Comments by "ke6gwf - Ben Blackburn" (@ke6gwf) on "" video.

  1. I remember my dad talking about seeing the Echo satellite go overhead. He went on to program for and operate a couple of the early tube and transistor computers including the ERMA at BofA in LA, basically the original Online Banking, and what made the magnetic ink on checks a thing so it could read them automatically. One fun story he told was that the computer developed a glitch, some circuit was going out and it would lock some board on the back end of the computer up, and the operator would have to get up from the control console and walk all the way around the racks, open a panel and flip a momentary reset toggle switch. The GE technicians had looked at it and just gave the instructions to keep flipping the switch as needed, and didn't seem to be in a hurry to repair it, so late one night when my dad was working alone processing checks, the thing kept locking up, and he would have to walk around to the other side of the racks and flip the switch, then walk back to the console and hit Continue, and it was wasting a lot of time, so he grabbed a roll of string from the secretary's desk, tied one end on the reset switch, through a vent slot in the cover panel, and then ran it over the top of the racks and tied it to the console, so every time it froze up he could just pull the string and hit the restart button and lose very little processing time. The next morning the manager gets into work and yells at him for the string dangling over the room, and my dad tells him how many minutes of processing time it saved that night by not having to walk back every time, and the manager simmered down. Then the manager went and called GE, and very soon the tech came over a little red around the ears and replaced the faulty board!
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