Among the handful of people who even knew what was going in in those shacks behind Channel 4 was longtime Buffalo television technician Gary Walters. In 1980, he answered a blind ad for a TV tape operator and was soon one of the men in charge of keeping the Movie Channel and Nickelodeon on the air from that tiny building in North Buffalo.

At the same time, Warner AMEX was making plans to start a music television channel, with part of those plans involving the building of studio space and a technical hub in Buffalo. It would have represented at least $10 million in structural investment and 50 new jobs. The corporate owners of Channel 4 wouldn’t agree to a long-term lease, so those plans fell through, and in December 1980, it was announced to employees that the Buffalo operations would be moving to a new complex on Long Island.

Before that move happened, in April 1981, Warner AMEX lent satellite space to NASA so that the first space shuttle launch could be sent around the world live.

“I was in heaven,” said Walters, the self-described space nut, whose job it was the day of the launch to record and mark tapes of the launch.

He didn’t know why he was recording and marking the tapes, but it was Walters’ recordings that were played back as the famous space shuttle countdown to the start of MTV.