Reminiscing

© Mark Ollig

“Music played from the radio while my father swept the floor, and I was cleaning off a table when suddenly, the music stopped, and we heard the voice of President Franklin Roosevelt,” my mother told me.

It was Monday, Dec. 8, 1941, and President Roosevelt was about to give his six-minute and thirty-second “Infamy Speech” to a joint session of Congress.

The time was around 12:30 p.m.; Mom was working in the restaurant owned and operated by her parents in Silver Lake when President Roosevelt began speaking on the radio.

She and her father paused to listen.

“Yesterday, Dec. 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy, the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by the naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan,” President Roosevelt said.

The Japanese military had attacked the United States Naval Base at Pearl Harbor, HI.

After Roosevelt said, “a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire,” Mom recalled something she would never forget.

“My father was holding the broom with its handle touching the floor; he lifted the broom and pounded it down onto the wooden floor, which caused a loud reverberating echo to be heard as he raised his voice saying, ‘My God, we’re at war!’” she said while raising her voice for emphasis.

I asked if she would like to hear President Roosevelt’s speech again. Mom paused for a moment and then said, “Yes.”

With my smartphone, I did a quick search, and within seconds, my mother was once again hearing Roosevelt’s Dec. 8, 1941 speech.

She listened intently with her eyes closed and nodded several times.

When President Roosevelt said, “a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire,” Mom softly repeated her father’s words.

While reminiscing about how her family lived during World War II, she recalled the famous US soldier, Audie Murphy.

Murphy was the most decorated US soldier during World War II and received every military medal of valor the US Army had.

“He’s buried in Arlington National Cemetery. I went there years ago while in Washington, DC,” Mom told me.

July 3, 1955, Audie Murphy appeared on the TV game show “What’s My Line?” which I found on YouTube and played for her.

Mom told me she and my father watched “What’s My Line?” every Sunday night, and she also remembered the name of the host, John Charles Daly.

Daly was also a journalist for CBS. He gave one of the first radio bulletin reports of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941.

Mom recalled when she and her sister, Marguerite, visited the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor in Honolulu, HI, in 1994.

During my visit with her, we listened to radio news bulletins and viewed film clips from Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941.

Sunday, Aug. 12, 2018, during the Winsted Summer Festival Grand Parade, Mom and other family members watched the long line of decorative floats as they passed by on Fairlawn Avenue West.

As a group of marching US military veterans approached, Mom started to wave the American flag she was holding.

One of the veterans marching by was her brother, David, who served in the US Army during the 1960s.

Mom was all smiles and shouted, “Hi Davey!”

David turned his head and noticed her waving the flag. He smiled at his sister and shouted, “Hey Therese!”

Mom continued waving the flag as she proudly watched her brother marching with the other military veterans.

I appreciate your taking the time to listen while I reminisced about my mother today.

Aug. 26 would have been her 92nd birthday.

I dedicate today’s column to my mother.

Therese Marie Ollig
August 12, 2018

A journey to the center of the Internet

© Mark Ollig

After learning his internet outage was caused by a squirrel chewing through a copper cable, Andrew Blum wanted to know more.

Blum, a published writer and a correspondent for Wired magazine began a two-year personal quest to learn, firsthand, where the other end of his home internet cable went.

He wanted to pull back the curtain and see how this cable connected to the physical world from his internet modem box.

“What would happen if you yanked the wire from the wall, and you started to follow it? Where would you go?” Blum pondered.

He followed the cable to a hole on an outside wall. From there, it ran into a plastic utility demarcation box on the side of his house.

The cable was strung 30 feet from the demarcation box to a nearby telephone pole.

He learned the cable went to his local internet service provider's location and connected with a fiber-optic cable from the 60 Street Hudson Building.

The 60 Street Hudson Building is a 24-story telecommunications building located in the Tribeca neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City.

Blum obtained access into the building and saw hundreds of electronic devices; many were digital data-packet routers used by major internet service providers and social media networks.

Various internet and communication carriers’ fiber-optic network cables from the outside terminate in designated rooms hosting their transport equipment in the building.

The Minnesota equivalent of the 60 Street Hudson building is the Minnesota Technology Center in Minneapolis. It is also known as the 511 Building, a Midwest regional hub for Minnesota’s major telecommunication, internet, and data carriers.

