@lauren Yeah, well, I'm writing an autobio anyway, for the historians and genealogists of the future to use. It might fill in some useful details, make connections, reveal certain mysterious stuff. Making money isn't my goal, just archiving it in safe places for future generations. Plus, it's cathartic to tell the stories and set the record straight.

@shuttersparks Soon to be a major motion picture, no doubt. In the horror genre, perhaps.

@lauren Hahaha. What genre? Hmm. Probably "Nerdporn" if there is such a thing.

@shuttersparks I'm pretty sure there is. Late at night computer rooms are a whole 'nuther world with the main lights out and nothing but little blinking lights and the roar of the fans covering any extraneous noises.

@lauren So you've done that too.

@shuttersparks Little known tales of ARPANET Site #1.

@lauren
Unfortunately, I could not do this in the biggest installations I've worked in since they operated 24/7. Come to think of it, I don't even know where the light controls were for the 1 acre sized computer room at Litton Mellonics. I sure would have liked to and taken photos.

However, I did this very thing thing at Litton Aero Service / Westrex (Yes, THAT Westrex). I had a key to the building and on weekends had the whole place to myself. I would do that. Shut all the lights off. Just me and the computer in the dark. Haha. Yeah. Weird. Okay, I'm weird. I don't deny it, but I'm old and don't give a shit.

However, it was nowhere near the systems we had at Mellonics. That would have been an insane photo. A 370/168, 64 3330 disk drives, 56 2314 disk drives, 120 tape drives, 7 3211 printers, four-platter 6,000 RPM cache memory, two CDC 6600 machines in the corner, on and on. Serious fun. And Litton was very cool. On Sundays we programmers had the entire facility to ourselves to use for any personal projects we wished. There were about 8 of us who took advantage of it.

@shuttersparks @lauren For the Interop show networks we would pre-stage the infrastructure in a warehouse before shipping it to the show venue.

To get a feel for the scale - I remember our gear filling 46 full sized trucks. We had literally thousands of networking devices. (And this was just the show infrastructure, not the vendor display stuff.)

Anyway, in the warehouse we had various tests. One was to throw the power main and then see if we could bring the network back.

But we also did lights-out - where we turned off all the lights in the building, leaving nothing but the bazillions of power indicators, data LEDs, and other blinking, glowing stuff. It was most impressive.

@karlauerbach @lauren That sounds like serious fun. :-)

@shuttersparks @lauren I never got to see a SAGE Q7 computer console in action (although I worked in a building where such a monster existed and ran.)

The glow from the tens upon tens of thousands of vacuum tubes must have been amazing.

In terms of giant computer rooms in the 1970s - I heard reports of the Social Security Administrations acres upon acres of computers and tape drives located somewhere in Virginia.

At Wells Fargo we had several data centers - mine occupied two floors in a high rise on Market Street in San Francisco. There was a much larger center in southern California.

But those never went dark, and access was never merely a key - my computer room in the '80s had several $billion flowing through it every day. Physical security was tight.

(I heard tales of the Federal Reserve's data center in an underground bunker under the Blue Ridge in Virginia. But I was never there.)

@karlauerbach @lauren Amazing. Wish I could have seen it. Mellonics was impressive enough for me. If you yell from one end of the room and someone at the other end hears nothing, it's a big computer room. Lol.

Seems I do have you beat in one single area. I was brought in by a friend to see the Sage7 in operation at SDC and got a demonstration, walked the rows of racks, sat at the console and used the lightpen to bring up real-time flight info for any blip on the screen. At that time, this was mind-blowing.

He also demonstrated the diagnostics possible because it was two mirrored machines. Walk down an aisle, yank out one of the logic modules, and a couple seconds later, the glacially slow line printer would print out the location of the failure and the ID of the module to replace. This was jaw-dropping to say the least. I'm still speechless today about this and can't get my head around it. Using tubes. Really? Yeah, tubes.

That experience was a useful lesson that I applied later in my career. It was also humbling. When I think back on it, I think, "Yeah, you're really smart, exceptional, done a lot of amazing things, but there are people much smarter then you still."

@shuttersparks @karlauerbach A shame that it never really worked up to its promised capabilities. Not even close. But hey, you can still see SAGE consoles and even circuit board arrays on old Irwin Allen shows like "Time Tunnel", "Lost in Space", etc.

