“I had to lube the computer”

Nice! All I got out of the Navy was a chunk of a P-8 that got torn off during a class A mishap from the squadron we relieved.

Cool! How did you get your hands on the id plate?

The Navy nuclear power plant I trained on had exactly one IC in it - an opamp in the feed water control circuitry. Everything else was magnetic amplifiers, which were state of the art technology when invented in 1901. I was operating the plant in 1988.

After that, I ended up fixing aircraft on a carrier using automated test equipment based around a 1960 telephone switching matrix powered by a 24K 18-bit word core memory CPU. We had all the modern conveniences like magnetic tape, which was a lot nicer than mylar punched tape. The month before we shipped out for Desert Storm, we got a 1MB fixed disk cartridge that replaced one of the tape drives.

MILSPEC: It might be old, but it sure is expensive.