Remembering the Brainerd Lakes Area

© Mark Ollig


It’s true about living each day to the fullest. Things can, and as all of us now know, do, change.

A few years ago, I wrote a column while vacationing in my old stomping grounds; the Brainerd Lakes Area.

I thought it might be uplifting to revisit my trip to Brainerd for this week to forget, even for a little while, the current situation all of us find ourselves living in now.

And so, let’s return to Aug. 25, 2017, and the column (with a few updates) yours truly wrote from Brainerd.

“Greetings from the Coco Moon Coffee Bar located in the heart of downtown Brainerd.

It has been nearly 10 years since I last visited this downtown Brainerd coffee shop on Laurel and 6th Street.

Brainerd is the city where I graduated from high school.

People are surprised to learn this, because my five siblings graduated from Winsted, and they assumed I did, too.

This morning, I’m writing your Bits & Bytes column from the same booth as I did in September 2006.

I admit to feeling a bit nostalgic being back here in the Brainerd Lakes Area.

The coffee bar has a good Wi-Fi signal, and my laptop computer is connected to it.

There is one thing that has changed since 2006; my coffee preference.

Today, I am drinking the light roast with a double shot of espresso and a splash of cream.

As I type this column, a message notification from a relative suddenly popped up on the screen.

My sister was responding to the Facebook video I posted earlier this morning from Nisswa, showing two deer wandering on the edge of a wooded area.

She posted the comment, “Awe!”

Another relative sent a Facebook Instant Message asking where I was staying while in Brainerd. We ended up messaging back-and-forth for a few minutes.

I guess it’s true. In the online world, we have all become networked together.

Looking out the window, I see a cloudless and vibrant blue sky. Across the street, there is a tall pine tree swaying in a light breeze. Cars, trucks, and an occasional semi-truck slowly traverse up and down 6th Street.

Until 2005, 6th Street used to be the stretch of Highway 371 which ran through downtown Brainerd – until the bypass; now, 371 traffic routes slightly westward and north, through the city limits of Baxter.

Baxter now has many new businesses sprinkled along this route of Highway 371.

When I lived here during the 1970s, we had a town rivalry between Brainerd and Baxter.

In 1976, citizens were hotly debating whether to add fluoride to the drinking water.

I also recall a late 1970s newspaper article of a proposed Highway 371 bypass of downtown Brainerd, which, of course, the local downtown businesses vehemently opposed.

The Paul Bunyan Center (with the 26-foot-tall talking, arm-waving Paul Bunyan statue) opened in 1950, and was advertised as being in Brainerd, but it was really located within the city limits of Baxter.

Sorry about that Baxter, but that’s how it goes with these town rivalries.

During the 1970s, Larry Lopp, the owner of the Paul Bunyan Amusement Center, lived in the same townhome association as my family, which was across the road from the Bar Harbor Supper Club.

I recall many times hearing loud whirling rotating blades, and then looking out our living room window to see the Paul Bunyan pontoon helicopter softly landing in the bay with Larry on board.

A boat would go out to meet the helicopter and bring him home.

More than 40 years have passed, so I suppose it is safe to reveal Lopp occasionally gave free tickets to the amusement center to my sisters and me – which we very much appreciated.

Sadly, all good things must come to an end.

The original Paul Bunyan Amusement Center closed in 2003.

However, it wasn’t the end of the revered Paul Bunyan talking statue.

Paul and his faithful partner from the original amusement center, Babe the Blue Ox, moved to a new location six miles east of, and within the city limits of Brainerd.

Paul Bunyan now officially lives in Brainerd.

Babe and Paul continue to entertain and provide memories for new generations of children and adults visiting the Paul Bunyan Land amusement park.

Paul still welcomes the children by name, which once mystified this 7-year-old the first time I saw Paul wave his hand at me and say, “Hello, Mark from Winsted, Minnesota!”

After heavy rainfall last night, I awoke this morning to clear blue skies and a chilly 52 degrees in the City of Lakeshore, south of Nisswa.”

It was great being back in the Brainerd Lakes Area.

Today, it is back to our 2020 reality.

I look forward to once again enjoying a vacation in the Brainerd Lakes Area.

For now, stay safe, everyone.

The new normal: working from home

© Mark Ollig


All of us are managing the changes occurring in our daily lives due to the Novel Coronavirus Disease 2019, commonly known as COVID-19.

During this widespread pandemic, many Minnesotans, who are able, have begun working from home.

The telecommunications company I work for announced last Friday those working in office buildings would begin working from home.

