MCI, DC

Back in 1984, when MCI was not owned by WorldCom, they were in partnership with IBM and someone else as a joint satellite venture, called ComSat. IBM decided the wanted out, so the sold the project and part of the employees to MCI. Part of the project was the process of "injecting" data into the satellite(s) from a IBM mainframe to a transmitter. The perceived problem was that there was one one version of the communications card in the 2701 that connected the mainframe to the transmitter. If it should die, the satellite would die.  The card in the 2701 had been modified by someone that was no long available, and not documented.

So there was a project to replace the special card with a standard card in the 2701 (itself, out of date), connect that to a Series/1 computer and connect that to the satellite transmitter. And then Murphy showed up. The project engineer who thought this up had been found dead in the trunk of his car. Drug related, maybe.

So they bought us a Series/1 computer to use. We questioned the validity of the project. Could the Series/1 hardware sensors do the job? Was it "just a matter of programming" it right? We questioned it and set up a test to see what the requirements were. The Series/1 could only sample once every 100 ms. The signal being provided was a pulse only 15 ms long. The Series/1 wasn't qualified. Project closed.