"OutdoorRugged" Amy Urban's page

The photo of Nomad in the office aquarium for a half hour had me laughing (besides "Nomad" on the Star Trek original series that Captain Kirk had to point out its fallible logic to destroy itself and Kirk thereby saves the Universe, well at least the Alpha Quad) and I recalled how our surveyor built a custom case with a heater under it to keep the HX-20 ("world's first laptop") warm enough to continue to work in the winter connected by a serial cable to a Leitz Elta-38 in "deep winter" excavations in lower Manhattan off of Whitehall and Broad streets. It finally went on the "fritz" in the high summer humidity of the Hudson Valley in Dobbs Ferry, NY when I guess condensation shorted it out and it started printing gibberish on its little paper built-in dot matrix printer, like those on newer cash registers. No one was near it so it was kind of dramatic. The guy from Zeiss had written the BASIC program for it which I had to change a bit once for a NYC datum, Columbus Circle historically was the 0,0 with all directions from there in positive feet (ENSW) not State Plane or UTM. These new data collectors (I've used the Sokkia one when it was Sokkisha, SDR24? after the HX-20) sure are spiffy.