WILL NORMAL TELLY DISAPPEAR?

Do you think mainstream TV will vanish like the household phone has done?

Small kids watch the childrens' channels like CBBC in the UK but I doubt any older kids watch anything in front of the front room television. Its all Netflix and You Tube on their consoles.

If they aren't watching now then they won't watch as they grow up. Will we see the end of BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and 5?

What do you think is happening where you are readers?

SNOW ON THE TELLY

Whilst checking for missing Christmas baubles I found our old portable black and white telly in the attic. A right blast from the analogue past!

It has a massive curved glass screen and huge behind, all topped off with an Area 51 style aerial! Classic three-channel heaven!

I turned it on hoping for an episode of Thunderbirds or Marine Boy for Christmas but all I got was snow!

Which Christmas TV programme would you liked to have seen on this old telly?

HELLO GOOGLE

I recently sat alone in my daughter's living room with a Google Assistant. It's Google's answer to Alexa. Being in a room with an electronic presence is really quite odd and I was unsure what to say to be honest. Like sitting with a stranger.

So like all new relationships I used humour to get over my initial shyness! For God's sake this is a machine I assured myself.

Being Google-born I asked the same thing I asked Google on my laptop years ago, how do I find Chuck Norris. I was surprised that Assistant didn't give me the classic reply, You don't find Chuck Norris, he finds you. Assistant said she didn't understand, which was probably a problem understanding my accent rather than any Chuck ignorance.

I then tried asking did she [is Assistant a she? I just assumed she was, dunno why] know that other Google entity, Siri? She said she did and they get on very well. I could have asked about Cortana and Alexa but the fizz had gone out of my curiosity now.

One more question popped into my head though, is there a cheap Nuclear Ferry toy somewhere in the world I can get for twenty quid and could you get it for me?

With visions of a huge mortgage-munching bill heading my way I didn't even voice it and left Assistant to brood on the meaning of her digital life.

My daughter walked in the room and asked Assistant to put on some cartoon or other for our Grandson who'd just come down. No Chuck Norris, no Nuclear Ferry, just practical.

Hello Google she said with the confidence of the tech generation.

And so AI has thus entered our family unit, utilitarian and always on hand. 

It's not for me I don't think although somehow I wish it was. I feel that I may miss out on the turbo jet pack or robot rocket that must inevitably follow on from engaging with these devices. They are so very Thunderbirds after all and we deserve our jet packs.

Is it for you readers?

Goodbye Google.

CAPRICORN GONE

De-cluttering is hard. Especially if you're a bit of a hoarder like me. It doesn't come naturally.

Chucking videos is a case in point. I love video. I collect 1980's big boxes and clamshells and have loads.

But we also have stacks of the normal-sized later video tapes, which we don't want anymore and I don't collect. Throwing them out seems wrong though.

But that's what I've had to do. We couldn't even give them away. Video has been killed good and proper. Even charity shops won't accept them.

We had a stack of about forty VHS was available free of charge to any good local home that wanted them, via Freecycle online. Twenty were kindly picked up yesterday by a lady who still watches VHS. 

One video was put aside for someone who just wanted Capricorn One last week. It's still on our outside porch step in a bag!

For the rest I had considered specialist recycling but it seems so complex and I was appalled when I saw the image on this site with piles of tinned film stock for destruction. God knows what treasures and gems people throw out! https://www.tiptopmedia.co.uk/recycling/

I even checked Cashconverters and Musicmagpie but Video isn't listed as something they buy anymore so no joy there.

The bin seemed the only option. In a bid to reduce what I had to chuck I have recycled all the paper covers [sleeves] and kept the plastic cases as hard packaging for when I sell action figures. That just left the tapes themselves.

So into the wheelie bin they went. I hate the idea that this once beautiful and ubiquitous technology going to landfill but they had to.

Only Capricorn One remains. Waiting for a final launch. My favourite film of the whole pile. It's still on our doorstep, where next door's cat has left half a shrew. Not a bad trade really!

