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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Method used to compute navigational tables.
From: Jeremy C
Date: 2010 Feb 1, 17:47 EST
From: Jeremy C
Date: 2010 Feb 1, 17:47 EST
They were quite proud in the 1970's that HO 229 was calculated by
computer. I think they mention it in the introduction. I was also
taught that HO 214 was the result of WPA work and done by hand.
One oddity of my volumes of HO 214 is that the spine is printed upside down
or backwards depending on how you look at it, compared to most books in my
library.
Jeremy
In a message dated 1/30/2010 5:48:56 P.M. Eastern Standard Time,
glapook@pacbell.net writes:
I just noticed in a volume of H.O. 214 printed in 1940 a statement that
the computations were done with seven place logarithms. This shows that
the early volumes were computed by hand. This was done as part of the
WPA program to put out of work mathematicians to work during the
depression. I wonder when these tables started to be calculated with
computers? Think of the amount of work doing all these calculations,
(720 entries per page, 259 pages per volumes, 186,400 entries per
volume) by hand.
gl
