When I was a child my first and most favourite toys at the age of 2 were plugs, just like the one below.
That may seem bizarre, but it's true - really. My Gran and many of her sisters had their houses upgraded to the new UK square pin standard. Like all thrifty Scottish people, they kept the old plugs, I have no idea why, you can't push a round pin into a square hole! In the age old nature verses nurture debate on how children develop, I'm undecided. Often parents will say, where did that interest come from? My friend thought this of his son. When you are very young, the whole world is mitigated through your parents. So why did I find plugs so fascinating? I particulaly liked the adaptors, I used to plug them into each other and out again to my little hearts content.
When I was 2 and a half, my cousin caught me on audio tape. It may have been my first performance! I can actually remember this. I also have found some images of what looks like the actual machine on the net, from a site called the "Rewind Museum". It was a mid 1950's machine made by a company called "Simon". He still has it, but I doubt if it's been used in 20 years,
I remember being utterly entranced by this gadget. What I liked most was the blinking green "Magic Eye" (remember them?). It was a sort of valve that had it's top set into the control panel of the tape recorder. The "eye" blinked on and off as the volume levels increased. It was a form of level control meter.
I have a copy of the recording. It was one of the very few from my cousin's collection that I could play in the slightly more modern early '70's Grundig machine that I had in the early '80's - the other tapes being too large to play on that machine.
I copied the 1969 recording onto cassette tape in 1982, then I copied the cassette tape to CD in 2001, then copied the CD to MP3 in 2005. So the recording went through 4 different recording mediums in 36 years!
What fascinates me about the recording, apart form the funny little "slice of life it captures from 1969; the voices of people sadly no longer with us, like my Gran saying at the beginning saying "what a waste of a tape" and a really funny little conversation captured between my Gran and my Aunt when they must have forgotten that the tape was rolling, lots of conversations about "stoking the fire" "putting coal on the fire", me handling "the poker", was my absolute entrancement with the tape recorder. It was magic to me. I was determined to work it! There is a lovely moment when my cousin is obviously getting concerned with me attempting to play with it and saying "yes there are knobs on the back, but they are too stiff for you to work", at which point, the recording goes dead. I had obviously figured out how to work it!
Gadgets like the one above then became the object of my desire as I got a little older as the '60's turned into the '70's. I wasn't able to find an image of it, which is a shame - my first record player was a blue and white 1965 HMV, with a BSR autochanger deck. It was my Mums, but she gave it to me in 1973, as I think she could see my musical obsession building even at that age. The above image is of the great '60's pop icon, the Dansette, which made record playing affordable for the Beatlemania generation. The image above is from http://www.dansettes.co.uk, truly Paradise for Dansette Fans! I didn't get my first Dansette until 1976.
When I first got the HMV, I got 50p pocket money each week and I used to be taken down to Boots in Inverness High Street to buy glam rock singles with my pocket money each week. I built up quite a collection, my favourite bands were "The Sweet" and "Mud". When most ordinary children were out playing on their space hoppers, I was stuck indoors with my HMV, which smelled just great! The longer it was on, the more the heat from the valves would dissipate throughout its casing as the machine heated up, making this smell I associate with my early musical passions. I love the smell of hot valves to this day. Though my Mum, obviously in a bid for a bit of peace, told me that if I played the HMV too much, it blow up. This sort of made sense to me at the age of 8 as it did get hotter, the longer it was on. So I limited my record playing to around 20 minutes at a time in case my precious HMV blew up. I'm happy to say it never did and I still have it, even though it is languishing in a storage locker in Edinburgh now. It's 41 years old, one year older than me! I did get my own back on my Mum though as, shortly after she told me about the possibilities of record player detonation, I told the babysitter not to watch the television for too long, as it may blow up too, and she believed me. She sat there in our mid 1970's living room with no telly, and as as we all know there was precious little else to do in the evenings in Inverness in the mid '70's!
I ended up collecting loads of electrical junk in the late '70's and early '80's. I still have some of it. I had two Dansettes, about 4 reel to reel tape reorders, three 1950's cabinet radios, and three (yes three!) 1970's televisions. What a valve obsession. I even used to like the fact they had to heat up, what kind of strange behaviour is that!
I still have the above radio. I got it in 1978 and it still works, as far as I know - it's wrapped in bubble wrap, in a storage locker in Edinburgh just now. One of my many 1970's TV's is behind it!
