Quote:
Originally Posted by dragoon500ly
It's always scary when people mention Air Force and using armored vehicles.
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Lee,
My dad was employed as a civilian contractor with Burroughs Business Machines, installing the SAGE network into NORAD stations across Canada (Pine-Tree and Mid-Canada radar lines). Mostly up north like northern Quebec, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, BC. Not the "Far North", more like what we call the "deep bush". (Like the Australians, we have our "outback" except we have so much there are increasingly severe degrees of outbackedness.)
Speaking of "brass-catchers", he met my mom in the officer's club of one of these bases (Mt. Brother near Kamloops). A friend of hers dragged her there to troll for Air Force officers (she says) but she ended up dating the tech guy so go figure. This would have been in the early 60's, and his memories of Operation Skyshield II and III, not to mention real alerts, were particularly harrowing. It's understandable why the results of these full-dress exercises were kept secret until recently (hint: we would have gotten creamed in a nuclear war unless we struck first).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Skyshield
At any rate, he said that Air Force guys running around the station with guns was always considered a bad sign! One day up in the Interior (mid-northern BC) he was having coffee in the cafeteria when an AF guy packing a carbine came in and started closing the windows and shuttering them. It was a fallout exercise and they were locking down the base, although they were probably the only worthwhile target within 500km. Curious, dad asked if he'd closed the rest of the base, including the ventilation and air conditioning for the computer annex (where the SAGE main-frames were located) even though the intakes were filtered and the building kept at positive pressure. As you may have guessed from the time period, this was when computers had to be kept well-cooled (I think he said the SAGE mainframes used water or liquid cooling).
When the answer was he started at that end of the base first and indeed had shut everything down, including the SAGE annex, dad bolted for the door. He arrived at the far side of the base just before the coolant boiled over and destroyed the mainframe.
This is an unrelated, but hilarious infantry briefing (submitted to the webcomic "Terminal Lance" and is Not Safe For Work):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sxXe...layer_embedded
Tony