Basement Archaeology: The Radical Rosemount Ski Boot

The Rosemount Fastback Ski Boot

I started skiing when I was about 10 years old. Throughout my youth, my unbelievably patient and supportive Dad, a committed non-skier, would take us to ski areas within easy reach of central New Jersey. I was hooked. Around eighth grade, I got my first new gear.

East Brunswick High School had a very active ski club and a racing team. We would pack 2, sometimes 3 large buses with tenth to twelfth grade teenagers each Friday night and head to Great Gorge (now Mountain Creek) in McAffee, NJ.

In tenth grade, most of my peers had newer equipment than mine, like plastic boots with metal buckles. Mine were an older pair of older leather boots, laced up inside and out. One effect of this was that everyone on the bus knew when we were about 20 minutes away from Great Gorge because that's when I started the labor intensive process of putting on my boots. This required lacing both the inner and outer boots, tightening them with the kind of lacing hook we used on our ice skates, then re-tightening them. By the time we got to the Gorge, I'd already broken a sweat.

My next pair of ski boots were something completely different. Rosemount Fastbacks. When I say completely different, I mean totally unconventional. The Rosemounts had virtually no leather in their construction. They claimed to be the first boot built without leather, and a number of patents were sought around construction details.

Rosemount Ski Boot Construction

The Rosemount shell was rock-hard fiberglass with a hinge to allow bending at the ankle, and another hinge along the back of the boot. That rear hinge supported a door on the side of the boot which would swing out so the foot could enter from the side rather than the top. The door was snapped shut with a two-buckle and steel cable system that kept the boot closed. A rubber gasket around the door, and a fabric snow cuff kept the snow out, mostly.

Forward flex was adjustable by inserting heavy duty "rubber bands" inside the rear of the boot, like its own Achilles tendon. Forward angle was limited by an external screw adjustable bumper and platform system, allowing quick and continuous adjustments.

Another unique feature was the integrated canting system. Canting inserts (cork, I think) could be put in the footbed, and the lateral angle of the shaft and ankle hinge could be varied to suit the skier's needs.

The Rosemount had no inner boot. Fit was achieved using Rosemount's "Red Stuff," a fine silicone-like powder that was literally blown into a number of bladders inside the boot. Special equipment was required for the fitting, and fit could be adjusted by adding or removing Red Stuff. There were also small packets of Red Stuff that fit into pockets in the boot for field fitting.

During this time, skiers were starting to discover the joys of high-back boots. There were strap-on high-back accessories, and Rosemount had a thick plastic accessory that would mount to the top of the boot, inside the snow collar, to provide an additional 3 or 4 inches of height, allowing us the coolness of sitting way back on the skis. Poor technique, but it really looked cool.

When my next pair of boots was purchased, I donated one of my Rosemounts to UVM's Department of Orthopedic Surgery, where the biomechanics of skiing was a hot research topic.

BYTE, Volume 8, Number 11

BYTE magazine, subtitled "the small systems journal" was first published in 1975 by the editor of 73, an amateur radio magazine. BYTE was required reading for anyone interested in computers, not just PC's. In the 1980's, when most computer magazines were devoted to certain brands (Apple or IBM-PC in particular), BYTE was known for its broad editorial coverage of hardware and computing topics of a more general nature, such as programming languages, supercomputing, hands-on building projects, in-depth articles on digital electronics and computer innards, and wonderful cover art by Robert Tinney.


The issue I came across, November 1983, Volume 8, Number 11, was dedicated to the IBM-PC, subtitled "Inside the IBM PC." A sampling of the table of contents, or 

In The Queue

36 Build the H-Com Handicapped Communicator by Steve Ciarcia / The Intel 8748 is the basis for a scanning communicator that users can control with just one switch.

52 BYTE West Coast: California Hardware by Barbara Robertson / A look at four new products, from a portable computer to bubble-memory boards.

88 IBM's Estridge by Lawrence J. Curran and Richard S. Shuford / In an interview with BYTE's editors, the president of IBM's Entry Systems Division talks about standards, the PC's simplicity, and a desire not to be different.

