It was summer of 1967, when I applied to Western Union for a summer job. Since I knew Morse Code, I figured they'd have a telegraph position for me. Heck, I could send and receive 25 words a minute.
Well, I wound up as bicycle telegram delivery boy. I covered downtown Buffalo five days a week.
The office runs weren't hard... a quick sprint into an office, hand a yellow envelope to the secretary, catch the elevator to the next floor, and do it again. Thick envelopes meant money-orders; night-letters were cheap, and high priority telegrams had red stamps on the front.
Hey - I delivered candy-grams. Marriage proposals. And once delivered a notice that a man had won the New York Lottery (Federal laws prevented these from being sent by mail). The guy tipped me a quarter... the only tip I collected that summer.
The worst were the eviction notices, delivered to indigent individuals and sometimes families. I'd bike over to a tenement building where the Western Union delivery boy was a most unwelcome visitor. The slumlords dealt with their tenants through process servers, lawyers, and telegraph agents... never face to face.
Then there was the killed-in-action notice of the GI in Viet Nam. I'm seventeen and I'm supposed to deliver this telegram to his mom. My boss - a stogie smoker who played the ponies - took pity on me and delivered it himself. Poor guy returned a wreck: the woman completely broke down at the news. (This was common enough that Western Union had instructions on how to deliver death notices)
Over the summer, I was immersed in Western-Union's electronics. Or should I say their electro-mechanics. Hundreds of Type 28 ASR teletypes, reperforators, and paper-tape systems... 5 channel baudot code meant telegrams came out in uppercase only. The stuff ran at 60 words per minute (or about 25 baud, I think) No parity. They had a staff of guys that just repaired and oiled the clunkers. And clunk they did -- these were loud!
At Christmas, teletype operators would pass along jingle bell messages to each other by sending teletype Control-G symbols at just the right intervals. Heck - they sent out time signals to local businesses who needed synchronized clocks.
So good bye Western Union... may those canary yellow telegrams age gracefully.
I was just an undergraduate, assigned to maintain the synthesizer at the University/Buffalo; Bob would often visit and show me nifty wrinkles and hacks for the system. It was a time when your fingers were likely found on a sliderule, an oscilloscope probe, or the cork of a soldering iron.
For his large synthesizers, Moog's circuit cards were etched and soldered by hand, and fitted into a wood frame work, with a spiffy black anodized front panel. The potentiometers were a constant headache: even milspec pots developed noise after a month of hard use by musicians.
Bob standardized on one volt per octave for his voltage controlled oscillators; my job was keeping these working... along with Bode ring oscillators, third-octave vocoders, two flat-plate echo chambers, and a handful of multitrack Ampex tape decks.
A visit from Bob Moog might mean experimenting with nonlinear mixers, measuring how an audio expander could minimize apparent noise, or the Fourier transforms of trumpets and coronets. With patch cords hanging around his neck, Bob helped rewire my homebrew Theramin to minimize drift, using a 2N107 germanium transistor as a thermal sensor.
Thirty five years later, I've been an astronomer, computer jock, writer, lecturer, and Klein Bottle mogul. But I'll never forget Bob Moog... a creative engineer, artistically aware, supportive of everyone from egocentric musician to a hopeful but uncertain technician.
Freezing point of mercury is -38C (which is just about -38F)... so it would be solid through much of the Antarctic winter.
When I froze mercury in the lab, it made a surface that wasn't optically useful -- lots of tiny bumps.
Also of interest: the century old Mt. Wilson 100-inch telescope used mercury bearings for the polar axis. In the 1970's, mercury pollution worried the operations staff; I don't know what was done about it.
Is http://www.kleinbottle.com a joke? If so, then the joke's on me.
For the past 4 or 5 years, I've been making (and selling) 3-dimensional immersions of Klein Bottles. Many mathematicians own them; they assure me that a Klein Bottle can indeed be immersed (but not embedded) in 3-D.
I thank slashdot readers for their support of my micro-business. I won't get rich as a zero-volume bottle maker, but I'm having plenty of fun.
Re:How about faking a super-secret miliary project
on
The Honeypot Project
·
· Score: 1
What can I say?