For many, it has been a significant change in their regular workday routine; not everyone had the proper computing equipment in place to begin working from home.

This announcement did not apply to me, as I have been working from home since December 2018.

In November of 2018, I was informed the office building I worked out of was closing.

The nearest town with a company office I could work from would be a 2-hour commute, which was something I didn’t want to do each day.

Before the office was shuttered, I applied with my employer to become a part of their WAH (Work at Home) program.

The program required a person’s home to have a minimum internet speed connection of 5Mbps.

My home internet connection uses a highspeed broadband connection with plenty of bandwidth, so I had that part covered.

WAH also needed various levels of approval; not everyone who applies is accepted.

While waiting to hear back from the company, I spent time at the office packing items into cardboard boxes to take to wherever I would be working from next.

A few days after I applied, the company approved my application for WAH. I was relieved; yet, I knew working from home would be a significant change in my daily routine.

At home, I set up a desk near the bay window (I got my office window back), along with a comfortable office chair.

A couple floor storage shelves found a new home on the right side of the desk to hold my reference books. A filing cabinet holds my telecom-related papers.

I placed a new printer stand near the desk.

A height-adjustable table on wheels for my laptop computer is located on the left side of my desk.

The company mailed me an HP T620 thin-client computer, keyboard, mouse, and the same model Polycom Managed IP (internet protocol) phone I used in the work office.

They also sent two large display monitors, a printer, and a wireless router with an internet Wide Area Network (WAN) port and four Local Area Network (LAN) ports for ethernet connections.

RJ45 ethernet cables, video splitters, and associated power cables were also sent to me.

I plugged the computer equipment into a CyberPower 600 VA (volt-ampere) surge protector/battery backup system in case of commercial power brownouts, spikes, or short-term interruptions.

After installing the computing devices, I ran several tests to ensure they operated correctly over the company’s virtual private network (VPN).

The VPN uses a firewall-protected layer of secure protocols and protected passwords.

My new home office equipment was set-up and successfully pretested.

I was ready for my first day of WAH. This would become my “new normal.”

My children are now adults and have been living on their own for many years, so my home office environment is quiet, although sometimes, I will turn up the volume on my music.

Having an office area located where one can concentrate and not be interrupted, makes working from home much more productive and less stressful.

I try to maintain a similar morning schedule as I did before working from home, including getting dressed for the day, because I don’t sit at my office desk wearing a bathrobe.

After finishing breakfast, instead of getting in the car and stopping at Starbucks for morning coffee, I make my own.

I bought one of those Keurig coffee makers. It is the kind of coffeemaker we used at the office building I worked in.

Using a single premeasured coffee container (light roast) in the coffee maker is convenient, and in seconds it quickly brews a fresh cup of coffee I can take with me from the kitchen to the office desk.

One of the Christmas gifts I received was a Mr. Coffee electric cup warmer. It keeps my coffee hot, which is one of those simple pleasures I appreciate while working.

I learned it is important to regularly use my lunch breaks to get out of the house and take in some sunshine and fresh air.

Of course, when out and about, make sure you observe proper social distancing.

The benefits of working from home for me have been many.

For one thing, my commuting time has been dramatically reduced.

Not having a daily commute drive saves money generally spent on gasoline.

Also, my car is not having those additional miles driven on it each day, which means it will last longer.

My car’s maintenance costs have been lowered, since I am no longer having to replace worn parts, and changing oil as often.

I don’t miss driving back and forth to the office during bad weather.

We have all experienced Minnesota snowstorms, and the havoc of driving through blinding snow, and on those icy roads during our daily work commute.

Not having to bundle up to head outside to the car for the work commute during those cold winter days is another advantage.

I can perform the same work tasks, converse with coworkers over the phone, use instant messaging, videoconferencing, and emails the same as I did when working out of the office building.

At the end of my workday, I shut off the home office computer and walk away from it, until the next morning.

Since working from home for over a year, I’ve grown accustomed to this new normal and am comfortable with it.

I fully understand that not all of us can perform our jobs from home and consider myself fortunate to be able to.

Today, we find ourselves facing many challenges because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Minnesotans are strong and resilient. We will press on the best we can, notwithstanding the effects COVID-19 is having on our daily lives.

The Minnesota Department of Health’s Situation Update for Coronavirus Disease 2019 webpage provides many informative resources on how to be safe and cope with the personal and social adjustments being caused by COVID-19.

Their webpage is located at this shortened link: https://bit.ly/2QpByJk.

We are all in this together.

My Work From Home office. 

