Where There is a Will, There is a Way

Sharing Stories

December 12, 2022 at 1:16 a.m.

Pete MacDoran, a young professor

...by Pete MacDoran

Where There is a Will, There is a Way

It was 1989 and my wife, Judy, and I had moved to Boulder, Colorado. I had been invited to join the faculty in Aerospace Engineering at The University of Colorado. My academic appointment was to CCAR, Colorado Center for Aerospace Research. I was assigned to establish a teaching and research laboratory focused on Master and PhD degrees projects.

The newly upgraded classrooms had rather large video display terminals that allowed high quality overhead video displays. These terminals were usually installed on campus by part-time persons who were from the campus engineering students. This arrangement seemed to be just fine, except for the mischief potential.

The cable television company customers were a mixture of ordinary town residential units in and around Boulder and on-campus residential units which were sort-of gender-specific and which were regularly out-smarted by clever students.

For example, there was the notation of separate gender residential units. Each residential unit had its own medicine cabinet that was back-to-back with the medicine cabinet on the other side of the wall in the next unit.

This design meant there was a pathway between gender-specific residential units without the inconvenience of having to go outside.
I was never actually in any of those units; however, my engineering students were quite proud of their modifications.

The mischief potential of video programs came from the ability to deliver pornographic ones during an actual classroom instruction interval, especially because the video display terminal was attached to the high ceiling above the instructor’s usual line of sight.

Unless the instructor was coached in advanced about the potential of a porno video program insertion, there was the likelihood that would happen. Classroom attendees were also likely to allow the video to run several minutes.

I got caught in a short run of the porno video segment during one of my early engineering seminars on the topic of the Global Positioning System, GPS.

In spite of that, GPS has become one of the most successful engineering achievements of all humankind.

Pete MacDoran is a Washington resident and author of Amazon.com: The Old Men Will Die First: A True Story of Cold War Espionage.

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