Rose Bowl Pranks, Part II: Rewiring the Scoreboard

December 27, 2005

The Challenge

Probably the most famous Caltech "legend" of all time involved reconfiguring the halftime card stunts at the 1961 Rose Bowl Game. But time had worn on and past pranks were receding into the distance. Even Murph Goldberger, president of Caltech, publicly chided students in his 1983 commencement address that they shouldn't just rest on the laurels of past glories. With the gauntlet having been thrown down by none other than the Institute's president, Techers vowed to restore some semblance of honor and renown to the name of Caltech. And, prophetically, in a piece written just before (and published on) New Year's Day, 1984, Los Angeles Times columnist Jack Smith admiringly recalled the 1961 stunt and warned, "I suppose it can't ever happen again. Security is too good these days. But don't count on it."

Indeed, several members of Blacker House had been thwarting security and investigating appropriate Rose Bowl stunt possibilities for over a year. Local experts at Blacker Lock & Key, Mike Nolan '85 and Art Fortini '83, eased the job of getting to the control booths in the stadium. While the earliest forays required crawling through shafts used for television and power cabling, later expeditions could get in and out quickly, permitting effective use of the cover of night. Despite their justified paranoia, security patrolled the Rose Bowl only intermittently, and Techers did not enter the stadium on nights when someone appeared to be home. There were a couple of close calls, but the students generally were both quiet and lucky.

The Equipment

The stadium scoreboard was a natural target for an electronic takeover. In order to understand how the scoreboard system functioned, students made a number of trips to trace wires and to fire up the stadium's own aging PDP-8 computer, which sent commands to the scoreboard. The Techers concentrated on the team-name and message sections of the scoreboards: tampering with the score or clock would clearly be inappropriate.

The pranksters' plan became to build a device that would sit on the cable between the computer and the scoreboard and to actuate the device by radio control. The implanted device in the Rose Bowl would send its own commands to the scoreboard over the cable, using the same protocol as--and overriding the commands--the computer in the control booth. The takeover device included an 8086 microprocessor, and appropriate drivers and relays. The relays would ensure that loss of power or loss of radio reception would return normal control to the stadium scoreboard operators.

The device in the Rose Bowl was to be commanded from a small, easily carried Epson laptop computer. The Epson needed to communicate with the PDP-8, and a packet transmission scheme was designed to be conveyed over a radio modem operating near 49 megahertz with a power of 100 milliwatts. The pranksters implemented a command set that allowed the transmission of ASCII text or dot-matrix pictures, and that had constructs for iteration and for scrolling or shifting the buffers that controlled the light bulbs in the scoreboard's dot matrix.

The Installation

The students found that the cable to the scoreboard could be accessed through a junction box high on a wall, 20 feet off the basement floor. They decided to install the takeover device there, since it was unlikely to be a place where anyone would casually look. Since the project had to installed weeks ahead of time to avoid the stepped-up security in the days immediately prior to the game, battery power would not last long enough, and the pranksters found it necessary to install AC power to the box. Since the junction box already had several pieces of conduit running to it, the Techers figured no one would notice an extra one. Waiting until a thunderstorm came along to drown out the noise of drilling, they installed an extra piece of conduit to allow the routing of both AC power and an antenna wire to the box. The coax for the antenna was run 40 feet out to a tree, where a simple dipole wire antenna was strung and concealed.

Dan Kegel '86 took the lead in building the electronics in a lab at Caltech, and was joined by Ted Williams '84 of Lloyd House for many nights of testing and debugging at the Rose Bowl. Each time, for the "field installation," they would rappel down the wall in the basement to hang in front of the junction box with a tool belt and a miner's headlamp. In the final sessions, they went into the stands with an antenna strewn over their shoulders and watched test messages on the scoreboard dispel the darkness. Once a police helicopter must have caught a glimpse of the duo, but by the time it buzzed closer and shined its searchlight down, they had already dived under the benches for cover.

In the final days, Kegel had to fly home for Christmas, where he finished programming the laptop computer and implementing the command set. Meanwhile, Williams worked out the final bugs and, working alone, installed the takeover device in the Rose Bowl. Word was whispered around Tech that the hardware was ready, and a number of Techers at a New Year's Eve party tried their hand at designing pictures to fit into the seven-pixel-high dot matrix of the scoreboard sections. Those who knew got a good laugh from a newspaper article published on December 29, quoting a Pasadena official who boasted, "We've got security inside the bowl . . . all is quiet so far."

The Tech Rose Bowl team actually had an extra day of final preparations since January 1, 1984, was a Sunday and the Rose Parade and game were scheduled for January 2. The pictures were stored on a minicassette for the laptop computer, and backpacks were made ready with the computer, radio modem, batteries, notes of ideas for messages to send, and wire for making an antenna.

