[R-390] NASA radio

[Flowertime01 at wmconnect.com]

Curt,

When I got out of service in 1975, property book was still a typewriter and 
carbon copy operation. Property book being who signed for what inventory on 
a site on any given day. The "Property Book Officer" was the designated 
stucky of ownership. You had property books for ever building and operation on 
a site. Someone owned the desks, chairs and file cabinets. Someone else 
owned all the radio equipment. Someone owned all the pots, pans, silverware, 
stoves in the mess hall. Someone owned the fire extinguishers. Someone owned 
all the vehicles in the motorpool. Someone owned the one truck, flagpole and 
buildings on the site. You wanted things to be inventoried as expendable 
(tubes, transistors, paper, punch tape, coffee, fuel, paint) so it would not be 
on a property book.

Every item that was received, transferred, shipped had a multi copy hand 
written or typed form with the from, what, and two completed. One signed off 
as released and another signed on as accepted and thus added to your property 
book. 

>From time to time you completed your tour of duty and signed your complete 
book over to another person. A real inspection hand hand and eye ball one 
every item in the property book was conducted. If you had a real "list" of 
what property you were controlling, it was because you typed it up by hand. A 
lot of officers punched their list up on RTTY tape. In many little parts. You 
could feed the parts to a repunch and string it all together. You deleted 
an item with scotch tape over some holes. You could stop the tape or tare the 
tape to insert an additional number or item. by changing the tape in the 
reader or flip a switch from read tape to read keyboard. Once you had a good 
tape together you could print nice list of noun nomenclatures and serial 
numbers.  These list then were walked around for inventory.  With your tape in 
hand you could delete and add items to your working list.

Later punch cards were hand typed one card one line one item. Sort them 
your self by hand. Feed the deck to a card reader and get a printed list back 
from the computer printer.

There is no history / data base of all those inventories of all that 
government property. This is why it is important to preserve what bit we can find.

Roger AI4NI</HTML>