Did you happen to work in Horsham? I used to visit the Motorola site there when I was working for Verizon Labs. They were one of our vendors for the FIOS architecture.
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Yep, right next to Commonwealth Golf Course on Horsham road. I worked there from 87' to 2009. Originally the company was called General Instrument, located in Hatboro. We moved to Horsham in 98', then Motorola bought us out around 2000.
I worked on the VoIP portion of FIOS in the ONT unit that hung on the outside of the house. This was around the 2002-2006 time frame.
I was let go at the end of 2009 after the financial crisis stagnated the industry for a few yrs. Went on to work at Comcast for about 14 yrs, testing WiFi routers and other WiFi devices.
BTW, I visited a Verizon lab outside of Boston to demo our device. Were you in the Boston area?
Nothing rivals the childhood and adolescent years of GenX...
I had one of those cable boxes that got everything scrambled back in the day. I was not real happy when Cox cable went digital. It was great while it lasted.
Nope, being gone on your bike at 9 AM Saturday morning and not back home til the street lights came on. Drank out of garden hoses all day because if you came inside mom would find something for you to do.
I would gather up neighborhood kids so we could play Evil Kinevil. I lined the kids up like barrels and my brother would jump his Stingray over 7-8 of them with a ramp.
The things we did and got away with would get parents arrested these days. We survived.
Crazy. That was our Waltham lab and I visited it many times. I worked in the Ashburn, VA lab. I had to mock up every flavor of FIOS that ever deployed, so my lab was kinda crazy. I had everything from the CPEs, to the OLT/ONTs all the way up to the core routers that they aggregated on. I ended up getting a patent for a design I came up with for automating the provisioning/testing of the BHR (home router).
That was a cool gig and I was with VZ from 2000-2012, then left for a job a little closer to home. Never should have left.
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Yep, Waltham was where I visited. We also partnered with a company called Quantum Bridge up in Andover, so I was in MA alot back then. Later we bought them out. It's a small world.
BTW, I got a patent for telco line protection on the ONT, of course the company owns it, but got a nice monetary reward for it. That was a fun time.
My later years at Comcast kind of sucked. A much more oppressive and high pressure environment. Quick to blame workers if things don't go right. Blame QA if they miss an issue with the product even though they are given little to no time to test before a Friday release goes out. Glad I am out of the rat race.
Hey @Faceplant and @PhillyRam Maybe you guys can answer a question I've always wondered. Back in the 80s I had set top boxes with the channel dial on them. I learned a trick in college where you could take a section of the cover of a phone book (likely any card stock would work), fold about 2" over, and slip that fold up under the top shell of the box, then you would kind of shimmy it around a little, and voila - you got every channel. Then you'd just fold the rest of that piece of cover back over the top and tape it down. I still have no idea why it worked or what it did. Can either of you explain it?
That's a little before my time. I didn't get to start working in video products until around 1990. So I worked on newer generations of video scrambling.
I recall the card trick. I think you broke or interrupted a signal path or something, but I don't know the details of it.
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About 20 years ago I was flicking through the channels on my foxtel box and the adults only channel was not scrambled. I then had a decision to make, do I change channels and come back to see if it still worked or do I leave it on until it scrambled again. I chose the latter.
It didn't take long to work out that the content was awful. It was R rated which meant they couldn't show any genitals or penetration. Watching a blob of hair move up and down was the least erotic thing I've seen. But sexy women were naked so that was good enough for me.
It was tricky with the kids. I put it on fta and told them the box wasn't working. But eventually I knew a nrl game was coming and I world have to change the channel to that. And that was that. When I went back to the adult channel it was scrambled again.
The days before pornhub.
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About 20 years ago I was flicking through the channels on my foxtel box and the adults only channel was not scrambled. I then had a decision to make, do I change channels and come back to see if it still worked or do I leave it on until it scrambled again. I chose the latter.
It didn't take long to work out that the content was awful. It was R rated which meant they couldn't show any genitals or penetration. Watching a blob of hair move up and down was the least erotic thing I've seen. But sexy women were naked so that was good enough for me.
It was tricky with the kids. I put it on fta and told them the box wasn't working. But eventually I knew a nrl game was coming and I world have to change the channel to that. And that was that. When I went back to the adult channel it was scrambled again.
The days before pornhub.
.
Yep. I got around 4k and a plaque for mine. Saved the company millions and millions of dollars, but of course they owned my intellectual rights at the time. I automated myself into a Maytag repair man and that was another reason I left. I was bored, haha.
Yeah, that is what happened to me at Comcast. I am not a SW guy, but a hardware engineer, who was pushed more into a test engineer role. So as testing became more and more automated, they didn't need a 59 yr old highly paid test engineer anymore. I saw it coming and looked forward to it to the point where I volunteered to go if cuts were going to happen. So when they did I just retired.
I'm still trying to figure out where the front/back porch went....
Analog television - Wikipedia
Boston was a hi-tech hub once.
As an ex-DECie, I didn't think it would end like this....
I worked with a couple of different high tech companies over the years in Andover MA. Polycom & Quantum Bridge.
Nice area. A number of the people I worked with lived across the border in NH because taxes are so high in Mass, but like I said a nice area overall.
