On Wednesday 15 January 2014 12:23:35 EBo did opine:

[snip a lot of boring history]

> > with an
> > old maid music teacher I finally made legal in '89, so next Dec 2,
> > we'll
> > have 25 years in without ever strongly thinking of an Alaskan
> > Divorce.  And
> > by then I'll be 80.
> 
> Gene.  Congrats on finding the old maid music teacher, and the past 25
> years!
> 
> Cool projects BTW.
> 
> 
>    EBo --

Thanks Ebo.  That 1802 project came about because its job was the most 
mistake prone job in the whole production of a commercial, often taking 2 
or 3 runs at dubbing the tape to a copy of the master tape, which itself 
was not in great condition.  By doing it, I learned about these things 
called computers from the foundation up as I had never had a chance to play 
with them until then.  Based on a Cosmac Elf from Quest, I built the rest 
of it either from kits, a 4k of static ram kit on an s100 board was $400 
then, or designed and built everything else but the case and s100 
backplane.  So it was about 25% whole cloth.

And it made that drudgery job into one of putting the target tape into the 
machine, a Sony 2850 with a remote control kit in it, grabbing the pendant 
with all the buttons on it, driving the machine to the exact frame you 
wanted to be the first air frame, and pushing the the right button to tell 
it how long the commercial was.  People interaction other than ejecting and 
taking the tape to the cold storage vault, was over.  Job done.

It then backed the tape up 15 seconds, and I did have some trouble with the 
production folks who didn't understand the need for 15 seconds of recorded 
black in front of their "masterpiece", then rolled it forward, bringing in 
a video insert of my academy leader at 9.9 seconds from first video, 
triggering a queue tone insert for 1 second at "t-5" seconds, turning off 
the academy insert at t-2, then letting it roll for the length selected 
while putting another tone on the tape at last frame - 5 seconds. The 
second tone started the next machine in the sequence if it was programmed 
into the ASB machine.

We cheated a little, allowing only 29.5 seconds for a :30 spot etc, because 
the machine would, when it ran out of tapes to play, fell back to passing 
the slide camera thru with a station ID slide showing, so we always had a 
video iD up for 1 or 2 seconds at the end of a long break.  My gizmo got 
rid of at least 1 dub generation, which in 3/4" u-matic tape days was a 
huge improvement in the image quality, and saved production once they got 
the hang of it, at least 2 man hours a day.

So if it had a long "flight" time, we'd dub a backup copy but with decent 
machine maintenance to prevent tape damage, the backup copy was rarely 
used.

And now I've bored everybody again.

And it will happen again, I promise. :-)

Cheers, Gene
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>

  Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man
  can never learn anything from history. -George Bernard Shaw
A pen in the hand of this president is far more
dangerous than 200 million guns in the hands of
         law-abiding citizens.

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