121 POKEing Around in the IBM PC, Part 1: Accessing System and Hardware Facilities by Hugh R. Howson / How to use BASIC'S PEEK and POKE commands to realize the speed and flexibility of machine-language code without sacrificing the convenience of a high-level language.

188 Installable Device Drivers for PC-DOS 2.0 by Tim Field / A look at the importance of device drivers and how they work with the PC.

285 MS-DOS 2.0: An Enhanced 16-bit Operating System by Chris Larson / The most recent version of Microsoft's popular single-user operating system offers installable device drivers, Xenix compatibility, and background tasking.

410 Lmodem: A Small Remote-Communication Program by David D. Clark / Written in the BDS version of the C programming language, the Lmodem program provides terminal emulation, text capture, and transfer of files.

449 Double the Apple II's Color Choices by Robert H. Sturges Jr. / How to get your Apple II to provide a wide selection of colors without sacrificing resolution

Quotes & Notes:

• Barbara Robertson, BYTE West Coast: "Whatever directions the portable computing field takes, it will undoubtedly be influenced by Intel's recent announcement of a price drop for its BPK70-4 1-megabit (128K-byte) Bubble Storage System"


• Steven S. Ross, writer and consultant: "The PC is replacing larger computers in many imaginative applications"


• BYTE's editors interview Philip Estridge, then president of IBM's Entry Systems Division:

BYTE: Have you ever used a mouse?
Estridge: Yes.

BYTE: Do you like it?
Estridge: It was just another way to do things. It didn't strike me one way or another.

BYTE: Most IBM software seems to allow users to make a limited number of copies. Do you have any thoughts about copy protection?
Estridge: Do I ever. It's wrong to copy-protect programs. The only reason anybody does it is because there are thieves who steal your product. That's wrong, too. There ought to be some way to stop that without creating products that are unusable.

• Hayes Smartmodem 1200 baud external modem ~$500


• Apple II 16Kb RAM card ~$100


• 5.25" floppy disk drive DSDD ~ $250


• Flip-It floppy disk punch - Convert 8-inch and 5.25-inch Single-Sided floppy disks for Double-Sided use by punching a second write-protect notch ~$35


• Hard disks for Apple & IBM: 5MB, ~$1500; 10MB, ~$1700; 20MB, ~$2400
• NEC Spinwriter letter-quality daisy wheel printer, $1875


• Epson FX-80 dot matrix printer, 80cps, ~$550

Basement Archaeology: Acoustic Coupled Modem

Novation CAT Acoustic Coupled Modem

Briefly

The Novation CAT 300bps acoustically coupled modem was very popular in the late 1970's and into the early 1980's. To use it, you would pick up the phone and manually dial the number for the computer (actually, another modem) to which you wanted to connect. Then, you would listen for a squealing noise indicating the remote modem had answered. Once you heard this "carrier tone," you would press the handset into the rubber cups on the CAT, being careful to orient it the proper way. The two modems would then start talking to each other, moving data to and fro at a whopping 300 bits/second. When you were finished with your session, you had to remove the telephone handset from the modem and hang up.

A Little More

Communicating with remote computers has been going on for a long time. Using the public telephone system to do so, however, had special rules.

Prior to 1968, the AT&T monopoly on the telephone system was complete. You paid for the connection to the phone company, the AT&T-owned Bell System, you leased your telephone, which was manufactured by Western Electric, another AT&T subsidiary, and you were not allowed to electrically connect any non-AT&T equipment to the phone system. Sweet deal for AT&T.

Fortunately for modem-makers at the time, Western Electric's telephones had very standardized handset designs. Novation and others used this by connecting their equipment to the telephone network acoustically, not electrically. The modem's speaker would "talk" into the handset microphone, and its microphone would "listen" to the handset's speaker. Because of the relatively poor bandwidth of the voice telephone network and the inherent distortion of the acoustic coupling method, the rate at which data could move back and forth was very limited.

As of this writing, through methods of compressing and encoding data as well as the ability to electrically connect to the public phone network, data rates of up to 56 Kbps are common. That said, dial-up connections through the phone system are rapidly disappearing with the spread of higher speed technologies using DSL, cable, fiber, and even satellite communications. Data rates based on modern technologies and media are measured in millions of bits per second Mbps, not hundreds or thousands.