BILL EV'S MINI-DISKS

In the days before Computers ruled all in broadcasting, Mini-Disks were one cost effective solution to replace NAB Standard Jingle Cartridges. When I built the original studios for the Bridgend Local Radio trials I installed Mini-Disks as replacements for the Cartridges which we all found very easy to operate and were reliable.

Needless to say when Celtica Radio's studios were first set up we used Mini-Disks as Computerisation was still in its infancy at that point. And I was not convinced that it was reliable enough.

Within three years though, by 2003, the Mini-Disks were virtually obsolete. But we decided to keep a couple of these great instruments operational in each studio installation, as even now they are still useful.

This full size Rack Mount Mini-Disks is only rarely used, but it is occasionally needed.

This much smaller Mini-Disk has a removable 4Gigabyte disc as it's recording media and can support a high quality digital recording of many many hours.

On this link https://www.celticaradio.com/archive.html you will find a number of outside broadcast recordings, interviews and concerts all either recorded with this 'NET' Mini-Disk, or an earlier version owned by Ed Risby who is Celtica Radios Company Secretary.

The quality of these recording instruments is absolutely stunning. And of course without them, Celtica Radio itself would never have been able to exist in the first place.

Keeping them serviced and in use, together with CDs, Turntables and Reel To Reel Tape Recorders, means that if our Playout system stopped working we could still sustain the service the old fashioned way!

Bill Everatt

A BEOGRAM TRACKED MY MINIDISC

We were out charity shopping last weekend and visited a large Help The Aged Furniture store. These are the larger shops full of second hand wardrobes and what-nots. There are some amazing bits of furniture in them.

Anyways, I'm always intrigued to see what old electrical media they have in, largely to check whether VHS is still clinging on to dear life!

So I was pleasantly surprised to see two nice VHS players in this store. Neither of them where better than the three I have [I'm a VHS tape collector after all!] but it was great to see.

Big Charity outlets like these are great repositories of dead tech and I always have a gander.

Two more items on my 'I'd love to see Them Again' list are a Laserdisc player, which I've never seen in one and a Bang and Olufson Beogram 4004, the one with the amazing linear tracking stylus. It always made me think of 2001 A Space Odyssey or UFO when I saw them in the 80's.

Alas, among the Ipods and Ipod docking stations no luck with either of these icons. I wouldn't mind seeing a Minidisc player either, another device I never had.

Have you or had you any of these wondrous sonic gadgets readers? The Beogram, the Laserdisc or the Minidisc Player? Pictures and stories welcomed!

BLIMEY, THAT'S TECHNICAL!

I was thinking about how I used to copy cassette tapes for my friends back in the day. I used tape to tape on my Matsui cassette player. Here are a few more 'technical' words from my youth. Please add more in the comments!

Taping
tape to tape - taping from one cassette to another. it could be done at twice the speed too
graphic equaliser - getting the music tone right using five sliding buttons
bass boost - boosting the bass
dubbing - not sure what this was
counter - it counted where you were on the cassette tape, which we then wrote down religiously on the tape card sleeve i.e. timings.

Video
Tracking - trying to get the picture right using the remote
Cue - I was never sure what this was
Letterbox - a frame around the picture
V2000 - early video format that lost out to VHS
Betamax - early video format that lost out to VHS
Clamshell - puffed plastic video case that opened like a book
Big Box - early and larger plastic video cases, often clamshells


Record Player
Separates - different components of the system from different makers
Wharfdales - the best speakers around
Run out groove - the smooth collar at the end of the record
Stereo - either referred to double sound or the type of device - a stereo may have had a record player and a cassette player in it too.
music centre - record player, cassette player and record rack
gramaphone - old version of music centre
stylus - needle
Emitex - top brand of record cleaning cloth

KEV'S PYE POCKET PHONE

Hi,

Here is my Pye Pocketphone. It is the same model used by CI5 operatives in The Professionals and by Steed, Purdey and Gambit in The New Avengers.

Mine seems to still work but nobody is calling from the 70's.

