Path: utzoo!telecom-request Date: Mon, 03 Jun 91 22:55:36 CDT From: "Roy M. Silvernail" Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: Free Teletypes Message-ID: Organization: Villa CyberSpace, Minneapolis, MN Sender: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu Approved: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 11, Issue 424, Message 1 of 8 Lines: 42 wb8foz@mthvax.cs.miami.edu (David Lesher) writes: > [about teletype machines and radio stations] > But that day, somebody at Cheyenne Mountain had loaded and fed, not > the weekly NORAD test tape, but the WAR! one. Confusion reigned across > the US as the wrong code was used to cancel the bogus message. Some > stations ignored it. Others followed the law and went off the air > ASAP. Hey, I remember that! It was 1973, I think ... my first year in radio. As I recall, the message I saw was the weekly Associated Press EBS test, but the AP threaded the wrong tape, and we saw the real McCoy message. The authentication codes checked out and everything. (big thrills as the news director finally got to rip open one of those red envelopes). We might have paid more attention, though, if it had come in some other time. The message arrived on Saturday, in the early afternoon (Bering Time), exactly the same time the AP _always_ ran the EBS test. I think AP began moving their tests around after that. It seems that very few stations took it seriously. > Can you imagine the look on the personality who finds a forest of > paper on the machine, most of which indicates that the USA has been at > war for four + hours, and Wxxx is still on the air? Gulp. Oh, yes, I can imagine. I also remember the look on an announcer's face when he was blasting through a bunch of news, and came across a wire piece that had actually been composed on the KSR tape-punch machine we had. It looked exactly like an authentic wire story, but was heavily peppered with un-airable expletives. He got about two syllables into it, and began to stammer and splutter, as we in the other room were collapsing in laughter. (radio folks are fun folks... some day, I'll tell you about getting pied in the face in the midst of a newscast :-) Roy M. Silvernail |+| roy%cybrspc@cs.umn.edu