Vic Smith wrote in
:

Screen flashing all over the place since it was interpretive,
but it worked and management used it for years.


Being a Navy installation, our XT opened each morning with "The National
Anthem" playing on the crappy little computer speaker while the green
flag waved on the screen. This was, of course, if you had the code for
the HARDWARE LOCK board which intercepted the bootup on its way to the
drives. No code? No access IN HARDWARE!

One of my problems was convincing the mainframe security types at the
yard HQ that it wasn't a threat to national security (not to mention
their own jobs, which is why they attempted to defeat every
microcomputer installed outside their office for years). We didn't NEED
them any more. It must have been terrifying that the "little people"
has so much power on their desktops. The head of IT Security spent
hours trying to crack into my system sitting at its terminal. "What do
you do when you go home at night? How do you secure it then??", he
asked my boss, pointedly. "We turn the goddamned thing off and lock the
door on our way out of the Secure Nuclear Industrial Area", my boss
retorted. "If they get inside the CIA, I doubt they'll go for the PC
with the calibration records on it!", he said louder to get his point
across. (He always got louder when excited.)

Knowing they were coming one day, I shooed Gloria away from the keyboard
and popped a floppy into the drive with some fun stuff on it. One
program made all the letters on the screen fall into a random-looking
pile on the bottom of the screen if you didn't do anything for 60
seconds. You had to press CTRL-END and the letters would jump back to
their normal position, completely usable as ever with no effect on
anything but a little CPU load. Another one popped up a green picture
of a goat who stuck his tongue out at you until you pressed a key to
make him quit. We baited the hook just as the guy arrived and Gloria
sat back down as if everything were "normal", whatever that meant in the
crazy lab full of mischievous engineers.

The computer was already up and running so we had no excuse not to let
him in. I kept him talking just long enough for the letters to fall off
the screen in front of his eyes. "What have you done to our system!", I
said in a loud voice. Right on cue, my big boss came storming out of
his office all in a fake huff and accused this jerk of trashing our
system to protect his turf, which is exactly what they were trying to do
without ever saying so. The goat popped up while they were arguing and
raspberried him through the little speaker. My boss lost it and
couldn't keep a straight face holding his stomach. Our ruse worked
perfectly. Now, convinced we were all insane, they never bothered us
again and refused to report the incident. Everyone in our command
structure knew what they were trying to achieve and backed us. What we
did solved the major problem with the Navy's ancient batch processed
paper system.....right in the lab.

My job was Electronic Technician, not computers. If I had not been a GS
employee, I'd have never been able to do it as the wage grade's union
would have filed grievance after grievance until I was stopped. This is
why I took the job in Metrology Laboratory in the first place. I came
from the yard's Instrument Room, a WG blue collar job.

My old shop asked for my help. Someone dumped a complete Wang MVP-2200
system on them noone wanted. It had to be "somewhere" because some
bigshot had bought it for hundreds of thousands of wasted dollars. It
had two disk pack drives plus a fixed disk and a 8", hard sectored,
floppy drive for input. Only one console came with it and a really
noisy chain printer we put in a closet when I installed it. It ran Wang
Extended BASIC and I had to learn BASIC all over again to do anything
with it. It was stupid, but available. I wrote a Wang BASIC program
for it that stored and tracked all the Shop 67 (Electronics) and Shop 51
(Electrical) tech manuals, which were in the thousands, a collection
from before WW2. This way there was something besides a green log book
you had to search through to find out who had the manual you wanted
checked out...by hand. I tried to dump the Wang and build the shop
another "Parts PC" from Bob's Computer Warehouse, but they had to use
the Wang. Sure was fast finding a record with all that power for the
day....(c; I tried to figure out how I could steal one of the disk pack
drives and hook it to my calibration PC to do backups faster than the
little tape drive I had on B: but never found an interface. I could
back up fast to the 9-track NEC, and did so several times, but I got a
deal on the little data tape drive and it would operate without my baby
sitting it the NEC software required. It just made a drive image.