[GreenKeys] Old stories of Teletype and Data Communications...

[Michael O'Day]

Hi Don, 

Likewise, yours were great stories. I came into the
datacomm arena a little later that you (1980) with
Burroughs Corp in Chicago. I used to maintain several
sites (banks and one railroad)which were "on-line" via
dedicated sync/async phone lines and modems that ran
at 700, 1200 or 1800 baud. Our boss got a call one day
from the railroad complaining that one of his
operators was picking up the modem (about the size of
a shoebox) and was repeatedly droping in on the desk
to make it work because that was what the night
operator had told him to do. Turned out the FE on call
was familiar with the ongoing problem with one
circuit, and had asked the night op to pick up one end
of the modem about an inch and drop it to reseat the
boards inside (which worked, a common problem). So the
operator put up a note advising the day shift to "drop
the modem onto the desktop in case of problem". Since
he didn't specify a distance, the day op was bouncing
it from about 2 feet up. Needless to say, the modem in
Baltimore was replaces post haste.

Mike - N9ODM


--- Don Robert House <k9tty at dls.net> wrote:

> Hi Wallace,
> 
> Nice story.  Thanks for sharing...
> 
> I remember the electrowriters!  I also remember the
> TWX at
> Hallicrafters that was attached to dial tone through
> a steel box with
> an interface to a KW-7 crypto unit.  They kept
> telling me that the 28
> ASR would not send.  Two times I proved that the
> KW-7 was not giving
> the tD a ground.  They still did not believe me so I
> had two of them
> "watch carefully"  while I put a screwdriver on the
> battery lead and
> let the shaft touch the frame...  BIG SPARK and the
> reader started.
> One of them fell back on his buttocks.  I never had
> to go back there
> again.  Tee hee.
> 
> Don
> 
> 
> On 8 May 2008, at 2:51 PM, MURRAY, WALLACE W
> (ATTASIAIT) wrote:
> 
> Great Story Don.
> 
> Similar stories come out of the Ford Rouge plant. 
> In the old days,
> the telephone company really did nothing inside the
> plant.  The
> telephone company pulled up to the gate handed the
> electricians at
> Ford's the cable and phones and Ford electricians
> did the rest.  Old
> man Henry Ford cut a deal with the president of
> Michigan Bell.  This
> arrangement did not change until registration and
> divestiture, when
> the telephone company said we would meet them in the
> telephone room in
> one building.  Very quickly, separate conduit runs
> and manholes were
> established just for telephone cables.
> 
> Ford tended to run everything in the same conduit
> runs.  So you could
> go into one of their manholes and find 130 KV
> electric power, high
> pressure super heated steam, and steam rated
> telephone cables.  Well,
> as you might expect, every now and then they had a
> power fault causing
> the manhole to explode.  It literally destroyed
> everything in the
> manhole and often shot the manhole frame and cover
> one hundred feet in
> the air.
> 
> Not sure if I ever told you about the teletype
> machines installed at
> Great Lakes steel on the hot strip mill.
> 
> Anyway, they were having an electrowriter problem
> which was traced to
> our local building cables.  As the young grunt, who
> was expected to
> drive the car, get coffee and then find the problem,
> I went along in
> search of the bad cable.  Not sure if you ever were
> in a hot strip
> rolling mill, but at the end of the line there is a
> large area where
> they let the steel that gets out of control pile up.
>  This is also the
> point where they needed a model 28 RO so they could
> identify the coil
> of steel they just made.  Everything worked fine
> until the first time
> the steel being rolled started to dance and jumped
> off the strip
> mill.  You guessed it, it piled up right into the 28
> RO going about 40
> miles an hour.  The TTY wound up being about one
> inch thick.  After
> one or two more failures, the folks at the mill put
> their heads
> together and made this shroud out of one inch thick
> steel plate.
> There was a hole in it just big enough so you could
> reach in and tear
> off the copy on the TTY.
> 
> I of course was very interested in the arrangement
> and asked them how
> they serviced the machine or even changed paper. 
> They pointed out the
> big lifting ring on the top of the shroud and the
> overhead crane.
> When service was needed, the crane operator lifted
> the shroud off,
> work was performed and the shroud replaced.  More
> important, every one
> was happy.
> 
> From: Don Robert House [mailto:k9tty at dls.net]
> Sent: Wednesday, May 07, 2008 7:11 PM
> To: MURRAY, WALLACE W (ATTASIAIT)
> Subject: Re: India's communications
> 
> This wiring mess reminds me of the (lack of) the
> wiring plan at the
> Motorola Tube Plant in Franklin Park, Illinois.  We
> could not get the
> covers on the cross-connect boxes.  Motorola wanted
> each and every new
> kind of circuit and service we could provide them
> from data
> communications, to Teletype, to picture-phone
> intercom service. But
> they would never let us take any service out and
> would never let us do
> any clean up of the wiring.    Motorola's 756 PBX
> rivaled some
> villages and towns' central offices.  They had Chief
> Operators for the
> PBX and for the Teletype pool.  They even had an
> Executive Operator
> and Traffic Manager.  Those were the days our
> foreman had to come out
> and stop the fighting between the different
> departments for our repair
> and installation priorities.  Things changed 200 %
> when Panasonic took
> over the plant.  Almost everything was removed.
> 
> Memories,  some of the good old days were not so
> good.
> 
> Don
> 
> Former Teltype repairman, data communication
> serviceman, SSB Circuit
> Designer, CPC trainer, Transmission Engineer,
> Regional transmission
> product selection manager
> Now suffering retiree and tax payer...  Where did
> all those benefits
> go anyway?
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