My week(ly) in 1979

A couple of months ago we uploaded some scans from a Living magazine from 1973 found in Mum's loft. Another magazine has been found, My Weekly from March 1979 and here are a few scans from that. Its not as funky as the 1973 magazine to be honest but old adverts are always of interest.

Model Week : The good old days

With not much going on model railway wise at the moment i thought i'd put up these two photos of my OO gauge layout from the mid to late 1980s. The photos were damaged so only about half was scannable but it does show how the layout used to look when i had it in my parent's garage.

End of the Shark

I've only ever owned three cars in my life, and until today I still owned the last two. My second car was the Shark, an L-reg Skoda Favorit. For the last ten years it has been rusting away on my Mum's drive. I should have had it scrapped years ago but have always resisted, maybe i thought i would one day be able to restore it. Today it went, to be honest it was beyond hope. The steering broke when it was being dragged onto the truck to be taken away! It is sad that the Shark has gone, i have happy memories of being in it. But like most things, it must end eventually. At least i kept the number plate!

Even more Living 1973

A final selection of scans from the October 1973 edition of Living Magazine.

More Living in 1973

A few more scans from the October 1973 Living magazine i found in my Mum's loft last week.

Living in 1973

While clearing junk from my Mum's loft yesterday I discovered an October 1973 copy of Living magazine. It was in reasonable condition considering it must have been up in the loft for a number of decades, even surviving a couple of burst pipes! Quite why the magazine was up there is a bit of a mystery as it was bought a few years before my parents bought the house, no doubt for some reason now lost to the mists of time the magazine was left up there. 

I am glad it survived as it offers a fascinating glimpse of life in the UK in the early 1970s. For the next few weeks let's enjoy some period adverts, styles and fashions. And truly get our 8p worth.

Hi Fella memories

A few weeks ago I began a long term project to clear my Mum's loft out of all the junk that has accumulated up there over the last few decades. There is a lot of stuff up there, much of it I am unclear as to why including dozens of computer magazines from the early 1990s! One thing I did find up there was a children's book my Mum bought me when i was a child many years ago. I did not throw this away.

"Hi Fella" by Eza Zistel is the story of a puppy who gets lost when the box he is being transported in falls over the side of a truck. He has to learn how to survive, at first with a raccoon and then a cat, until he can find his way home. Wherever or whatever that is. It is a delightful story and I am glad it was dumped up in the loft along with everything else instead of being thrown away. Sometimes hoarding is good.

Playing fields of dreams

Time for a little nostalgia. I like to walk, it helps me clear my head. One of the nearby locations in Erdington that i like to walk around sometimes are the Spring Lane playing fields. Its a popular spot for dog walkers too, though i go to walk myself. Its a special place for me as the first school that i went to backs onto the playing fields and indeed back in my youth, in the late 1970s and early 1980s the playing fields was where we went and played various kinds of sports and the odd nature trail.

That school in question is St Barnabas Primary School which these days has a good name. I don't really know how good its name was back in the day, i recall my parents forever moaning about it but i don't think i turned out that badly. The school is a typical example of late 1960s architecture which i personally like to be honest. The below photo i took in 2008 and, apart from a few additions in the play ground, the school hasn't changed a great deal. It probably has changed a lot more inside.

I went to the school from the ages of 5 to 11 (there was no nursery class back then though one did form after i started school). The only thing i remember about my first day was that my Mum gave me a banana for lunch. Like most of your memories though they tend to be a blur (as the mundane is easily forgotten). I do remember when Concorde came to Birmingham Airport though, as the approach flightpath went right over our school. We all waited in the play ground and watched it fly over. A truly wonderful sight. Later on the Space Shuttle (atop a 747) made a flyover Birmingham though unfortunately it was a cloudy day and we never got to see anything.

One thing i do remember about school are the various events and shows put on. Often i was in the choir with my angelic voice. I was in the choir in one production of Rumplestiltskin (my Mum kept the programme - my memories of this are vague), one of the older girls was dressed in green including green skin paint. I think that was my first crush. Nicola Carter what are you doing now? Hopefully you are not still green.

I also remember having to sing "The Rainbow Song" on stage at some sort of end of year gala. I was one of a number of classmates who sang the song, each of us represented one colour of the rainbow and had to dress head to toe in that colour. Luckily i was "Blue" which was easy to achieve.

The below photo shows one of the shows my class put on at the school, telling a story by the medium of Chinese dragon dance (or a kind of approximation anyway). The class was split into two groups representing the two factions in the story : a dragon and a panda. I was on Team Panda, i am the one right behind the panda mask carrier in the photo. I've always been tall. I don't actually remember this event apart from a vague memory of creating my mask. A horrible task involving glue and fake fur.

