Delete comment from: Ken Shirriff's blog
Your comment brightened my Christmas...
Curious how so far away, you were in DC and I were in Endicott NY, but everything you reported happened there in some way:
Testing the programs was a struggle because there were few prototypes and you were forced to work night shifts.
The idea that the Russians were spying was a joke... as we had to write manuals for custom engineers to use the diagnostics, we joked that it was written to deceive Russians...
And sometimes they gathered us together to scare us into not commenting on anything we did to anyone because we had signed non-disclosure commitments...
The clearances to enter where the prototypes were were difficult, even for us who were employees.
Managers didn't have a faintest idea about what we were doing and id they have a stacked bottle of whiskey I don't know, but it was what was left to them...
Eating in the early hours after we left was a problem and the places where you could eat were spread by word of mouth and the recurring topic;;
These were truly good'ol days...
Dec 21, 2023, 6:20:19 PM
Posted to Iconic consoles of the IBM System/360 mainframes, 55 years old