My first contact with Computers
I was assigned to the Vint Hill Farm Field Station, in Warrenton, VA, to work on an experimental mission, after returning from Vietnam. Some government agency had put up a satellite and it sampled morse signals from around the world, and downloading them to, as I recall, 9 track tapes. The tapes would then be given to ditty boppers who would translate the morse code to plain text, typed up on mills and this output would be given to me, or another TA, for identification. We had a computer network and we put whatever we identified the signal as into the system. The network terminals were teletype machines and the computer took up a room downstairs and had, if I remember right, 6k of Random Access Memory. The programs for the computer and the network were stored on paper tape which was continually breaking. The computer was down all the time and the Operations Sergeant hated to see me sitting around, so he was always sending me down to "help" the civilian engineers, which is how I got started working with computers, which has made a good living for me these many years.
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