But one day it was all over. The below photo was taken on my last day and shows my last form teacher (and the best teacher i ever had at school) Mr Saunders and the headmaster Mr Bennett. The last year at the school was great. Mr Saunders let us spend most of the year on individual (and barely monitored) projects. One reason for this was that he was rather busy and had many things to do, including planing some new wardrobe doors he had got actually in the classroom in front of us.

Not that i am complaining, this opportunity for personal research i probably found the most valuable of lessons at primary school even if i did spend most of the time filling book after book with pictures of airliners. Most kids completed a book over the course of a year, i filled seventeen. I have always been prolific. School books then, blogs now. 

Even back then i have been nostalgic for the past and melancholic about change. I remember the last Summer at that school very fondly. Often on that playing field, hoping the term would never end and the horrors of big school would never materialise...

The strange beauty of historic computers

Wired have a great article on the sights and smells of historic computing, the strange beauty indeed of the "olden days" of computing : mainframes, minicomputers, line printers and other historic computing artifacts. Many of the computers and peripherals at places like the Computer History Museum in California (somewhere i must visit one day!) or at the National Museum of Computing in Bletchley (which i have been to) still work after being restored adding an extra dimension to the experience. The sound and heat of a punched card reader...

It was a very different tech world to now, a bigger world too. Computers filled huge rooms with printers being the size of small cars, plus tape units the size of wardrobes. That is part of the fascination i feel, its just so different to the computing we use now.

Unfortunately by the time i entered work the world was largely moving past the age of old iron, though i did get to use a Prime minicomputer at university. This was great fun but the closest i ever got to the hardware were the rooms full of dumb terminals and a large remote printer (though that made a wonderful noise). 

The biggest computer i've ever had physical access to is a HP PC server which was the size of a small fridge. Big but not the same as a room full of IBM 360 or an ICL...

Photo from Flickr Commons

Old workplaces

Yesterday I had a walk around the Jewellery Quarter in Birmingham and visited the first three workplaces I have been at in my career. All three were the business locations of Tw2 which I worked at from 1995 until it's demise in 2001. The first location was on Lionel Street, in just a couple of months time it will mark twenty five years since I began my working life there, a fresh faced graduate who had little idea what he was doing. After a couple of years the company moved to bigger premises on Northwood Street. 

Finally, amid much expansion, came the move to swanky (and thus expensive) offices on Newhall Street. Like many companies which expanded rapidly with the resulting debts and expenses when there is a downturn then the bills become harder and harder to pay. However there were some good memories in these places and I'm glad all three still exist even if Tw2 itself is long gone. You can see my Birmingham photos here.

The sad end of Ian Allan Birmingham

It is Spock (the Vulcan) who said "All things must end." and indeed is the case with the Ian Allan bookshop in Birmingham which will close next weekend. This is very sad for me as Ian Allan was not a normal shop in many ways. A specialist transport and military bookshop, it was regularly visited by myself and my best friend in our teens. It was the highlight of our weekends (this was before we discovered girls of course).

Indeed I have been going to the shop since the mid-1980s (albeit in it's previous location where the Birmingham New Street entrance is now). I have bought hundreds of books from there, many of which I still own.

Below is the first book I ever bought from Ian Allan on Electric Locomotives which I bought as my interest in railways first began when I was a schoolboy in the mid-1980s. Next to it are the last two books I bought last weekend. Inbetween are many many books and many many memories.

Rupert the Bear

When I was a youngster my Mum always used to buy me a Rupert the Bear annual for Christmas. I never used to read them though as I was more into spaceships and robots rather than the adventure of a little bear, fairies and elves. Later on she continued to buy me a Beano annual but eventually I asked her to stop a few years ago. But because I knew I was always going to be her little boy and she wanted to get me an annual for Christmas I asked her to get me a Rupert the Bear annual instead.

So now I have quite a few, from recent years and also a few from my childhood which have been kept. I have finally started to read them! They are indeed lovely stories, tales of innocent adventure and also nostalgia. I'm glad I never threw away any of these annuals. The nostalgia and wonder of the stories, plus the folklorish elements appear to me now as didn't so much in the late 1970s.

Rupert has been around since 1920 and continues to appear in the Daily Express. Over eighty annuals have now been released.

The oldest PC DOS

The OS/2 Museum has come into possession of a 160K disk containing what may be the oldest surviving piece of software for the IBM PC. This is PC-DOS 1.0 dating from June 1981, thus predating the official v1.0 release of the IBM PC operating system by a few months. PC-DOS (and MS-DOS - the two were identical for a long time, PC-DOS just being the IBM branded version) ruled the roost in the business computer world in the 1980s and later conquered the home market.

The first PC i had was an Amstrad PC1640 which came with MS-DOS 3.2. Later i bought a copy of MS-DOS 4.0 (which i thought personally was good though it had many critics at the time) and later PCs came with v5.0. DOS was quite a limited operating system and there was a huge industry of add-ons and enhancements, software like Xtree which was highly popular.

