Here’s
a brief history of Staff Notes—and UCAR.
From the Beginning
1966: Lyndon Johnson is president
of the United States, Walt Roberts the director of
NCAR. A Hershey bar costs a nickel and a full lunch
in the NCAR cafeteria costs 80 cents. Our top-of-the-line
computer is a Control Data 6600. UCAR's membership
increases to 23 universities. NCAR staff move into
the Mesa Lab. Calendar Notes begins publication
on 23 June as a typewritten weekly and becomes Staff
Notes in November.
1970: The Brady Bunch is on television,
The Wild Bunch in the theaters. The University of
Toronto becomes the first international member university
of UCAR. The Climax Observatory prepares to close;
the High Altitude Observatory stakes out a Mexican
eclipse. The first direct bus service to Stapleton
International Airport operates several times a day
for $2.20 one way. Staff Notes is still typewritten.
1976: It's the 16th year of UCAR
and the 200th year of the United States. A west wing
is added to the Mesa Lab to house the brand-new,
$8-million CRAY-1A. The National Academy of Sciences
calls for curtailing chlorofluorocarbons; atmospheric
chemistry research gears up at NCAR. The National
Hail Research Experiment is in full swing. Comet
West wows predawn observers for several days in March.
The NCAR Library's first interactive literature search
facility comes on line. Staff Notes, now produced
on an NBI word processor, introduces a two-column
format.
1989: Time magazine comes to NCAR
as greenhouse warming and the ozone hole seize the
public's attention. The Scientific Computing
Division installs its second CRAY X- MP. A few months
after Rick Anthes becomes UCAR president, Bob Serafin
is appointed NCAR director. Wind-shear detection
techniques coproduced by the Research Applications
Program help avoid a major plane crash at Stapleton.
UCAR adds the Cooperative Program for Operational
Meteorology, Education and Training (COMET) to its
growing roster of programs. Now produced via Macintosh,
Staff Notes undergoes its first redesign in over
a decade.
1994: Bill Clinton is in
the White House. UCAR staff--more than 1000--are
in two major sites and several smaller ones. Climate
models are coupling and computers are clustering.
Profilers, radiometers, Doppler radars, and Global
Positioning Satellites scan the skies. Staff
Notes closes one era and begins a new one. The
weekly newsletter dissolves into three new forms:
- This Week at UCAR: weekly on-line information
sent to all staff each Thursday
- UCARline: e-mail service bringing jobs, calendar,
visitors, and other items of interest each week
to external subscribers
- Staff Notes Monthly: features, profiles, and
photos beginning in mid- November
2002: George W. Bush is in the
White House and Tim Killeen is now NCAR director.
UCAR, which now employs more than 1,300, purchases
three buildings on Center Green Drive. Scientists
work on projects ranging from studying the interplay
between landforms and the troposphere to detecting
atmospheres on planets that orbit distant stars.
NCAR lands on a top 10 list of the world’s
fastest supercomputing centers, thanks to its acquisition
of Blue Sky, an IBM SP system with a peak speed up
to seven trillion calculations per second. And Staff
Notes Monthly sports a fresh new look after
undergoing a print and Web redesign.
Stay tuned as we continue to evolve!
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