There's more stuff underground in D.C. than above ground of course. Once I was in an (unspecified here) federal building, being escorted from one part of the building to another. My escort decided to take a shortcut through a basement stairway. Along the basement corridor we walked by a pair of wooden double doors that were open, I got a glimpse of a long, long well lit, apparently featureless hallway that stretched out to the vanishing point. Where did it lead? Damned if I knew. I didn't ask.

@shuttersparks @lauren Lightpens back then were quite interesting. They didn't emit light at all. Rather they simply picked up a light blip that was raster-scanned on the screen. Then from the timing of the raster scan and the pickup of the the blip the position of the pen could be easily computed.

@karlauerbach @shuttersparks They were popular with hobbyists too. One of my homemade terminals, that displayed on a regular TV, had a light pen system I built. Given that the display was 64x16 (I think 16) characters, that was the precision of the pen, but it was fairly impressive in demos at the time.

@karlauerbach @lauren Yes. I imagine a light pen would be difficult to implement today.

Back when I laid hands on that that running Sage machine at SDC (around March 1969 I think) I was 15 had been programming for about 6 months. Hah. And I was already an electronics geek. It was science fiction come to life to place the light pen over a blip on the big round screen and flight info would appear on a small CRT to the right.

And I puzzled over how this thing worked. Looked at the end of the pen, which had a small lens. Wtf? My mentor explained that the pen contained a light sensor not a light source. The CRT is scanning, of course, and when the beam passed under the tip of the pen a pulse was produced, locating the position of the pen.

Derp. Obvious, once you get the idea. Easy peasy.

With today's active TFT LCDs a light pen is probably not doable.

My mentor, who taught me quite a lot about programming and algorithms worked for RAND and wrote some of the software that ran on the Sage. He had access and invited me to check it out.

I was fortunate with mentors. Years later I had already done logic design for a while. And then I met Al Harano, who was one of the designers of the little RTL computer that flew on the Apollo. He took me under his wing, fixed a large design I had done (poorly), taught me some basic rules, and for the rest of my career every hardware logic design I ever did worked flawlessly first time. I owe a lot to those guys. It's all about discipline and not bending the rules.

@shuttersparks @karlauerbach If I was doing a light pen with an LCD, I'd code a short artifact that scanned through the display that the pen could pick up. Would still need low level access but I think completely doable. But no reason of course to do so now. As you know for a time I ran the RAND UNIX facility (the DEC machines down in the basement, 11s and the IMPs/TIPs were there too). That room was the one and only time in my life when I pushed THE BIG RED BUTTON THAT IS NEVER TO BE PRESSED. Which not only killed the power instantly to the 11s and all the ARPANET stuff, but also a bunch of disk drives for the 370 upstairs. I walked in one day and the room was full of smoke -- I couldn't see a thing. It's interesting when there's something like that you totally don't expect. And then you have to overcome the resistance to pushing that big red button under the shield just inside the door. The whole interval was probably five seconds or less but it felt much longer.

@lauren @shuttersparks I've never pushed the big red button. However, during a show when I was in the booth we started to have smoke pouring out of one of the offstage wings. I thought "fire" and began to work through my mental checklist - work lights on, house lights full, stage lights off, .. It took a while for the assistant stage manage to get back and tell us that a smoke machine had gone awry and that there was no fire. The audience was not aware, except for a strange burst of Rosco smoke and a momentary weirdness in the lights.

@karlauerbach @lauren Hahaha. Great story.

@lauren @karlauerbach Yes. "Emergency Pull" it was called on IBM installations. I've pulled it several times out of curiosity, but not at the big installation at Mellonics. Lol.

@shuttersparks More fun when you're not alone in the computer room with just the blinky lights. Of course, humans being humans, there have probably been similar incidents accompanying most technological innovations since the caves. "Hey, you wanna see my new invention?"

@lauren Hmm, yes, if you're talking about what I think you're talking about, yes, that happened too. Hahaha.

@lauren @shuttersparks What sorta books do you read? :D

You guys lived through one of the biggest inflection points in human history.

There's books to be wrote in there. Before it all becomes magic black box crap that nobody knows how got here.