[Coco] Multi Pack Replacement

[Gene Heskett]

I am going to speak up for the just because group as I have done a couple of 
projects purely as a onsie.

Walking into a new job at a different tv station several times in my working 
life, I have nearly always looked at the work flow involved and wondered if 
the most time consuming and error prone operation could be both simplified 
and made more dependable.  So I did 2 projects almost from scratch, as much 
to teach me about the technology as any other reason.

Of course, projects that involve money always have to be sold to the person in 
charge of such things.  So I approached them with the idea I would buy a 
single board computer, learn first how to program it, and then make a time 
saving, much more accurate device that would do in a few button pushes, the 
same job as the production employees were doing, saving one generation of 
image quality loss in addition to making it possible to 20 additional such 
operations a day with the same person on the payroll.  Obviously the saving 
of a generation loss in the copy to air cassette was a huge factor, as was 
the error rate & redo reduction. Project OK'd.  I built it from scratch 
including a character generator of sorts for very large, see them clear 
across the control room on a 5" monitor, to replace the old timey, stolen 
from the front of a movie, 8 seconds worth of the "academy leader" that was 
perfectly timed at the actual video on the tape.  I made several copies of 
the software, including one copy for myself if I ever wanted to re-invent 
that wheel.  Broadcasting changes, sometime at light speed, and I was amazed 
when I last talked to the engineer there, to find that 16 years later, it was 
still in use quite a few times a day.

Then, about 2 years after I became the CE at WDTV, we were actually having a 
positive cash flow, so we bought a new production video switcher, straight 
out of the J. C. Penny's facility in NYC. One of the intriguing documents 
that came with it was a copy of the protocol used for an accessory we didn't 
have, and which GVG wanted $20,000 for a kit of it, a disk storage that could 
reach into the switcher and extract for storage, or reload the switcher from 
storage, thereby allowing our tech directors to develop their own bag of 
tricks that they didn't have to re-enter into the switcher every time they 
sat down to do the 5 o-clock news.  So I built one myself and programmed it, 
and it ran 4x faster that the $20,000 kit to boot in addition to giving the 
guys english filenames for their stuff.  And I built it using a coco2 running 
os9 level 1, two disk drives and a long cable from the bit-banger to the 
switcher.  I sold the hardware to the station for $265 at the time, and when 
they finally bought a newer switcher, they gave it back to me about 2 weeks 
after I retired.  And again I thought its lifetime would be 2, maybe 3 years, 
but since I was able to keep that switcher running, that 2 or 3 years turned 
into 15.  Both of those were, in this business, record breaking time frames.

In neither instance had I ever figured on building and shipping another such 
unit.  But subtracting 40 years off my age, and going back to work in a tv 
station again, I would do it all over again, just because.

This fresh MPI would be a similarly defined labor of love, possibly only for 
me. I was surprised at the level of response until I hit the docs roadblock.  
But the docs have got to be there, and other than the service manuals for the 
originals, we have very close to zip to go on.

Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
"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>