But in the real world CAORF stands for the Computer Aided Operations Research Facility which is located on the grounds of the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, N.Y. Originally built by the Federal Government as the National Maritime Research Center, CAORF was for a time one of the most sophisticated ship simulators in the world. Why do I blog on CAORF? Two reasons: one- to make a point about the evolution of technology and two- (and almost more importantly) because my Dad had a huge hand in the development and management of the facility.
The facility's main purpose was and still is to train ship personnel in a full fidelity simulator, to look at the layouts of specific harbor and channel designs, to determine the viability of specific ship dimensions and designs to pass through those harbors and channels before the ship is even built, and to study the causes of accidents and to make recommendations to avoid them before they happen.
The simulator bridge contains actual maritime equipment, including radar, communications and steering mechanisms. Encompassing the bridge is a massive 240-foot horizontal 24-foot vertical panorama of actual port conditions. The simulation can be varied by type of vessel, cargo load, time of day, atmospheric and tide conditions, other ships passing and tug effects.
My first point is this; back in 1975 when CAORF was first operational all this was accomplished through several rooms of computers and video hardware. And by several rooms, I mean the facility practically had its own building on the Kings Point campus. I should know, I saw it several times. The facility was a complex myriad of refrigerator sized tape-to-tape drives, Smart Car sized CRTs, old style lamp driven projectors, miles of wires, behemoth cooling units, expansive control panels, and it had an electricity appetite of a small town. All of this produced what was considered at the time to be state-of-the-art graphics.
As has been said many times before, we now carry more technology power in the palms of our hands than NASA used to land a man on the moon, or than my Dad had to build CAORF.
First consider what a tremendous undertaking it had to have been to build CAORF back in '75. Today we can look at virtually any spot on the globe with Google maps on an iPhone, but back then it took a huge team of technologists, scientists, contractors, engineers, programmers, bureaucrats, electricians, fabricators, and project managers, etc... plus sizable budgets to even power up the instillation. Also consider for a second how CAORF helped to pioneer so much of the technology we take for granted today. For instance, it had 'apps' that ran on a simultaneous integration and manipulation of computer languages like Fortran, C, and even Basic, before there were Linux or even MSDOS based operating systems. These 'apps' created some of the first true topographical simulations ever, and are the basis of so many of today's gaming and CGI systems.
Now almost more of a museum than a functioning facility, CAORF stands as a true testament to the spirit of innovation so pervasive in the field of technology. My Dad might even say the same about himself at the age of 83. Much like how museums teach us the lessons of the past to help us keep evolving our human endeavors, so too do the stories, lessons, and experiences of men like my Dad help us to keep building onward.
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