[Boatanchors] Speaking of cheap stuff (was harbor freight and soldering guns)

[Jim Wiley]

Well, I suppose the statute of limitations has expired by now, so here 
is my tale of mischief by a group of high-school "nerds"  in the mid 
60's.  Our school had one of those central clocks that kept the room 
clocks synchronized by distributing pulses every minute to all the rooms 
from a master clock in the principal's office.

Several of us in the radio club took it upon ourselves to see what could 
be done to sow confusion and disarray among the students.  We sneaked 
into the school after hours (actually about 2:00 AM on a Sunday morning) 
and by selectively "killing" or adding to the sync pulses to the various 
rooms managed to get every clock in about 80 rooms different from every 
other clock by intervals ranging from 5 minutes to as much as 8 hours.   
Took us about 4 hours.

Took them almost a month to get everything back to where it belonged.    
Good fun.   We told them we would fix it for free, but they weren't 
interested - after all, how could a bunch of teenagers possibly know 
anything about something as complex as a master clock system?


- Jim, KL7CC




<snip>


On 9/13/2015 7:55 AM, Pete Lancashire wrote:
> What I have is a bit 'nuts' since I am a member of the "time-nuts" 
> group. I have 3 of the old IBM office/school clocks most of us grew up 
> with. Their big competitor was Simplex. They run from a central 
> "server" that produces 1 pulse per second. And can also be reset 
> remotely. In a way the boat anchors of office clocks. -pete