A hummingbird with range
Les Earnest, IEEE
Life Member
January 1, 2009
Published
subsequently in the IEEE Life Members
Newsletter
The radar atop Mt. Umunhum, south of San
Jose, California, which was part of the SAGE air defense system, managed to get
even with me in 1966 for badmouthing the crooked system in which it operated.
In late 1965 I came to Stanford University as Executive Officer of the
Artificial Intelligence Lab. They had ordered a million dollar computer, a
Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-6, but hadn’t found a place to put it yet. I
eventually found space in an incomplete building that Stanford had acquired a
few miles off-campus and arranged to convert what had been planned as the
cafeteria into a room for both the large computer and experimental robotic
equipment.
After the computer was installed we had difficulty getting it working. DEC had
sent engineer Bob Clements to help but after a couple of weeks they were
threatening to bring him home and were urging us to complete the acceptance
tests. We decided to go for it on June 6 (i.e. 6/6/66) but that turned out to be a
very hot day and our air conditioning system was not yet installed. Not to be
deterred, we dispatched a couple of graduate students to get blocks of dry ice,
to be placed under the false floor from where the computer cabinets drew
cooling air, and put another two on the roof with water hoses to cool down the
room. Happily this worked well enough to bring the room temperature within the
acceptable range and we proceeded with the tests. Just for fun, at one point a
student named David Poole got on top of the memory cabinets and performed an
East European folk dance during memory tests. Happily the machine still passed.
All was well for a couple of weeks but the computer then started malfunctioning
again. We eventually figured out that this was happening at 13 second intervals
but didn’t understand why until someone happened to bring a portable radio into
the computer room and it was noticed that the radio buzzed at the same instant that
the computer malfunctioned.
We eventually figured out that the source of both effects was the air defense
radar on top of Mt. Unumhum, about 20 miles away, and
got the computer working again by fixing a ground wire connection on one
cabinet. We also learned that “umunhum” is the Ohlone Indian word for “place of the humming bird”, which
in this case was reaching out a long way to buzz us. Note that hummingbirds
make a sound close to “umunhum”.
The Mt. Umunhum radar was the same one that
caused the “Two second burp” observed by Ken Crook (Dec. 2008 IEEE Life
Member’s Newsletter). In a sense I was partly to blame since it was part of the
SAGE air defense system that I helped design a decade earlier. While doing that
I learned that SAGE was a gigantic fraud on taxpayers but that is another
story. Perhaps that radar was trying to get back at me for badmouthing the
system in which it operated.
Les Earnest, IEEE Life Member #00639575
Los
Altos Hills, CA
650-941-3984