Blue Marble Security, born out of the Michigan Tech Enterprise program, is a virtual company comprised of American and international undergraduate students focused on securing the future through thoughtful use of technology.
The project Paul Sanders proposed to Glen Archer was straightforward enough — make something old new again. Sanders came upon the challenge through a former colleague at Ford Motor Company, James Boileau.
The company’s goal was to replace the CRT monitors with off-the-shelf LED displays, similar to what you would find in most office computers.
The students were given access to Tech’s JEOL 6400. In addition, Owen Mills, senior research engineer and director of the Applied Chemical and Morphological Analysis Laboratory in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, provided printed schematics, operations and maintenance manuals. The search for a place to tap the video signals required the visual inspection and search of hundreds of pages of printed schematics. Finally Blue Marble found what they were looking for — a low-voltage signal in an early video display protocol pioneered by IBM called monochrome display adapter (MDA).