (reading core dumps was a valuable skill), and determine that there was a data problem in a transaction (e.g. an alpha character in a numeric field). You would find the offending card, pull it, tear it in half and set it aside to be addressed in the morning as a missing transaction, and tell ops to rerun the job. With luck, there were no bad cards after that one.
Tell that to kids today, and they won't believe you.
There's a lot of interesting Greaseweazle-y floppy development being done at Adafruit right now. Some days they're posting multiple videos a day showing progress updates.
Famously, President Richard Nixon departed Washington DC on Air Force One bound for California. In flight over Missouri, his resignation took effect and Gerald Ford was sworn in as President. When that happened, the callsign of the flight changed to SAM 2700.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Force_One#SAM_27000