I am an Astronaut

Listening to Emperor Tomato Ketchup by Stereolab

I am determined to make a mark via this blog. I know it will probably never happen but I have come up with an idea in the situationist spirit of 30 years since some arbitrary milestone in the history of Punk Rock. I do feel that the use of the phrase situationist by the pioneer punks of the day was probably not as rigorous as it could have been though that is probably in the self-referential spirit of the whole thing anyway. Feel free to tell me if the following idea is situationist or naff or somewhere in between. You are right in thinking that I have not read exactly what Wikipedia says about Situationism.

I read a short prose piece by someone who detailed why he should not be allowed to have kids because he would subvert society through them, causing them mental anguish along the way. I think it was only half serious – very worrying if it wasn’t. A sort of de-energised version follows – like a vaccine is the thing you are trying to protect against without the deadly payload. For a long time I have fed my daughter various phrases to shout in the playground, not that she remembers to do so very often but I like to think of her marching up and down shouting “Sinister – Dexter” or even the one she thought up to use on her own during her Suffragette phase “Votes For Women!” My next meme will be – Clap – Clap – Grabowski. Clap - Clap as an action with “Grabowski” shouted afterwards – like a football chant. I will try and persuade her to get the other children to shout this at the same time. If just one of you convinces a child to pass this around, we could soon have a new craze. This is what Tim and Graham shouted when they were at the world chess championships in the Goodies Kitten Kong episode. Go on! You know we can do it. And maybe we will have a few more kids picking up guitars and learning three chords. I know three! I can see the positions – no idea what they are called. Let’s call them A, B and C. That’s the truth! OMG! “Three Chords and the Truth” is a country album. Now the question is do I look like the original scream or like macordly culllkin in the Home Alone posters?

We did have a phase at school where the standard response to anything – question – statement – strange shaped vegetables was “Ooooh! Sponge”. I thought it was my brother who started this but he cannot remember it at all. I have no idea where it came from – it might well be filthy in the extreme as the school’s registered keeper of “art” magazines seemed to be the focus for it. For this reason it will not be passed on for Junior School appreciation.

Souvenir by OMD was a great self-referential record for me. Less than a second into it and I can place myself back in the sunny late summer of 1981, walking through the woods with a girl called Julie – not sure how we heard music out in the woods but the link is there. The words to it are just abstract additions that may give some insight into the state of mind of the person who wrote them but only to himself. I always get frustrated by the fact that people speak different languages and the further you get from home, the less able you are to pick out the emotional content because of various inflections used to convey meaning – so many Chinese words are pronounced the same way but by using different timbres and cadences, the same word conveys many different meanings. However, music seems universal. Regardless of the changes in scale, the different tunings and keys, it always seems possible to pick out at least the very highest level of emotion from a piece. I seem to remember that this was some part of the explanation of how the Star Trek universal translator worked but I may be wrong. Anyway – if by the slightest chance – Julie is reading this (I was the guy with the Rubik’s cube fascination and the green shirt which looked so punk * – I brought you Rock back from holiday), please tell me if you still like Souvenir.

I suppose we liked Enola Gay as well but that’s about the plane which dropped the atomic bomb, never a suitable romantic song though I did once hear it used as backing for a programme about Japan’s economy. Give the producer of that show a toffee.

* It was actually my old scout shirt. I took the badges off – all except the one for self-piercing.

Who Wants to be Ruth Lawrence?

Now if you could go back and redo some things, how far would it have to be? A certain amount of nostalgia has been bouncing around in my head recently which inevitably leads on to one or two moments I would rather forget. Any desire for an ability to undo things is really a request to erase the memory of certain things rather than to go back and actually undo them. The complexity of life and physics actually means that expunging even the most trivial of red-face moments has the potential to completely change a life. I regret not spending more time reading classic books when I was a lot younger. All that time spent out playing in streams, crawling along tunnels or climbing trees could have used for improvement. I have memories lit by flashes of lightning where I sit in some sunny, sixties library, turning the huge pages of art books and making copies of the pictures I like. I wasn’t the sportiest child at that age anyway but I did “get out” and come home to the lectures about how filthy I was. (The detergent companies seem to have realised that these dressing-downs are the enemy of sales and have succeeded in making such terrible behaviour completely acceptable – and well done I say). What would I be now had I concentrated on books and stayed in? I’m not sure I would have become a high-flyer – that takes super-intelligence and focus as well – just a prig (good Arthur Ransome type word).

