Your (USA members) Government at Work

[rprosperi]

(02-03-2015 01:33 PM)Katie Wasserman Wrote:  An ebay find by Don Sheperd led me to a treasure trove of documents on what the US government has been doing with HP calculators. Try a search for "HP calculator" here.

I'm just itching to use my HP-97 to calculate the blast wave from a nuclear detonation.

From the titles and abstracts there seems to be some interesting stuff, but it's not easy to get at the full text for many of these.

In the early 80's, a friend and fellow HP41 geek was working in aerospace in SoCal and he wrote and submitted several 41 programs to the HP User Library Catalog, for calculating all kinds of parameters related the the effects of Nuclear Weapons (using the "Blue Book" as anyone involved will clearly remember) including overpressure vs. range, shock induced ground motion, etc. etc. He went through a tremendously long and complex process within his company to ensure there was no classified or sensitive material involved, which was ultimately approved.

After many weeks, unfortunately, HP rejected including them in the Library, stating they were unsure if they were capable of making a similar determination, and thus did not want to accept and publish them. He gave them to me, too bummed-out to play further with them; I still have them today along with HP's very polite rejection letter.

They were written almost the exact same time as the HP-97 program noted in Katie's post, which was obviously widely distributed within DoD at the time.

The most interesting thing to me about that paper, is that it was written within the SAC Directorate of Aircraft Maintenance. Maintenance!?!? I guess fixing B-52s and KC-135s had gotten somewhat boring by the early 80s.