[GreenKeys] What brought you here?

[Jim Haynes]

I thought I had replied to this thread already, but I can't find the reply
so maybe I meant to and never did it.

For the long version of the story google for "Chad Is Our Most Important
Product"  (for youngsters, that title is a parody of one of General
Electric's slogans from time past, Progress Is Our Most Important Product)
This was originally written for an audience of ex-Teletype people so not
all of it will make sense to those outside the company.

Short version.

As a youngster fascinated by Teletype machines at Western Union office,
newspaper and broadcast radio station.  And by electrical and radio stuff
in general.  An uncle who was a ham, but lived pretty far away so I
rarely got to visit him.  Friends at the telephone company let me borrow
a book that explained how Teletype machines work.  Then I could look at
the actual machines and see the parts working just as the book described.

(circa 1954)
As a teenager learned about amateur RTTY from Wayne Green's articles in
CQ magazine.  Had never before imagined a Teletype was something a person
could own and use on radio.  Wayne's article put me in touch with Merrill
Swan W6AEE, original publisher of RTTY which became the de facto national
publication for hams.  We became friends by mail.  Found a bought a
Model 21-A tape printer.  Built an electronic receiving distributor for
it from an article by Cecil Crafts W6ZBV in RTTY.  Built a version of
the W2PAT terminal unit, using a polar relay liberated by a telephone
company worker.  The receiving distributor never worked, but I have a
lot of fun playing with the machine.

(1955-1960)
Off to University to study E.E.  Got into the ham club there, and
Teletype Corp. donated some equipment to the school, a 28KSR and
some tape equipment.  I got the club station on RTTY and studied
and got a conditional class ham license.  (I didn't bother with the
Novice class since it didn't permit RTTY)  Did a lot of experimenting
and reading about FSK demodulation while in school.  Worked both of
the RTTY contests back then, trying to run up a good score for W5YM
and show the flag - we had the only RTTY station in Arkansas, so everybody
wanted to work us.

Bob Weitbrecht W6NRM/W9TCJ left his job at Yerkes Observatory in
Wisconsin and stopped in Arkansas to visit us on his way back to
California.  We had had almost nightly RTTY QSOs while I was in
school, and it was a treat to meet the man who was one of the foremost
promoters of RTTY back before Irv Hoff got into the game.

(1958, 1959)
That led to a summer job at Teletype Corp., and another one the following
year.  Got to meet Ray Morrison W9GRW while I was in Chicago and see his
fabulous collection.  He gave me a box of enough parts to put together
a Model 15 KSR, which I did in the work room of the radio club at the
YMCA where I was living.  During those summers Teletype R&D was working
on time-division multiplex equipment.  We had a radio receiver and
URA-8 demodulator in our lab so we would occasionally listen to and copy
MUX signals that were on the air at the time.

(1960-63)
Having gone through ROTC I was in the Air Force for 3 years at Edwards
AFB in California.  While I hoped to do something communication related,
I was put into rocket engine testing.  And we had almost nothing to do
while waiting for the test stand to be modified for the engine we were
going to test, so lots of time to study and design ham equipment.
At the time Edwards was about a 2 hour drive from Arcadia where Merrill
Swan lived, so I spent lots of weekend afternoons in his ham shack where
we talked about RTTY for hours.  Also occasional visits with W6NRM when
he would visit his mother who lived near Merrill.

(1963-66)
Returned to Skokie and a full time job at Teletype.  Had my RTTY station
set up in the house I rented in Deerfield.  Model 15, BC-375 transmitter,
Drake 2B receiver.  Many conversations with Irf Hoff, Keith Petersen, and
Vic Poor about demodulator design and other things.

(1966-68)
Left Teletype for General Electric Computer Dept. in Phoenix.  At the time
G.E. was close to being the leading computer vendor in the time sharing
and online business: the Dartmouth time sharing systems, and the by then
archaic Datanet-30 communication processor, and the 600-line of computers,
plus the 645 machine being built for the MULTICS system at MIT and a few
other places.  One of the RTTY big guys in Phoenix was Cecil W7VKO.  He
was doing RTTY for Air Force MARS.  I replaced the BC-375 with a home 
built transmitter.

(1968-1998)
While I learned a lot at G.E. I didn't really like the company culture.
Shortly before I left there I saw the Datanet-30 terminal, which was being
made by the Communication Products Dept. in Virginia.  I was really
blown away by it - G.E. had never done anything like that before and
it seemed like such a nice machine.  Meanwhile Teletype was struggling
to get the mechanically complex Model 37 out the door and it was only
half as fast.  I landed a job with computer pioneer Harry Huskey at the 
new campus of University of California in Santa Cruz.  I had been trying
to build my own computer at home, but it never got near operational
status because this was before integrated circuits and it was just too
much work building all the circuits out of parts.  (In fact I had been
working in this direction since Skokie, using some wire delay line memory
that I had picked up at a surplus store in Pasadena while visiting Merrill
Swan.  An executive at Teletype managed to "liberate" a Model 35 and a
Model 33 to help me in my extra-curricular work, thinking it would
produce some knowledge that Teletype might eventually use.)

At Santa Cruz our main computer was an IBM 360 Model 40, entirely a
punch card operation.  We also had an IBM 1130 minicomputer that
was attached to a machine that provided interfaces for Teletypes.
Some in the administrative data processing area were working on some
ideas for online computing but nothing ever came of it.  Later we got
our first time-sharing machine, a DEC PDP-8 with five Model 33 terminals
attached.  That was replaced by a PDP-11, and then some PDP-11/45 and 
11/70 machines, and over the years we went through Teletype 43 and various
CRT terminals.  Also bought Teletype Model 40 line printers for the
student terminal labs so they could print their work.  Added a number
of DEC VAX computers, and then replaced them with Sun machines using
the Project Athena system developed at MIT.  And then I retired and I
guess my successors have been busy undoing whatever I did.

(1998-present)
Returned to my native Arkansas, Fayetteville, home of the University and
W5YM.  Had in mind to build a sort of Teletype museum, but now I realize
I have got to be 82 years old and will never complete it as planned - too
many other interesting things to do.  I have 14s, 15s, 28s, Western Union
100 series machines, a Siemens, couple of Qwint, Texas Instruments,
and other odd stuff.  Maybe I'll post some pictures later.

Well I said this was the short version, and as Tom Lehrer sang, "You've
yourself to blame if it's too long / you should never have let me begin,
begin, you should never have let me begin."

Jim W6JVE


 	---

 	"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