All this noodling is pointless really. I am talking about personal things. Stephen fry makes the same point on a much bigger scale in Making History but although I enjoyed this, looking back it seems to be too sweeping in its affects. I suppose that even a tiny personal change to one’s life has the potential to bring down governments. Reading about the turbulent history of Europe in The Devil’s Doctor with its running them of apocalyptic change, I was struck with how sane things have become since then. We are so far removed in outlook and behaviour from the fear of sudden death through either illness or recalcitrance, that the fact that we are descended from these decapitators and burners and separated by only 400 years is quite sobering. Then again some of the perpetrators of the most recent European evil-doings are still alive – still young and having children. I have rambled but the point I wanted to make was that we can often think that the end of the World is imminent and then it all goes right and things settle down. Conversely, maybe some tiny event that seems trivial at the time will bring us to planetary obliteration in a second. I am thinking of the unlikely creation of a black hole in the lab maybe.

Strangely I am reminded of the profile of Allan Ahlberg that was on the Culture Show last night. He and his wife produced a wonderful picture book called Peepo! which details the world through the eyes of a small child. It is a cosy world of happy confusion and cheeky sisters. A first reading has you thinking how wonderful it all is. However a careful examination of the pictures shows you that it is set in wartime - the gas-masks, the Spitfires over the houses, the barrage balloons in the distance. The baby’s father is in fatigues and I always thought he was off to Home Guard duty but Ahlberg said last night that he was off back to the army which makes it so much more poignant. The baby is of course Ahlberg himself. No matter that the worst war ever is going on – the comfort of real people and the ceaseless blurring of both embarrassments and apocalypses keeps us from complete break down.

Classical Scat

This section is pre-apologised!

Back in the swing of The Devil’s Doctor now. We are up to Paracelsus’ involvement with Luther, not that they met, but this requires a “Lutheranism for Beginners” section which has been quite an eye-opener. My limited views on the great Christian Schism have fallen into seeing Catholicism as the old-guard, rooted in mysticism and the origins of Christianity with Luther as a new broom, using his rationality and decency to sweep away the excesses of the papacy and the local clergy. All this has been reversed. Of course there were excesses – with two Popes at one point that is an excess of one Pope – much un-celibate and immoral behaviour, but Luther was a mad, unswerving zealot who as far as I can see has been responsible for the extreme concentration on faith rather than rational discussion that we still see as excuse for stifling debate. He said that men should not understand – they should only believe. In best Scaryduck fashion, I can also reveal that much of Luther’s theology was a result of constipation – lots of his writings give in great scatological detail, accounts of Satan’s use of his chamber, leaving a foul stench for days. He also says that many of his revelations came to him on the privy. I have to add that these details are only in a footnote in the book – though maybe they should be in a footstool note. It is strange to think that some of the worst conflicts and behaviour committed in the name of religion could have been avoided had Luther had a better diet, though as my wife says, if there was no religion, people would find something else to fight over.

Paracelsus himself had a much more pragmatic view of the scriptures and seems to have dismissed most organised religious worship as irrelevant saying that most people, religious or lay, had not understood what they were trying to say. All this sounds very “hello clouds! Hello sky”, like looking for God in the hedgerows and under stones, a sort of Eastern interpretation but that fits with his medical views as well. I am amazed that this book has so much detail though so much of it is background, details of the political and religious state of play (not that there was much separation between the two then – there was the Papacy and The Holy Roman Empire but they are just two sides to the same coin). I am getting view of rationalism in transition with Paracelsus as border guard albeit a mad one. I see him a bit like Tom Baker’s Doctor Who, strange and unpredictable in day-to-day things but rational and dependable when needed.

I don’t remember Paracelsus being in The Ascent Of Man which is now for sale at £31 on Amazon. They are waiting for me to bite. There is an episode on BBC4 next week as part of their 1973 season if you would like a taster. I have just seen that they are also showing The Green Death story from Doctor Who which is listed as being “the one with the maggots”. I remember this well, partly for the maggots but probably also because it was the first time I took notice of a Doctor’s assistant as anything other than the screaming sides-person. If only I’d known about the Dalek pictures. There was a long preview of 1973 week after A for Andromeda which seemed to make that year as cool as Life on Mars did.

