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speedometer

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speedometer

a device fitted to a vehicle to measure and display the speed of travel
Collins Discovery Encyclopedia, 1st edition © HarperCollins Publishers 2005

speedometer

[spi′däm·əd·ər]
(engineering)
An instrument that indicates the speed of travel of a vehicle in miles per hour, kilometers per hour, or knots.
McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific & Technical Terms, 6E, Copyright © 2003 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

speedometer

A pattern of lights displayed on a linear set of LEDs (today) or nixie tubes (yesterday, on ancient mainframes). The pattern is shifted left every N times the operating system goes through its main loop. A swiftly moving pattern indicates that the system is mostly idle; the speedometer slows down as the system becomes overloaded. The speedometer on Sun Microsystems hardware bounces back and forth like the eyes on one of the Cylons from the wretched "Battlestar Galactica" TV series.

Historical note: One computer, the GE 600 (later Honeywell 6000) actually had an *analog* speedometer on the front panel, calibrated in instructions executed per second.
This article is provided by FOLDOC - Free Online Dictionary of Computing (foldoc.org)
The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Speedometer

 

an instrument used in motor vehicles to measure the speed of travel and the distance traveled. The speed indicator of a speedometer is magnetically operated, and the distance counter (odometer) operates mechanically by means of rollers. In mechanically driven speedometers, both the speed indicator and the odometer are connected by means of a flexible cable to a set of reduction gears, one gear of which is driven from the driven shaft of the vehicle’s transmission. In electrically driven speedometers, the transmission’s driven shaft is connected to a contact breaker that functions as a pickup and converts direct current into three-phase alternating current. The frequency of the alternating current is proportional to the speed of rotation of the driven shaft. The current feeds an electric motor, whose rotor rotates at the same speed as that of the pickup.

REFERENCES

Galkin, Iu. M. Elektrooborudovanie avtomobilei i traktorov, 2nd ed. Moscow, 1967.
The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
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