Peter planned to show the guys down on Vesey Street his project. But when he got there, the wrecker’s ball had started taking whacks and big chunks out of the Hudson Tubes terminal. Those guys, and an era, were gone. He started walking north, for what seemed like hours. Eventually, he found himself at Grand Central Station. From here, he could take the subway home. But he had another idea. The Union Carbide building was around the corner on Park Avenue. They were the company that sponsored the science fairs. Maybe a little advance publicity would be good for this, his mother of all science fair projects.
The lobby was daunting. It was so huge. The elevators only went to certain floors and a directory took up an entire wall. He scanned it and his eyes locked on “Computer Dept. NYRCC. 47th floor.”
He found the 35–50 bank of elevators and got on. The only elevator he had ever been on was the one in his cousin’s house in the “projects” that moved slow but still beat walking up the six floors of the subsidized housing complex. His stomach reacted as if he were on the Dragoncoaster at Rye Beach Playland as the elevator sped straight up. It was his first time in a Manhattan skyscraper. When the doors opened, he walked around a little and then saw a door that said, “Authorized Personnel Only.” So, of course, he walked right in.
He walked up an incline to a raised floor. There were computers humming, buzzing, and blinking everywhere. Dozens of big red tape drives and big rectangular cabinets with flashing lights and colored knobs crammed the entire 50th floor. Inside this computer room, the air was crisp and cold. It smelled sharp and acrid. There was the whirring and an occasional swooshing sound as tape drives rewound and their power windows opened. He was taking all this in when a hand came down on his shoulder.
“How did you get in here?”
Peter looked up and saw the scowling face and grim demeanor of a man in a blue shirt and yellow tie.
“You can’t be here, kid. I’ll walk you out.”
Thinking quick, Peter said, “Er… I built a computer.”
“That’s nice, son. Aren’t you supposed to be in school?”
“No, really. I have it right here in this case.”
That stopped the man. “Show me.”
“Can I put this down over there?” Peter pointed to a return table off the CPU of the IBM mainframe that was currently one of the twenty computers operating at Union Carbide’s New York Regional Computing Center. The man who collared him, Ed Cortez, was a director. Peter plopped down the attaché case and popped the latches. As he opened it, he saw Mr. Cortez’ eyes widen and jaw drop. Whose wouldn’t? There before him in a nineteen-inch wide by eleven-inch deep attaché was an impressive array of light bulbs, switches, red-and-black binding posts, jeweled power lights, and a big telephone dial. Peter hit the power button and then the reset button. The light bulbs, which were randomly lit across two rows, all reset to the lower row. He then dialed a ten, and as the dial turned, the lights jumped and flashed in a special order that only a computer scientist would recognize. The number he dialed in was transformed into on-off-on-off, or the number “10” in binary code.
Peter further ingratiated himself to Mr. Cortez by pointing out that the bank of register lights in the attaché case — 1,2,4,8,16,32,64,128 — was the same as the register monitor on the IBM SYSTEMS 360 — 65 CPU main panel. In short, he just equated his thirty-five dollar science project with the six-million dollar machine that was one of the biggest operating anywhere in the world.
Soon, many C.E.s, programmers, and operators were gathered around the pimply-faced kid with the suitcase computer. So much so, that in time the big blue machine went unattended and that brought out Ed Ryan, Chief of NYRCC. Although Ryan started out hard-assed, soon the little kid and his science project had the same “Gee Whiz” effect on him. To many of these computer engineers — among America’s business computing elite — this was the son they wish they had. And like good stepfathers, they showered him with gifts. Manuals, schematics, power supplies, and coveted circuit boards — with the gold contacts still on them! Sol and the boys at Vesey Street would have given him the whole store for one of these, just for the gold. This new paternal group offered him a summer job, but more than he could ever imagine was about to come.
Meanwhile, at the UN meeting, Dr. Brodenchy was about to walk out of the room. He was sure that the Undersecretary General of the U.N. for Economic and Social Affairs must have been drinking. Otherwise, he was insane. Either way Brodenchy didn’t want any part of it.
Sensing the impossible position he was in, the undersecretary took the chance of his career. “What if I show you proof?”
That stopped Brodenchy. Now this bureaucrat was either pulling a prank or had misinterpreted something as “proof” of the outlandish claims he just made. His intellectual interest piqued, Brodenchy acceded.
“May I ask you to wait here while I make the necessary preparations?” the undersecretary said.
“Certainly,” Brodenchy said. He took a seat in the outer office. His mind raced with the implications to mankind if what he had just heard was true. Why had he never heard anything about this before? Furthermore, if it were a fact, why did they want him involved?
“Doctor, the Secretary will see us now.”
“The Secretary?” Brodenchy asked.
“The Secretary General of the United Nations, U Thant.”
A chill went through Brodenchy. U Thant was a world-respected figure. If he was buying into this nonsense, maybe there was something…
Chapter Four
Peter had hit the mother lode. It was like taking candy from big babies. All he had to do was violate the sanctity of some computer room and within minutes he had them right in the palm of his hand. Peter was now firmly committed to his goal of actually building an older IBM 1401 computer from all the parts they threw at him. He’d have to talk his uncle Joe into giving him space in his garage. A 1401, even just the boards, was a big machine, too big for the three-room apartment in the two family house he, his parents, and brother now lived in.
Peter remembered the pinch in his nose that the computer room caused. It became the basis of his plan of attack. He’d go into a midtown skyscraper, press all the buttons on the elevator and at every floor, sniff the air. The clue Peter was sniffing for was the smell of acetate. It was the base layer of the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing’s magnetic tape that was unceasingly run at high speed past the heads on the big computer tape drives of the day. The odor was unmistakable, a little like vinegar, and a little like old galoshes. 3M used it because when they broke, acetate based tapes broke clean with no stretching, meaning they could be repaired by a simple splice of tape with no loss of data.
In the Pan Am building, Peter sniffed his way to two IBM 360 — 40s in one room. He walked off with a power supply compliments of an enamored computer engineer. At Lever House (IBM 360 –30) he got manuals and two register motherboards. Even at just a plain white building on 51st and Park, he smelled out an IBM 360-30 at a brokerage house and got to make up punch cards with his name on them. He had the idea to type in the alphabet and numbers 0–9 and get the whole alphanumeric card code right there in his hands. The largess from his little forays into corporate America was filling up his room in the Bronx — he’d better talk to Uncle Joe soon!
Brodenchy left the U.N. in a daze and checked in to a room at the Waldorf. He ordered room service and sat trying to figure out how to accomplish the outrageous mission he had just accepted. He had agreed to chair a committee that at this point had no one on it. The conundrum he faced was that someone had to be on the committee before he could tell that person what the committee was about. His fear was that once he told anyone, he would probably not want to be on it, or worse, suggest Brodenchy stop drinking. It didn’t take any part of his prodigious brain to figure out that this was not going to be easy. He needed some event or convincer to attract some of the greatest minds in the world onto his panel. That panel would then advise the world on something it would never believe. The more he thought about it, the more he doubted his own sanity.