Take care,

Kevin D

UK

I KNOW, LETS TAKE A TELEPHONE WHEREVER WE GO!

I have one of the earliest mobile phones going I reckon.

Not so much a phone. More a brief case full of a huge battery and a phone nestled at the side.

I bought it in 2000 when Ebay landed in the UK. The phone was cheapish but the shipping from the US nearly sank Woodsy Inc.

From the 1970's my attache case telephone must be the forerunner of what we now call mobiles. It even says Portable Telephone on its baseplate. 

There are about 15 big buttons to push down and I've often pressed them and wondered what they did and who they would have connected too. I'd love to fire it up! I'd probably need permission!

Costing thousands of dollars at the time - it came with all its paperwork -  there can't have been that many of these things around in the US in the late 70's surely? or?

I will blog the phone in detail soon but wondered if you had a briefcase telephone or a an attache case walkie talkie, either a real one or a toy?

Maybe an early mobile brick, a field phone or a toy Batphone or a James Bond communicator in an attache case? I had a Secret Sam case but I'm sure there wasn't a walkie talkie or even a radio in there but maybe it was just a secret!

Let's hear from you!

THE FUTURE WAS GREAT

I was talking to a futurologist the other day who was staying with us.

She advises large companies on how to look far far ahead into the future.

I showed her my collection of dead technologies and we discussed the futures we expected. A Sixties kid and an Eighties kid.

Being much older and a baby boomer I explained that my expected future had been of steel and glass needle-pointed cities piercing a domed sky bristling with gleaming rockets and jet cars.

Clearly this dream future never came and I realised whilst describing it that I felt a strong sense of disappointment. Maybe even betrayal.

I wonder if any of you feel like this readers, that the future we thought would emerge from Thunderbirds, Star Trek, TV21, the moonshot and a million B-movies has simply not materialised.

Smart phones just don't cut it.

What do you think? Am I misguided?

THE DEMISE OF THE BATTERY HOME?

I have been testing a few toys for the Grandson and me of late and I've realised that finding batteries in our house is not easy anymore!

Hardly any of our gizmos have batteries in them.

I remember a time in my tender youth when batteries ruled the home. They were everywhere and if you couldn't find a pack of the big ones in the kitchen cupboards there was something wrong.

Batteries were not included with toys and gadgets but they were certainly to hand back then, thanks to my battery-loving parents!

Now I'm reduced to scratting round for old batteries in drawers.

The one sure place, the final sanctuary is .... the torch. Yep, the faithful torch holds the home's last batteries!

Is this your experience readers? Are batteries old tech?

DO YOU STILL WATCH TELEVISION?

I heard two predictions recently: the household telephone will vanish completely in the UK within 5 years and similarly that terrestrial television will have ended within 20 years.

Both of these were king when I was a kid. Mates phones on the house phone [when my Dad took the lock off!] and I watched everything - Thunderbirds, Blue Peter, Department S, everything - on the telly. First black and white and from 1970, colour, bought for the World Cup!

But the ground is shifting.

Now our own house phone doesn't get used much at all, although it is an essential lifeline for an elderly member of our family, who rings us every night on it. I can't see the actual landline connection going though because we need it for our router, unless of course something else is invented.

As for the the telly I can see why such a prediction has been made. Young people have all but ditched TV in favour of You Tube, which they watch on a multitude of devices in their rooms. Traditionally programming isn't needed either. You Tube presenters can entertain kids for very little cost.

That's not to say that toddlers and infants don't watch telly. They do and the output from CBBC and CITV is good. Thunderbirds Are Go is currently on and my own Grandson loves Bing and Duggie on the TV.

But things are changing. At the expensive end of the revolution. Netflix and Amazon Prime are the heralds of a new programming, which all other TV channels will have to compete with. Many will fall by the wayside. Like our High Street shops, which are increasingly empty, the next generation of snowflake offspring will determine the future by how they loyally interact with social media and the internet and nothing else.

