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btw, There'll be a 1Kw, or thereabouts, magnetron in your microwave oven if you ever need one...
My first ever job was designing magetrons to put into buoys. A magnetron in a buoy looks just like a decent-sized ship as it re-emits the radar signals it receives - an effective & cheap decoy.
I remember nothing of the real work, just the weird and wonderful bits:
- the magnetron 'bible' was a very rare book published in about 1948 to capture all the progress made during the war in print, and no progress had really been made since then, other than neater ways to manufacture them. The book was where you looked for formulae, design, ideas, etc. This was 1981!
- purchasing 2Mb of RAM for a Hewlett-Packhard PC at £20k (4* my annual salary), to calculate the ideal shape of the magnetron chamber for different frequencies
- a discussion with techies mocking whether 4G Bytes would ever be needed in a supercomputer, and how many bits the CPU would need to process at a time
- watching two extremely expensive and large rare earth toroid magnets flip over on themelves and shattering, watching the bits momentarily fly out and then sticking together again. But not in the same order. Oh. (6 month wait for new ones, at £5k / pair = annual salary. Luckily I wasn't the idiot who separated the pair without protection between them. They came with thick cardboard wedged between them. I wonder why.)
- getting drunk very cheaply in the company club/pub
But I did get a taste for coding.
The name of the company - Marconi-Osram Valves.
I'm a child of the valve age.
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