Dr. Patz on Computers at the Naval Training Equipment Center

I was teaching some classes for the Naval Training Equipment Center and they were interested in the VAX which was VAX top of the line… At that time I think most everybody thought that the VAX was going to be THE computer system that was going to overtake everything and then in about three to five years – the VAX went its way.

Learn about the computer equipment, projects, and challenges of work at the Naval Training Equipment Center in Orlando in this interview with Dr. Benjamin Patz,  listen    (4:52). He describes the challenge of working on computer code to align an airplane on the deck of an aircraft carrier. Dr. Patz would go back to control laws, test the visual system, and equations. He discusses the computers and visual graphics of the day available for the project as well as how the team worked to find solutions for landing the plane on the carrier.

Dr. Benjamin Patz’s scientific contributions to our area include working in the GENESYS Program at  Cape Canaveral, Lockheed Martin, teaching at the Naval Training Equipment Center, Rollins College, and the University of Central Florida. His students from the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science at UCF recall Professor Patz as a patient teacher who spent diligent time with everyone, undergraduate or graduate. In the GENESYS Program at the Cape his students were people working at Martin Marietta and NASA. Dr. Patz says, “They had interesting problems they would discuss with you… It was a good chance to go over control systems, electromagnetic fields, the boundary value problems.”