My own TV tastes are increasingly specific too. Much of what is on - countless channel's worth - is of no interest to me at all.  Increasingly I turn to You Tube and free offers on Amazon and Netflix to find a decent film to watch.

Having said that I rely on the TV for News and I watch it religiously in the evenings, which probably accounts for my permanently nervous disposition!

What do you think readers? Are house phones and the TV on their way out?

ROB T'S MUSIC CENTRE

Hi Woodsy,

Pics of our 1974 Sony Music Center and great Stranglers pink vinyl EP.

Cheers

Rob T.

*

Have you got a music centre readers?

Should I Feed the Ducks Instead?

Modern British kids have long online days. You Tube and X-Box appear to be the objects of their undivided attention along with virtual playgrounds Snapchat and Facebook. 

Just as I was once excited about getting home from school to read about Samurai and listen to Rush on my stereo, modern kids can't wait to get in and go on X-Box and listen to Ed Sheeran on their smartphones.

Who am I to say whether one is different to the other and certainly I can't say whether one is better. Can you?

Kids are kids and get excited about stuff and fads, crazes and technology are all part of it for whatever generation.

Yet there persists a nagging feeling among oldies like me that kids are in some way threatened by spending so much time online. 

"We" believe that it could erode their social skills, reduce their attention spans, expose them to daily online violence, even dehumanise them and maybe arching over all these, a general feeling that kids should be playing out in the fresh air with their real life mates grazing their knees and muddying their shorts.

I remember these same issues when I was a kid. I was often happy in my own company and could spend hours and hours in my bedroom doing my own thing, which was, depending on my age, reading, drawing, playing with space and monster toys, researching Kung Fu, identifying fossils, playing guitar and taping music and listening to albums to name a few of my 'projects'.

I thought this was all perfectly normal and as long as I played with friends, which I actually wanted to, my folks seemed happy. My Dad definitely thought my obsession with horror was occasionally unhealthy and did once chuck a monster mag in a bin but I think he knew that it was a global craze that he could never stop it.

Parents always fear popular culture in some way I suppose. Sometimes these fears are valid and sometimes they manifest themselves as mass paranoia. It seems ridiculous to me now that Mars Attacks cards were banned, that horror comics were the enemy of the innocent and that videos were deemed toxic enough to kids that video store owners were actually jailed!

Being a Parent and Grandparent myself I do know that some things are out of my control and that I'm not able to watch over my dependents twenty four seven. And yes, its a crazy world out there and there are some bad people.

Kids though have to lead their own lives and have space to imagine the lives of others. This is how they develop isn't it?

As a nipper I often lived in my own world and I imagine nowadays kids would have said I was a bit geeky, but that word didn't exist in 1973 when I became a teenager for the first time. 

Having said that I did love playing out and playing inside with mates. Either was good and there was always something to do - playing games like Crossfire or Mouse Trap, playing with Action Men, riding scooters and bikes, walking to the park to the swings, Kung Fu fighting in the lounge, training in my home-made dojo, going up town on Saturdays for the Top Rank disco and buying records and going to the cinema.

I'm far less sociable now. I know far fewer people than I did as a kid. I suppose my world has got smaller and this brings me full circle to being online, which I am, obviously, now. 

I too enjoy a cyber life. I do. It connects me to other people, but I can't help feeling that I should be out more in pubs, at sports matches, cycling, walking and feeding ducks. That somehow my time online is bad for me.

This is a pervasive idea. The Internet is the new video nasty, the new horror comic, the new Mars Attacks card. Yes, for some kids its a bad experience and it should be monitored especially for the very young. But for the majority of young teenagers its their portal into another world, a world of online friends, YouTubers, Xboxers and Ed Sheeran.

Who am I to say that my Sixties childhood was any better or for that matter healthier. As long as kids are loved and fed and kept warm in winter and protected from harm they should be fine whatever they're doing.

There are countless old and modern films I could cite as testimony to the rising fear of teenagers' online lives and its 'effects' on them. Just go back to Tron and War Games. Did we really believe that kids playing games would lead to thermonuclear war? It seems laughable now but the paranoia persisted.

