bill schmitt	April 5, 2013

In 1965, when CBS moved into their new building at 51 W. 52nd St in NYC, a 1050
with Fastrand was installed on the 31st floor, under the direction of James
Walsh, with the task of providing real-time access to the CBS Television
commercial schedule. Teletype 33 terminals were installed at the NYC Production
Center on 57th St., as well as at the CBS Television City facility (TVC) in Los
Angeles. I believe, but am not sure, that the TVC link had a dedicated line.

In any event, the Jim Walsh security feature on the TVC line was the electrical
inversion of the bit-serial signal. As far as I know, this was sufficient.

CRT terminals were supported as well, but each group of CRTs required a
multi-thousand dollar controller within a few hundred feet, so these only went
to priority locations like the CBS Television Sales Department.

This was not the interactive system that we expect today, it was a transaction
system, where the user typed a transaction number followed by an arbitrary
number of fields separated by delimiter characters. You needed a reference book
to show the expected format for each transaction. A single transaction could
create a new record, modify one or more fields of an existing record, or print
out any one of a number of reports.

Response time was usually in the five second region. Each transaction invoked a
unique program, written by someone like myself. In my two years as a programmer,
I don’t recall any major software crashes – if there was a problem, it was
usually the fault of the transaction program alone.

Terminals could not be used to enter or modify transaction programs. They had to
be punched into 80-column cards, compiled on the 1050 when it was offline,
loaded onto the Fastrand, and tested by booting up the system.

We had a Fastrand II and a couple of tape drives for our daily system backup.
The Fastrand was generally reliable, but I recall a couple of mechanical
failures that required the Fastrand headbar to be manually positioned over every
track (with the help of a ‘scope), so that each track could be dumped to a tape,
a tedious, hours long task.

I have no idea what our annual budget was, but in 1967 the NYC department had 12
souls. As a programmer, I was paid a bit over $8000. per year.

There should be a detailed writeup of this pioneering application in the
professional literature, but I haven’t found it to date.

BTW, there was a predecessor system installed on the 15th Floor of the original
CBS Headquarters at 4485 Madison Avenue. I worked on the same floor, but only
saw the system once, and believe it was made by Boroughs, used vacuum tubes with
a mercury delay line memory, but at the time I had no idea I would spend most of
my life with my head inside digital equipment. You would think I would have
taken some pictures at least….(insert Latin motto here).