An issue of a random Printed Engineering Magazine (PEM) sat inside a top secret facility, school libraries, colleges, every engineer’s home at one point. From a print magazines to a global reach online today, PEMs have been an ever present resource for engineers. If you are reading this, you know how important PEMs is in the engineering media world.
Engineering has always been an industry where each generation builds on the shoulders of the ones before it. Let’s see what this PEM means to each decade, starting with top secret work back in the 1980s.
I spoke with a retired engineer from the government contractor industry. Due to the nature of his work and clearance levels, his name and company will not be mentioned.
I asked about key project he worked on and about PEMs; here is a transcript of his story:
We affectionately called it "The Doomsday Radio," a radio that could operate in the tempest of multiple high-altitude EMP bursts. In the mid-1980s, I worked for a defense contractor as a systems engineer on that radio, or at least one of those radios. There were others. (More on that later.)
Of course, everyone involved in the project had to have COMSEC clearances, and some of us had TOP SECRET clearances. Given that this system would be used to direct military operations in the event of a nuclear attack, the security was understandable and rigid. Brief cases were thoroughly examined coming and going, even lunch bags got the treatment. Engineering notebooks stayed at the facility, and certainly no documentation left the building. Notes and even scratch paper were shredded and turned over to the FBI for disposal.
The company had its own engineering library with reference materials dating back almost a decade. Whatever arcane subject you needed for your part of the project could most likely be found in the library. If not, the librarian would get it for you. They even had a selection of periodicals, mostly engineering but some secular, like Time and U.S. News & Report.
But, the one most sought after was [PEM name removed]. Someone was always looking up an article they recalled from the past or trying to stay current with new ideas and technologies. When you are sequestered, as we were, you tend to become myopic. In fact, procedures encouraged it. If someone stopped by your desk to ask a question or touch base on some issue, we were required to place a cover sheet over whatever documentation we were reading at the time. Need to know...you know.
In a way, we were shut off from the world. Publications like [this PEM] gave engineers a chance to venture outside the walls. (And there were no windows, by the way.) We could read about what was happening, what new discoveries were being made, or what old technologies were being updated. It was a pleasant departure from the rigors of the project.
Years later after completion, we found out that quite possibly our project was only one of many such radios. Where did we read that? In a [Printed Engineering Magazine – PEM].
His work in this area continued into the 1990s with relatively no change in how PEMs were viewed.
The ‘90s brought accessible computers and the Internet to the masses. Information was only a few keystrokes away. But, this was the pre-wikipedia days. The wild west of the Internet. Comic sans fonts and animated gifs on every page was status quo. This was my time. My early days as an engineer – those college days!
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