local demolition of SAGE building

On Tue, 19 Jul 2005, Teo Zenios wrote: I don't have the figures for annual tube replacement, but it was a continuous process. As I mentioned in my last note, the marginal checking system allowed us to pull suspected flaky or about-to-fail tubes before they failed on duty. Various SAGE histories have reported "technicians running up and down the aisles pushing shopping carts full of tubes". I don't know about other air divisions, but I never saw it. Towards the end of the system's life, the remaining SAGE systems had to make due with tubes scrounged from previously deactivated systems. According to others who worked on the system, sometimes the replacements were worse than the ones currently in use. The SAGE system actually had two computerss: one running the air defense program and the other usually on standby. When the standby system wasn't undergoing preventive maintenance (PM), it would be receiving updates from the active system in case it needed to take over. If the standby system sensed that the active computer was no longer functioning correctly, it would automatically switch over and start cycling the air defense program. If something happened that the standby didn't automatically switch in case of a failure, we'd have to do a manual switchover. Depending on the circumstances, this procedure could take up to 3 minutes, which is all the down time we were allowed before having to report a "noplex" condition to NORAD. Mike Loewen mloewen at cpumagic.scol.pa.us Old Technology http://ripsaw.cac.psu.edu/~mloewen/Oldtech/