1975.
EDI LS-8 on the original Broadway production of A Chorus
Line.
ST
Steve
Do have any idea what happened to the actual LS-8 you used ?, was it replaced at some
point in the run ?.
And where did Fred Fosters version - the one that was sitting up and almost buried on top of a storage area in the new factory, come from ?.
I believe there's an LS-8 as well, at a museum in Boston.
And for those of you too young to remember,
A Chorus Line was the very first Broadway show to use a memory
console - hell, I think B'dway skipped all the 2 and multi-scene consoles and went right from DC resistance dimmers to memory.
Big woop-de-doo and legal troubles at the time about the LS-8 used on
A Chorus Line, which was an (ultimately illegal)
Electronics Diversified copy of a Steve Skirpan Auto-Cue control
system. It used a light pen to access channels on the
screen.
Oh the days, as I fondly (and not-so-fondly) remembered programming on the Multi-Q. It was very easy to hit the "Load to
Console"
button, instead of the "Save to Disk"
button, which were right next to each other and looked alike. Very simple process to dump everything you worked on and
load in the contents of an empty 5.25" floppy. No error messages we get now days, like - "Are You Sure" ?.
And I do believe it was our very own Steve Terry (correct me if this is a misquote or in error) who, in reply to a Broadway
producer commenting on how much easier became the job of Broadway electricians running a computer
console, having once had to deal with resistance dimmers, who said "They are not paying us $70,000 to push GO, they're paying us $70,000 to know what to do when the GO
button doesn't work".
A Classic
line that I have often quoted.
SB