I used COGO in 1969/70, of course then I just thought of it as Latitudes and Departures. I was a student at Lehigh University taking a FORTAN IV class and had access to the IBM 3600. I assisted my father in field work on a large tract in the Poconos. We had a 1' Kegelman Brothers transit and did recon with stadia and a 12' Philadelphia rod with three targets. First time I used radios, which were owned by the client. Traversed from State Game Lands monuments at the MW corner. I wrote a Fortran coordinate routine and entered data via punch cards. South and then East to a long and winding words road near the eastern property line tying into an equally large parcel to the North. The Patents to both parcels disagreed to the common line, with two overlaps and a gore, and the disagreement with the related landowners. The landowners agreed on the Senior line for the overlaps but legally could not claim the gore. My father filed for a Warrant with the State, hired a surveyor and received a Patent for 3.5 acres that was then sold to the developer of the Northern parcel.
By 71/72 I had an HP 35 and was using it for extended Latitudes and departures and then my dad got an HP 25 to do the same. It was in the 1980s that I actually saw a computer program labeled COGO. It was just as easy to use a CPM computer and spreadsheet to accumulate Latitudes and Departures and calculate areas. In 85/86 I took an AutoCAD drafting course, Version 2, I believe. In 1989 first used AutoCAD 10 with it's internal routines to draft line work from deeds and field notes. Then had a cogo computer routine whose name I cannot recall. A few years later getting Carlson SurvCADD.
Still at that time surveying was not my business but a way to enhance my computer skills.
Latitudes and Departures was all that was needed to do extensive hand drafted maps.
Paul in PA
Bruce Small, post: 383460, member: 1201 wrote: Um, I know 1971 seems like the Stone Age to some of you, but I started using COGO in 1965 on an IBM360, and I was certainly using COGO on the Wang 360KT in 1970. I still have the program card holder one of the drafters made for me (bless him, it was a brilliant idea). One for traverse, one for inverse, one for areas, etc. Ah, the good old days certainly fostered creativity.
In referring to a 1971 plat as "older," perhaps I should have said "old-style" or "old-fashioned."
It's certainly true that the transition from Latitudes and Departures to COGO didn't happen in an organized fashion.
Those of us who experienced the introduction of COGO, or what later came to be called COGO, all saw it from slightly different viewpoints. Machines that could run COGO programs, not to mention the programs themselves, were introduced slowly. And the hardware was expensive at first, so it depended on what your company felt was worth the money.
I first used COGO in 1975 as a party chief. We did the field comps with HP-45 and HP-25 calculators. Those machines only had enough memory to store a few pairs of coordinates, and even that was troublesome because you had to remember what registers they were in. There was no such thing as storing and retrieving coordinates by point number.
What we generally did in the field was read the comped coordinates from the display, write them down, check the written coordinates back against the display, and re-enter them again as necessary. Most of the office comps at my company were done on a time-shared mainframe (I don't know what kind) that was accessed through a modem.
Ah, yes. The days of one computer filling a 30' x 60' room, setting atop a false floor to provide space for air conditioning and various cables to run. Approach the nerdy, work-study employee whose job was to growl at anyone who expected preferential treatment or to expect results in less than 24 hours. Hand over your precious multi-hours worth of rubber-banded punch cards for processing after all the really important stuff had been completed. Return once or twice or thrice before being handed back your block of punch cards and a single sheet of printout announcing you had done something wrong in the first 15 cards which then aborted the entire process. Repeat process, over and over, until the computer was happy with every card and the order in which they were placed. Then take your 20-page result to study over to determine whether or not your program did what you wanted it to do. Satisfying the computer and satisfying your requirements were two very different things.
IF--THEN (ARGHHHHHH, infinite loop that timed out)
Then there was this mysterious desk-sized thing called WANG. I never found enough time to master it's secret way of thinking.
