The above photo is of the Combat Direction shop on the U.S.S. America (CV-66).
The CP-642A Tactical Data System was, even back in 1984, a dinosaur. I'd been told that it was basically the same system that was used to track the '60 moon missions. We are talking about solid state - as in resistors, transistors, and capacitors - computer technology.
On the America, the TDS drove the Combat Information Center. CIC was that dark room with all the glowing consoles used to track the bad guys in Navy movies. Just watch the movie Top Gun or Hunt for Red October again, you'll see what I mean.
The three cabinets to the left were computers (30 bit, 16k of memory, water cooled), the set directly center was the switching units (hard patched parallel IO, the cables running along the overhead, no fancy TCP/IP here), the far right was an analog to digital converter for radar and such, and on the right is the magnetic tape units. Not shown on the near right would be the extended memory unit (shared memory - quite the revolution and it even had those new age "chips" in it!) and teletype/paper tape unit. Yes - PAPER tape.
I'm one of the few technicians who really know what the bit bucket is, and for you, my loyal blog reader I'll share; the bit bucket held the punched out holes from paper tape. It was actually a rectangle tin. The scrap "dots" had a lot of static cling to them, they'd stick to any thing and anyone they came in contact with (you can imagine the fun we had!).