Waving to Elizabeth

I may never get back on my bike again. I suppose I should try though the loose pedal will need some work if indeed the old thing has not fallen apart at the back of the garage. It is dry in there so it may be possible to retrieve it undamaged. I used to cycle to school during the summers I was in the sixth form. Our school was tiny compared to most institutions these days, still is though the middle school has been merged by filling in the wonderful quad it used to have to fit in computer rooms and new stuff I’ve never seen. As well as being small (<400 pupils), it was also out in the sticks and took people from an area with a diameter of 20+ miles though maybe it was a very long ellipse rather than a circle. I was only 5 miles from the school and could leave bang on 3:45. The buses didn’t leave for twenty minutes after that which meant that I could be sitting on the cable box by the Church when our bus actually arrived. This seemed to impress a number of the kids on the bus who would actually wave – physical exertion always being able to breed popularity more than any intellectual ability. There were even a few slightly romantic gestures which made my day, though I didn’t dare delve into the seriousness of any of these even though some of them were from girls; I lived for studying of course. All this seems the coolest thing on earth to me and yet looking back at the pictures we all seem lost in the mire of dated seventies fashions and haircuts without any of coolness attached to such things a Life On Mars. The coy waves from the bus may make me want to go back but some of the vicious sneers on the faces of some of my classmates remind me of a certain rural reality. For some strange reason, the foyer of this building had the smell of our school corridors and a lot of this came back to me in that instant.

And all the books I should have been reading then, a list that haunts me, things I will never get around to, just like I will probably never get back on that bike; all those science books instead of ‘On the Road’. We were not cool, just sad and mired in trying to look cool. Even some of the ‘cool’ kids look strange, with pinched faces and sneers of dislike for everything. Or is that just normal attitude for teenagers? And yet so many of them I liked. I would love to speak to them again. There was strange magic in some of them. I was an outsider, born in town and brought up in town. Some of the kids came from families that had been in the same houses for generations and despite their liking for punk or Prog-Rock or Electronica, could tell you of things not far removed from witch bottles and fertility curses. I imagine the girls and their apple peel thrown over their shoulder, looking for the initial of some boy they liked, or scattering flour in the fire to make faces of future boyfriends. Maybe all this is just colouring and it never came to me when I moved back to town, but I told someone in a pub once where I came from and they evoked an image of deep magic and magnetic things drawing back leavers to the village. It gets me sometimes, even just seeing the hills; bringing on some desire to just lie down in the bushes, looking up at the empty sky, blue or grey, to just live on what the place provides. Winter would bring me out if this, grey water all around, getting in everywhere; wetting the floors and making the house seem cold and empty with even the high-banked fire failing to lift the darkness.

Witches and whiskey they were; Fairies and coy smiles, born of the Celts who made the fort on the hill. I bet you could trace through from the bones the students used to dig up all the way through to some of those kids, lost in that valley for years. And now we are scattered save for a few grown up to farm or inherit those old houses that just avoid the shadow of Ragged Stone Hill.

I’ll never get back on that bike.

The Mutual Dorsal Itch Removal Operatives

She hates this song you know. Oh sorry! Dizzy by Throwing Muses

It is apparently “Untrue”.

I have noticed that I am listening to whole albums at the moment after having been pointed at them by unexpected tracks coming up on the shuffle. I am sure that I have not heard 20% of the tracks on this PC even once. I just want to dance.

Was that Richard Dawkins daughter on University Challenge last night? She certainly looked like him and she is about the right age. Pity that St Hildas bombed against Manchester who didn’t even do the gentlemanly thing and let the women get a few in at the end. And so we switched over before the end in good time for A for Andromeda. This had a great claustrophobic atmosphere and despite it being based on an original by Fred Hoyle of the Steady State Theory (which always makes me worry pompously about his scientific credentials), was quite believable in terms of how the remote signal could be turned into a live, walking, talking human being. There was some fast editing which made it slightly disjointed – you cannot build a computer like that without contracting out – and a few points after the arrival of Andromeda herself which seemed a bit far-fetched. But hey – it was a drama, the acting was good, the sets were less gee-whizz than they could have been and the pace was almost right.

Maybe it tried to introduce a few ideas regarding the philosophy of the whole thing which were not developed as they should have been but we are not all scientists or thinkers. Anyway, Arthur C. Clarke did it better with the Conversations with Starglider in The Fountains of Paradise, though Andromeda did raise the question of why an alien intelligence would try to give us all this knowledge for free. (You can actually find the entire text of the conversations here.) Actually no! Starglider withheld knowledge that it considered damaging to humankind. I suppose the question is whether aliens who have developed technology to allow them to communicate or travel over the vast distances that must exist between any civilizations would also have developed the intelligence to totally rid themselves of the petty and limiting behaviour that makes intelligent entities think that behaviour that promotes the existence of the individual over the collective whole is better. Maths, logic, chaos theory applied to societies comes down on the side of long-term altruistic behaviour being better for survival. I really need to re-read The Selfish gene though who says Dawkins is right, not that he says things are in any way as simple as I have maybe suggested they are. Having said this, what if an alien society was so different that things we would find totally unacceptable, were the main trunk of survival?

