The more things change...

Dad and I spent several hours in a meeting yesterday, beginning preparations for the new digital microwave systems our stations will be installing to transmit live news shots back to the studios. We sat side by side, listening and making notes and thinking about the work we would need to do during the next year.

Some forty years ago we sat side by side in a breezy wooden press box perched above the concrete stands of Archbold Stadium, talking about the radio remote that was about to start. We had lugged cases of equipment up the open stairs — the clunky Koss headphones with a wire bracket on the side to hold the mic; the RCA mixer with knobs almost bigger than my hands; the long Sennheiser shotgun mic to pick up the band. As he spoke, I absorbed both technical and practical lessons: keep some crowd noise in the mix; pay attention to what's coming up, not just to what's happening right now; make sure to visit the bathroom before the broadcast starts; don't leave cups of soda around because they draw bees.

So much has changed since he got into the business. He started at channel 3 before videotape came to Syracuse, and was there when their first color equipment went on the air. Nowadays tape is being replaced by computer servers and solid state memory cards; in three more years the standards that made color broadcasting possible will be discontinued, replaced by digital transmission. The control room was an exciting noisy place full of massive machinery that smelled of warm oil, film cleaner, and hot tubes; 16 millimeter projectors pulled film through the gate frame by frame with a nervous chatter; optical multiplexers flipped their mirrors with a thunk; VTR heads sounded their thin whine as they spun, quick as a dentist's drill, on air bearings. And above it all, the quietly urgent commands of engineers on the intercom, coordinating everything at precisely the right time.

Nowadays one can walk into a control room and find it empty, computer monitors scrolling unseen as the automation plays commercials and switches satellite feeds.

Equipment failure used to be a normal daily event. Lamps would blow, tubes would fail. Film splices would break and the damaged edge of a videotape would catch the spinning head and be instantly sliced as by a buzz saw. Engineers went about their duties with a constant edge of alertness, ready to patch around a dead amplifier or to touch up an adjustment with the Xcelite tweakers that were as much a badge of their profession as the FCC licenses framed on the wall. A merely good day was one during which everything held together; on an excellent day one of the three VTRs would die, film would be missing, the network would abandon its format without notice, and the program log would be full of typos — yet through sustained hustle and ingenuity, nobody at home would guess that anything was amiss. Even in the early 1980s, when I started at channel 9 and most of our commercials played from the relatively automated but still intensely mechanical ACR-25, I would come home after sign-off so wired that it would be hours before I could get to sleep.

Several years ago a friend quipped, "Computers have taken broadcasting out of broadcasting." There's much truth there, yet nearly fifty years after he started at 3, Dad's still at it — ready to keep the station on the air with a click of the mouse or a turn of his trusty green tweaker.