There was a young man (David) and his girl friend (Julie) who would like to visit the museum. The problem is he is blind.
Since the 1401 restoration room is the only place in the museum that has equipment that can be 'touched', Jim asked if he could schedule the vist for Saturday, January 14th which is one of our work days.
We told Jim that was no problem and bring David in.
The Wednesday before that date, we were working on the German 1401. It had several card failures.
Late in the day, the Connecticut machine decided to fail.
On Friday, I convinced Jim Hunt to join me at the CHM to try and get one of the machines up and running for Saturday.
Jim Hunt fixing another IBM 1401 SMS cards.
Stan Paddock getting his finger stuck in some piece of equipment.
After spending the day working on the German machine, we were not able to make it work. We thought we were close to the answer when we started but were not successful
On Saturday, Ron Williams, Bob Edwards, Jim Hunt, Gary Feierbach, and myself came in early to attack the problem.
Ron Williams working on the Connecticut machine's problem.
Bob Erickson working on a different problem.
Ron, Bob and myself worked on the Connecticut machine while Gary and Jim worked on the German machine.
Jim McClure, from the museum staff, was escorting David and Julie through the rest of the museum. At noon, I went to find them and let them know we were still down and maybe they should wait until after they had lunch to come in to the 1401 room. They said OK.
When I returned to the 1401 room, Ron informed me that the Connecticut machine was back in operation.
I went back out on the floor and invited Dave and Julie into our room.
Understanding David's limitations, we gave him a modified tour where he was allowed to touch the machines involved and even inside of the IBM 1402 where the cards passed through rubber rollers into pockets.
David was given our sample core memory module and he could feel the actual ferric core beads.
We ran the 'Big Print' program for David and Julie and 'Powers of 2'.
David ran his fingers over his name punched onto an IBM punched card and was told how to decode the punched holes. He thought that was cool.
While he could not read the printout of 'Powers of 2', he was impressed by the noise of the IBM 1403 printer.
I hope David and Julie enjoyed the tour as much as we did presenting it to them.
Stan Paddock
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