Theatre Design & Technology - Winter 1998 - 16

electronic control was taking place, that fewer stagehands
would be required to run shows. Much as labor unions in
other industries feared that automation and robotics would
cut the need for a human workforce, there was a sense that
new lighting technologies would mean reduced crews. The ente11ainment industry has seen, however, that as theatre technology-scenic as well as lighting-has gotten more
complicated, the need for stagehands to run technically complex shows has increased.
As plans to move A Cbo1'lls Line uptown from the Public
Theatre were being finalized, a number of memory-based
lighting control systems were being marketed: the "Memo-Q"
and "MMS" systems from Strand-Century; the "Q-File" and "QLevel" from Kliegl (manufactured by Thorn); the "Memory
Center" from Berkey Colortran; and the "Autocue" from
Skirpan. Many of these systems were designed for large permanent installations. For A Cbo1'lls Line, where the number of
cues (134) and channels (125) were already known, such
large systems were unnecessary.
Electronics Diversified (EDI) was chosen to supply the
console for the Broadway production in large part because
EDI guaranteed timely delivery of a console. The console that
arrived on Broadway was not their "TAM" console originally
specified by Tharon Musser. Instead, EDI supplied a prototype
"LS-8" console. This console was developed by Gordon
Pearlman (currently president of Rosco/Entertainment Technology) while he was the lighting designer and technical director at tlle niversity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Pearlman had no computer training so I asked him how he
came to learn enough about computers to eventually develop a
control console:
I got into it when we were doing a production that had
14

WIN

9 9 8

TD & T

thirty-five slide projectors and were controlling it with
a paper tape reader, which we had picked up surplus
at the state surplus store. We quickly discovered that if
we wanted to make a change in the order of the show,
we had to re-punch the entire tape. I went out and
taught myself enough Basic-in those days it was a
teletype connected to the computer center-enough
Basic programming to be able to write the cues in tllis
Basic program and then have it re-punch the paper
tape. And the teletype took an hour to an hour and a
half to re-punch the tape. But [using the Basic progranl], every time you wanted to make a change you
didn't have to manually re-punch tile whole tape. You
could edit changes into the nliddle, and then get the
teletype to re-punch the paper tape. 3
Pearlman went on to develop the LS-8 console around a Digital Equipment Corp. PDP-8 computer-"the equivalent of
today's PC," according to Pearlman.
The original console developed at NC had 8Kb of core
memory. At EDI that memory capacity was eventually upgraded
to 16Kb. (Compare this to the 32Mb of RAM memory one commonly finds today.) There were 125 control channels, an A-B
fader pair and a C-D fader pair. Softpatclling was unheard of in
those days. Crossfades could be executed manually or with a
timed fader-an unused feature on A Cbo1'lls Line where
crossfades were run manually, "because tempos ch:mged from
night to night.".
Pearlman never had the opportunity to actually nm a
show using the LS-8 willie at ONC because "at Chapel Hill we
didn't have electronic dimmers. Those were the days of autotr:msformers. So we had one sLx pack of dimmers and we
played with tlle console on that for sLx to eight months before

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Winter 1998