Face on Mars

[Nick England]

Face on Mars ? Heathkits ? Is there a connection ?
Well, actually there is!

I started a company making image processing hardware 20 years ago.
The gear actually got used by JPL and others for procesing
images of Mars (and we used to have a Mars image in our demos).

What was the host computer for our $75,000 image processing machine ?
A Heathkit H-11 !

When we started the company, we couldn't afford
a real DEC LSI-11, so we bought the Heath version. Even after we had
bigger computers it was fun to take the Heath H-11 to trade shows
because people always figured that if the demo looked that good
with a Heathkit the system would run even better with their big VAX
minicomputers.

Our Heath H-11 still runs - I just finished reviving it (thanks to
help from the list) and one of our old imaging systems after 10 years in a
garage and shipped them off to the SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics trade
show for a 25th anniversary retrospective exhibit.

Heathkit - still going strong.

73 & Have Fun,
Nick England  KD4CPL    nick at cs.unc.edu     Univ. Of North Carolina
http://www.cs.unc.edu/~nick/hobbies.html    Chapel Hill NC

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