I worked Tech Control inside, stationed from Pete Field, right after I came back from Okinawa in 1971, IIRC. I was there just 5 months and got another overseas PCS very quickly (My 8 years and three months in the AF got me 6 years, 11 months overseas tours and the last 4 years of that was 50% TDY to remote locations).
What AMAZED me most was 90% of the guys there had spent their entire AF careers inside that mountain, never was outside CONUS once. I learned it all quickly, but I was the square peg in the round hole. I got a promotion out of it and was assigned overseas - again very soon.
It was an amazing place. Entire buildings on huge coil springs (for shock), large interior tunnels and cavities, many filled with epoxy filling in cracks in the interior granite laced with chicken wire to keep pieces from falling in on people. At the time, there were three main computer systems serving the complex: Burroughs NCR, IBM and UNIVAC running what they called “The Left Wall.”
6 million gallon interior lake, quaternary generating backup capacity (that ALL of failed at once, frighteningly) and the two big lumbering hydraulic blast doors.
BTW, I lost faith in all that once when one day I went in and BOTH doors were open. Never happened before. In this case, the contractor doing something in there had it in the contract they remain open.
The best thing? The chow hall. Best food I saw in my entire career. Because that’s where the General ate.
Something I won’t ever forget but don’t want to go back. :0)
I first lived on Ent and then moved to Peterson when they closed Ent.
Oh, yeah, I had lots of friends in Tech Control. In the 90s, they put tech control into the comm-computer field, as circuits became imps and then routers in milnet and siprnet. By the time I retired in 98, I was also a tech controller—by way of the combined AFSC only! But I did get my NT 4.0 MCSE...
But yeah, I actually went out on the little rowboat in the lake. My best friend was an electrician and had to maintain the water gauges therein.
I’m surprised you didn’t mention the Philco computers. They were the ones running the space operations center —Delta, and Missile warning—425L. Fornicator, as we called in (four and a quarter). They were old then—I think the original systems from the early sixties.