I am now angry all over again about that teacher from The Learning Curve the other week, the upholder of traditional teaching methods over the holistic approach who complained about a discussion which resulted in the existence of aliens being raised in a project about space. This is a perfectly legitimate part of discussion which would fire any great scientists. We are all held back by the tank-tops who seem to have inherited the institutions which decide on how we are to be taught. We all start out cleverer than our teachers and they know it. The tragedy is that they succeed in beating this out of us.

Not literally in my case – I was once slippered for throwing curry powder, though the punishment was the humiliation rather than any pain inflicted.

SELECT LARK FROM BIRDS_TABLE ORDER BY LARK ASCENDING

Before you write I can be more bothered to write this sentence than I can to go and get the correct character to end the word Bronte. Not that anyone does anyway.

I had to go out to the car just now and all around were the sounds of birds, crows cawing absently, larks over the wall making very spring-like sounds and just the contrapuntal web of various other sounds. I like thinking about the wildlife; they have nothing to worry about because they do not know their own mortality. Survival is just an instinct and there is nothing outside the text of their lives. Anyway – very relaxing when all about is SQL and frames etc.

Trying to work out if some remastering and some extra noodling is enough justification to buy the new release of My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts. This is one of my favourite albums, probably one of the first really weird things I bought on recommendation of the cool people I started working with all those years ago. The vocal samples seem to have burned into my head over time. The one phrase “America is waiting for a message of some sort” doesn’t come from my memory; someone speaks it in to my ear.

I finally got up into attic yesterday, ostensibly to retrieve various BBC videos for my wife, more of which later. I did find an ‘extra’ photo album which along with some pictures of me in a Gallini T-shirt looking about 12, has many of my fellow students and co-workers from my placement with Bristol and West. I was going to scan them in last night to see if anyone recognised themselves. There is a picture of Gareth who I have been trying to locate for some time. I am shamed that I don’t remember his surname but he did divinity at Ox. Or Cam. and started me on Godel, Escher, Bach. Maybe pictures will be up tomorrow but with A for Andromeda on tonight that may not be possible. Anyway, back to the videos. These were the Bronte/Austen things from the early 80s. We started Jane Eyre yesterday and I had to bite my hands to get through the early excuse for child abuse perpetrated by Mr. Brocklehusrt, the nasty pastor who had the young Jane in the fiery pits of hell. We have reached the bit where she first meets Mr. Rochester who personifies the brute in black, the boot in the face. He thinks she is a fairy of some sort because he suspects she charmed his horse out from under him. I cannot tell through the over-acting, whether this is gentle teasing or a genuine belief in the little people. The long scene where Mr Rochester talks to Jane after arriving back at the house where she is Governess to his love child by a feckless French opera singer seems to be no more than Charlotte Bronte carrying out psycho-analysis on herself through the two main characters. Unfortunately it has veered in car-crash territory which means I will have to finish it now despite the hamming by Timothy Dalton. Why did I ever think he was a good James Bond?

It’s an Earth-Rod Earth-Rod, Earth-Rod

Listening to the sounds of the LEO Computers.

I finished A Computer Called LEO yesterday and was happy to see some links other than my old lecturer being involved. LEO computers was formed as a division of Lyons (of the tea-shops and ice-cream) but was eventually merged with the computer division of English Electric which happened to be part of Marconi. They later merged with other manufacturers under the supervision of the Government and the LEO staff became absorbed and subordinate to those from the other companies. The company became ICL which no longer exists with that name having turned into Fujitsu Services. I worked for Marconi though their business had moved on from mainframe computers by the time I got to them – actually they got to me because without moving desks I worked for – Deep Breath – Plessey, GEC-Plessey Telecommunications (GPT) and then Marconi. That great company no longer exists in this country, being split up into two parts one of which is called Telent and the other part which has become part of Ericsson. Not that it matters because I no longer work for either of them. There is another link which has to remain secret for the moment though it does involve the possibility that some of the people I work with actually saw a LEO machine.

