that is rather impressive!
Just curious, were you totally  blind at the time?  And if so, what sort of
ways did you use to work with circuit boards and IC chips and such?

Regards
Colin
----- Original Message -----
From: "Martin McCormick" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, March 16, 2005 4:32 PM
Subject: Re: off topic: radio nostalgia


>         This topic makes me think of what I was doing thirty years ago
> this year.  I was one year after graduating from college in Journalism
> and Broadcasting and working for the Oklahoma Radio Reading Service
> network at our library for the blind in Oklahoma City.  I don't think
> I would have been able to do this next part if I had not been a ham.
>
>         The library was in a bad part of Oklahoma City with a bar a
> couple of doors down and a housing project across the street.  Our
> programming stayed on the air until 23:00 each evening and we had a
> heck of a time getting reliable people to work that shift and not
> either go to sleep, go missing for long periods of time or just not be
> able to do the job properly.
>
>         I approached my boss about getting automation for that time of
> the day and was told we couldn't buy it for lots of reasons.
>
>         I was able to build a primitive automation setup for us using
> a rotary stepping switch, a little patch pannel to allow one to
> program the sequence of which tape recorder came on next and a tone
> decoder and silence alarm that listened for a 25-HZ tone at the end of
> each tape so that a pulse could be generated to click the stepper over
> to the next position.
>
>         I used a NE567 decoder chip and an NE555 timer and 7400 nand
> gate to clean up the output of the 555 which gets a little flicker to
> it just as one acquires the tone at that low of a frequency.
>
>         Later, I came back and replaced the rotary stepper with a 7493
> digital counter IC, a 7489 16-nibble memory IC and a 7441 1 of 10
> decoder chip.  I used perf board and wire-wrap for all this and just
> let the stepper switch sit on an empty position so we could go back to
> the old system if necessary.
>
>         My tone decoder board also had a vox with a 20-second delay
> which pulsed the stepper or the IC counter if there was that much
> silence.  Sometimes, people forgot to put the queue on the end of the
> tapes.
>
>         I kind of felt proud of that contraption because they
> continued to use it until Oklahoma discontinued its radio reading
> service around 1990.
>
>         In the mid eighties when I was working back at Oklahoma State
> University where I work to this day, I got a call one day from the
> Library for the blind after they had had a thunderstorm the night
> before and lost power.  The rechargable battery I had put in that
> system gave out or the lightning scrambled the memory and they lost
> their sequence.  They were asking me how to manually reprogram it
> again.
>
>         I told them and it came back to life.
>
>         What I wouldn't have given to have known about PIC processors,
> the Motorola 68HC11 or microcomputers in general.  I wouldn't learn
> about those for a couple of more years after I had already moved on.
>