Nocturnal Aviation

Contents

Due to overwhelming popular demand (an email to David Udin saying "it wouldn't take much prodding to get me to put up a few more," followed by an email from David Udin saying "OK, consider yourself prodded") we present a few more...

George says he was at WTBS from 1964 to 1971, worked with Pete Samson in the AI lab, and credits himself with adding "two tiny bits to the Gunkies canon: the phrase 'eventual twelve-channel capability' to the Dyna- digitron spot, and the 'acronym' 'Flexopneumohydrosystematization and C.'" He adds "Have you observed that the domain names gunkies.com, gunkies.org, and gunkies.net are not yet in use?"

Harrison Klein '71 writes "Not more than a year ago I heard Rory Johnston on a BBC radio news clip broadcast on KQED in San Francisco and just about drove off the road. The voice was unmistakable even before he gave his name at the close, but I still couldn't believe it because I lstill including the BBC, and have never heard him before or since. By the way, your web page lists it as Digicomputronimation, instead of Digicomputronimatics." [Yes, yes, I know, I know, mea culpa, I've fixed it, I'll never do it again.] "Yours really was the Golden Age of WTBS. I was there from '67 - '73 in various capacities, and I prepared the first application for Class A facilities. I was one of the few that continued in broadcasting after I graduated, eventually becoming Director of Engineering for the Westinghouse Broadcasting (Group W) stations."

These are RealAudio files; many browsers come with RealAudio preinstalled and will download and play these files automatically. As detailed below, these are parodies that ran on the MIT campus radio station, WTBS, in the mid-sixties.

1. Digicomputronimatics Writer, announcer: Pete Samson. "Asynchronous design techniques" were used in the Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-6 which thus did not have the usual "clock." Parodies the corporate naming style of the time.
2. Digicomputronimatics Introduces the Mark IIa Writer, announcer: Pete Samson. Portability: this was roughly the time of Digital's introduction of the PDP-8, which could possibly have been carried in the back of a station wagon...
3. Flexopneumohydroservosystematization & Control Writer, announcer: unknown, but Dave Udin remembers that "he was a mechanical engineer," which was memorable because most WTBS staffers were EE types. Cable addresses: when you needed to communicate rapidly in writing with an overseas business in the sixties, you sent a cablegram. It seems to me that they might have cost around fifty cents a word. Businesses were assigned short, code-like cable addresses--usually single, short "words," rather similar to today's node names in fact.
4. Flexo...Model R Systemat Actually, I think that "Popocatepetl" is pronounced with the accent on the fourth syllable, but it would be cavilling to mention it. "Early Bird" was an early communications satellite. Communication satellites were pretty new at the time. The first communications satellite, Telstar, was launched in 1962. I watched the inaugural broadcast (live television from France!) feeling that it was an important historic event. Of course it consisted of pompous speeches and boring "entertainment." Telstar didn't last long (it got fried by radiation from bomb tests). Early Bird was launched in 1965 and was the first of the Intelsats. I'd love to know if the "channel number" is authentic.
5. Nocturnal Aviation's 13 Divisions Writer and announcer, Pete Samson. You should be able to see the punch line coming a mile away--if, that is, you know anything about college students, which you probably do, and about vacuum tubes, which you possibly may not. Echo effect: WTBS was equipped with the classic professional tape recorders of the day, Ampex 350's. These 3-head reel-to-reel tape decks could record and play back at the same time. Due to the separation of the record and playback heads, the playback was delayed by about a tenth of a second--more or less depending on the tape speed. Mixing the delayed playback into the record input, produced an endlessly fascinating echo effect, used--possibly overused?--in the Apple Gunkies ads. It was also fun to feed the delayed playback into an announcer's headphones, which induced stuttering and other speech impediments in the most articulate speakers.
6. Nocturnal Defense Laboratories Writer and announcer, Pete Samson. Companies, both civilian and defense, really did run recruiting ads rather like this on WTBS. (Was he thinking of Sandia in New Mexico?)
7. Apple Gunkies: Physics Lecture Writer, Dan Smith. Announcer, Rory Johnston. Yes, it's pretty derivative of a style of humor popularized by the writer Max Shulman.
8. Apple Gunkies: Astronomy Lecture Writer, Dan Smith. Announcer, Rory Johnston. However, the best line in it ("although the sun is bigger...") was actually suggested by Sue Lasdon.
9. Apple Gunkies: When Grandma Made Gunkies Writer, Dan Smith. Announcer, Rory Johnston.
10. Apple Gunkies: 864 Varieties The announcer (and I assume writer) is Dan Murphy. The voice heard at the end is Larry Kilgallen. Dan Murphy was actually a fine disk jockey, whose impromptu style was captivating and unlike the somewhat formal tone he uses here. The last time I ran into Dan Murphy, he was an engineer at Digital's Spit Brook facility. I saw Larry Kilgallen at a local DECUS meeting sometime around 1987.

History: the call letters WTBS used to belong to MIT's student radio station (before Ted Turner bought the call letters and it became WMBR). It broadcast at 88.1 megacycles (cycles, not Hertz--these were the old days!) with an effective radiated power of fourteen watts, and was educational and noncommercial. It also broadcast the same programs to the dorms via short-distance "carrier-current" AM. When commercials ran on the AM station, it was necessary to fill the time on the FM station, which traditionally was done with public service announcements. The following link has more information on the history of WMBR.

I decided it would be fun to run fake humorous commercials instead. (Those were the days. Stan Freberg was a god, I tell you, a god...).

The name "Apple Gunkies" was the creation of Sue Lasdon and her friends at Goucher. I borrowed (stole) it for the first Apple Gunkies ad. "Apple Gunkies" were seized on and embroidered by many other WTBS staffers, and gave rise to other commercial parodies, such as Pete Samson's ads for "Digicomputronimation" and "Nocturnal Aviation."

--Dan Smith. Comments to dpbsmith@world.std.com