Who Originated the Acronym COGO?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COGO

It actually originated before the days of Apple and in the days where there were no PC's that were affordable.  In the mid sixties through the mid 70's, advanced companies who could afford it bought time shares on a "super computer" where they fed punch cards in for the program they wanted to run and got the results via a hand held telephone set on a modem that was much slower than the first 28.8 dial up modem.  That's where the COGO slang originated, I had a tough time deciding between computer tech or surveying but I'm glad that I went with surveying.

Before computers it was called traverse computations done on preprinted Traverse Sheets.

I believe it was Professor Charles L. Miller at MIT

https://www.cadhistory.net/civil-engineering-software-development-at-mit/

Best regards,

Terry

COGO is an acronym for coordinate geometry

Pedantic note:  it's not an acronym, or even an initialization.  It's some sort of bastardized shorthand nomenclature.

@jim-frame 

Thank you for that, I've always felt the same way about this forever.

COordinate GeOmetry is about as Intuitive as self intentional vasectomies...

Wikipedia says that coordinate geometry is the same as analytic geometry, which isn't true. The term "analytic geometry" goes back over 100 years. Those who studied it worked on plots of equations which gave curves like the parabola and hyperbola.

I remember being shown how to prepare a latitude-and-departure sheet at my first surveying job in 1961. It was a means of checking traverse closure and computing the area of the polygon. Changes in position were computed in the N-S-E-W directions, but the points had no coordinates.

I first heard the term "coordinate geometry" in 1975. That year I used point coordinates for construction staking for the first time. We had no calculators that would store and retrieve coordinates; only mainframe computers could do that at the time. We had to write the coordinates down and re-input them as needed. The term "COGO" came in somewhat later.

@rplumb314 

Scientific calculators existed as early as 1968, but were quite rare because they cost as much as a good car.

Another guy and I in college (1971 or 72) would sneak into a lab without authorization to play with an HP 9100. It had a little CRT display for the registers and could show graphs, which seemed magical.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hewlett-Packard_9100A

Pedantic note:  it's not an acronym, or even an initialization.  It's some sort of bastardized shorthand nomenclature.

Ah, the good old BSNC.

@bill93 In the spirit of you know you are a redneck when... You know you are a geek when you sneak in somewhere to play with a calculator.

@lurker 

Guilty as charged.

There was a Wang computer in a little-used classroom just down the hall from our Departmental Reading Room.  We would sneak in there and try to figure out how to get it to do what we needed done.  This was in the days when THE COMPUTER we were supposed to be using took up an area of three classrooms in the basement of the Math/Science building, setting atop a raised floor for environmental reasons and only understood punch cards.

Learned Pacsoft on an HP310 workstation. Probably the toughest computer  I have ever used. 

I had a professor at a competing surveying school tell me it was named after Dr. Cogonasious. I thought he kidding, but he was not. 

Dr. Cogonasious.

Learned Pacsoft on an HP310 workstation. Probably the toughest computer  I have ever used. 

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I believe the outfit I worked at in maybe '86 (?) purchased on of those.  If it's the same one everything was on a floppy.  And yes, it was an exercise to actually get anything done with it.

The guys in the office tried their best to utilize it and I guess had some success.  At the time I was running all the crews and favored my HP41.  I really think my hand-held was faster than that behemoth, but the guys in the office could use it to print out points and coords (on an archaic Okidata daisy-wheel printer).

In about a year that rig made its way to the back for the surveyors to use.  It seems each project had its own floppy and we could print out point lists with it.  That was back in the day when we used the 3810A "punkin".

Some folks like to reminisce about "the old days"....but having endured all the intermediate crap between then and now, I'd just as soon forget it.   Somewhat like a "choke" knob on an old truck, nobody ever thinks about them until someone brings it up.  😉 

@paden-cash 

We actually had a 20mb hard drive and floppy drive. Pacsoft was an awesome cogo program and building a TIN was so easy. We dumped a SDR33 data collector to the 310 for topographic jobs.