Gramophone record

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ClubMan

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A UK colleague of mine recently mentioned how his 9 year old daughter was acting up and his wife reprimanded her by telling her that she sounded "like a broken gramophone record". The daughter looked blankly at her and asked what a "gramophone" and a "record" were. When it was explained to her she started asking about why the needle in the CD player didn't scratch the CD etc...

This got us into a discussion of the sorts of now obsolete technology that we had all come across in our lifetimes (so far). Anybody remember dual 405/625 line TVs? The ones with the rotary channel changer that would eventually break leading to many Irish households keeping a pliers near the TV in order to faciliate channel surfing! :D
 
"dual 405/625 line TVs?"

God, you lot were very grand with your 405/625. We generally had a telly that got a wallop on the side when the picture started rolling - hang on there it goes again, I'll be back in a sec. :D
 
Yeah - we had a really fancy pliers (channel changer) too! :D

I was just revisting and have to say that I don't remember the pirate TV operators of the . Anybody else?
 
I think they referred to companies that retransmitted the likes of UTV and BBC channels to those of us outside Cablelink country
 
ClubMan said:
Yeah - we had a really fancy pliers (channel changer) too! :D

I was just revisting and have to say that I don't remember the pirate TV operators of the . Anybody else?
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well if its the rebeam merchants then they are alive and well in places like Carrigiline...South Coast TV
 
I remember in the late seventies our (first) family tv was one of the old ones that relied on valve technology and I vaguely remember making a trip with my father to a repair shop looking for the appropriate valve to repair the tv at some stage. I also remember our proudest moment- having bought a brand new Sony Betamax video recorder, I think it cost my dad over £400 and that was a lot of money in 1981 (I think). The machine gave nothing but trouble and I remember the long journey to Sony in Airton Road to get replacement heads amongst other repairs. I also remember my uncle had an eight track tape machine in his Fiat Mirafori, again sometime in the seventies- the tapes were nearly the size of a VHS cassette!
 
My dad had an eight-track player in his car for years after they stopped making them. We also got a Betamax video recorder first and of course VHS became the one which kept going. My poor dad always seemed to choose the new technology that was least likely to keep going. While everyone else was getting Commodore 64s and starting to use floppy disks we had an Atari which used cassette tape. At least we never had a laser disc player. Never hear about them anymore.
 
Commodore 64- that's brought back a few memories. Our first "home computer" was an "Acorn Electron", were these made by/ affiliated to the BBC? I seem to remember some connection. Programs had to be downloaded from audio tape and took an age.
 
The first office I ever worked in (c.1977) was considered very technologically advanced as it had a computer. It was an Olivetti and used large magnetic strip cards. The machine was so big that only one person at a time could fit in the room with it - and all the furniture shook when it was switched on.
 
Carpenter said:
Commodore 64- that's brought back a few memories. Our first "home computer" was an "Acorn Electron", were these made by/ affiliated to the BBC? I seem to remember some connection. Programs had to be downloaded from audio tape and took an age.
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At least you had some on tape - I remember we could never figure out how to save onto the tape thing and so any time we wanted to play "Power Raider" we had to type the program in by hand first. Don't think it was in binary but it wasn't far away from it. Still, good training for an eight year old I suppose - I'm a dab hand at typing now!
 
I remember "writing" my first and only computer program using Basic, I think it was a program to calculate areas to estimate quantities for wall tiling. In my first job I rmember the boss (back in 1989) having a "car phone"- wow what an amazing piece of technology that was, the size of a brick, unreliable and very expensive. The boss used to give out about the phone bill, even at that other partners in the practice were desperate to borrow it or to have a "car phone" of their own! Letters were typed on an electric Brother typewriter, drawings were printed on a Dyeline machine and Fax machines were heralded as a major advancement in communication altogether!
 
ClubMan said:
A UK colleague of mine recently mentioned how his 9 year old daughter was acting up and his wife reprimanded her by telling her that she sounded "like a broken gramophone record". The daughter looked blankly at her and asked what a "gramophone" and a "record" were.
Click to expand...

Ah yes, the giant black CDs, as a friend of the young wan referred to them.

Also: telexes, Gestetners, telegrams........ Electric typewriters, 'golfball' typewriters, for god's sake! Now I really do begin to feel old.
 
We had an Acorn Electron as well... I thought we were the only ones in the country.
 
I've posted it before but this link will bring back memories (not all of them fond) to some people here... :D

A company I worked for in the late 80s/early 90s came out of examinership to be taken over by the world's largest software company at the time (not Microsoft!) and they installed their own internal HR/admin system which used 3270 dumb terminals connected to some mysterious box that booted off 8" (!) floppy disks.

We also had an X.25 connection for access to CompuServe (GO CompuServe! :D)!

I remember the first time I used a PC with more than 640KB of memory and a hard drive (a few MB if I recall correctly).

A database system that I worked on to select plastics/metals based on physical criteria for use in new products was complemented by a microfiche system which contained more detailed information such as datasheets etc.

I found some 5.25" floppies from college and previous jobs at home the other night. I would be hard pushed to find a system capable of reading them assuming that they haven't suffered from bit rot in the meantime.

The first program that I ever wrote was in COMAL on an Apple ][ in school. Beside it sat a paper tape reader which nobody ever seemed to use. I think it was obsolete even then.

Up to not too long ago my brother who worked as a Systems Analyst in the Civil Service would regularly be seen with 80 column punch cards.

I could go on and on (some people say I do! :D) but won't...
 
..or those hand-cranked spirit copiers which seemed to specialise in pink ink...
d
 
daithi said:
..or those hand-cranked spirit copiers which seemed to specialise in pink ink...
d
Click to expand...

Reminds me of a summer job I had in a bank branch. When the tally roll on the 'adding machine' was about to run out, a pink stripe ran along the paper. The cashier threw me the old role and asked me to get a new one.

That's right .. I spent 30 minutes in the staionery store trying to find tally rolls with pink stripes.

Back to technology, I started on a Sinclair ZX81 with 1K of memory and no storage - unplug the machine and everything was wiped. When the brother brought home a Sinclair Spectrum with 16K, and the facility to store code to cassette tape, I could not comprehend how so much storage could be utilised.

In work, I was like a dog with 2 mickeys when I got my first 3270 colour terminal. There was talk of people running a 3270 terminal emulator on a PC, but we reckoned that was the work of the devil. When PCs became more prevalent, I remember my wide-eyed wonder at my first sight Wolfenstein 3D; the first of many ways in which the advent of the PC has eroded my productivity.
 
I suppose there are a few young AAMers who don't remember personal computing pre Windows days, anyone for a bit of DOS?
 
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