Similar horrors lurked in CCTV and TV: The Running Man, ED TV, The Truman Show, The Net, The Ring and Videodrome.

Unfriended, Pulse, Feardotcom, Smiley, Chatroom, iMurders and the Circle are just a splattering of the latest fayre produced by adults to be viewed by a teenage population eager for more online kicks on phones, ipads, tablets and iwatches wherever they are. 

Watching movies about how bad it could get is something we all do. This schadenfreude is at the heart of horror and thriller films and watching them help s us all carry on knowing its just fantasy and we will be alright when the movie's over.

I suppose maybe thats the difference nowadays to when we were kids. TV isn't king anymore. Kids don't come in with grazed knees after scrabbling up the canal bank desperate to watch Crackerjack at 5 to 5, faces reddened with oxygen and shorts blathered in good old-fashioned mud.

The net has taken over and access to any form of cybertainment is universally available to all kids everywhere anytime.

Its a brave new childhood for modern kids but is it really any different from the ones we had?

What do you think readers?

laser disc anyone?

I never had a laser disc. 

I experienced VHS from the get go but not laser disc.

I saw them though. In the shops. Like heavy LP's.

Did you ever watch any laser discs?

What was it like and does it still exist?

the death of the dvd?

My LOVEFILM subscription has been put on notice. I have been a subscriber for years and watched many fantastic films.

For those who don't know LOVEFILM is a postal DVD rental service, whereby subscribers can rent movies and get them delivered by the postman. Once done you simply send them back.

LOVEFILM will close on October 31st.

Amazon acquired LOVEFILM some years ago.

The reasons cited for closure are a a decline in subscriptions and a drop in the number of requests for DVDs by post.

People are simply not renting DVDs anymore and stream their movies direct these days.

Is this the beginning of the end for the DVD?

the fax of life

I used to love fax machines. My old career in charity management relied on it. I faxed everyday.

I was always impressed with the simplicity of the idea, sending pictures through a telephone, which I suppose is a forerunner of the internet.

The whole world of faxing was fascinating. It had its own telephone number on letterheads so it must have been important. If you rang a fax number you would hear that crazy screeching noise like a bad day at NASA.

You could send handwritten notes and sketches by fax, which was always fun to do and receive. I only sent black and white stuff though. No idea if colour was possible.

I used to use my fax as a lazy copier too. It would easily photocopy a couple of sheets and never seemed to have the catastrophic melt-downs the xerox had.

Some companies had Telex when I first started work. Like Fax, the Telex number was printed on a letterhead. To this day I'm still unsure what Telex was or whether Fax grew out of it. I only actually found out years later when I saw the phrase Facsimile Machines on a bridge billboard that Fax was short for facsimile, which is obvious really!

I bet in its heyday the Fax even came in toy form for young 'uns. I had a toy Casdon cash till and plastic telephone set when I was a kid so why not.

I wonder just how far real fax machines came before email booted them out of the nest? Did they have video screens for instance where you could see who was faxing you? Could you talk to your faxer at the same time? Just how big could a fax be? A0? I used to wonder if eventually we would fax things like moving images like video footage or even physical objects, a nod towards Star Trek beaming-up and 3D printing perhaps?

Yep, I miss my fax. Do you?

butlers of oblivion

I can't help thinking about these new fangled gadgets advertised on telly.

First there was the Amazon Echo and now Google have one too. The things stand somewhere in the living room by the looks of it and you ask it stuff.

More to the point you ask it to do things.

So just how far would these gizmos go to carry out these instructions?

A general train enquiry would be perfectly reasonable, say - what time is the next train to Leeds?

But what if I asked one to buy me a Project SWORD Moon Bus?

Would the machine find one on Ebay or somewhere and actually go ahead and buy it? Are they linked to Paypal accounts say? What else are they linked to? Health records? 

