Mark Sundstrom

I made two trips to Ocean Falls in 1977-78, for Diamond Engineering Corporation, to install a paper roll handling and printing system in the paper mill that was there at the time. We stayed at the large hotel which also had a restaurant.

The only practical way to get to Ocean Falls is via float plane. My first trip there was with my work associate, Chuck H. We drove to Vancouver from Seattle to catch the flight. The aircraft being used were Grumman Mallard (or Goose? can't remember.) I think our first flight was cancelled due to weather, but eventually we made it in. We spent a couple of days there, then I think our flight out was cancelled, due to weather, perhaps more than once. Chuck was not a huge fan of airplanes and suggested an alternate way home. This meant getting up at "oh-dark-hundred" one morning and taking a boat launch for a few hours to Bella Bella. There we caught a B.C. Ferry, the "Queen of Prince Rupert", all the way to Vancouver. This was an overnight trip.

I was by myself on the second trip and flew in and out both ways this time. I remember on the trip north that we flew above the clouds for a couple of hours, then the pilot circled down and we followed the ocean channel to Ocean Falls. We flew pretty close to the water surface much of the time and I distinctly remember flying under some power lines once.

At least one of the flights I took involved a stop at Bella Coola and another time at Bella Bella.

The computer system that we installed was based on a Data General Nova 3 computer, with no hard disk, just core memory used for everything. I think it was 32KB, maybe 64KB. The program was loaded via paper tape . Of course, once it was loaded, it would stay in core memory and not have to be reloaded unless some sort of corruption occurred.

The system had a CRT and keyboard enclosed in a metal housing, with cooling. It attached to a scale that was used to tell the software the weight of the paper roll, and also to a customized printer which was used to print a large sheet to identify the paper roll.