How about: read my first book, The Cuckoo's Egg. Better yet, read my article in the May 1988 issue of the Communications of the ACM, "Stalking the Wily Hacker"
Friden made wonderful mechanical calculators from 1935 until 1972. These were mechanical behemoths - heavy monsters with keyboards of 100 keys (10 columns of 10 digits each) They used twelfth-horsepower motors to turn gears, ratchets, and pawls. One version even mechanically calculated square roots! Physics departments were happy if they owned one of these! Here's a photo of a mechanical Friden calculator: http://www.hpmuseum.org/big/friden.jpg
During the 1950's, Friden made many mechanical calculators & adding machines. They were also the prime contractor to make mechanical rotor-based crypto machines for the NSA.
In 1962, Friden introduced the all-electronic calculator. It used reverse Polish notation, a 10 button keypad, and 7-segment displays on an oscilloscope-style screen. It was actually the second electronic calculator (a British firm beat it by a year) but it revolutionized calculations: silent, fast, and with space-age styling. Here's a photo: http://www.hpmuseum.org/ec132.jpg
Friden began making printers and disk drives, eventually making computers in 1966.
In 1964, Friden was sold to Singer - the same folks who made sewing machines. It was a disaster. Friden had been run locally (in San Leandro, California -- just up from the future Silicon Valley). Suddenly lots of New York City consultants descended from Singer -- quasi-executives who repeatedly reorganized the company. Friden failed to take advantage of their immense market lead in electronic calculators; worse, they continued to develop and sell mechanical calculators even after they (and their competitors) had made cheap electronic calculators.
By 1972, Friden-Singer was about dead. All their good engineers were leaving (often to printer and disk drive companies in Silicon Valley: Diablo & Seagate & Shugart). The mechanical plant was useless, since nobody wanted motor driven adding machines. And Singer never integrated Friden's mechanical expertise into the sewing machine business.
Friden-Singer closed in 1976, leaving behind a factory site in San Leandro which was recently studied for PCB contamination in its underground water.
How do I know this? Oh, I've been working with the engineer who designed the Friden 130 electronic calculator. He's pushing 80 years old, and still remembers the excitement of developing the world's first electronic calculator. Zooks, but he remembers the schematics to it (which is handy, since we're rebuilding one!)
-Cliff Stoll 12 Oct 2000
Slashdot Mirror
It was summer of 1967, when I applied to Western Union for a summer job. Since I knew Morse Code, I figured they'd have a telegraph position for me. Heck, I could send and receive 25 words a minute.
... a quick sprint into an office, hand a yellow envelope to the secretary, catch the elevator to the next floor, and do it again. Thick envelopes meant money-orders; night-letters were cheap, and high priority telegrams had red stamps on the front.
... the only tip I collected that summer.
... never face to face.
... 5 channel baudot code meant telegrams came out in uppercase only. The stuff ran at 60 words per minute (or about 25 baud, I think) No parity. They had a staff of guys that just repaired and oiled the clunkers. And clunk they did -- these were loud!
... may those canary yellow telegrams age gracefully.
Well, I wound up as bicycle telegram delivery boy. I covered downtown Buffalo five days a week.
The office runs weren't hard
Hey - I delivered candy-grams. Marriage proposals. And once delivered a notice that a man had won the New York Lottery (Federal laws prevented these from being sent by mail). The guy tipped me a quarter
The worst were the eviction notices, delivered to indigent individuals and sometimes families. I'd bike over to a tenement building where the Western Union delivery boy was a most unwelcome visitor. The slumlords dealt with their tenants through process servers, lawyers, and telegraph agents
Then there was the killed-in-action notice of the GI in Viet Nam. I'm seventeen and I'm supposed to deliver this telegram to his mom. My boss - a stogie smoker who played the ponies - took pity on me and delivered it himself. Poor guy returned a wreck: the woman completely broke down at the news. (This was common enough that Western Union had instructions on how to deliver death notices)
Over the summer, I was immersed in Western-Union's electronics. Or should I say their electro-mechanics. Hundreds of Type 28 ASR teletypes, reperforators, and paper-tape systems
At Christmas, teletype operators would pass along jingle bell messages to each other by sending teletype Control-G symbols at just the right intervals. Heck - they sent out time signals to local businesses who needed synchronized clocks.
So good bye Western Union
From 1968 to 1973, I worked with Robert Moog.
... along with Bode ring oscillators, third-octave vocoders, two flat-plate echo chambers, and a handful of multitrack Ampex tape decks.