I can think of much grittier scenarios as well, along the lines of the film War Games, the euphemism 'Wouldn't you prefer a nice game of chess Professor?' now embedded into popular culture.

Just how far do these new things go to obey their masters?

Does anyone have one of these electronic butlers?

is this the beginning of the white-hot Thunderbirds future us Sixties kids are all craving?

we will see a lot more drones in the future says max headroom

Watching Saturday morning telly at Moonbase is a high-tech overload these days.

Gone are the cuddly antics of Scooby Do and the Double Deckers.

In are stories about this week's new sizzling gadgets and the white-hot world they'll create for us in the new Frontier.

This morning was a silicon Molotov that burst over me in waves of increasing tech utopia. I felt like the Lawnmower Man pumped with data bundles.

First was an advert straight from the movie Robocop - you know the ones, asking 'do you wanna know more?' - this time for a new kind of bicycle by the young upstart of UK lawnmower magic called Gtech, who are snapping at the heels of suction kings Dyson. The 'break free' bike, as its called, although I'm unsure, has a battery, which kicks in when you give up and its not a lawnmower.

Bike batteries have been around for decades. I saw them in the Sixties I'm sure and my old Father in Law has one on his pushiron even now. Its not the idea but the new marketing, which makes it so Robocop. Its done in a calm, soporific voice slowly but convincingly extolling the benefits of effortless biking in our beautiful chic cities. There's no chain, just a 'clean carbon belt', the emphasis on the word clean. The new world in which we'll 'break free' will be clean and effortless!

I should like it, I really should but something seeps darkly at its heart and I don't know what.

This gtech ad was followed by a piece in the news about drones. We will apparently be seeing a lot more of them in our daily lives. The chap droned on [he may have been one] about how we might intercept an unwanted drone using a net gun. A net gun? First of all why would we encounter an unwanted drone in the clean, beautiful, effortless cities of the gtech advert and where on the battery bike would be store a net gun? The saddle? Maybe they could be fitted between the handlebars like a UFO Interceptor missile?

To further complicate matters it would now seem that we should all be remotely viewing who comes to our doors with a new gizmo from an outfit called Ring. Now the word ring always makes me think of the one ring to bind them all but ignoring that unwanted shadowy notion for now the tech basically allows you to see who is ringing your clever new door-bell from wherever you are in the world. 

This neat fresh nology apparently gives you the chance to say appropriate things like 'leave it on the doorstep' to the bemused postman whilst you cycle without effort up the pristine inclines of Eldorado or alternatively inappropriate stuff like 'get lost buster, I've got one' to the scented salesman attempting to flog you a battery-powered city bike, which you already own and upon which you are cruising without breaking a sweat up the new aerial cycleway on Mount Everest netgunning unwanted post office drones on the way.

It all reminds me of Max Headroom's blip blip blip blipverts.

Yep, I can feel my head exploding.

KEV'S STEREOGRAM, ROB'S MUSIC CENTRE AND TONY'S STEEPLETONE

Hi,

Prompted by the recent blog post, I trawled my old photos to see if I had one of the old stereogram or music centre This was the best I could find, it is the stereogram and I think the photo was late 60's or early 70's (we moved into that house in 1968). Couldn't find the music centre but it was a 'Ferguson Studio 50D', you can still see them online in all their smoked plastic glory!

Sorry the photo is so poor (I doubt it is useable) it is just part of an image from an old 126 camera, I just thought you'd be interested.

Take care,

Kevin D

*

Pics of our 1974 Sony Music Center and great Stranglers Pink Vinyl EP..I only buy Vinyl..cant stand CD's! 

Rob T

*

Hi Woodsy,

Just caught up with the blog and really enjoyed the article and great pictures featuring Kevin and Rob's vintage record players. 

Inspired, I ventured into the Attic of K to search for my original basic Steepletone, which came from dear old mum's mail order catalogue. 

I found it and also unearthed a few of my favourite records, most of which I'm sure I got from Woolies?

Pix attached - If it isn't to late, you're welcome to add them to the article if you wish.

Tony K