The Birth of Alpha Control
On an unusually warm evening, in the autumn of 1947, a son was born to a construction worker and his young wife in a small hospital in northern New England. That boy and the siblings that followed over the years grew up in remarkable times in a very unremarkable corner of the world.
William James King grew into an average student with a keen mind for mathematics and a love of science fiction. King graduated somewhere in the middle of his high school class, but thanks to the prodding of a favorite science teacher, young Bill applied for and received a scholarship to Pike Technical College to study electronics. At the time, no one on Earth, or several other worlds for that matter, could have predicted how this minor moment in one young man's life would affect the entire future of the human species.
Bill King entered Pike Tech in September of 1965, a small-town boy out of his element in the big city of Pikeville, a booming metropolis of nearly 30,000 souls, including almost 1,200 students, faculty and staff at the college. King was farther from home, in mind and body, than he had ever ventured before and he liked it.
Pike Tech offered Bill King more than he had ever imagined. With the Space Race shifting into high gear, government funding poured in to help train the future scientists and engineers from across all disciplines. NASA and the hundreds of private contractors working to beat the Russians to the Moon were scooping up even the greenest graduates of the nation's technical schools as quickly as they could find them.
King excelled in designing electronic circuitry and reveled in the challenges of making things smaller, faster and cheaper. In the spacecraft of the day, every gram, every microvolt, every millimeter saved was like money in the bank. By 1969, King was part of a team that analyzed the data returned by the telemetry that tracked every aspect of the flight systems for the Gemini and Apollo missions; systems that had not even existed a few years earlier. This was as cutting edge as it got and it was addictive.
Bill King was in one of the back rooms at the Manned Space Center in Houston when Neil Armstrong landed his Eagle on the Moon. Like hundreds of other nameless twenty- and thirty-something technicians, he was far from the choreographed chaos of the actual Mission Control Center, but he manned a monitor that spewed out a steady stream of systems data in real time. In another decade, or so, this function would be performed by a computer, but in 1969 both the US and Soviet space programs ran largely on slide rules and sharp eyes. King's goal was to design the machine that would put him out of a job.
That job wasn't exactly a front row seat to the Apollo missions, King mused, but with a show like this, even balcony seating was pretty darn good.
Bill King saw the Apollo 11 landing in July of 1969 not as the culmination of an ambitious adventure, but rather as the next logical step in a procession of logical steps of exploration of the solar system and outer space. Unfortunately, the Space Race was born of political motives, not scientific, and no sooner had Neil Armstrong uttered his famous line, "The Eagle has landed!" then the bureaucrats began to dismantle the costly manned space program. The money was needed elsewhere.
The fickle public began to lose interest in the Apollo program soon after Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins were plucked from the ocean after splashdown. In November, 1969, an innocent move by an unknowing astronaut fried the television camera carried by Apollo 12 when it was briefly turned toward the Sun. No live images, no public interest. The heart-pounding drama surrounding the explosion aboard Apollo 13 the following April briefly recaptured the nation's attention, but it also planted the seeds of doubt regarding the value and risks of sending humans to the Moon. The optimism of Kennedy's New Frontier was giving way to the cynical, self-absorbed Seventies.
By 1971, the two final Moon landings had already been cancelled by Congress and Bill King found that NASA no longer required his services, as well. The news came especially hard as King had married a local Texas girl, May Snow, only four months earlier. Fortunately, the long hours King had put in during the heyday of the program hadn't left him much free time to spend his take-home pay, and with May's job as an elementary school teacher, the young couple was able to scrimp by while he looked for work.
Fortune smiled again on Bill King in the early months of 1972; a college buddy recommended him for a job in a Defense Department lab in Virginia, not far from Washington, D.C. It didn't have the allure of the Space Program, but it paid well enough and he was working on the inertial guidance systems of long-range missiles. While the thought that his work might someday bring death and destruction to hundreds, or thousands or even millions of human beings was sobering, King salved his conscience with the knowledge that his efforts also had many beneficial applications, such as for weather satellites and interplanetary spacecraft.
The DoD job also allowed King the free time and disposable income to enjoy his computer programming hobby in his spare time. Ever the pocket-protected geek, Bill King loved the simple logic that governed the clumsy, hand-written codes that drove the room-sized mainframe computers of the day. "Garbage in. Garbage out" was the programmer's mantra in the early days. If the program didn't perform as expected it wasn't the computer's fault.
The programming codes were called "languages" for a reason, and King was quickly becoming fluent in several of them. He also had a couple of friends in the computer center in the basement of his office building who would sneak his experiments into the queue of programs to be run over the weekends, and every Monday morning they would deliver a small ream of green-bar printout paper to his office for his inspection. King's earliest programs were simple enough: directing the computer to flash a series of lights in a prescribed sequence or performing basic mathematical calculations. As time progressed, King's attention focused on methods of interacting with the computer in real-time, such as moving a point of light on a cathode-ray tube by using a joystick or other hardware.
In those first months of 1973, Bill King had no way of knowing that by year's end he would become the founding father of a company that would change the world forever, and the father of a young man who would change that company in unimaginable ways one day. In October, Bill King prepared to open the doors of his own business, to be called Beta Testing Systems. It was only a last minute word from May that convinced him that his potential customers, government agencies and aerospace companies, might perceive "testing" as a passive pursuit and "beta" as somewhat second-string. King immediately grasped the wisdom of May's advice, as he would uncounted times in the long years that lay ahead of them. William King became the first president of the Alpha Control Corporation, known more colloquially to the world as Alpha Control.