DavecUK rrrrrrr, eeeeee, rrrrschhrrr, chrrrss. wheee, boing

You win the Internet for best impression of early data storage and transmission sounds. Definitely nailed it! Like when you dial a fax machine number. The worst thing was, if you turned it down it didn’t work. That was when data speed was measured in baud, 1 baud was 1 bit per second for a binary signal IIRC.

I remember burning my finger on one of those little always-on pilot lights on a gas stove as a kid.

Eye level grill was what we had where I lodged (and made my first ‘espresso’) until I moved into my own house. I remember the landlady’s son coming home from the pub and making a bacon sandwich before passing out. I was asleep on the 2nd floor and was woken up by smoke. Went to the kitchen, he was unconscious on the table. Eye level grill full inferno! I could not rouse him so I put him in the garden for air and left a note saying “I’ve saved our bacon, yours was too far gone” and went back to bed.

    I remember the good old steel bath which we had our bath in in front of the open fire. The treat was going down to the local public baths in Fulham Broadway for a proper bath. My first car should have been a Triumph Herald but it fell apart before my Dad could pass it on to me so I ended up with a Ford Anglia which had more filler than metal.My first computer was a IBM which had 4gb memory can’t remember what size hard drive but it did come with a floppy drive. Mars bars Milky Way and crisp packets were all bigger in the good old days we were spoilt.

    I wonder how one of the kids in the bath above got just one arm so dirty, and why isn’t the other kid screaming with its hair being on fire 🤔

    • 4W5 likes this.

    Anybody remember buying loose biscuits from the Coop? And being able to buy a bag of broken biscuits for a penny?

      CafeCalando Yes remember them very well, at that time most ‘grocers’ sold biscuits from tins about a foot square, standing on an inclined rack👍

        Pompeyexile I had the MG version, bloody rot box, you had to be careful when you jacked it up in case

        the cill gave way and went into the door. Had to replace cill’s , subframe and heel board on mine amongst other items.

          My first experience with computer was Cray X-MP in 1985 in my graduate school. We wrote programs in Fortran and Pascal. It was then IBM PC/2 with a unix OS. We used LATEX for word processing. In late 1990s, HP Compag, HP Pavilion, Dell P4 in 2003, and HP workstation XW 8600.

          The Dell and HP work station are still with us in good working order.

          My first job out of school mid 80s was at a research place that had a badass computer called a Vax mainframe. You logged on using dumb terminals, which IIRC were called DEC VT220 or similar, basically a chunky keyboard and green text only screen. All the processing was done on the Vax which was in a bunker somewhere. The boffs used it for rocket science. I used to play Snake on it at lunchtime. Many years later when I got my first mobile phone, a Nokia 3210, finding the Snake game on it was a blast from the past, in the past!

          Then years later Vax became a wet n dry vacuum cleaner. Now it’s an injection. I wonder what Vax will mean in another decade?

          https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAX

          https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VT220

          I learned to program on my cousin’s ZX81 (1K, no expansion pack), then got my own Spectrum 48K for Xmas 1982. I was always a Spectrum boy, never a Commodore boy, so I went for an Atari 520STFM (sold the ZX to help my Dad fund the Atari) after that rather than an Amiga. From there, went to a Sega Megadrive and on to my first video game development job with Attention to Detail, making games for Atari Jaguar CD ROM, PlayStation, Sega Saturn, etc.

            Does anyone else remember the smell of stale coffee in 1970/80s Italian restaurants (or anywhere that they sold oodles)? I always loved the smell but could never associate it with coffee until I started drinking coffee in my 20s. There was one place in particular (a cafe at a nearby country park) that absolutely reeked (in a good way, c.f. diesel fumes from ice cream vans, stale beer smell from 70/80s holiday camp bars, purple duplicated copies of paper in primary school). Smell is definitely the most potent memory jerker of the senses.

            I was so happy when I worked out what the smell actually was and lay that ghost to rest, but it’s getting harder and harder to find these days.

              -Mac I learned to program on my cousin’s ZX81 (1K, no expansion pack), then got my own Spectrum 48K for Xmas 1982.

              My father got me a ZX81 kit when I was 12. After successfully completing radio transistor and digital clock kits, he over estimated my skills. I made a mess of the soldering and it didn’t work, so it had to be posted for fixing. He then took me with him to pick it up from Sinclair’s headquarters in Cambridge.

              Once the computer was up and running, my dad would read to me from the Basic manual that had a spiral binding.