The sad part is that like the whole Betamax/VHS thing, the LEO computers were better than those of the other manufacturers and yet did not become the market leaders. In addition the staff had a policy of higher integration with the client companies – a culture of consultancy and investigation rather than ship-it-out-and-forget-it. The sound-bite from the book would be that the management structure at LEO computers was task-based rather than role-based; there was a concentration on getting things done rather than getting things done by specific people. I am sure that management consultants would question the efficiency of this but left to themselves, this is what happens anyway.

It looks like we may go through the same issue with Blue-Ray/HD-DVD.

Oh Michael! Michael

A Ruddy Frame! That’s what!

My daughter requested Bolero as her bedtime music the other day so I made her a mix CD which has now got her into Brian Eno and Pooka along with The Balanescu Quartet’s version of Computer Love which she now keeps requesting because “it is violins and I want to play the violin”. I can’t wait!

I had a dream within a dream today. I first dreamed of a strange, underground cavern, lit in yellow, seemingly made of creamy wet rock which turned out to be bone dry. Turning a corner, I found myself facing a cafeteria integrated into the walls of the cave, empty but lit the same way. I don’t remember anything else, either pre or post but I do recall trying to describe this dream probably because I want to blog it. The question now is am I still in the dream trying to describe me describing the dream. Chuang Tzu has nothing on me.

For some reason, I was thinking about this on the way here this morning and the string of thought got me thinking about A Canterbury Tale while I overtook yet another wagon emblazoned with clichés both visual and verbal. It was for this food company and had the standard cheffy picture of our white-suited-and-hatted hero, holding up a plump pepper with one hand and gesturing to it meaningfully with the other. There he is on the website. I can only imagine that he is making some obscene comment about the comestible in question. The slogan of “Bringing Food To Life” is also meaningless in the extreme. I suppose they may be a very good company; many are. It’s just that the advertising that goes with everything these days seems to be at a low point. I wonder if the companies simply throw their marketing and advertising out to someone else and never bother about it. Private Eye has a regular list of “solutions”, a set of tag lines for companies where the “S” word has simply been inserted into a complex way of describing the company product. “Domestic Waste Management Solutions” for rubbish collection etc.

I seem to have got off the point. Contrast this empty mess of marketing with the gentle visit to the carpenter/wheelwright in A Canterbury Tale. I possibly thought of this because of the bucolic reverie that results from listening to Cider With Rosie. It is of course a pipe dream, to think of going back to those less-complex days and of course there is always what I call “The Rickets factor”. We have things a lot better these days in terms of our welfare. It is just that I suspect our mental welfare suffers because of this complexity. Downsizing has always looked attractive but is of course impractical. I actually grew up in a rural area though my urban origins were obvious to the locals, and winter was hard. In fact a lot of the time was boring despite my rosy view of it from this distance.

That’s a Load of Hyperbolics

“Just put your feet down child, ‘cos you’re all grown up now.”

I am lost in Frames at the moment. I hate HTML frames and I apologise if you like them. Dot net knows nothing of frames and using them seems perverse. I have no option unfortunately.

I had a brainstorm this morning which for a moment convinced me that I could build my own rudimentary computer from egg boxes and the bits that Maplin throw out. When I had calmed down, I remembered the first computer I ever built. It was at school when we were taught how to use index cards with holes and slots as some sort of collation device. They were suspended inside a cornflake packet by knitting needles, each of which corresponded to a specific hole on the cards. Cards with slots conformed to the data that the corresponding hole described so they would let those cards fall when a trapdoor beneath them was opened. I extended this so that it could be used as a calculator to multiply 2 numbers (unless it was a square when ten cards would fall). I was really proud of that. I seem to have gone from then when everything was understandable to now when I know that even the most complex programming I do simply skims the surface of a collection of many technologies. As I said yesterday, I would love to be able to trace back from the high-level language statements I write every day, all the way down to the bits and bytes at the lowest levels. Let’s face it – there isn’t much to what happens - it’s just that there is a lot of it. Sorry! I said that yesterday as well.

Merr Christma Everybod

(sic again)

I found a set of unabridged tapes of Laurie Lee reading Cider with Rosie and As I Walked out One Midsummer Morning. It was in Help the Aged and was signed so I bought it to listen to in the car. I was worried that the author would not have the best voice for this but as befits the poetry of the book, his reading is shot through with feeling for the places and events he talks about. The box is signed by the way.
My dad tells me that he once heard Henry Williamson reading from Tarka the Otter and that he just didn’t have the voice for it, doing the whole thing in an indistinct monotone. I suppose that some of this could be down to nervousness; I am sure I would be the same. Anyway what do you expect of one of Mosley’s cronies? TS Eliot is only slightly better. My wife hates my impression of him reading Prufrock. You can hear it here yourself – TS Eliot, not me. There is an advert at the start so keep listening. Compare and contrast with Sylvia Plath who has the same intonation as Eliot though when just speaking she sounds uncannily like Loyd Grossman.

