@Viss @jerry

Fun story!

I worked in a sw eng (for real, not MSCE "we're engineers" way) research facility in uni and we had lots of guest lecturers. My fav. one was from NASA. Back in the first half of the shuttle program, the avionics were still pretty basic. One of the problems they had was radio LoS or loss of signal - if they weren't receiving any vox from Houston, was it because they were LoS or was the radio bork? And unlike almost every other system on an air or space craft,

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@Viss @jerry

there wasn't really any kind of radio self-test - or rather you might be able to tell if the radio equipment was working, but what if there was an antennae problem. So a piece of mind to the crew would be to know - without the usual statement of that fact FROM Houston ON the radio - where they were vs. radio coverage.
Problem is, none of the computers on the original avionics had that capability - this was, after all,

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@Viss @jerry

So anyway knowing where they were over earth or vs. the radio coverage wasn't in the avionics at the time. So someone hacked together a crude world map visualization and they ploted the orbiter's position on it as well as the radio coverage map. They found a lighteight compact 286 or whatever laptop to run it on.
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@Viss @jerry

Exceeept, the cockpit didn't have a north american 120V AC outlet for the adapter. While they had got permission to bring a laptop, they did NOT get permission to bodge an AC inverter into the all-DC craft busses or directly wire the laptop barrel connector. So each crew member had to sacrifice a portion of their personnal effects weight budget to bring spare, charged laptop batteries, enough for the entire trip.
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@Viss @jerry

The last problem (Im getting to it) was occasionally they'd experience weird and random glitches in the program; they'd be solved with a restart, but then they'd have to reenter the shuttles current location, alt and velocity manually (it could approximate from there) which was a pain, but it was assumed that this was caused by RAMdom bitflipping because the Compaq's memory wasn't core memory. Easily solved, future missions
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@Viss @jerry

they cracked the laptop case and foiled the inside of it with gold foil or whatever they used to wrap satellites.

And of course later avionics updates made this all unnecessary. This - and other stories - were from the one guy (I've never seen a 3rd party corroboration), so it could be a tall tail, but a) why would someone make that story up?

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@Viss @jerry

b) I can just imagine everyone's crew duffle had 3 lbs of laptop batteries, that seems like such a simple practical (typical NASA) solution to a problem.

8/8