The early days of the home PC revolution completely passed me by. In the early '80's when friends were fascinated with the ZX 80, etc. I couldn't see the attraction. I think I associated computers then, with computer games. I had no interest in games, then or now. I got into computers slowly, via work. In 1990 I was given the an Olivetti twin drive floppy machine like the one above. The theory was, that I would learn how computer's worked and teach the others. This was only a partial success, some of the guys learned, some just left it all to me! But I learned loads of valuable things at this time. Like Dos commands and what "control alt delete" would do.
Having upgraded fairly frequently through the early 1990's my then employers, after some persuasion, let me take one of the replaced Zenith Data Systems 286's home around 1992. Really, having a computer at home in those days was not that exciting. I did a few personal business letters, started keeping spreadsheets to track my expenses (I still use the same format today!) and wrote up the details of who played what on the early Pooheads songs. Oh and I stated my novel, but only managed three Pages! Probably a blessing in disguise.
It wasn't until in 1996, after much more persuasion, that I was able to take home from work a machine that might conceivably connect to the internet, that it really got interesting. God knows how I managed to pull it off. I really had very little clue what I was doing. My then employers, having just replaced a Zenith 484DX with a mighty Pentium 1 (remember how great we thought they were at the time?) allowed me to take the 486 home. I bought a 28.8k modem and plugged it into the only socket on the back of the machine that seemed to fit the cable, and hoped for the best. I was amazed! Even though I only had one friend who I could send e-mail to (imagine that), I was hooked. The early internet was amazing to me at the time, you could only imagine the possibilities that this technology would bring.
The 486 could be horribly flaky. I was originally using the original Mozaic browser, and that would not display all the new fanged web pages properly, so I downloaded Netscape which worked well, apart from an odd error message, "integer divide by zero", which used to crash the programme. If you ask any good computer programmer "integer divide by zero", is complete gibberish! I also didn't realise what a sound card was. Internet radio was just, just beginning. There was a station from Ullapool I wanted to hear, but when I clicked on the link for the audio stream, nothing happened - I didn't realise I didn't have a sound card! Imagine computers without sound now.
The first computer I actually bought with my own money was a second hand Pentium 1 with, miracle of all miracles, a sound card!
But it wasn't until I bought the machine above in early 2000 at the height of the dot com madness, that things really got interesting. The Pentium 1 only lasted 18 months, it was kinda dumb to buy a second hand machine in a time of such technological change, but it was all I could afford at the time. The Pentium 1 did go on to have a worthwhile existence after me, as I gave it to my mate Ian, and it was his first computer - it lasted five years with him. I bought the above Dell in early 2000, at great expense. It let me create the original Kirkcaldy bands webpage, along with my very first stumbling attempts at home recording. Of course, it had the operating system from hell, Windows 98, installed, so there were many, many, many system crashes.
So, enter the 21st century now, and you can do things with technology that would have been pure science fiction when I was playing with round plugs, staring at magic eyes, and bopping to "Tiger Feet" as my HMV heated up. I'm really glad to have been able to live through such a period of fascinating technological change. Even better, I live in the heart of Silicon Valley where it all started, and to a great extent, where it all continues.
I was trying to imagine today, all the new things that would have been science fiction 30 years ago that technology has allowed me to do in the last 24 hours. We take the technology so much for granted now that it's difficult to articulate it all, but here is an attempt -
1. Shoot video with audio and take still pictures in the Fillmore, on a device small enough to fit in my pocket.
2. Send a text message to my friend who I had lost in the Fillmore.
3. Complete the alterations to my Kirkcaldybands webpage, which has allowed me to re-connect with some people I haven't spoken to in as much as 20 years.
4. Send mails to some people I haven't spoken to in years, who I have been connected to again via the website.
5. Get my pictures from the Fillmore uploaded, so a potential worldwide audience can see them.
6. Make my new music available to a worldwide audience, via www.andrewcrescent.com.
7. Listen to numerous BBC radio programmes and watch Gordon Brown on the BBC TV's Sunday AM, even though BBC is not available in the US (apart from the terrible BBC America), and I don't have a television.
8. Sit with my iTunes shuffle play on and randomly hear my entire music collection, allowing me to "stumble" over some songs that I had quite forgotten about, but are really rather good. Cases in point today as Yazoo's "Only You" and Kate Bush's "Flight of the Swallow".
9. Find the hair colour I wanted to buy.
10. Call my ex-girlfriend who was out in Glasgow celebrating her 40th. BTW Happy Birthday Silvana!
11. Write this piece whilst having no clue how top spell certain words, the computer just sorts it out for me.
12. Oh, and spending about 2 hours finding pictures of old technology and writing this piece.
Phew.
I still miss the valves, though both my iMac and iBook are warming up quite dramatically today - hope they don't blow up!
