The Pleasant Hills Slag Heap





When we were about to move to Pittsburgh, one of our Connecticut friends said to us, "Oh, I know that place! It is where there is this huge slag dump, right next to the highway and when they dump at night traffic stops and I've heard that cars get scorched".
Our house is only a mile or so from the dump - they had stopped pouring out hot slag on the Rte 51 side by then, but our house had a backside view of the dump, where they were still dumping. The sky would light up red and the first few times I ran to the back window, wondering where the fire was.
The following year we put a deck on the back of our house, and spent the warm weather in our deck chairs watching the dumping operation. It was like having a volcano in our own back yard!

By 1970 dumping was abandoned altogether and the dump sat idle until 1978 when U.S. Steel, who owned it, announced that it would be developed with one of the biggest, most modern and up-to-date shopping malls -- Century III mall. The top of the hump was bulldozed off, and the material thrown into the gully that lay at the foot of the slag heap, all the way around. Eventually the lower surface was leveled off, and the remaining mound terraced, and building of the shopping mall began.

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photo by Larry Comden. Photo Gallery









New Wave Skateboard Park

At about that time 3 executives from Westinghouse and 1 from Alcoa pooled their money and built the New Wave Skateboard Park, nestled at the foot of the former slag heap. 2 of the men had sons of skateboarding age; I suspect the other two thought that within a year they'd be lighting their cigars with $100 bills.





The skatepark was a beautiful thing, in striking contrast to the rough-hewn, zigarat like sharp edged terraces of the slag heap behind it, the runs and dips undulating with smooth, sinewy grace. This was a work of art, a sculpture cast in concrete which would last the ages, it would outlast the slag mountain behind it.

It was not to be. The cost of insurance, and of the bank loan, outran the income from admissions. At the end of the year the 4 partners sold out to a new owner/manager, and he kept it going for another year. Finally, in 1981 the skatepark closed for good.


In it's final incarnation, the park became a go kart track, which was a little more successful than the skateboard park. The pool (with coping and tile) was filled in and certain transitions were resculpted and all asphalted. But, oh, so ugly. The princess had turned into a toad!


Even the go-kart track eventually closed. Today that corner lot is not even a parking lot, it is an empty, weedy, trashy lot. All that remains from the skatepark days are the spruce trees planted to screen the parking lot

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PENNTEXT - A text news service for the deaf



Between 1986 and 1993, Pennsylvania's deaf citizens were able to read a news service created especially for them and carried on the text channel of their local PBS station. This service took advantage of the "line 21" technology, which also brings forth the captions for closed captioned programs. At that time, deaf people had to buy a separate decoder which was cabled between their TV set and antenna. This decoder had a switch which allowed the user to select "captions", "text" or "none". In most parts of the country, the text channel was empty.

PENNTEXT had a number of different news programs which cycled through the day. MORNING NEWS brought the day's headlines with simplified synopses of the news stories. LOCAL NEWS contained stories from the local pages of the newspaper. DEAF NEWS was a compilation of news stories of special interest to the deaf, taken from a large number of sources including call-ins, deaf reporters and magazines. KIDS NEWS carried stories written by students in the residential schools for the deaf, and in deaf programs across the state. Finally, EVENING NEWS gave the producers of PENNTEXT to update news stories as they broke throughout the day.





Penntext was produced at the Western PA School for the Deaf in Edgewood. The morning newspapers were read, stories selected, rewritten and entered into the EDAC computer. We had prepared disks of Deaf News, Kids News. Local stories from the other PPTN stations had been sent electronically by an early form of e-mail over SpecialNet. At 9 in the morning, we began our transmissions to the 6 stations of the PPTN network. The transmission included the user schedule for the day and the news stories.

At the television stations, the files were fed into a "encoder" which merged them onto the television signal. At 10, the user schedule kicked in, and PENNTEXT began to roll!



Morning News

Kids News
Deaf News






Computer Clubs




Pittsburgh Area Computer Club




I've heard that PACC still exists, a mere shadow of the large and influential club it once was. It was the mother of all the other computer clubs, and the story of its founding is so good that it has to be repeated here!

