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.