Will My Son Be As Fascinated...?

I remember when I was young having a fascination for things electrical. I was very curious to understand how things worked and on many occasions I would take things apart to see what was inside. This included the 26" family TV set in the lounge which I would remove the back from and poke around whenever I was left home alone. At that time I was oblivious to the enormous voltages circulating just inches from me and on one occasion, I did poke too far and received an electric shock large enough to propel me across the room. Thankfully I escaped unscathed though my screwdriver had been significantly reduced in length.

I was fascinated also by video and I would sit watching schools programmes wondering not how the human body functioned, but how the pictures got from the cassette to the TV screen. I remember hounding my parents so much that they finally gave in sometime around 1985 and I received for Christmas my first video recorder, albeit rented from Granada - as it was then. Having been familiar with cine film (I at that time had a small projector), I had always assumed the video tape to be like film with individual framed images printed on it. Of course, it is very similar to audio tape.
How ancient these things seem nowadays with our DVD's and digital downloads. Despite the digital age we all now live in, I still have a fondness for the past. I miss the fact that you can't now see something working, like tape spools rotating. I miss that.

Sound recording was another thing I had a fascination for. I would create my own sound effects and splice the tape, physically editing the soundtrack by joining the two ends and physically feeding the tape past the play heads. I used to splice the effects together for a local amateur dramatics society I had a brief liaison with  around 1990. At home, I had several machines and many reels of tape and soon I had mastered the art. All the machines and tapes have long gone. I can't actually remember what happened to them, but I would do anything to have one of them here again.

The audio cassette was most people's preferred audio medium during the 70's and 80's. I still, like many people, have boxes of old cassettes. I keep meaning to transfer everything to CD but I've never got round to it and suspect I will go to my grave still not having done it. They will all be left to my son. On a few occasions he has asked me what they are. He is so used to seeing discs for everything that he cannot imagine how music is played from it. He must see everything as so ancient, much like I did with the old formats.
I'm hoping he will grow up with a degree of respect for technology and how it has evolved over the years. Just because something is old does not mean it should be consigned to the history books. Like VHS, it can still perform and it would be a shame to scrap everything that became obsolete. I still have a couple of VHS recorders, and I still use them. I have lots of VHS tapes and it is nice to watch some of the old programmes and home movies again. I did once have a Betamax machine and a great many tapes. Woolworth's were selling them off cheap so I bought as many as I could. Sadly I only have one left and I wish I had a machine I could play it on. My wife would never allow it especially as now they command such a high price on eBay, a sure sign of their rarity.

I have already been successful in introducing my son to vinyl records and he enjoys playing with my horned gramophone. I have quite a collection of 78's which he knows to be careful with. I think there is already an acceptance of sorts. Of course when he is my age, the DVD and hard drives will have been superseded and we will have solid state storage devices with no moving parts.
I hope very much that alongside these devices, there will still be space for the VHS recorder, the reel to reel tape deck and the record deck.

Employment Past

I had a sift through my VHS tapes earlier today. I used to have hundreds, literally and they covered every wall. Now I probably have a little under a hundred. I found some very old tapes, some more than 20 years old. There were certainly some gems amongst the recordings - holidays when I was young, parties and weddings. There was video of people loved then and loved now who have sadly passed on. They all brought back memories. One tape in particular contained a recording I made in 1990 at one of the company's first summer parties. Back then I was quite the amateur videographer and often travelled with my video camera recording all that I could. Back then in 1990, I was a new member of staff at a fledgling company called Churchill Insurance. Not long before, the company had been known as Meridian Insurance but this was changed in favor of the new brand. There was no dog back then, it was just the word 'Churchill' with a red line underneath and the words 'online to serve you'. Churchill's success in its early days was attributed to its technology, which was second to none. Its systems, its daring use of Kray servers, were the heart of the company and were nursed day and night by a small team of developers and operations staff.
Back to the video and it was good to see so many former colleagues, many of which were there at Churchill's birth. They literally formed the foundations and the pillars of the company and little did they know back then just how great it would become. I have fond memories of my time there. I was with the company from 1989 to 2005, forced out by redundancy thanks to the nasty man that is Fred The Shred and his evil RBS empire. RBS had bought Churchill a couple of years before, netting Martin Long (Churchill's Chief Exec) around £60 million.
My fondest memories are of the times I would have to literally retrieve our network engineer Richard Cauldwell from a nearby hotel at 10 in the morning escort him to Churchill House to fix a problem. He'd normally be drunk or hung-over from a session the night before. I recall also the day Alan Bowers, then the head of IT, was killed in a car crash. I remember hearing the cries from his loyal development team through the thin partition wall separating them and the computer 'bunker' I was in at the time. I recall with sadness hearing the news not long after that Richard Cauldwell had been killed in a snorkeling accident while on holiday. Those early days of rocketing success were certainly marked with tragedy.
It would be just a few years until Churchill became Bromley's largest employer. Bromley was and still is Churchill's home. A ball would be held each year in June for all staff. The venues would grow in size each year to accommodate the growing numbers and a regular event would be the 'blowing-up' of a mock Direct Line telephone, much to everyone's enjoyment. Yes, they were good days and days I look back on with deep fondness.
Good days indeed and how different things are now. Back then, I had no worries about putting petrol in the car or just going for an afternoon drive. I would buy things I didn't need and know that the bank account was looking after itself. That's what it was like. I was in a good job with no worries. Back to reality and with my memories, anyone would think I'm at retirement age. I'm not, I'm only 38...
I found a load more videos today... I'll write about what I discovered soon.