Fifty Years Ahead of the Private Sector by James Pate Williams, Jr, BA, BS, MSwE, PhD
I have heard some former or want to be National Security Officers suggest that the National Security Agency is and has been since 1952 fifty years ahead of the private sector in many active areas of research. I have clear evidence based on one 1941 document that the United States Navy was at least fifty years ahead of the war-by -wireless technology in the Ordnance Pamphlet 770 which was printed in October 1941:
The approximate maximum range of the 16-inch by 50 caliber fast battleship class Iowa artillery is around 24 miles at a maximum elevation of 45 degrees. The horizon can be calculated to be at height of 60 feet above sea level to be 1.22 * (60)^(1/2) = 9.45 miles. So, the question is how can you guarantee an accurate shot at 24 miles even with the crude radar of the day? One uses a spotter aircraft to give the accurate longitude-latitude coordinates of the enemy ship. Thus, we have GPS gunnery in 1930s-1940s technology. We are a country of warfare geniuses in the United States of North America.
I am sure there are many other examples of the U.S. getting a lot of bang for our tax dollars.
My whole legal name is James Pate Williams, Jr. I was born in LaGrange, Georgia approximately 70 years ago. I barely graduated from LaGrange High School with low marks in June 1971. Later in June 1979, I graduated from LaGrange College with a Bachelor of Arts in Chemistry with a little over a 3 out 4 Grade Point Average (GPA). In the Spring Quarter of 1978, I taught myself how to program a Texas Instruments desktop programmable calculator and in the Summer Quarter of 1978 I taught myself Dayton BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) on LaGrange College's Data General Eclipse minicomputer. I took courses in BASIC in the Fall Quarter of 1978 and FORTRAN IV (Formula Translator IV) in the Winter Quarter of 1979. Professor Kenneth Cooper, a genius poly-scientist taught me a course in the Intel 8085 microprocessor architecture and assembly and machine language. We would hand assemble our programs and insert the resulting machine code into our crude wooden box computer which was designed and built by Professor Cooper. From 1990 to 1994 I earned a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from LaGrange College. I had a 4 out of 4 GPA in the period 1990 to 1994. I took courses in C, COBOL, and Pascal during my BS work. After graduating from LaGrange College a second time in May 1994, I taught myself C++. In December 1995, I started using the Internet and taught myself client-server programming. I created a website in 1997 which had C and C# implementations of algorithms from the "Handbook of Applied Cryptography" by Alfred J. Menezes, et. al., and some other cryptography and number theory textbooks and treatises.
View all posts by jamespatewilliamsjr
Numerical Explorations 