Is this the real life

Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen

I remember when our family got our first colour TV.  It was 1975 and Bohemian Rhapsody was number 1.  The set was hired from Radio Rentals in Salisbury and delivered to our home just 2 miles from Stonehenge.

It was pre-tuned to pick up all the available broadcast channels. That was a grand total of three - BBC1, BBC2 and ITV (a second ITV channel, Channel 4, was still 7 years away).  The TV stations all closed down every evening with a stirring rendition of "God Save The Queen", to be followed by white noise and an incessant whine.  Next day when the TV started up again we sometimes had many hours of the 'test card', used by TV engineers to tune the set in when there was no actual programme broadcasting on the frequency.  On BBC2, that may well have been after lunch.

 A 22 inch TV circa 1975, complete with test card transmission  

How things have changed.  My kids are now much the same age as I was then but their multimedia experience is from a different time and space.  They see the 1975 TV scene as pretty lame.  Jump forward to 2013 and their family TV is a full high definition LCD, connected directly to the internet via a computer router, replete with digital video recorder, surround sound, Blu-ray and various games consoles.  It has quite a few more channels, many beamed in from distant parts of the world.  There are more remote controls on the coffee table than my wife can cope with (although funnily enough the kids never seem to have any trouble working out what each one does).

I don't know what the standard size TV is that people buy now but I guess a 39 -42 inch would probably be de rigueur. I could have splashed out on a 55" model but I thought I might have been pushing my luck to smuggle that one into the lounge so I got a middle of the range 42". So, I've ended up with a TV twice as big as the one I grew up watching.  I'd have thought that was reward enough.  Not so.

Sharp has recently released an LED television aimed at the consumer market that has a 90 inch display.  It's certainly not the biggest TV out there but as a consumer device for you to put in your front room that is a serious amount of display real estate.  I'll be checking it out in store next time I'm out and about.  This is something I just have to see.

What can I say?

Sharp unveils 90" Aquos LED TV (Engadget)

When a girl and a clown ruled the airwaves (Guardian UK)

South West England Vintage Television Museum

Back in the day

Apple 1 (1976) - how far we have come

Fancy owning a piece of computer history?  Are you flush with cash?  Well, you may need to be if you want to own this first of its kind personal computer.  The Apple 1 was lovingly crafted (and autographed) by Steve Wozniak as a practically hand-built device, back in the dim and distant past of 1976.  Check out a copy of the Apple 1 owner's manual.

Personally signed by Wozniak himself

I thought my Sinclair ZX81 was primitive but this takes the biscuit.  Seeing that tape machine brought back horrible memories of trying in vain to load up programs from cassettes, only to get loading errors and having to start all over again. And you try and tell the young people of today that . . . they won't believe you.

Check out this link to see how much one of these Apple 1s sold for last year.   No, I couldn't believe it either.

You even had to make your own case for the Apple 1

Overnight this latest auction has netted a price of $US650,000, according to this BBC news story.  Apparently, only 100 Apple 1s were ever made and there are just 6 known working models left in the world.  What would you  be prepared to pay for one?

Apple 1 up for grabs (Mashable)

Wozniak original fetches $650,000 at auction (BBC)

Apple 1 Microcomputer Museum (youTube)

ZX81 memories

Modern art

Cave art

Victorian ladies immortalised on film

Capturing images for posterity has occurred as long as man has walked this earth.  It started with primitive people carving on cave rock.  We have archaeologists to thank for bringing us huge numbers of antiquities that capture the life of our forebears on murals, ornaments and temple walls.  Development of paints that last for hundreds or thousands of years have long allowed artists to pass their work on down through the generations.

When photography was developed people could for the first time capture an image of exactly what they saw rather than having to draw, carve or sculpt a representation of it.

We are so lucky because we still have this vast historical treasure trove to enjoy plus we have all the same methods of capturing life's wonders.

The additional advantage we have over our forebears is that we can now photograph scenes that we ourselves have not seen and may never see with our own eyes.  Thanks to marvels of telescopes, cameras on space probes and immensely powerful computers to process the incoming data from the galaxy, we are treated to stunning photographs of worlds way beyond our planet.

It's an art form made possible through the application of technology.

Cassini photo of Saturn (false colour composite image)

Check out some stunning space images every day at Wired.com

Oh the humble bar code

Bar Code

An historical technology that’s still enormously useful today is the bar code.

We see them everywhere – on every product we buy from the supermarket, retail store.

They are used the world over for inventory control.  They identify the product model, the manufacturer.  They can uniquely identify millions of products, wherever in the world they are used.

Given that they use a pretty lo-fi monochrome series of vertical bars they can be printed on a huge number of materials, they are incredibly precise.  Built-in error prevention exists in the form of a check digit line that uses an algorithm to ensure the code has been scanned accurately.

Although we seldom give them much thought they are one of those base technologies that our modern world needs.  Without the ability to rapidly scan large numbers of products we couldn’t have supermarkets or retail warehouses of the convenience we expect.  Throughput of product counting, selling, warehousing would be drastically reduced. 

QR Code

Barcodes took retail sales out of the corner shop era.  They mean that shops no longer need to price each article, the price can be adjusted immediately without any re-pricing of the individual items.

The vast depots of Amazon and Walmart could never be accessed without barcodes and derivatives.  Supermarkets couldn’t draw on the in-depth sales analysis that tells them precisely who bought what and how much.

It’s a technology that will be with us for many years to come.  It’s given rise to other optical marks such as the QR codes that can hold so much more information, such as web URLs.

Humble but such a vital part of modern commerce.