[GreenKeys] Old stories of Teletype and Data Communications...

[Don Robert House]

Hi Wallace,

Nice story.  Thanks for sharing...

I remember the electrowriters!  I also remember the TWX at
Hallicrafters that was attached to dial tone through a steel box with
an interface to a KW-7 crypto unit.  They kept telling me that the 28
ASR would not send.  Two times I proved that the KW-7 was not giving
the tD a ground.  They still did not believe me so I had two of them
"watch carefully"  while I put a screwdriver on the battery lead and
let the shaft touch the frame...  BIG SPARK and the reader started.
One of them fell back on his buttocks.  I never had to go back there
again.  Tee hee.

Don


On 8 May 2008, at 2:51 PM, MURRAY, WALLACE W (ATTASIAIT) wrote:

Great Story Don.

Similar stories come out of the Ford Rouge plant.  In the old days,
the telephone company really did nothing inside the plant.  The
telephone company pulled up to the gate handed the electricians at
Ford's the cable and phones and Ford electricians did the rest.  Old
man Henry Ford cut a deal with the president of Michigan Bell.  This
arrangement did not change until registration and divestiture, when
the telephone company said we would meet them in the telephone room in
one building.  Very quickly, separate conduit runs and manholes were
established just for telephone cables.

Ford tended to run everything in the same conduit runs.  So you could
go into one of their manholes and find 130 KV electric power, high
pressure super heated steam, and steam rated telephone cables.  Well,
as you might expect, every now and then they had a power fault causing
the manhole to explode.  It literally destroyed everything in the
manhole and often shot the manhole frame and cover one hundred feet in
the air.

Not sure if I ever told you about the teletype machines installed at
Great Lakes steel on the hot strip mill.

Anyway, they were having an electrowriter problem which was traced to
our local building cables.  As the young grunt, who was expected to
drive the car, get coffee and then find the problem, I went along in
search of the bad cable.  Not sure if you ever were in a hot strip
rolling mill, but at the end of the line there is a large area where
they let the steel that gets out of control pile up.  This is also the
point where they needed a model 28 RO so they could identify the coil
of steel they just made.  Everything worked fine until the first time
the steel being rolled started to dance and jumped off the strip
mill.  You guessed it, it piled up right into the 28 RO going about 40
miles an hour.  The TTY wound up being about one inch thick.  After
one or two more failures, the folks at the mill put their heads
together and made this shroud out of one inch thick steel plate.
There was a hole in it just big enough so you could reach in and tear
off the copy on the TTY.

I of course was very interested in the arrangement and asked them how
they serviced the machine or even changed paper.  They pointed out the
big lifting ring on the top of the shroud and the overhead crane.
When service was needed, the crane operator lifted the shroud off,
work was performed and the shroud replaced.  More important, every one
was happy.

From: Don Robert House [mailto:k9tty at dls.net]
Sent: Wednesday, May 07, 2008 7:11 PM
To: MURRAY, WALLACE W (ATTASIAIT)
Subject: Re: India's communications

This wiring mess reminds me of the (lack of) the wiring plan at the
Motorola Tube Plant in Franklin Park, Illinois.  We could not get the
covers on the cross-connect boxes.  Motorola wanted each and every new
kind of circuit and service we could provide them from data
communications, to Teletype, to picture-phone intercom service. But
they would never let us take any service out and would never let us do
any clean up of the wiring.    Motorola's 756 PBX rivaled some
villages and towns' central offices.  They had Chief Operators for the
PBX and for the Teletype pool.  They even had an Executive Operator
and Traffic Manager.  Those were the days our foreman had to come out
and stop the fighting between the different departments for our repair
and installation priorities.  Things changed 200 % when Panasonic took
over the plant.  Almost everything was removed.

Memories,  some of the good old days were not so good.

Don

Former Teltype repairman, data communication serviceman, SSB Circuit
Designer, CPC trainer, Transmission Engineer, Regional transmission
product selection manager
Now suffering retiree and tax payer...  Where did all those benefits
go anyway?