Blum observed the yellow fiber-optic cables connected to data routers physically interfaced with the transmission network systems of the internet, data, and telecommunication service providers.

Tall metal cabinets contained the electronic network transport facilities utilizing synchronous optical networking protocols for sending and receiving data among service providers.

The 60 Street Hudson building is also the interconnection hub for many trans-Atlantic oceanic fiber-optic cables connecting North America with Europe and other parts of the world.

An undersea fiber-optic cable originates from inside a building called a landing station and usually is located along a seaside neighborhood.

A representative working for an internet company informed Blum of a location, date, and time where he could see firsthand an undersea fiber-optic cable brought onto shore from a specialized cable landing ship near a beach south of Lisbon, Portugal.

Blum traveled to Lisbon, arrived at the specified beach location in the early morning, and observed a fiber-optic cable landing ship approximately 1,500 feet from the shoreline.

Then, someone in a diving suit walked out of the water onto the shore, holding a green nylon rope used as a messenger line for pulling the fiber-optic cable onto the beach from the landing ship.

Andrew Blum heard the loud engine of a bulldozer driving along the shoreline to be used for pulling the messenger line attached to the fiber-optic cable.

The bulldozer pulled the messenger line and the needed length of the fiber-optic cable onto the shore.

The other end of the fiber-optic cable floated atop the water attached to buoys to position the line correctly.

The person in the diving suit went back into the water with a knife to cut off the buoys, allowing the fiber-optic cable to sink and rest on the ocean floor.

The typical diameter of an undersea cable is 1-inch, which is nearly the size of a garden hose.

Blum watched as workers used a hacksaw to cut the end of the fiber-optic cable pulled in from the ocean to be prepared for splicing to another fiber-optic cable placed in a trench from the coastal landing station.

I contacted Andrew Blum for a brief interview shortly after the book about his two-year adventure was published.

B&B: Andrew, you said some people envision the internet as a cloud-like image. After two years of exploring and writing a book about the physical side of the internet, how do you see it now?

AB: I now have a pretty clear image of its physical realities, particularly the hubs closest to my home in Brooklyn. When a web page hangs, I often picture my cable company’s router and curse the traffic on the yellow fiber-optic cable feeding it.

B&B: Some people believe the internet is connected across the planet using orbiting space satellites; however, we know undersea fiber-optic cables provide 99 percent of the service. What did you know about the global internet before you started your investigation?

AB: Even when I started, I knew it wasn’t connected by satellites. I’d read Neal Stephenson’s excellent piece in Wired, “Mother Earth Mother Board,” so I had a good understanding of the “tubes” under the ocean.

B&B: What surprised you the most during your two-year exploration of the physical side of the internet?

AB: How small the internet turned out to be, physically, and the list of its most important buildings is surprisingly short. The number of engineers involved in interconnecting its networks is also minimal.

“When you see these guys going at the cable with a hacksaw, you stop thinking about the internet as a cloud; it starts to seem like an incredibly physical thing,” said Blum.

Andrew Blum’s book, “Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet,” can be ordered through Barnes & Noble and Amazon.

Andrew Blum's internet modem box

Undersea fiber-optic internet cable brought onshore from
a fiber-optic cable landing ship

Revolution of the planets

© Mark Ollig

In April 1972, I participated in the annual science fair held at Holy Trinity school in Winsted.

“Revolution of the Planets” was the name of my science fair project.

Yes, my project featured the planets orbiting our sun.

I needed to create an attention-grabbing artificial solar system with nine planets and a sun.

The two sources of my research were the school library and the World Book encyclopedias at home (no Google in 1972).

The display for this project required a sturdy cardboard box sprayed with black paint on the inside and out.

I glued multicolored glitter sparkles on the interior, representing the stars.

Next, I cut a hole in the back of the box for the sun (yellow light bulb).

Remember, folks; This was 50 years and four months ago when I was just a youngster.

What would I use to support the nine planets (various-sized Styrofoam balls) going around the sun?

My mother suggested round metal lamp rings (lampshade cover fitting).

Since lampshade metal rings were of various sizes, I needed to find nine that would represent the orbital path of each planet around the sun.

Where did I find the correctly sized rings?

At the Winsted Worn-A-Bit Shop.

There, I found the correct sizes of all nine round metal lampshade rings needed to hold my planets as they orbited the sun.