              I could speak English at the time, but couldn’t read it. I remember my father reading the instructions to me. Every few sentences he would stop and comment: “I have no idea what they are talking about!”, and I would ask him to continue reading because it was all so perfectly clear. It never occurred to me that one day I will be the same with my children…. :-)

              My first program on the ZX81 was a game: a character appeared on the screen for a random amount of time, and the player had to guess how much time that was. I think this pretty much used all the available memory - 1kb. To save the program I had to use a simple tape recorder, which somehow converted the software to squeaking sounds - a remarkable thing, and an absolute miracle when it worked!

              For my 13th birthday my dad got me the 16kb memory extension pack which was plugged to the back slot of the computer - a massive upgrade! My uncle bought me the printer: It had a 10cm-wide silver paper role that was etched with heat or something like that (aluminium coating would evaporate and reveal the black paper underneath it). The printer connected to the slot at the back and had a pass-through for the memory extension. I printed the Thank You notes for my presents on this printer and posted them in the mail.

                  -Mac Does anyone else remember the smell of stale coffee in 1970/80s Italian restaurants (or anywhere that they sold oodles)? I always loved the smell but could never associate it with coffee until I started drinking coffee in my 20s.

                  The first exposure I had to the smell of coffee was at around 2.5 to 3 years old. My mum used to shop at Sainsbury in West Byfleet (long gone now). In those days the store had wooden floors, sawdust and separate counters for everything..no self service like today. I always remember walking up to the store and on many days there was the smell of roasting coffee from an old gas trentate roaster, vented out of the window….you could actually see it operating. The smell was absolutely fantastic and with the wind in the right direction was detectable from a great distance. I think it formed part of the draw to bring customers in…..

                  Then the world turned to…..instant, a few years later.

                  Contact me

                    I lived in Watford in the 80s and there was a coffee shop called “Importers” that sold beans and they vented their roaster out of the front window onto the lower High Street. Not sure that would be allowed nowadays but it used to fill the lower high st with the smell of dark roasted coffee and a not inconsiderable amount of smoke! Everyone either loved or hated it. I was all for it personally.

                    Going back a little further, most towns had a ‘grocers’ shop where the roasted and ground the coffee. The grinder was a huge red thing like a n overgrown mincer. The beans were stored in box drawers behind the counter with labels on (often with exotic names).

                    The other common item in the grocers were sides of bacon hanging on chromed racks, choose your bacon and the thickness that you wanted, all bone dry not oozing liquid brine.😢

                      Doram

                      Almost exactly the same story as mine! My Dad did the soldering on the kit and cocked up the TV RF bit somehow. Took him days and days to figure it out, with me pestering the life out of him to get it up and running. Got there in the end. Ah the joys of 1K programming, and the sheer excitement of getting 16K expansion pack. From the ZX81 I went to an Atari 400, then the one with the proper keyboard (bliss!!!) before jumping ship to Amiga 500.

                          Lake_M Ah the joys of 1K programming

                          Forgot to mention that the chirps and squeecks sounds to and from the cassette tape when saving and uploading a program to the zx81 were probably not dissimilar to a facsimile, but it was a good few years before I first saw a fax machine - a miracle in its own right. 📠

                              Doram fax machine, but it was a good few years before I saw a fax machine for the first time - a miracle in its own right. 📠

                              I always thought the fax was invented in the 80s, Imagine my surprise when I found out it was in the 1840s.

                              I used to love the show “The secret Life of”…

                              Another shocker was to realise the first video recording was done by Eddison.

                              To have your mind really blown as mine was when I first heard about these recordings…first TV recorded for later viewing…1927. The only problem was, a playback device had not been invented and wouldn’t be for 70 years.

                              Contact me

                                  My mate at GT Audio has a handful of Edison cylinder recordings. Not sure he has anything to play them on mind you! They were used as ornaments on his Voight corner horns.

                                  DavecUK I always thought the fax was invented in the 80s, Imagine my surprise when I found out it was in the 1840s.

                                  Quite amazing this. Other extraordinary things where invented ahead of their times. I Just saw something about an in-car navigation system in 1909…

                                  Sat nav is another one. The military had it since the early 1980’s, but we mortals used maps till the new millennium. Personally I have no sense of direction. My wife used to be in charge of the atlas, but when I was on my own it was a always a nightmare. First time I travelled with a borrowed sat nav from my dad (cost him a fortune) I was in total awe. This was a game changer for everyone, but for people like me it was a life saver.