Dr. Patz on Computers at the Cape

Working at the Cape you get to do a lot of different kinds of stuff. I remember… an ocean group that was part of the Cape and they said, “You know these capacitors could explode.” Of course, they didn’t know what they were talking about and so the other guy said, “Can you calculate or make a test that will verify that they’re not going to explode? Because we’ve only had them here about 20 years and they haven’t exploded yet.”

Dr. Benjamin Patz remembers working at the Cape when the programs were run on the IBM system and he had the task of increasing the speed at which data downloads could take place. He explains how he solved the problem and showed the programmers at the Cape where the code was and the process to do it. He said, “They caught on quick.” And so, in less than a week they had that done. Learn more about computer technology at Cape Canaveral in this excerpt from this October 31, 2011 oral history interview with Dr. Patz.

LISTEN (4:56)

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 University of Central Florida 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.”

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