When NASA Went Dark

I cannot remember what month it was, but it must have been during 1965 when the Johnson Space Center (JSC) went dark. My first day working at JSC was Tuesday, June 2, 1964, and I was working in Building 12. I was taken to the main Administration building to complete all of the paperwork including the security questionnaire for security clearance. I was provided a tour of the campus and allowed to enter some of the buildings. I was 21, recently married, and excited with all I saw that day. I had been interviewed the day before and that was the first time I had ever seen the facility, but my Brother-in-law, Ted had been working there for a little while and that is how I learned about the job.

At that time, there were multiple buildings that had computers installed for various purposes and computers from several computer companies. IBM was the largest and most capable provider, but the federal government was down on IBM because of its dominance in the market. Congress had their favorite donors and that got contracts with Sperry Rand Univac, Control Data, and other smaller companies to provide mainframe computers at JSC. During my time working at JSC, I had training on almost all of those computers; however, none of the non-IBM computers were ever used for critical processing. Put those in the category of taxpayer money being wasted by Congress.

My first assignment was working on The Direct Coupled System, otherwise known as the “KLUNGE”. This was an IBM-7094-II connected to an IBM-7044 computer. The 7094 was the main processing computer and the 7044 was used for Input and Output processing. The term spooling was coined and the operating system Houston Automatic Spooling Priority (HASP) was developed there on that computer. That was truly a development program from the hardware and software sides with no examples of how to do it or how to operate it. The terms Cold-Start and Warm-Start were coined with different processes developed and documented. The very first Drum Storage and Disk Storage Systems were added and tested. Every day new things were tried and sometimes they were successful and sometimes they went back to the “drawing board”. This system was used for massive amounts of testing of programs and data developed by many engineers working on different parts of the space program. During the next 7 months working with the DCS Team, I learned so much and was provided the chance to prove my ability to learn and to teach others some very difficult processes and to do so without mistakes. Those qualities got me raises and opportunities to advance.

I was asked to transfer to Building 30 on the third floor where a computer center was used by Mission Support Team. Building 30 is where Mission Control is located and the main computer center for space flights was on the first floor where four IBM-7094-IIs were located. The IBM-7094 on the third floor was used by the backup team that served two purposes; every calculation was done by two different teams using different programs as a safety net and when there were two spacecraft in the air at the same time (Gemini), then each team would handle the re-entry of one of the vehicles. That IBM-7094 was an upgraded IBM-7090 and it was the only computer in the world that could run the program used to check the Onboard computers in the spacecraft. Due to the upgrade to the computer, the program could not start or complete in a normal process so special procedures were required to run and get the output. That computer could run five different operating systems that each required special knowledge and training. Processing was 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. We would get data tapes from various places around the country that sometimes a single job could run for 50-60 hours. Special restart functions were programmed in to allow the setting of sense-switches to create restart files every 1-3 hours so that many processing hours would not be lost if a tape error or other problems would cause the program to end abnormally.

I believe it was a Saturday night around 10:00 pm and one of those long-running jobs from JPL (California) had been running for several hours when the lights went out and the huge computer shut down. The 10-ton A/C unit in the computer room and the building A/C also shut down. The room was totally dark with no windows and the silence was shocking. The first challenge was to find a way to get out of the computer room because you could not just go from the hallway into the computer room. It was just like you became blind within seconds and you had no idea which way to go to get around all of the computers, printers, punch, and other equipment.

Once we were in the hallway, again no lights or windows, and most of the offices with windows were locked with very few people in the building. The elevators were not working and not even any exit lights working. No flashlights were available because the JSC had never had a blackout before. We found the stairs and were glad they were not locked. When we got to the ground floor and got outside, other people had gathered in the parking lot. Again, not a single light could be seen anywhere. The entire campus was totally dark and at that time you could not see any buildings outside of the campus from that location. It was like the world had gone dark and we had no idea what had caused it. Clear Lake was much smaller back then and very few businesses were located in that area. It was an eerie feeling standing there in the parking lot trying to guess what was going on.

About two hours later, a security guard came by and told us that the power to the entire campus was off and the power company was trying to locate where the problem was so they could fix it. Well, at least we knew that others were still alive and someone was working to get the power back on. I think it was around 2:30 am that power to some buildings began to have lights back on and you could see another building light up every few minutes. Before we had the power to Building 12 and Building 30 (they are nearby), another security guard came by and told us that the power company had found a large field rat that had got into a switch box underground and caused a fire that shut down the power transmission to the campus.

Millions of dollars of computers had been shut down without normal shutdown procedures and IBM Engineers needed to be onsite if any problems occurred during the power-up process. Getting the A/C plant going again for the campus was another issue as well as those A/C systems for each computer center. Just imagine the documentation required to report our every action and the recovery process to get everything back running and processing. It was very fortunate that no spacecraft was in space and no simulation was in process at that time, but it raised those concerns all the way to DC. I might report that no problem gets by without DC making the problem much worse.

This is one of my memories of my time working at NASA. I am thankful for the time I worked there where I learned a lot about the computer industry and what I was capable of doing and the chance to develop my leadership abilities.