The first inner ring supported Mercury, and the ninth outer ring held Pluto.

I securely tied each ring using thin black strings fastened to the box.

Years later, I learned mom kept an eye out to be sure I didn’t go around the house removing all the lampshade rings.

My science project’s sun was a low-wattage yellow bulb powered by a desk lamp (no lampshade cover), its base positioned horizontally, and its electrical cord plugged into a handy nearby wall outlet.

Many of the students’ projects required electrical outlets, which were in high demand during the science fair.

The completed “Revolution of the Planets” solar system display contained sparkling light from the glittering stars, nine planets, and yellow sunlight.

In reality, as seen in space, the sun appears white; Earth’s atmosphere causes the sun to look yellow, orange, and red.

On the morning of the science fair, which took place in the school gymnasium, I finished setting up my project on a card table with a “Revolution of the Planets” banner over my artificial solar system.

I included typewritten summaries of each planet and a poster of them orbiting the sun.

Overall, I felt pleased with this “artificial solar system in a box” sitting on the table.

Charles DeVos was in charge of the school science fair and stopped by to check on each student’s project.

Mr. DeVos was also my eighth grade social studies teacher.

I remembered him smiling while peering into my science fair solar system box containing sparkling stars, a glowing yellow sun, and nine orbital rings, each with a planet attached.

Mr. DeVos jokingly complimented me on not missing any of the planets.

Later in the morning, the science fair judges stopped by my project display and asked me questions about the planets and their orbit around the sun.

The end of the 1972 Winsted Holy Trinity Science Fair found the judges awarding my science project the first place blue ribbon.

“Revolution of the Planets” (with several improvements and modifications) would next travel to Mankato State University to compete in the Mid-Minnesota State Science Fair.

There, I received an honorable mention ribbon, which I was happy with, given the quality of the competition among hundreds of other science fair projects.

In 1972, astronomers considered Pluto the ninth planet in our solar system.

By the early 2000s, a scientific discussion began about whether Pluto was a planet.

In 2006, Caltech researcher Mike Brown reclassified Pluto as a “dwarf planet,” which triggered a vigorous debate that continues to this day.

NASA describes a planet as “… a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit.”

For the record, I still consider Pluto a planet.

It takes 248 years for Pluto to make one revolution or orbit around the sun.

It has been reported the time it takes the earth to travel around the sun is increasing due to our planet’s minimal distance increase of one micron (one-millionth of a meter) with each orbit.

The Kepler space observatory, other ground-based telescopes, and the 32-year-old earth-orbiting Hubble space telescope have discovered more than 5,000 exoplanets (planets outside our solar system).

As the new James Webb Space Telescope looks throughout the universe, we can expect to find and learn more about the planets outside our solar system.

With all this reminiscing, the youngster inside me needs to search for a 50-year-old first-place blue ribbon awarded for “Revolution of the Planets.”

"Revolution of the Planets"
(April 1972)

NASA and its IBM computers

© Mark Ollig

The Real-Time Computer Complex (RTCC) is located at the NASA Mission Control Center in Houston, TX.

In 1962, the RTCC housed several IBM large-scale data processing mainframe digital computers.

Think of the RTCC as the computing brain that processes mountains of data to guide nearly every portion of a NASA spaceflight mission. Flight controllers and engineers in the Mission Control Center depended on the RTCC.

On April 11, 1970, a portion of the Apollo 13 command service module exploded while it was halfway to the moon. Numerous voices from flight controllers in the Mission Control room desperately attempted to ascertain how serious the situation was while communicating with the astronauts aboard the Apollo 13 command module.

NASA Flight Director Gene Kranz directs his Mission Control team by clearly and firmly saying, “OK, listen up … Quiet down, people. Procedures, I need another computer up in the RTCC.”

The quick thinking and resourcefulness of NASA flight controllers and engineers, along with the courage and professionalism of the Apollo 13 astronauts, resulted in their safe return to earth.

Credit for their safe return should also be acknowledged to the five high-performance IBM System/360 Model 75 computers in the RTCC.

About 16 years earlier, the 1954 IBM 704 digital mainframe computer operated using a low-level assembly language and a high-speed magnetic core storage memory, replacing the electrostatic tube storage used in previous IBM computers.

In 1957, Sputnik 1, Earth’s first artificial satellite, was tracked during its orbit around the planet by two IBM 704 computers.

