Year: 1973

Categories
Computers

IBM 3340: the Winchester hard drive

  • March 13, 1973

IBM Model 3340IBM introduces the Model 3340 hard disk drive system for its System/370 mainframe computers. Housed in a large casing similar to a combined washer and dryer, this is the birth of modern hard disk technology, with read and write heads integral to the drive itself rather than being mounted on an arm which reaches into the drive casing. The 3340’s removable modules, each containing drive platters and the read/write heads, can be swapped out with other modules containing other drives. IBM ships the 3340 with two maximum storage capacities: 35 megabytes or 70 megabytes; the unit is internally called a Winchester hard drive, a case of a code name that sticks well beyond development. The 3340 is available through 1984.

Categories
Television

Genesis II

  • March 23, 1973

Genesis IICBS premieres the made-for-TV movie Genesis II, starring Alex Cord, Mariette Hartley, Ted Cassidy, and Percy Rodrigues. Created and written by Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, Genesis II is clearly a series pilot, the first of several attempts by Roddenberry to chart a career beyond Star Trek. The story concerns an astronaut named Dylan Hunt who is frozen in suspended animation, only reawakening after the fall of human civilization; the pilot does not result in a series pickup, though the story of Dylan Hunt will form the basis of Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda, a syndicated series produced in the early 2000s after Roddenberry’s death.

More about Gene Roddenberry’s 1970s pilot projects in the LogBook
Hear about it on the Sci-Fi 5 podcast

Categories
Doctor Who Television

Doctor Who: Frontier In Space, Part 6

  • March 31, 1973

Doctor WhoThe 343rd episode of Doctor Who airs on BBC1. This is the last story featuring Roger Delgado as the Master before the actor’s untimely death in June 1973. Madhav Sharma (Moonbase 3) guest stars. This marks one of the earliest collaborations between the Doctor’s various enemies (in this case, a one-time-only alliance between the Master and the Daleks).

More about Doctor Who in the LogBook
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Categories
Crewed Spaceflight Salyut

Salyut 2: first military space station

  • April 3, 1973

Salyut 2The Soviet Union launches a second space station, and the first station designed exclusively for military tasks in orbit. Salyut 2 is the first station to use the Almaz military space station design devised in the 1960s as a response to the US Air Force’s never-flown Manned Orbiting Laboratory. Within two weeks, however, technical difficulties take their toll: Salyut 2 begins to tumble out of control, and its crew compartment depressurizes. (The redesigned Soyuz vehicle is not ready to fly yet, so no crew ever visits Salyut 2.) The second Soviet space station burns up in the atmosphere less than two months after launch.

Categories
Pioneer Uncrewed Spaceflight

Pioneer 11 launched

  • April 6, 1973

Pioneer 11The unmanned space probe Pioneer 11 is launched on a course that will be one of the first real tests of the theory of gravity assist. Reaching Jupiter in 1975, it will use the giant planet’s gravity to throw it across the solar system to rendezvous with Saturn, the first human-made vehicle to visit that planet. The experience gained with Pioneer 11’s groundbreaking trajectory through the solar system will prove instrumental in the upcoming Mariner Jupter/Saturn ’77 mission, which is later be renamed Voyager.

Categories
Crewed Spaceflight Skylab

Skylab launched

  • May 14, 1973

SkylabThe first American space station, Skylab, is launched unmanned atop the last Saturn V rocket ever to be flown. Within minutes, however, it’s obvious that the space station – whose habitable space is actually the heavily modified third stage of the Saturn V – is already in serious trouble. Launch vibrations rip off one of the solar panels, and the other panel fails to automatically open. With less than two weeks before the first Skylab crew is due to lift off, the clock is ticking for mission planners to devise contingency and repair procedures.

Categories
Television

Night Gallery: The Doll Of Death

  • May 20, 1973

Night GalleryNBC airs the 43rd and final episode of Night Gallery, an anthology series of original short plays and short story adaptations hosted by Rod Serling. Susan Strasberg guest stars. The series will resurface in syndication, but cut down to half-hour form, often severely truncating or even omitting story segments from the earlier hour-long episodes and, bizarrely, incorporating equally significantly edited-down episodes of the hour-long Gary Collins series The Sixth Sense (also produced by Universal) with new Rod Serling intros to pad out the syndication package.

More about Rod Serling’s Night Gallery in the LogBook

Categories
Science & Technology Weather & Climate

Chasing the storm

  • May 24, 1973

Weather BulletinThe National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma dispatches “storm chasers” to track, follow, and observe the behavior of storms in a predicted tornado outbreak. The chasers manage to document the complete development of a tornado in Union City, Oklahoma on film and on an experimental Doppler radar system; for the first time, large-scale cloud rotation at high altitude is observed on radar prior to the appearance of a funnel cloud, a key discovery in tornado prediction. This phenomenon, called the Tornadic Vortex Signature, is a precursor to virtually every radar-detected tornado.

Categories
Apollo Crewed Spaceflight Skylab

Skylab 2: save the station!

  • May 25, 1973

SkylabThe first three-man Skylab crew lifts off to undertake a mission far different from the one for which they had trained. Their primary objective is now to save the crippled station from the damage it suffered during launch; as it is, Skylab is uninhabitable, with temperatures in its workshop and crew quarters soaring above 100 degrees, threatening to heat up items inside enough to fill the space with toxic gases. The first repair spacewalk takes place less than 24 hours after the crew arrives in an Apollo capsule, and succeeds in starting to drop the temperature inside.