It's fun to see result of some of my own work is on display at the National Cryptologic Museum - the Cray supercomputers plus the magnetic tape technology pioneered by IBM's HARVEST and by StorageTek.
@20committee @LouiseMensch https://twitter.com/NatCryptoMuseum/status/1356259047394209796

This actually gives me a bit more perspective I can add to the book manuscript. So I was taking a close look - including describing the opening of the Yardley vault!

'Throwing open the two large doors that led into the vault area, Friedman lit a match and announced, "Welcome, gentlemen, to the archives of the American Black Chamber."'

https://www.nsa.gov/about/cryptologic-heritage/museum/exhibits/#magic_of_purple

Here's my NSA Mug Shot. There's a story behind the mug... heh :)

That was the trip where we set up and played a game of horseshoes in the spotless computer room at NSA Headquarters in the middle of the night. Pulled floor tiles about 20 feet apart and used the round-tape write rings as horseshoes, tossing them like frisbees. @nomadphp

There's something odd about the round-tape drives, though. There is ALWAYS a woman in front of the tape drive. Go figure.

Funny thing, though. The operating system code running on the Cray supercomputers at NSA... written by women.

Some of them have Oral History interviews, as computing pioneers, at the Charles Babbage Institute based in the University of Minnesota. The women who programmed ENIAC, in most cases, never received credit during their lifetimes - even though they were in the freakin' photos.

See who's doing the tape drives? If you believe the photos... always. But the machine room operators were as likely to be male. Random chance, no doubt :)

There is, of course, a coolness factor involved in mounting a magnetic tape. This is a manual-mount tape drive where the operator needs to mount the reel on the top, thread the tape through all of the mechanism to the right, and wind it onto the bottom reel; press the LOAD button

The coolness factor is a second and a half. If you can mount, thread, and wind the magnetic tape in the mechanism in less than a second and a half, nothing is said. If not, you obviously have no business touching the tape drive and should hand it to a Real Operator for mounting.

This fact made for a bit of fun teaching Cray Operating System Internals. The CRAY-1 was actually booted from a magnetic tape. Or could be; disk was also an option but we taught both as part of the class.

Students needed to put their copy of the operating system onto their magnetic tape reel. It's analogous to building and booting your own modern Linux ISO. So, of course, they had to mount their mag tape reel in the tape drive like you see above.

Most had never written, let alone mounted, a commercial-size mag tape before. This was the floppy disk era, so people knew magnetic media, but programmers don't generally do large-reel tapes.

So I carefully and slowly show each group of 2-3 people at a time how to thread the tape drive and have each practice. Not a big deal but a painstakingly slow process to get it threaded aright through the vacuum chamber.

This is late at night... 10 pm to 4am, when we could get standalone computer time. Not our best hours. But everyone gets their tape mounted on the boot drive eventually. Slowly and carefully.

But, as you now know, there's a special arm motion that runs the tape through the route, getting it threaded and mounted. Grab near the end of the tape, and do a fast squiggle.

So, after everyone's got it figured out, and each person knows in their bones how tricky and frustrating it is, I tell them I'll just toss my boot tape on the drive so we can move on to the next step in the operations training.

So I walk over and Boop! it's mounted before anyone realizes I even touched the tape drive. Just kinda casual-like and not worth mentioning.

But there's actually a reason for that.

The people who come in for the operating system internals training are the best of the best. They're the ones picked by the labs and other non-existent places to go get the training. They're the top of the pecking order. They've come to Cray Research headquarters.

So a little Boop! now and then helps remind people why they came to US. The software instructors aren't just reading them stuff from a book... we actually physically wrote the books being used.

And I must say... the late-night Boop! is fun. Heh :)

Oh. Right. There's more to the Boop. My first boss at Cray Research had himself previously been a computer room operator. He's the one who taught me that you can annoy the heck out of the third-shift operator by...

taking your penknife and cutting the line printer's control tape part way through. Once the tape breaks on the *next* shift, the printer will start spewing paper as fast as it can. An accident, of course, the printer tape needed to be replaced.

Thanks to his prior experience he, naturally, could juggle tape mounts across a bank of twelve tape drives as fast as anyone. And, also naturally, do a manual tape mount with a slight twitch of his wrist. And then look at me sideways as if to say that's an expected skill.

Trust me, when the boss boops and gives you the side-eye, you'd best learn to boop with the best.

That paid off years later when I moved into the training group... I was, of course, the new guy (due to being the new guy). I booped kinda casual-like, hoping to gain a bit of credibility as not *entirely* new. It's the little things that can be fun--if ya put the work in first.