[GreenKeys] Bert Prall

[Jim Haynes]

I had the pleasure of knowing Bert when I was working for Teletype in
Skokie, and visited his house a few times.  But I was not one of his
inner circle.  One who was, and is still living in his 90s, is Bill
Lill in Glenview IL.

Later Bert moved to San Antonio and was somewhat connected with Datapoint,
Inc.  makers of about the first programmable CRT terminal that was
actually usable as a PC.  One of the stars at Datapoint was Vic Poor,
previously with Frederick Electronics Corp. of Frederick MD.  Vic worked
closely with Irv Hoff on TU design, Irv making the ST-6 and Frederick
making several commercial products.  After going with Datapoint Vic
became notable as the architect of the Intel 8008 - altho Intel didn't
decide to make the product in time so the Datapoint terminal was built
with smaller scale ICs.

A good friend of Bert was David Monroe, who currently is building the
museum SAMSAT in San Antonio.

There was a very good telephone museum in Houston.  It received Bert's
extensive collection after his death.  But then before they could get it
unpacked AT&T sold the building where it was located.  David was quite
active with that museum.  I don't know to what extent its collection is
all packed away or is going to be merged into SAMSAT or what is happening.
The Houston operation was named the Doc Porter museum.

It's my understanding that a bunch of Bert's friends around Skokie had
voice and/or Teletype connections to a switch at his home.  They had
found that there was a very cheap rate for private lines from the 
telephone company for burglar alarms, so that's what they were using.
Ordering a burglar alarm line got you a "dry pair" of wires between
the two points.  Eventually the telco learned that they were taking
advantage of the voice-grade bandwidth of these lines, and shunted
capacitors across them to restrict them to very slow signaling.

 	---

 	"Ya can argue all ya wanna, but it's dif'rent than it was."
 	"No it ain't! No it ain't!  But ya gotta know the territory."
 		Meredith Willson, The Music Man