Project Yo-Yo.

In an effort to sell the US Coast Guard some C-130 airplanes for air/sea rescue someone came up with the idea of flying in a circle and trailing a cable out the back of the airplane. The idea was that if the circle was the right size and the cable length the correct length the cable would fall down to the center of the circle and the end would be stationary over a given point. The person to be rescued would put on a harness and a winch would slowly pull him up to the airplane.

To test this theory Lockheed gave the project to a programmer named Grady Keith. It was called Project Yo-Yo. Grady wrote a simulation program that would vary air speed, circle diameter, cable length and other variables. They ran many hours of computer time on this problem. Grady took a lot of kidding about his project. It was finally cancelled when it was decided the theory was ok but no pilot could fly the precise circle necessary.

Lockheed had hired two Georgia Tech students as temporary operators at night while they went to school in the daytime. Their names were Louie Gomez and Jerry Durand. One night Louie and Jerry started Grady’s program and let it print out about half of its output on the 716 Online Printer. They put the computer in manual mode to stop it temporarily and removed the paper from the printer without tearing it. Then they took the output paper out to the EAM room where they put it in a 407 accounting machine that had the same set of type wheels as the 716. They had a card deck that would print a banner on the 407. It printed three pages of big block letters that said "Keith Go Home". Then they returned the paper, again without tearing it, to the 716 and place the computer in automatic letting it finish its output.

The next morning when Grady came in Louie and Jerry were back at school. He could not figure out how they could stop his program, load another one to print the block letters, and then get his program to start back where it left off. I don’t think Louie and Jerry would have ever told him how they did it.

I thought I would have some fun with Grady so I told him about this new computer IBM was coming out with. I told him it was a self checking machine. You ran your program and when you got your output you feed it back in as input. It would run the program backwards and if you came up with your original input everything was ok. I told him we were going to call it the Yo-Yo machine.

Georgia Power Company at the time had a cartoon character named "Ready Kilowatt" that they used in their advertising. They had put a man size cardboard figure of Ready Kilowatt at the entrance tunnel to the Lockheed plant. When Louie and Jerry came to work that night they picked up Ready Kilowatt and brought him to the computer room. When everyone came to work the next morning there was Ready at the computer console.

Years later Louie was a Manager at Delta Airlines and Jerry became a Vice President of Southern Railway over all their data processing.

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Jerry (Gerry) Durand later found the above item here, and responded:

Ed et al, The rest of the story--Grady's program ran every night--always same result. A memory dump--called a CPO in those days, Core Print Out. We had to manually record the IC, ACC, MQ and index registers. The output referred to in Van's document was a CPO. After a week of the same results, Louie and I decided to have some fun. If we had worked as hard on our jobs as we did on our prank, we would have been head of the dept. Jerry