... a creative engineer, artistically aware, supportive of everyone from egocentric musician to a hopeful but uncertain technician.
I was just an undergraduate, assigned to maintain the synthesizer at the University/Buffalo; Bob would often visit and show me nifty wrinkles and hacks for the system. It was a time when your fingers were likely found on a sliderule, an oscilloscope probe, or the cork of a soldering iron.
For his large synthesizers, Moog's circuit cards were etched and soldered by hand, and fitted into a wood frame work, with a spiffy black anodized front panel. The potentiometers were a constant headache: even milspec pots developed noise after a month of hard use by musicians.
Bob standardized on one volt per octave for his voltage controlled oscillators; my job was keeping these working
A visit from Bob Moog might mean experimenting with nonlinear mixers, measuring how an audio expander could minimize apparent noise, or the Fourier transforms of trumpets and coronets. With patch cords hanging around his neck, Bob helped rewire my homebrew Theramin to minimize drift, using a 2N107 germanium transistor as a thermal sensor.
Thirty five years later, I've been an astronomer, computer jock, writer, lecturer, and Klein Bottle mogul. But I'll never forget Bob Moog
- Cliff Stoll 2005/8/22
Freezing point of mercury is -38C (which is just about -38F) ... so it would be solid through much of the Antarctic winter.
When I froze mercury in the lab, it made a surface that wasn't optically useful -- lots of tiny bumps.
Also of interest: the century old Mt. Wilson 100-inch telescope used mercury bearings for the polar axis. In the 1970's, mercury pollution worried the operations staff; I don't know what was done about it.
True. And sad.
-Cliff
For the past 4 or 5 years, I've been making (and selling) 3-dimensional immersions of Klein Bottles. Many mathematicians own them; they assure me that a Klein Bottle can indeed be immersed (but not embedded) in 3-D.
I thank slashdot readers for their support of my micro-business. I won't get rich as a zero-volume bottle maker, but I'm having plenty of fun.
How about: read my first book, The Cuckoo's Egg. Better yet, read my article in the May 1988 issue of the Communications of the ACM, "Stalking the Wily Hacker"
Cheers to all,
-Cliff (still keeping a low profile)
Friden made wonderful mechanical calculators from 1935 until 1972. These were mechanical behemoths - heavy monsters with keyboards of 100 keys (10 columns of 10 digits each) They used twelfth-horsepower motors to turn gears, ratchets, and pawls. One version even mechanically calculated square roots! Physics departments were happy if they owned one of these! Here's a photo of a mechanical Friden calculator: http://www.hpmuseum.org/big/friden.jpg During the 1950's, Friden made many mechanical calculators & adding machines. They were also the prime contractor to make mechanical rotor-based crypto machines for the NSA. In 1962, Friden introduced the all-electronic calculator. It used reverse Polish notation, a 10 button keypad, and 7-segment displays on an oscilloscope-style screen. It was actually the second electronic calculator (a British firm beat it by a year) but it revolutionized calculations: silent, fast, and with space-age styling. Here's a photo: http://www.hpmuseum.org/ec132.jpg Friden began making printers and disk drives, eventually making computers in 1966. In 1964, Friden was sold to Singer - the same folks who made sewing machines. It was a disaster. Friden had been run locally (in San Leandro, California -- just up from the future Silicon Valley). Suddenly lots of New York City consultants descended from Singer -- quasi-executives who repeatedly reorganized the company. Friden failed to take advantage of their immense market lead in electronic calculators; worse, they continued to develop and sell mechanical calculators even after they (and their competitors) had made cheap electronic calculators. By 1972, Friden-Singer was about dead. All their good engineers were leaving (often to printer and disk drive companies in Silicon Valley: Diablo & Seagate & Shugart). The mechanical plant was useless, since nobody wanted motor driven adding machines. And Singer never integrated Friden's mechanical expertise into the sewing machine business. Friden-Singer closed in 1976, leaving behind a factory site in San Leandro which was recently studied for PCB contamination in its underground water. How do I know this? Oh, I've been working with the engineer who designed the Friden 130 electronic calculator. He's pushing 80 years old, and still remembers the excitement of developing the world's first electronic calculator. Zooks, but he remembers the schematics to it (which is handy, since we're rebuilding one!) -Cliff Stoll 12 Oct 2000