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Andrew, I use to work in those two buildings where you were sitting at the consoles (Buildings 30/30S). I was the Loral/Lockheed Quality Engineer for hardware development. Something to make Steve (Go4Long) proud is that the blue consoles you are sitting at in the Gold Flight Control Room (FCR) were manufactured in Calgary by Evans Consoles. A very good company with an outstanding product, in fact I would say they share Jim's values for meeting customer expectations. (Understand, expectations are not the same as requirements, it's more difficult.) They also provided the consoles for the Canadian Space Agency control room in Montreal (another of my projects). Of course most of my time was spent in the many back rooms and floors surrounding the control rooms, really boring stuff to look at, and some really cold rooms.
Interesting note about the consoles. Underneath each console is 40' of cable for each interface for every piece of hardware inside each cabinet. (Consider there are 3 unix workstations, 2 FDDI comm stations, etc., that's a lot of hardware!) We did not spec that in our drawings, so when I saw the NASA on-site contractor rolling up the extra cable and lay it under the floor on the cable tray, I ask him "why?". He said they had to do that in case the Flight Director or other operation manager wanted to move their console. I told him the center was designed with a distributed architecture, so all they would have to do is to move to the console of their choice and log in. Of course he answered, "I do what I am told". Your gov't dollars wisely spent. Of course, the building 30 lobby has a silver hammer award from Al Gore for saving the Gov't money! Go figure.
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