Another Blast From The Past - Hydrography

[Habebty]

Have to say, I’m loving these “Look at Life” films! We’re they shown in cinemas?

Another glimpse of Harwich in there....oh, and that wasn’t a bad run ashore, Caribbean then Monaco!

 

[AntarcticPilot]

That's set 15 years before I got involved in mapping, but things hadn't changed much in those 20 years - absolute position fixing was still the exception rather than the rule, and I remember being amazed at the first satellite navigation system I saw - Transit, not GPS, and it was a box the size of a filing cabinet that crashed at least once a watch and needed rebooting by setting a series of instructions using front panel toggle switches! But it gave a fix to about 50m a few times an hour - it was linked to a dead reckoning system that gave a constant track, and you could see the track jump when a fix came in!

During the 90s, GPS and absolute position fixing became the norm - and that caused absolute havoc with charting until WGS84 based mapping and charting became widely available.

 

[michael_w]

I've got one of those brass roller parallel rulers. It'd chop your toes off if it came off the chart table.