[GreenKeys] Oddball 28?

[George B. Hutchison]

John - - -

The machine you have was part of the Air Force's Autodin System - 
AUTODIN being an anacronym for "Automatic Digital Network". The 
machines were owned by the government but were serviced by Western 
Union.

Around the time that the famous "Mouse" 28's were being made 
available to California (and ultimately nationwide) amateurs, Western 
Union had seven of those machines sitting in their shop in San 
Francisco. They wanted them very badly for the parts, but could not 
dismantle them because of the governmental ownership.

By some magic quirk of fate it was decided that those machines should 
go to radio amateurs, and it was my privelage to be able to go to San 
Francisco and scarf all of them.

When the mouse machines were distributed via the moving company hired 
to transport them all over the U.S., those hams around the country 
who wanted to pay the extra freight had one loaded on the moving vans 
with their name on it. Five of them went around the country, and I 
kept two for myself.

If the machine is complete, there is a five-level with edge-notching 
LARP parallel reperforator under the dome.

The large cable with the Winchester connector was the means whereby 
the machines were connected to the cryptographic equipment.

Note that the inboard tape reader, a parallel-reading teletype model 
LX3, has the five bit-sensing pins one would normally find, plus 
there is a sixth sense pin which was used to sense a notch in the 
edge of the tape. I believe the tape was notched in the event that 
there was a discarded/incorrect character in the tape which was to be 
discarded.

The dual-headed TD was geared for only 100 speed. To my knowledge 
there were never any gears for any other speed manufactured for them. 
You cannot ordinarily use regular TD gears as they would run the TD 
shafts in reverse, and that would not be nice!

The LARP perforator ran at 200 WPM, and was parallel fed by six 
magnets (One for the notch), and the clutch magnet which when tripped 
caused the perf cam to make a half-revolution, as these units had 
dual stop clutches in them.

You have indeed a rarie!.

Of the two I kept I gave one to a friend in Mount Shasta, California, 
who ultimately took it to the dump many years ago.

The other resides in a little ham shack on the North Kitsap 
Peninsula, here in Washington state.

George - W7TTY