Eventually Windows took over and people stopped caring which DOS they were running, especially after Windows 95 replaced it. I can still remember some of the commands though like dir and type.

These days i run Mac OSX however i have DOSbox installed for running old games (something i seldom do to be honest, no time to play!) I can thus open it and type those commands again. And then return to my GUI.

Revisiting the first house

The first house i ever lived in was in Crosby on the Merseyside. However i was only a baby so have no memories of my time there except perhaps a hazy memory of roses, which were my Dad's pride around the garden there. At the weekend i headed up to see the house i only knew from photographs. I have seen how it looks now on Google Street View but on Saturday was the first time i had seen it for real since... oh about 1974. The house was still recognisable though the roses are gone.

Early 1970s

2017

The 70s house

Scanning a few old photographs yesterday i came upon this one taken in the first house i lived in, in Crosby. I was only a baby at the time so the photograph was likely taken sometime in 1972 or perhaps early 1973. What is most interesting about the photograph is probably what is missing. There seems to be a total absence of technology though there was probably was a TV out of shot. Nowadays a photo of your living room would include remote controls, mobile phones, consoles, DVDs and other paraphernalia. Back in the early 1970s you might have a TV and little else, maybe a hi-fi or a radio. The telephone would usually be in the hall, on its own little table.

Other than that the room is quite familiar and probably trendily retro these days. I wonder how the living room will change in another 40 years time. Its interesting how much has changed though some items in the photo have survived all these years, the painting on the wall for example is right behind me on my own bedroom wall now as i type this! I know my Mum still has some of the ornaments.

Paint Along With Nancy

The first TV programme i can remember was Paint Along With Nancy starring Nancy Kominsky which always seemed to be the first programme on ITV after the overnight shut down ended at about 9am. I used to watch it at my Nan's. Here are the titles.


What used to amaze me (even as someone about 5 or 6) was that she seemed to paint with a knife not a brush! Also i loved how she built up a painting from nothing. Almost like magic! (Well i was very young). I'd love for the series to be reissued on DVD.

A couple of years ago i tracked down a copy of the book which accompanied the series. Maybe one day i will actually try and emulate my first hero...

How OS/2 kickstarted the UK e-commerce industry

Its 25 years since the release of OS/2 2.0 by IBM and this blog post about a previously thought lost beta build of OS/2 2.0 being rediscovered caused me to remember when i ran the operating system. This was back in the early 1990s when i was at university doing a software engineering degree. Most people were happy with Windows 3.1 and DOS, with a 32-bit version of Windows on the horizon. But i wanted something more, i wanted something now.

My PC back then was a rather lowly Unisys 386SX-33 with just 4MB of RAM. I had an external CD-ROM and was thinking of running OS/2. For graduating my parents bought me a copy of OS/2 3.0 Warp in 1995 and a 4MB RAM upgrade. Thus i installed Warp on my Unisys and it ... worked great actually. Perfectly usable, not lightening fast but worked great for what i needed. I even wrote my first webpages on it, viewing them in Web Explorer.

A few months later in 1995 i started my first job at TW2, a very early UK web design agency. The big plan was to create one of the UK's first (maybe the first - Amazon was only a couple of months old at the time after all) e-commerce website. I needed a web server on my work PC to develop the site... well Apache and Perl ran on OS/2 so i installed that on the PC and build a demonstrator website for this new and back then fairly unknown concept of selling things on the internet.

My prototype website was then demonstrated in late 1995 to the heads of the UK arms of software companies like Adobe and Microsoft to get buy in to the project in London. The demonstration wowed the crowd as a web store was searched and items were added to a basket! All running on work PC running OS/2 (though the actual live site when built in 1996 ran on Irix).

So OS/2 Warp helped start British e-commerce, and thats nice.

Dumb terminals

I was so glad to find the wonderful VT100 website is still up, though it doesn't seem to have been updated for 10 years now. Its a website about dumb terminals, ancient technology to most geeks these days maybe but full of memories for me. Dumb terminals look a bit like computers (in that they have screens, keyboards and sometimes mice) but they do no computing themselves. Instead they access a remote computer where all the actual computing takes place, i suppose you could say they are the ancestors of Chromebooks?

When i started my HND at Birmingham Polytechnic (as it was back then, now BCU of course) in 1990, as well as rooms full of IBM PCs (real ones) there was a Pr1me minicomputer which we logged into for programming class (Pascal) and sending e-mail (the first e-mail i ever had). We usually logged into the Pr1me from one of the PCs using Kermit terminal emulation software but there were also a number of real terminals dotted around the polytechnic.

