Morse Code Day
April 27th is Morse Code Day, to commemorate the birthday of Samuel Morse, inventor of Morse code.
What Is It?
Hint: this picture was taken in 1956
A friend of mine forwarded this to me…
It’s a hard disk drive back in 1956… with 5 MB of storage.
In September 1956 IBM launched the 305 RAMAC, the first ‘SUPER’ computer with a hard disk drive (HDD). The HDD weighed over a ton and stored a ‘whopping’ 5 MB of data.
Do you appreciate your 8 GB memory stick a little more now?
73, Al
QSL Cards from the Past
The ARRL just posted a link to this old QSL cards website by W8JYZ which documents some of the older QSL cards around. You will recognize some very famous names (hams and SWLers) on the website when you surf over there.
73, Al
Sputnik 1
The first man-made artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, was launched by the Soviet union on the 4th of October 1957, it marked the beginning of the Sopace Age. The satellite travelled at 29,000 kilometers per hour (18,000 mph), completed an orbit in 96.2 minutes and transmitted radio signals at 20.005 and 40.002 mhz and was monitored by many amateurs worldwide. Sputnik’s flight lasted until the 4th of January 1958 when it burned up after coming back into the Earth’s atmoshere.
Mike AA1TJ has taken on a project to rebuild the transmitter used in Sputnik 1 and hopes to complete it sometime this year before the 64th anniversary of its launch. This may prove to be a historic project, reproducing something that blasted us into the Space Age.
For more information, check out the wiki link.
73, Al