We went from FORTRAN IV to WATFOR and WATFIV, or something like that. Avoided the Arts and Parties variations known as COBOL, SNOBOL and SPITBOL. Discovered that things called modems existed where you took a dial telephone handpiece and stuck it on a magic set of headphones (oriented properly, of course) to (maybe) be connected directly to the BIG COMPUTER on the other side of the campus.
Remember seeing the first handheld calculators on campus. Add, subtract, multiply, divide and (sometimes) be able to get a square root. Eventually you could store one number. Then TI and HP went nuts attempting to corner the nerd market. You could buy a TI for $200 that would get you through most of your first two years of college classes but it took the $800 HP if you really wanted the capability to move through the upper level classes and graduate courses. Of course, little magnetic strips and other variations had to be employed to really feel like you were getting somewhere.
RPlumb314, post: 383499, member: 6313 wrote: In referring to a 1971 plat as "older," perhaps I should have said "old-style" or "old-fashioned."
It's certainly true that the transition from Latitudes and Departures to COGO didn't happen in an organized fashion.
Those of us who experienced the introduction of COGO, or what later came to be called COGO, all saw it from slightly different viewpoints. Machines that could run COGO programs, not to mention the programs themselves, were introduced slowly. And the hardware was expensive at first, so it depended on what your company felt was worth the money.
I first used COGO in 1975 as a party chief. We did the field comps with HP-45 and HP-25 calculators. Those machines only had enough memory to store a few pairs of coordinates, and even that was troublesome because you had to remember what registers they were in. There was no such thing as storing and retrieving coordinates by point number.
What we generally did in the field was read the comped coordinates from the display, write them down, check the written coordinates back against the display, and re-enter them again as necessary. Most of the office comps at my company were done on a time-shared mainframe (I don't know what kind) that was accessed through a modem.
Latitudes and Departures are indeed the Northings and Eastings understood in Coordinate Geometry. Possibly there are some who could not grasp that the initial latitude and departure calculated from point A to Point B was only the first step in that the l&d for B had to be then added to the L&D for A to give the L&D for B.
The problem may be that COGO programs were the first dumbing down of surveying allowing calculator persons to not have to realize that an angle right and distance was in fact an azimuth or surveyors bearing and distance. There seems to quite a bit of complaint and lamenting that it was necessary to record and note the intermediate steps.
I believe Mister Cow has doubled or more the typical calculator prices. My HP 35 was $395 and had a 4 deep stack. My HP 10 were in the $60 range but I do not recall the HP 41 price with the Survey Module and printer, but think the package was less than $1000. It was only necessary to have one card reader for an entire office. When I was doing dirty dusty field stakeout work I purchased 2 TI 12s at $15 and kept the HPs in the trailer.
On the HP 35 and HP 25 one could do a whole series of latitudes then do the departures, then elevations if necessary.
Paul in PA
I had a TI-35 in high school (early '80s) and then got a HP12C (still have it) for college in 1984. I remember it being quite expensive at the time--somewhere between $100-200. Ah, I love RPN.
mkennedy, post: 383618, member: 7183 wrote: I had a TI-35 in high school (early '80s) and then got a HP12C (still have it) for college in 1984. I remember it being quite expensive at the time--somewhere between $100-200. Ah, I love RPN.
I took my LSIT exam using a TI-35. I was told under no circumstances was I allowed to use a programmable calculator. When I showed them my solar powered TI-35 and asked if it was acceptable, they just laughed. I passed and thus laughed last. 😉
Being born in 1965 and being a relative newby to the world of surveying, I highly value the comments and input of the older surveyors on this board who help me gain a better grasp how things were done before all of the technology I've become accustomed to came along.
The prices I quoted above for the very early TI and HP handheld calculators were what was reported to me by those lucky few who actually bought them before anyone else. At that point in time I didn't have an extra $5 let alone have enough to buy even the most basic unit which might have been a Casio. Some people's parents were so happy to have them out of the house and out of sight that they would gladly fork over cash to make sure they didn't come home and embarrass the family. Flower children weren't allowed to go home.