A poem from some time ago because I can’t write anything good at the moment.

This Numb Age

A Milestone,
a lichened,off-skew post,
flashed by me like a shadow,
not with direction,
just telling me
how far I’d come.

All those Bacchanalian girls,
called me from the screens,
or sirens, bell-like singers
waving, blank but happy
as the sun-set,
intellect evaporated
and my mind became
the gunk that made it,
dragged it from the sea
to make it think.

Here’s Scarlet,
a bleach-bombed
set-square for the
middle-aged and bored,
the blank and breathless
family man.

I am in the galleries
of twenty years ago,
made mad by boredom
and stupidity,
a blank (because it works),
black, aged critic,
dried-up and cynical
(because it always works.)

I would re-think,
push a lever here
to free the sluggish
thoughts of this, my
treacle mind,
and fly back,
to those days of heatwave,
where we sledged in summer,
over the hill like Marie
into the forest and the snow.
And Scarlet turns, Lithuanian,
a memory of Europe in her face,
to kiss the screen to grey.


I will filter all these words,
take them through the bushes
to the bottle-dumps
we found as children,
the festooned, secret places
where we lost money
and dowsed for water-pipes
amongst the rocks and trees.

And every line
wants to start the same way,
the world, the earth is mine,
spinning on my fingers,
every woman mine,
and every friend an equal,
in these underpasses,
the links to hospitals
and those we want to hide.

I photographed the clouds
with red and polarising filters,
made them darker,
as deep white against the sky
as any of my demons.
And Marie cried, across the road
from me, a cousin in those books,
the chief mind of New Jersey,
a princess long thrown
across the ocean,
a ballista bolt re-entered
in this gutted city.

And in her Latin,
I deciphered odd words,
felt the numbers
she discussed, as flowers
falling through the scented air
to me as message
and seduction.

This numb age,
makes me real.
This array of visions
is no more than shadows
on the wall
to prove the life outside
the cave is safety.
I pour water on the fire
and hear it
hissing into darkness.

I’d rather Have That Much Mars


A Computer Called Leo is a wonderful book, full of background but not skimping on the detail of very early computers. The memory on the first British computers was in the form of a 5 foot long tube of mercury which was fed with a series of pulses representing the bytes to be stored. These pulses in the form of sound, took a defined length of time to pass down the entire tube and could then be fed back in to the start. In the EDSAC computer, these tubes gave it the equivalent of 2 KB which for those of us who first cut our teeth on the ZX81 seems quite generous. (Actually, that is not true. My first computer program was written out on coding sheets and typed in by nice people at the council offices. We received a print out of the results and a nice roll of paper tape with the code on it. I did have that first roll for ages but it seems to have gone missing). The tubes were originally used to filter out stationary objects in radar returns. If you take an incoming radar signal, delay it by a short time, feed it back into it’s own input, you can work out what part of the signal was there in the previous cycle and take it out. This removes things like trees, hills and large assemblages of nougat, leaving only moving stuff like falling whales and Messerschmitts. Of my two most intrepid aunts, the one who was in the WRAF and looked after teams of Radar operators and battle-plotters, actually worked with the guys who invented the mercury delay tubes. I never really asked her about her history but various things have come together. Freddie Williams who was instrumental in building the tubes for use in radar, worked at the Telecommunications Research Establishment in Malvern (where I come from) which possibly explains why my aunt came to be in Malvern as well. She also talked a lot about the Manchester computer experiments which by any definition were the first stored-program computers. The British obsession with secrecy probably gave the original award for this to the Americans. Both the radar stuff and the Colossus computers at Bletchley Park were lost in the OSA and indeed in the case of colossus, destroyed along with all their design notes. The last two Colossus machines were kept at GCHQ and were finally destroyed in the 60s. Interestingly, Public Key Encryption was invented at GCHQ years before Diffie-Hellman but was kept secret.

For some time now I have tried to follow some sort of basic course about the hardware of computers but never get the time. The fantastic thing about the first machines is that it is actually possible for one person to understand the whole thing. It’s a bit like a fractal; you might not be able to handle all or even more than a few of the numbers but the process by which the results are produced is simple enough to code in one page. The architecture of a basic computer is quite simple; it just brings together lots of simple parts to make a whole which can handle complex operations.