Work became rather routine. With the Viet Nam conflict over the mission load was not very great. The tech reps would usually go in about 8am, check everything out and if there were no mission scheduled and all the processing from the previous mission was complete and shipped off to Beale, it was off to do something else. I spent a lot of time at the gym playing racquetball and Jan spent time taking pictures with her new Nikon and developing the film and framing pictures in the hobby shop on Kadena. She got very good at all three.
During the early days of our stay on Okinawa the personal computer became very popular and the ‘Intel 386’ was just being put into several computers. A group of 7 tech reps got together and ordered the latest and greatest 386 from Gateway. We wired off a great sum of money and waited anxiously for our packages to arrive.
We all got them in a couple weeks and proceeded to join the latest ‘PC Users Group’ on the base. We all had various tales to relate every week about what we had discovered and shared little secrets on the innards of our new toys. While fiddling around with the BIOS and playing with the settings I re-booted and the screen remained blank. I panicked and no matter what I did it I could not get anything on the display. I was ready to ship it back to Gateway but was saved by a member of the Users Group that told me to disconnect the battery that kept the BIOS alive and after a short while the BIOS would revert to the default settings. The next morning, I disconnected the battery and went to work. When I came home that afternoon, reconnected the battery and it booted up with no problems. My first lesson on PCs was to not screw with the BIOS if you don’t know what you are doing.
These early ‘386’ computers were large and quite heavy. Lugging them to a Users Group meeting became a chore. The motherboards were rather large and populated with many memory chips that looked like little multi-legged bugs. Barney Schwartz, a troop from the ELINT shop went to Taiwan for vacation and I asked him to get me some additional memory chips and parts for a ‘286’ for me to assemble. He got the memory chips for $1.95 each and bought me 108 of them and parts for the ‘286’ which I put together and put in the field shop. I was in PC heaven. A couple of years later when the newer mother boards were being put into computers the manufacturing of the memory chips changed, I retired the ‘286’ and sold the memory chips. I was offered $7.95 each for then from a local Okinawan PC store. A member of the Users Group offered to match that price, I sold them. Best investment I had ever made.