In early 1975 the MITS Altair 8800 kit was sold by mail order (the Popular Electronics issue with it on the cover is now a collector's item). Several people in Pittsburgh ordered them -- but there were mistakes in the instructions so that if you followed them to the letter, they wouldn't work. Someone ran an ad in the Pittsburgh Press classifieds looking for other people struggling with the Altair kits. 2 guys answered his ad, and they discovered that between them they had already solved about 80% of the errors. They began meeting regularly, working on the kits and were soon completely successful . Word got around -- if you had an Altair 8800 kit you needed to get in touch with one of the 3 in order to make it work. PACC eventually gelled around them.

When we joined the club in 1980, the meetings were held in Northway Mall on one Sunday afternoon of the month. Many computers were represented among the membership but DEC, TRS-80 and any computer running CP/M comprised the majority. Larry had a DEC PDP-11 and Tippi had an Apple II, and found belonging to a club such as PACC invaluable. The speakers usually talked or demonstrated a cross-platform item which would be of interest to all computer owners, then the members gathered with others of similar machine to discuss specifics.

Computers were not particularly user-friendly back in the early '80s (are they now?)and a support network, such as could be found at PACC, was vital.

I remember seeing oneof the original Altairs at a PACC computer show. It was "booted up" by flicking a series of switches in the front panel. TRS-80s "booted up" from cassette tapes, as did the TI 99 4/A. We Apple owners had floppy disk drives, and the system was carried on each of the floppies (along with the program or programs!) Only the real biggies -- like DEC -- had internal hard drives.

After several years -- by 1986 or so -- several changes had occurred. PACC moved to CCAC's Allegheny campus where parking was not as easy and available as it had been at the mall. The Apple Pitts club was founded, comprised mainly of Apple members who had broken off from PACC. Tippi drifted away to the Apple Pitts. Larry's new company, MicroControl Systems was also started around that time and he no longer had the spare time for a computer club.







The Apple Pitts






The members of the Apple Pitts were largely educators and parents, and interested in educational rather than business applications of their computers. And, of course, games.

We met at first in Ed Bicker's "Computer House" on Greentree Road (also not here any more) but soon outgrew that space. Luckily one of our members was a professor at Penn State, McKeesport, and he was able to sponsor us there. We rented out the whole student union one Sunday a month, which gave us a large meeting space with a stage, and in the snack bar area, each booth was perfect to set up a computer system. Extension cords snaked through the aisles but were only a small annoyance. Otherwise the space was perfect!

The flaw in this picture of perfection was, unfortunately, the ease which Apple computers could copy software. There wasn't a protection scheme that couldn't be hacked by Apple users. The officers of the club passed rules, scolded, railed against this, but the copying still went on. It was the demise of the club - honest members became disgusted and left, and the copiers were not interested in supporting the club with anything except dues. Eventually there was no one there to run the club, they no longer had a sponsor and the club disbanded, spending the last of their dues on a grand feast.

But before all this happened, there was one great, grand day of glory. On Nov. 23, 1986 Woz - Apple founder Steve Wozniak came to give a talk to the Apple Pitts! One of our members, who had received the "Teacher of the Year" award, was instrumental in bringing Woz to our club, and met him at the airport with her school band. He stayed as her guest that weekend. After his talk, he signed the lids of all our Apple II+ and IIes. I still have my lid, although the computer underneath it no longer works.

The TI Computer Advantage Club




The genesis of this club is completely different from all the others. It started as a sales gimmick by TI: "buy our computer and you can belong to our club". TI arranged the meetings, sent out the newsletter, and it was TI salespeople who were the presenters.
The TI was a fairly expensive, and powerful little machine. It was a 16 bit machine when most of the other personal computers were 8 bit machines, which meant it could handle floating point math; and could do LOGO -- turtle graphics. And that madeit very attractive to parents and educators. Software came in EPROM cartridges, which little hands could insert into the machine more easily than running a disk drive, and they were awfully hard to destroy - another advantage in an educational setting. Add to that the small keyboard, which fit little fingers and TI gave us a good computer for early education.

The problem was that it was poorly designed. A huge box had to be purchased to hold the additional memory that was required to run LOGO. Printing was problematical.

And then, suddenly, in less than a year, TI abandoned the 99 4/A. The price dropped from $700+ to $75 and eventually even lower. TI also abandoned the club. But rather than let the club drop and die, the members took it over. They changed the name to PUG - Pittsburgh User's group - and continued to meet at CCAC in West Mifflin for several years. Members taught programming classes, which were very popular, and demonstrated software that they themselves had created.

I don't know if anyone today uses the TI 99. I don't know when PUG disbanded. Long before that happened, our school had switched to Macintosh.












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