Red Room, Red Room

Or, Red Room, Red Room

The bulldozers will be busting down the Red Room any day now to make way for more classrooms, computer labs, and office space.

A well-organized group of alumni, staff, and students are gathering signatures for a petition to stop the erosion of our Mathematics and Computer Building heritage. We may have lost the EMS Library, and we may have lost the seventh floor, but we'll be damned if we're going to let the Red Room go.

But first, a little history

The Red Room came into existence surprisingly soon after the original MC building opened. Originally named MC2015, it was years before the room settled down to MC1015. The room was originally painted white in a neo-modern style, until the painters remembered that they were still in the 60's. At 70'x55'x20', the room had the largest cubic volume of any room on campus at the time: an incredible (70x55x20) cubic feet.

There are many stories to tell about the Red Room, in fact, there are so many that they would fill a room as big as 70'x55'x19'. Here are some of them.

• The Red Room once contained the second most powerful computer in the world: the VIC-21. This amazing little device was so powerful, the Pentagon kept a zipped-up backup copy of all of its security files. Graduate students and Faculty became the most prolific contributors to Russian computer journals of all time.
• Because of that PENTAGON.ZIP file, Russia not only benefited from our scholars, but also targeted the Red Room with several nuclear weapons. If the U.S. decided to start a war (which the Russians were assured would never happen), then Russia would not only bomb the Pentagon, but the Red Room as well. Concerned members of the University were assured by Russian officials that collateral damage would be kept to a minimum.
• The Red Room, unlike Prabhakar Ragde, has appeared in a movie. Gene Hackman appeared in some movie once where he had to be in some crawlspace. That crawlspace? Yup, the Red Room. You see, back then, computers had hundreds of cords and wires coming out of every port and board, and these cords and wires had to go somewhere. That somewhere? Yup, the crawlspace. Today's computers are much better since those hundreds of cords and wires are all now colour-coded.
• And who could forget the time Dave Winfield hit that bird in the outfield?

Are we misty-eyed yet?

With such a rich tapestry and history, it is clear that the Big Red Room should not be subdivided into Little Red Rooms. And those Little Red Rooms may not even be red! Imagine, our treasured Red Room, turned into offices and labs and classrooms. Imagine, potential students on a tour in MC not passing by the Red Room and hearing "And this is the Red Room" before continuing on their tour?

What can you do to stop this from happening? Fill out the form below and send it in to mathNEWS by using our BLACK BOX on the third floor. We'll pass them on to the group handling this protest.

The next time you pass the Red Room may be your last.

CAS