those on the board. From the top left of the page there was a chip about an inch square, which appeared to be some sort of standard input/output (I/O) conversion chip (analog to digital/digital to analog). To the right of the I/O chip was a chip much larger, about one and a half inches across and three inches tall. I had no clue what that chip would do, but it looked similar to a main processor chip like a Pentium VI. I labeled it A.
To the right of chip A was a slightly smaller chip, about one inch square, and I labeled it B. To the right of chip B was an identical twin to chip A, which I labeled C. To the right of chip C was another I/O chip. The chip sequence I/O, A, B, C, I/O made up the top row of my block diagram. Also, all of the chips on this row were connected by a copper stripe on the circuit board. The I/O chips had what appeared to be standard serial outputs connected to them.
With the top line of the block diagram completed I then added chip D directly below chip B and then chip E directly below chip D. Chip D had copper leads to both chips A and C. There were also fiber optic cables connecting chips A to B, B to C, D to A, D to C, and E to D. Below and on each side of chip E there was a small power processing unit (PPU) board just like the type in a game console power supply unit (PSU). Each of these PPUs was in turn connected to a single transformer and fuse box that had a standard power cable input. There were also power connections between several pins on each of the chips and the PPUs and other standard components on the board. It looked to me as though there were two separate PPUs because the board was actually two systems in one. Perhaps the two identical processor-looking chips were parallel processors on a single board, or maybe one was a backup to the other. I didn't know.
By the time I had figured out the rough block diagram, it was six-thirty. I just knew Lazarus was going to kill me since I was late for his evening walk. I packed up my things, put the board in my bag, along with my notes, and headed out for the evening. There couldn't be any security risk or anything; hell, my clearance hadn't come through yet. So I knew this stuff was public stuff. No problem; if it had been classified they would never have let me see it.
Laz was damned happy to see me. No sooner than the door had opened did he jump up and lick my face. Of course, I dropped everything and cursed some. 'Damnit Laz,' I yelled. But then, it wasn't his fault I was late.
'I know buddy, sorry about that. You wanna go for a walk?' I tugged his left ear just above the white spot that met his neck. I grabbed his leash off the wall, a handful of smelly liver treats, and pocketed a couple of grocery store bags; then we were off, Lazarus pulling me the entire way. We strolled down the sidewalk to his favorite fire hydrant where he marked it as his. We walked for a good twenty minutes or so. It was my guess, in retrospect, that Lazarus was the only thing keeping me from having a heart attack. Since he was old enough, we have walked every day for about twenty or thirty minutes. I'll bet he has caused me to lose about ten pounds, not that I couldn't stand to lose another twenty-five or more.
We finished the walk and I took another one of my new pills. I realized that I hadn't cried all day. Was it the fact that I was preoccupied with the new circuit board or was it the new drugs? I didn't really give a shit as long as I quit crying all the time.
Lazarus and I played around a bit and then I threw together a sandwich. I was eager to get back to working on that circuit board, so I booted up my system and ate at my computer station. My block diagram was too primitive and paper is hard to manipulate, so I 'CADed' it up in 3-D and loaded my circuit-modeling software. I had built enough game system modifications in the past to lead me to go out on the Framework and find a circuit-modeling shareware program. That way, I could draw up the circuit mods and run the software, which in turn would simulate the system's response and tell me if I needed to alter the circuit or something. This was nothing fancy; we used PSPICE back in my first Circuits class at University of Dayton, a standard approach. But PSPICE had become expensive, so I found the cheap version I still possessed. The coolest part was the interface program I had written a few years ago to translate my CAD drawings into circuit information, which would then interface with the circuit-modeling software. Cool.
So, I finished drawing up my circuit and I pulled a power source icon over to the PSU input on the diagram and connected them. I double-clicked the power source and typed in for it to be a standard one hundred twenty volts alternating current source with a ten-ampere breaker. Then I put oscilloscope icon leads at several places in the circuit. Since, I had no clue what was inside chips A through E, I connected the leads from each pin of each chip and ran them to the analog-to-digital/digital-to-analog board of my computer system. My plan was to put the thing in operation and record what happened to the outputs after placing certain small voltages all around the board. I would use a couple of volts and a few microamp signals. I finally got all that coded and wired up by about midnight. I turned it on and got some of the most random outputs I had ever seen. I tinkered with the thing for hours, trying a different voltage here and measuring a different output there. Nothing made any sense. Neither of the chips seemed to have any standard purpose that I could determine. About three forty-five I decided to go to bed.
I loaded up my data and hardware and lugged it back to work bright and early the next morning and set up the circuit on my workbench in the lab. I felt great and not tired at all. I wasn't sad either. I went right to work on the circuit board. This time I decided to back up and focus on one chip at a time. Chips A and C had way too many pins coming out of them but chips D and E only had a couple of connected fiber optics cables and a couple of what appeared to be I/O and power pins. So, I disconnected chip E's fiber optic cable and powered up the board. A bright beam of green light came out of the end of the fiber optic cable.
'Aha!' I exclaimed. 'It's a laser on a chip.' I played around with it a bit until I figured out how to control the laser output by adjusting the power on the proper pin. Then I connected the cable back to Chip D. 'So obviously, whatever is happening in chip D is optical!'
I removed the cables from chip D and powered up the laser chip. A faint beam of green light came out of the fiber optic cable fitting on each side of chip D.
'Chip D has, at the least, a beamsplitter,' I muttered to myself. I connected the cables back to chips A and C and disconnected the cables between chips A to B and C to B. Or was it B to C? No way to know. When I powered the system up again, I didn't see light exiting the chips as expected. I turned off the lights and held a piece of paper in front of them and could barely see a faint beam coming out of A, nothing from B, and nothing from C.
I had no idea what this board was for and I wasn't sure that I would ever figure it out. I worked like mad on the thing for the entire semester I was supposed to work full-time. By the end of the semester, all I had figured out was that you could put an input signal of however many bits into one I/O chip and you would get the exact same thing out the other I/O chip. I guessed that this meant the chips A, B, and C were shorted out. I wrote up a report and handed it to Larry for my cooperative education credit. Then I signed up for my last four classes.
I had taken two classes while I was working and managed a B and a C, good enough to graduate. Once I finished the four classes this semester I would start as a civil servant for the Air Force full time. I did have to tailor my transcript a little for the job though. I was previously looking only at software coding, but the fun I had had at the ICG was making me think more about hardware.
My last four classes were senior level electives, so I got to pick basically whatever senior to graduate level computer, physics, math, or electrical engineering class I wanted to. I registered for