Baker building (B208) had a whole room full of Volker-Craig VC404 terminals, and there were also some in the library as well as some other type of terminal (i think they were Volker-Craigs too) for accessing the library catalogue. Many an hour was spent pounding away on these terminals (and PCs) logged into the Pr1me. Firstly on the XCOM BBS which was installed on the Pr1me but also in a chat program. Later on we were able to venture out onto JANET and FTP files down using the Pr1me/Kermit (we couldn't use the terminals for this alas) and connecting to the Monochrome BBS (which still exists) and talking to students from other universities using Relay.

Social networking and living a life on-line being a new thing? I was doing this in the early 90s!

I miss the simplicity of using a dumb terminal to access the Pr1me and the internet in general, it was robust, reliable and simple. Just ASCII characters on a screen. Limited and slow maybe but it had a lot of charm. Of course getting any files was a bit long winded. As mentioned above this had to be done on one of the PCs running the Kermit terminal emulation software. First of all you needed to log into an FTP site from your Pr1me account, and bring the files you wanted to your Pr1me space. Then you used Kermit to download the files to the PC. Then you had to take the files home on a floppy disc! Downloading files is a lot easier now.

A document i still have is the university IT department's user guide to using EMACS (a text editor) on the VC404, i scanned the document a number of years ago and you can see it below:

Birmingham Polytechnic Computer Services Document #82 : EMACS on the Volker-Craig by Chris Davies on Scribd

A mysterious drone

Many times as i lay in bed at night as a kid (and beyond) i would hear a far off drone. Some sort of aircraft of course but with the otherwise peace of the night the drone felt so alone. I would listen to the drone until it faded away and would wonder what plane it was (i of course was a plane spotter back then too). As it seemed like a smaller propeller plane i imagined it could be a light aircraft, maybe some specialist transport link running late at night. Maybe even MI5 or the US government running a black network of secret agents.

Although i've always lived under the BHX flight path (and indeed my own house is a mile closer to the airport) my fascination with the drone went away, no doubt replaced by girls or Class 47 diesel locomotives. In recent years however i've started noticing the drone again, though a somewhat different tone, not as mournful. A few months ago i was in the garden on a light night when i heard the drone, and as it was a clear night i could finally see the source of this drone (and also could see what it was on a flight tracking app, this wasn't available to me in the early 1980s!)

It turned out to just be a propeller regional airliner flying high above, maybe flying into East Midlands Airport. Some of the romance has now been lost. My fantasy of secret missions have turned into the last flight out of Belfast of the day. How disappointing, sometimes its better not to know everything and keep some mysteries alive. I suspect the drone i knew so well was that of RR Dart turboprops which powered so many airliners back in the 70s and 80s. The newer breed of turboprop are no doubt much more efficient, but don't sound as good!

A photo i took at B'ham Airport in the 1980s of a British Midland F27, great drone!

A modern airliner, not as good a drone!

A Personal Computer History (3) : The PC world

After our third microcomputer, a BBC Model B, blew up it was time to "progress" to the PC world. The Amstrad PC was by then becoming popular being cheap enough for many to consider (though still expensive compared to today). We got a PC1640DD, 1MB of RAM, double 5.25" floppy drives and a CGA colour monitor. It might not seem much these days but it was a quantum leap after the days of loading programs off cassette tape. We upgraded the Amstrad PC a lot, adding a 3.5" floppy drive and a 32MB hard drive. Although a crude plastic machine in many ways it was also pretty robust and reliable.

By now we were in the early 1990s and i was at university, thus armed with my student grant (yes we got paid to be students back then) i decided it was time i bought my own computer. My first was an Amstrad too, a PPC512, so a kind of crude laptop. I didn't like it though and soon sold it on buying a Zenith minisport instead. This was a small notebook a bit like the Macbook and Chromebook Pixel i use these days though of course much less advanced.

The minisport had no hard drive though had a RAM drive and MS-DOS was installed on a ROM. The minisport had a 2" floppy drive, which was cute though no other computer used this format and getting the disks was difficult. Luckily it came with an external 3.5" floppy drive too though this made it rather less portable. The screen was quite nice as it was a backlit LCD though was a rather strange resolution as can be seen from the photograph above. 640 by 300 so any pie charts would be a bit squashed.

A year or so later i bought my first desktop PC, a Unisys with a mighty 386SX-33 CPU! This also had a hard drive so could be used for some decent computing. I had Windows 3.1 on it and did some Pascal and Visual BASIC programming and the like, useful for my degree in Software Engineering anyway. The 4MB RAM was later doubled to 8 (my present for graduating!) and i bought an external CD-ROM drive so i could install OS/2 Warp on it. It was just about usable...

Finally a number of years later i upgraded to a Tulip PC with a 100MHz 486 CPU. This i ran Windows 95 on. A fine computer but by now i was working at a design agency full of Apple Macintoshes... that would soon guide my next computer purchase.