It’s that time of the month... the morning after the second Tuesday, the holiday our computers faithfully observe: Windows Update Day.  For now the celebration lies dormant, the only sign being a small picture in the corner of each monitor showing the world, dominated by Microsoft’s logo.  No symbolism there, eh?

For the next several hours I’ll be diverted from useful work to babysitting several dozen computers as they install their mysterious updates, reboot, and hopefully come back to a productive life without taking any of the stations off the air.

Several years ago a friend who, like me, came to work for channel 9 when we were in the basement of Shoppingtown, lamented: “computers have taken television out of television.”  How right he was.

The control room used to be a center of quiet frenzy with its unique sounds and smells:  the chatter of a projector pulling a movie through the gate; a waft of ethyloid film cement; the aroma of warm lubricating oil; the sharp whine from the videotape machine’s head, spinning like a dentist’s drill on air bearings.  Terse commands to roll and take and flip mirrors and advance slide drums, punctuated by the occasional annoyed grunt when the start of a spot got clipped or a tape didn’t quite lock up.

Every show and every commercial that played was on a piece of film, or a reel of tape, or an audio cart with a handful of slides... and the master control engineers spent their shifts in a constant push to get the next film threaded and the next tape cued just in time to air.  An exciting place, and one where you learned early not to stand in the way.  I would get home around two in the morning after signing off the station, so wired that it would take hours to fall asleep.

Nowadays the control room is filled with computers, and the atmosphere is completely different... rather laid back, by comparison.  Even the old comforting smells are gone, replaced with the distant aroma of someone’s lunch.  It’s sad, somehow... but exciting, too.  This new gear is what makes DTV possible; and today you can see a picture in your living room that is so far better than what we could produce in the control room even ten years ago... there’s almost no comparison.

But for now it’s Windows Update Day, and I have babysitting to do.  Twenty-five years ago, who would have thought this would be the future of broadcast engineering?

-- Jeff