https://youtu.be/ri_7vfzyamQ
What great memories! One of the greatest things about my long career in MCC is that I spent about half of it in the “old” control center, built in the early 1960’s with technology that was state of the art at the time – and was used from Gemini through the first fifteen years of the Shuttle program. The switches in this video were our interface to just about everything – from the Mission Operations Computer to the display system and especially the communication systems. There must have been hundreds of thousands of these things in the building!
Flight controllers quickly learned (by fidgeting when they were bored) how to take them apart and mess with bulbs, colors, and labels. It was not entirely unheard of for a controller to show up for a simulation (we looked down on screwing around during missions…) and find all of the labels on their panel had been switched. Of course, you didn’t want to get caught doing this, as some technician would have to spend hours restoring the configuration and certifying it for flight! Technicians, at times, outnumbered flight controllers in the building, so you could always call someone to come replace a bulb – but most drawers had a few spares on hand and it was easy enough to change them yourself….or so I heard (cough….).
Those bulbs were incandescent and generated a lot of heat. There was a panel that was common to all consoles, located at an angle between the horizontal “desk” and the vertical display panel. These were about ten inches long and maybe six inches high and had a complete matrix of lighted buttons. You would press a certain set of buttons, then hit “execute” to tell the computer to do something. So long as you didn’t press “execute”, you could turn on any combination of buttons you wanted. If you were chilly, for instance, you could turn them all on and warm your hands. Or…if you turned half of them on and put a sealed package of pop tarts on top of the panel, then covered it with a book, you’d have steamy, warm pop tarts in about ten minutes.
Then along came the mini-computer consoles that did away with dedicated lights and buttons in exchange for configurable displays. No romance, no pizazz….and no pop-tart warmers…..
Ahhh…The good old days!
What great memories! One of the greatest things about my long career in MCC is that I spent about half of it in the “old” control center, built in the early 1960’s with technology that was state of the art at the time – and was used from Gemini through the first fifteen years of the Shuttle program. The switches in this video were our interface to just about everything – from the Mission Operations Computer to the display system and especially the communication systems. There must have been hundreds of thousands of these things in the building!
Flight controllers quickly learned (by fidgeting when they were bored) how to take them apart and mess with bulbs, colors, and labels. It was not entirely unheard of for a controller to show up for a simulation (we looked down on screwing around during missions…) and find all of the labels on their panel had been switched. Of course, you didn’t want to get caught doing this, as some technician would have to spend hours restoring the configuration and certifying it for flight! Technicians, at times, outnumbered flight controllers in the building, so you could always call someone to come replace a bulb – but most drawers had a few spares on hand and it was easy enough to change them yourself….or so I heard (cough….).
Those bulbs were incandescent and generated a lot of heat. There was a panel that was common to all consoles, located at an angle between the horizontal “desk” and the vertical display panel. These were about ten inches long and maybe six inches high and had a complete matrix of lighted buttons. You would press a certain set of buttons, then hit “execute” to tell the computer to do something. So long as you didn’t press “execute”, you could turn on any combination of buttons you wanted. If you were chilly, for instance, you could turn them all on and warm your hands. Or…if you turned half of them on and put a sealed package of pop tarts on top of the panel, then covered it with a book, you’d have steamy, warm pop tarts in about ten minutes.
Then along came the mini-computer consoles that did away with dedicated lights and buttons in exchange for configurable displays. No romance, no pizazz….and no pop-tart warmers…..
Ahhh…The good old days!