Originally Posted by
vapilot2004
Thank you, Oz for that recollection.
It has always been my understanding that the ubiquitous slide rule was used for more than just a little of the Queen of the Skies' design work, but your link suggests mainframe computers were also in use. Care to help a fellow out with your perspective?
I'LL jump in a bit here. I was at boeing on the SST program in the 60's as an Engineer. Boeing had been using mainframe computers since the late 50's, and the structural analyis was largely done via fortran programming on both the 747 and 2707 ( SST ). At that time mainframes were fed by punchcards. Yes sliderules were common for preliminary calculations which were then translated into fortran coding, punch cards typed in, and then fed into the mainframes. the mainframes did mostly an iteration of various values and then data was sent live/ or spooled via tape to printers which printed out bucu reams of paper for examination, and then corrections, changes made, etc - rinse and repeat
Some machinde tools of that era used mylar tape programming to control certainb cutting and machining operations.
Apollo- saturn program used similar techniques.