In 1959, the IBM 1401 mainframe computer was built using a high-level programming language with FORTRAN (Formula Translation/Translator) computer language coding system created by IBM programmer John Backus in 1957 and tested on the IBM 704.

Backus said FORTRAN took what had previously required 1,000 machine statement instructions to be written in only 47 statements, significantly increasing computer programmer productivity.

In 1961, NASA launched two crewed Mercury suborbital flights. IBM 7090 computers installed in NASA Ames Research Center assisted engineers and mission flight controllers by quickly performing thousands of calculations per second.

The 1965 NASA Gemini spacecraft’s 59-pound onboard digital guidance computer was manufactured by IBM. It used a 7.143-hertz processor clock and could execute more than 7,000 calculations per second.

In 1969, IBM’s computer reliability was credited with keeping Apollo 12 on its proper trajectory after a potentially catastrophic event.

On Nov. 14, 1969. About 37 seconds after the Apollo 12 Saturn V rocket left the launchpad from Cape Canaveral, two lightning bolts struck it, knocking out all of the command module’s onboard instrumentation systems and telemetry with Mission Control in Houston.

“What the hell was that?” shouted Apollo 12 command module pilot Richard Gordon after lightning struck the Saturn V rocket traveling at 6,000 mph.

Fortunately, two-way radio communications were still functioning between Mission Control and the command module spacecraft.

“I just lost the whole platform,” Apollo 12 mission commander Charles Conrad Jr. radioed Mission Control. “We had everything in the world drop out,” he added.

The static discharge from the lightning caused a voltage outage, knocking out most of the Apollo 12 command module control systems, including the disconnection of its vital telemetry communications link with Mission Control.

Loud, overlapping voices could be heard in Mission Control as engineers and flight controllers worked on what course of action to take.

Fortunately, the Apollo 12 Saturn V rocket did not deviate from its planned trajectory. Instead, the IBM 60-pound Launch Vehicle Digital Computer (LVDC) housed inside the Instrument Unit section of the rocket’s third stage contained the required processing power to continue the Saturn V’s programmed course.

Meanwhile, Mission Control engineers saw strange data pattern readings on their control screens and desperately worked to find a solution.

NASA Mission flight controller and engineer John Aron recalled similar data patterns during simulation tests. He remembered it meant the Signal Conditioning Electronics were down.

“Flight, try SCE to AUX,” Aaron recommended to Mission Flight Director Gerry Griffin.

Griffin instructed the recommendation to be radioed to the astronauts in the command module.

One minute after the lightning strike, Mission Control radioed the astronauts in the Apollo 12 command module with the following:

“Apollo 12, Houston. Try SCE to Auxiliary. Over.”

There was a brief pause as the astronauts heard what they thought was the acronym “FCE” instead of “SCE.”

“Try FCE to Auxiliary. What the hell is that?” Conrad questioned Mission Control.

“SCE – SCE to Auxiliary,” Mission Control slowly repeated with emphasis.

Apollo 12 pilot astronaut Alan Bean was familiar with the SCE switch inside the command module. So, turning around in his seat, he flipped SCE to AUX, which restored and normalized the command module instrumentation data and telemetry transmissions.

Apollo 12 was able to complete its mission to the moon, thanks in significant part to the reliability of the IBM LVDC and, of course, Aaron’s “SCE to AUX.”

In 1962, science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke witnessed a demonstration in Bell Labs where its scientists used the IBM 7094 computer to create a synthesized human voice singing the song “Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for Two).”

This demonstration by the IBM computer inspired Clarke to write a much-remembered scene in the 1968 science fiction movie “2001: A Space Odyssey” featuring the somewhat sentient “Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic” computer known as the HAL 9000.

In the movie, the HAL 9000 computer is singing “Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for Two)” while deactivating to inoperability as astronaut David Bowman removes its computing modules.

For the record, the HAL 9000 was not an IBM computer.

Photo from my bookshelf of the Apollo Command Module,
SCE to Aux replica switch, SCE coffee cup, and autographed
photo of Apollo 13 Flight Director, Gene Kranz.

The Real-Time Computer Complex (RTCC)
 is located at the NASA Mission Control Center in Houston, TX.

The Real-Time Computer Complex (RTCC)
 is located at the NASA Mission Control Center in Houston, TX.