A transistorized supersonic digital computer

© Mark Ollig

“A miniature electronic flying brain for jet speed,” is how one newspaper described it. 

In 1951, at the request of the US Air Force, a program was started to design a new digital computer to be installed in the military’s supersonic jets. This computer would be used for navigation, targeting, and other flight computations.

March 14, 1955, Bell Telephone Company announced they had developed a new airborne digital computer to be used by the US Air Force in their military jets flying above supersonic speeds of 767.2 mph.

TRADIC (TRAnisitor DIgital Computer) was the name given for the computer.

Bell Telephone’s version of the “flying brain” is the first airborne digital computer using point-contact transistors and no vacuum tubes. It was designed and built by Jean H. Felker. 

The transistor was invented in 1947 at the Bell Telephone Laboratories as a replacement for equipment requiring a vacuum tube for controlling electronic radio/voice signaling.

Transistors are more efficient, take less space and power to operate, are highly reliable, and are not susceptible to overheating failures as are vacuum tubes.

The airborne digital computer used was known as TRADIC Phase Two.

This computer used dials and switches for input commands, not punched tape or electric typewriter keystrokes. Its data output would be visual operational signals and informational numerals.  

Three years earlier, the TRADIC Phase One computer was built inside Bell Labs, where it underwent electronic component, instruction command, and calculation performance testing. This binary digital computer was synchronous operating using a clocking signal.

The TRADIC electronic components includes 800 transistors, 11,000 electronic germanium diodes for one-way current switching, 6,000 resistors, 4,000 capacitors, and 1,000 power transformers.
The 1955 TRADIC used compact 684 Bell Labs-manufactured removable component module cartridges to hold the transistors and diodes. Each cartridge is plugged into an assigned slot on a mounting strip panel inside the computer.

Before TRADIC, US Airforce jet aircrafts’ electronic computing systems were exceptionally vulnerable to overheated vacuum tubes, which failed and needed to be replaced. 

Because of its use of transistors, the TRADIC requires less than 100 watts of power to operate its processing capabilities, which is one-twentieth the power needed to operate a similar computer design using vacuum tubes. 

Of course, space aboard a supersonic jet is at a premium.

The airborne TRADIC computer occupied three cubic feet, which is equivalent to a moving box measuring 18 1/8-inches by 18-inches by 16-inches.

The airborne TRADIC performed 62,500 basic computations per second using its 1 MHz processor clock.

The TRADIC operated the jets transistorized radar, onboard encoding and decoding devices, its decimal display devices, the jet’s instruments, and navigation equipment.

Its command instructions are coded in single address memory blocks along with other data and are stored in the computer’s internal memory magnetic drum registers.

Although it was 65 years ago, the familiar computer input, output, memory, arithmetic, and control functions were designed into this all-transistor digital computer.

I read a 1955 report by J.H. Felker, titled “Performance of TRADIC Transistor Digital Computer.”

In the report, I noted the diodes used in the TRADIC were manufactured by the Hughs Organization, not Western Electric, which at the time was the equipment manufacturing arm of the Bell Telephone System. 

Felker said the transistorized digital computer required a unique diode that could recover rapidly.

“We were delighted when they came out. Western does not make a diode that would do our job,” Felker wrote.

He stated there are five or six different types of diodes used with the TRADIC and was happy “the Hughs people were willing and anxious to make diodes to our specifications.”

Felker preferred wire-wrapping instead of soldering within the TRADIC. He felt wire-wrapping provided a better physical connection.

He also talked about his interest in “printed circuit cables,” which probably seemed a bit futuristic 65 years ago. 

In 1945, after having served in the US Army during WWII, Felker worked on computer circuitry at the Bell Telephone Military Systems Laboratory in Whippany, NJ. 

The National Academy of Engineering elected Felker to membership in 1973, citing him for "design of the first transistorized digital computer and for the engineering of digital systems."

In 1962, he became a founding director of Bellcomm, Inc., an engineering organization working with NASA.

Bellcomm, Inc. was directly responsible for systems engineering, analysis, and overall spacecraft integration for the Apollo moon landing program.

Jean H. Felker passed away on Feb. 27, 1994, in Durham, PA.

Tail section of an Air Force plane. The cargo door is open and inside
is the TRADIC computer with three men, in suits, looking at manuals

TRADIC computer inside the tail section of an Air Force jet.

Transistor is inserted into one of TRADIC's "memory" packages. 

Project Ozma: The search for ET

© Mark Ollig

Yes, ET, as in extraterrestrial intelligence.