The Game

On the morning of the game, the pranksters talked their way into the backyard of a home on a hill overlooking the stadium by claiming to be "poor Caltech students who couldn't get tickets for the Rose Bowl." From that vantage point a mile away, using binoculars, they had a good view of both scoreboards. After stringing an antenna, they established radio contact with the box in the stadium. It quickly became apparent that there was a lot more radio interference than there had been during any of the tests. They guessed that they might have been using frequencies that were also being used by some of the mobile radio telephone equipment being used by the media themselves at the Rose Bowl. The students had designed the packet transmission protocol to retransmit on errors, but it still took much longer to successfully send commands than they had anticipated.

During the first quarter of the game, Kegel and Williams tested their control of the boards by changing "UCLA" to "U.C.L.A." In the second quarter they displayed the infamous "D.E.I." (It was later heard that Caltech President Goldberger was in the audience--and that he lowered his head when he saw this indication of what was to come.) For halftime, the Techers had planned an elaborate animated sequence of scrolling pictures, including "Pac-Man," but the radio interference prevented sending all of the commands necessary to enact it. The third quarter saw more direct messages, and the pranksters gradually increased the length of time the messages remained on the scoreboard. In block letters, the simple message "CALTECH" appeared in the message section for over five minutes.

The Techers, although watching from a mile away, were still able to hear the roar of the UCLA cheering section when it began chanting "Go . . . Cal . . . Tech . . . Go . . . Cal . . .Tech" in response to a flashing "Go CIT" on the scoreboard. About that time the two realized in horror that the lantern batteries supplying power to the radio transmitter were going dead from the long period of continuous use. Scrambling to figure out how to get more 12-volt DC power, they moved the computer, antenna, and transmitter setup out to Williams' car and tapped its battery. By this time, the game had progressed to the fourth quarter, and the students decided to change the scoreboard even more dramatically.

(Also hidden in the stadium, by the way, was a second part of the project, which was to be activated and patched into the audio system. On radio command, the pranksters triggered a tape recorder implanted in the same junction box with the scoreboard controller. The tape was patched through some concealed wires into the stadium's amplifiers and played over the stadium's loudspeakers. The recording contained "Ride of the Valkyries," as well as verbal proclamations, such as "Caltech--Changing the World to Suit Its Needs." The music was heard by Techers in the audience, but the roar of the crowd muffled it to those whose ears were not tuned to hearing the familiar strains of The Ride.)

Kegel had originally thought of posting the message "Caltech 2, Rose Bowl 0" in honor of the 1961 stunt, but the real score was so one-sided that he and Williams just kept the score and changed the team names to proclaim "Caltech 38, MIT 9." (Later, during an interview, a Rose Bowl official said that at the moment the team names were changed, the first reaction of the scoreboard operators was to exclaim, "How did they get lowercase characters?" since their own computer did not have a lowercase font, while the Tech version did.)

To go with the new team names, there appeared pictures of two beavers, the mascots of both Caltech and MIT. With that--and with four minutes remaining in the game--the stadium officials, fearful of what might come next, ordered the power to the scoreboard turned off. This was not all bad: the Illini coach, Mike White, was in fact quoted as saying, "The highlight of the game for me came when the scoreboard went out."

Epilogue

The prank was certainly noticed: in the following weeks, Techers' parents sent them clipping from newspapers across the country, radio stations called, and television stations visited Caltech to learn more about the story. There were brief mentions in Newsweek, Byte, Discover, and Popular Mechanics.

But not everyone was smiling: there ensued an editorial war, with some people writing letters praising the stunt while others wrote to complain about the disruption of the seriousness of the game and the "lack of respect for the Law in today's youth." One ardent UCLA fan wrote an impassioned letter demanding the Rose Bowl restage the actual final score of UCLA's 45-9 victory on the scoreboard and send a color picture of it to all the spectators of the game. The New York Times accused the pranksters of "hacking for criminal gain" and denounced Caltech for not having a more serious curriculum. The Los Angeles Times wrote, on the other hand, "We are not persuaded" that there was any malicious intent or potential for danger, and affirmed that "the genius behind this exercise in good-natured, harmless computer electronics skullduggery should be encouraged, not deterred."

Kegel and Williams received several job offers in the mail. One of these offers was from the company that made the scoreboard, and another was from a local aerospace company, in a letter prefaced by, "We would like to offer you an opportunity to apply your creative talents, that is, if you are not too busy turning big rocks into small ones at one of the local institutions."

From More Legends of Caltech, copyright 1989, Alumni Association, California Institute of Technology. Used with permission.

Visit the Alumni Association online at http://www.alumni.caltech.edu/. More Legends of Caltech is available at the Caltech bookstore, on the Web at http://www.bookstore.caltech.edu.