Linkmeister

Link-strewn reminiscences

Back in my Navy days (1972-1974) I was stationed at the Naval Communications Station Japan (now called NavTelComSta Far East) as a radioteletype operator. There were four shifts of 22 radiomen each, working in four distinct rooms. The one immediately inside the cyber-locked door was the main Fleet Center, where the IBM 360/20 stood, spitting out punched paper tape messages for distribution to the appropriate addressee via a tape distributor. There were often as many as 50 different addressees per message; 30 or more might be ships in port (the whole Submarine fleet) and shore activities (the Supply Depot, the Public Works Center). Each addressee was identified by a unique routing indicator (ours was RUYNSHH). On the right was a bank of teletype machines, with one keyboard and three tape readers. This configuration ran along the right side of the room for about 25 feet; with as many as 10 guys trying to navigate the space (2 feet between the keyboards on either side) it got pretty crowded. Each tape reader was assigned to a different send channel; for a busy ship like the Oklahoma City (7th Fleet flagship at the time; here's a cruise book which gives an idea of WESTPAC tours back then) there were three transmission channels and two for reception. We usually were communicating with no fewer than 8 ships.

A little beyond this section, there was a bank of 12-15 teletype printers with no input capability; this was called the "broadcast" section of the shop, where all unclassified messages to 7th Fleet were monitored. This was easily the most boring job on the shift, as all the operator was required to do was watch to see if the radio frequencies suddenly "dropped" and the messages became garbled. If they did, he reported it to the Chief of the Watch (actually, to his assistant) and the word got passed up to the techs upstairs.

The next room was called "Local Delivery;" that was where messages routed to all the ships in port and the shore activities ended up. All messages came in over the tape readers and were slapped onto three printers, each loaded with mimeograph paper (yep, this was before copiers were in wide use). Once the message was printed, it would be handed off to a routing clerk, who would determine from the number of addressees how many copies were required and pass it over to the poor schmuck running the mimeo machine. Everybody hated this job, because your fingers came out blue (and stayed blue) from the mimeo ink for days afterwards. I never thought of writing a poem about the stuff.

Once the requisite number of copies was made, they would be passed along to a mail clerk, who would count the copies for each ship or shore command and slot them into a huge wooden mailbox (same as you'd see in a corporate mailroom). I'll bet we ran out of rubber fingers once a week.

The next room you entered was the message center; this was the room where all outgoing messages were routed, typed up on teletype paper and paper tape, proofread, and sent (via tape distributor) to the IBM 360/20 at the front of the house for transmission to the rest of the world. This was the only part of the section where competitive pride could really take hold; every operator wanted to be the fastest, most accurate tapecutter on the shift.

The last room was the file room; in all my working life I've never met anyone who liked to file, and doing the job of the operator back there was when I first recognized that fact. Each outgoing message had to be filed in one of those vertical dual-post files by date-time-group. This was complicated by the fact that the Navy uses ZULU or GMT for all its message traffic to convey a standard time for the entire world.

If you look over here, you'll see some images of things I wore or used while in the Navy. It became second nature to read the coded paper tape; some teletype perforators printed the letters on the tape, but nobody ever used those.

Posted by Linkmeister at August 9, 2003 01:31 PM