Nearly 60 years ago, a serious attempt to detect interstellar radio transmissions sent by intelligent beings living on planets orbiting stars other than our own began.

It was called Project Ozma.

Astronomers believe the Milky Way galaxy (where we live) contains 200 billion stars.

Two years ago, astronomers learned the Milky Way is a much bigger place than previously thought.

It would take 200,000 years in a spaceship traveling the speed of light (186,000 miles per second) to cross our galaxy.

The Hubble Space Telescope has identified some 100 billion galaxies. Future telescopes will no doubt detect many more.

Indeed, the universe is a big place.

As of March 2, NASA has confirmed 4,126 exoplanets, or planets outside our solar system circling a star similarly to how Earth orbits the sun.

So far, 161 of these exoplanets are classified as terrestrial, meaning they are rocky, with iron-rich cores, like Earth.

“I search for exoplanets because I want to know whether there’s another Earth-like world out there, and whether life could exist outside our solar system,” said Matthew Smith, systems engineer for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The first Earth-size habitable-zone planet was discovered Jan. 7, by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, TESS, launched April 18, 2018.

The two-year mission for TESS (which officially ends next month) is to survey 200,000 of the brightest stars near the sun to search for transiting exoplanets.

NASA’s website for exoplanet exploration is https://exoplanets.nasa.gov.

In 1959, an article in the magazine, “Nature,” took a serious-minded look at searching for interstellar radio communications originating from worlds other than our own.

“Near some star rather like the Sun, there are civilizations, with scientific interests and with technical possibilities much greater than those now available to us,” the article stated.

So, in other words, the article suggests there are civilizations out there more technically-advanced than we are.

Maybe.

I suppose a much older-than-Earth exoplanet where the conditions were present for life – intelligent life – to evolve may have developed technology far superior to where we are currently.

The 1959 article got the public thinking, especially Frank Drake, who is an astronomer and astrophysicist.

Drake wanted astronomers to scan the sky and listen for radio and television signal patterns emanating from outside of our world using the latest technology.

In April 1960, Drake started Project Ozma, using a radio telescope at the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory at Green Bank, WV.

In addition to radio and television signals, they also searched for mathematical prime numbers in a message. This would indicate an intelligent origin.

One surprise did occur when astronomers discovered a repeated series of uniformly patterned pulses indicating a message of intelligence.

I can only imagine the excitement by the astronomers when this distinct pattern of radio pulses was discovered.

To their disappointment, the pattern ended up being radio signals caused by a secret US military experiment.

Unfortunately, Project Ozma only lasted four months.

Project Ozma is remembered as being historically significant, because it was our first serious attempt to answer the question, “Are we alone in the universe?”

During the 1960s and early 1970s, NASA supported the search for extraterrestrial radio signals with Project Orion, the Microwave Observing Project, and an effort called Toward Other Planetary Systems.

In 1974, Frank Drake created the Arecibo message.

The digital message consists of 1,679 bits, arranged into 73 lines of 23 characters per line. Its binary “ones” and “zeroes” code were transmitted by frequency shifting at the rate of 10 bits per second.

The Arecibo message was beamed into the M13 Global Star Cluster located on the edge of the Milky Way, some 25,000 light-years away from Earth.

The radio message was broadcast on a frequency of 2,380 MHz, using 1 million watts of power from the Arecibo radio telescope and transmitting antenna dish located in Puerto Rico.

Included in this interstellar message are the digits 1 to 10, the formula for deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), a graphical stick figure outline of a human, Earth’s population in 1974 (3.9 billion), our understanding of the essential elements of life, and an illustration of our solar system.

The transmission of the Arecibo message took less than three minutes.

You can view the Arecibo message on the Cornell University web page at https://bit.ly/2TzFx6P.

In 1984, another serious attempt to look for extraterrestrial intelligence began, with the formation of Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (SETI) started by astronomer Carl Sagan, and Drake.

In 1992, NASA started an intensive program to search for other worldly intelligence; however, Congress soon canceled this program.

Sept. 19, 1959, “Nature” magazine published “Searching for Interstellar Communications,” written by Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison.

It can be read at https://bit.ly/32ORSsb.

Is there intelligent life living on other planets out there in the universe?

“Contact” is a movie from 1997, and is one of my favorites. It is based on the 1985 book written by Carl Sagan.

In the book, Sagan wrote, “The universe is a pretty big place. If it’s just us, it seems like an awful waste of space.”

I agree, Carl

Radio telescope at the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory
 at Green Bank, WV used for Project Ozma