The original binary code

Morse Code goes big at a computer trade show

(Quick update: I’ve noticed that some folks are only reading the Monday culture and politics posts; others only the music. I have now organized Lost in Cyberspace into a series of newsletters — your subscription gets you access to all of them, but this may make it easier to only read what you’re interested in. You can, I believe, also subscribe or unsubscribe to individual sections.)

My dad was the one who got me into the mess I found myself in on a Thursday afternoon at the San Diego Convention Center.

Well, not directly.

I had, after all, volunteered my own self to organize an exhibit for the Computer Museum of America at a three-day computer trade show.

But it was my dad who first got me interested in SIGs — special interest groups for computer users. The less geeky might simply call them clubs.

And it was a group of SIGs that was running this exposition.

Which is how I found myself wondering how I was going to come up with $200 so we could connect Dad’s telegraph keys for our exhibit on telecommunications.

---

When my dad bought an Atari 400 home computer in 1979, he found out from the dealer who sold him the computer that there was an Atari club in town where members would exchange shareware and public domain software, exchange tips, sell used gear, etc.

While I don’t remember going to any meetings of the San Diego Atari Computer Enthusiasts with my dad, it was always exciting to boot the 400 up and try out whatever new software he brought home from their shareware library. (You could take blank cassettes and disks and get copies made at meetings.)

About a decade later, I also joined SDACE to try to learn more about the Atari ST 16-bit computer I was using as my main rig.

SDACE was under the nonprofit corporate umbrella of the San Diego Computer Society — which had SIGs for every platform and major software application you could think of. The monthly meetings at the local county education office featured a joint opening, usually with a presentation by an outside speaker — then everyone would break up into their individual SIGs in separate classrooms.

The Computer Society sponsored an annual computer show at the small exhibit hall adjacent to San Diego City Hall. Golden Hall wasn’t much bigger than a high school gym, but we had fun organizing the annual show where each SIG would set up its own booth to show off what their platform could do.

In the mid-1990s, ComputorEdge magazine (yes, it was really spelled that way) came on board as joint sponsor, and by the late 1990s the small San Diego Computer Expo at Golden Hall had moved down to the Convention Center and become the California Computer Expo.

All kinds of vendors showed up for the annual expo — Microsoft and Apple, CompuServe and Novell, and dozens of other companies eager to show their new innovations to consumers. We had speakers and panels addressing all the hot topics of the day — and outside the annual auto show, we were the biggest convention in town then, bigger than that comic book thing was at the time.

Tens of thousands of people poured through the gates over the three days — with people lined up hours ahead of time waiting to get in.

I was also on the board of advisors for the Computer Museum of America by then, and ComputorEdge — for whom I wrote a weekly column about dial-up bulletin board systems — asked if the Museum could set up an exhibit in the middle of the convention center floor.

While the CMA had a good-sized two-story home downtown then, we still had tons of artifacts in storage. The annual Expo was a great chance to bring historic computer equipment out of storage and share it with our fellow geeks for three days.

Somehow I was tasked with curating the CMA exhibit — which had something like 400 square feet of floor space at our disposal. One year, I chose the theme of telecommunications. We pulled old Hayes modems out of storage, some Radio Shack acoustic couplers, an old reporter’s portable Teletype that still had its San Diego Evening Tribune sticker on the back. We did research on each artifact, and made up signage for each exhibit tracing how computer technology had greatly advanced the state of the art in telecommunications.

One of our prized exhibits was on loan from my dad — his old telegraph keys he’d bought from a surplus shop when he was a kid. They still worked, running off a 6V battery. He had (and still has, I believe) a combination send/receive unit, and then another send key, and another receiver. Our plan was to set up a couple of telegraph stations on opposite ends of our large exhibit where visitors could send messages to each other via Morse code on the keys. We even printed out two copies of Morse Code cheat sheets — one for each station.

Once we had the two stations set up, the only thing left to do was to run the wiring between them.

The convention center staff informed us that due to safety regulations, the wiring would have to straight up from each station to the rafters high above, run through the rafters, then drop down to the other station.

But because this was not something in the contract with the Expo, we’d have to pay out of pocket to have the wiring run by staff — at a cost of a couple hundred dollars.

While I was talking this over with the ComputorEdge staff on site and the Convention Center supervisor, one of the Teamsters who would be doing the work with his cherry picker was nearby — unable to take his eyes off the telegraph keys.

Finally, he came over to our group, pointed out to his supervisor that he had a lunch break coming up — and that being ex-Navy and having used a telegraph early in his career, he’d be honored to string our wiring on his break and save us the money.

When the doors opened Friday morning for the start of the Expo, our overall exhibit was pretty popular — parents showing their kids machines they’d used years before.

By far the most popular part of our exhibit, though, were the telegraph stations. Former Coast Guardsmen and sailors couldn’t get enough of it — we even had some veterans of the Filipino Navy come by to use the telegraph.

For most of that weekend, the steady tap tap tap of the telegraphs made our exhibit sound like a World War II radio room.

-30-