To all,

I remember taking a field trip to Fort Lee, Virginia, sometime around 1972,
to see the SAGE computer (it was an entire 3 story concrete block BUILDING)
which was part of the Strategic Air Command radar monitoring system.

Drum storage: massive brown stacks of brown spinning platters behind glass
doors inside refrigerator sized cases.

Tubes: several rooms full of differently-sized tubes (tiny to
water-cooler-bottle size), plugged into racks from floor to ceiling, glowing
orange or white inside the glass...

Wire: the 'spaghetti room' - miles of wire and plugboards where all of the
stuff on the three floors of the building was interconnected...

Paper tape, punch cards, plastic 'autodialer' cards that when plugged into a
special slot in a touchtone phone would dial the number for you and then
spit out the card...

CRT terminals: the 'operations room' - USAF technicians monitoring air
traffic over the entire east coast in a darkened room on CRTs with text,
graphics and 'light pens', clipboards with TOP SECRET cover paper obscuring
. . . who knows?

Mechanical terminals: giant teletypes that looked like the front of a '58
Buick, clattering intermittently, as well as IBM Selectric terminals and IBM
1403 line printers

Another field trip was to a Bell System switching station, with giant racks
of relays clattering endlessly. I remember the guy who was giving the tour
showing us one particular connected relay, saying 'this is a phone call in
progress' before he pinched the relays apart and disconnected the call.

It was totally cool to a 14 year old kid...

Bryan Brodie

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