The Advent of Commercial Helium Diving

[Oceanaut]

Thank you for posting the videos.

Interestingly, the Eureka, the coring vessel Shell provided as the support vessel for Hannes Keller’s 1,000’/305M dive off Catalina Island in December 1962 was fitted with a dynamic positioning system.

According to Dynamic positioning - Wikipedia, whereas the CUSS I was kept in position manually with four steerable propellers as part of Project Mohole, the Eureka had an analogue control system interfaced with a taut wire, making it the first true dynamically-positioned ship.

 

[Akimbo]

The term Dynamic Positioning was coined by Willard Bascom years before the Mohole project. He was working on ways to get around the need for tugs during a labor strike. I don't think any of these people anticipated the technology behind today's DP. Imagined it maybe, but thought that it would happen in their lifetimes, no.

The first DP system I personally saw was in 1975 and used a DEC PDP-11 in a climate controlled compartment behind the wheelhouse. I can't even imagine how many of these things it would take to have the floating point capacity of a smart-phone.