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Episode: 3083
Title: HPR3083: Mumbling while on lockdown
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3083/hpr3083.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 16:27:18
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 383 for Wednesday 27 May 2020.
Today's show is entitled Mumbling While On Lockdown. It is hosted by Dave Morris
and is about 50 minutes long
and carries an explicit flag. The summer is
two Edinburgh-based hosts have a chat from their respective houses.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by An Honesthost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code
HPR15. That's HPR15.
Better web hosting that's Honest and Fair at An Honesthost.com.
Music
Hello everybody
and welcome to Hacker Public Radio.
This is Dave Morris
and I'm talking to Mr. X. Hi Mr. X, how are you doing?
Hi Dave, doing fine and doing fine and these interesting things we're loving him.
Indeed indeed.
So we're just doing the thing that I think more and more people are doing
which is just getting together over Mumble Wars or other methods
just to have a chat, you know, because that's sitting in your house
without a much chance of talking to anybody is a bit frustrating.
So it's quite nice to virtually get out and have a wee chat.
So that's what we're doing.
Yes indeed indeed.
Of course, it's also been a video chatting and whatnot
with other members of the family and whatnot.
And my mother's becoming very...
or fear with hangouts and whatnot.
And my mother's been using duals.
Which as soon as it seemed to be a bit of a kind of mess
at Google's done with the video conference and they've got the dual
which kind of replaced hangouts, but it doesn't do text, chat, you know,
you can't do text, you want to do video.
And I didn't even really know anything about duals.
My brother was telling me he's an IT, so it seems a bit of a mess.
All right, I don't know anything about it.
So actually, I was telling you earlier that I had a wee chat
with a friend using Jitsi during the week.
We just used the Jitsi Meet thing, which is a web-based thing.
So you just go to it and start up a chat and it gives you a name.
I think you can probably give it your own name and then share it
with your friends or whoever you're speaking to.
And I think this password is involved or can be, but we didn't bother with that.
So that seemed to work quite well.
It does have a text stream as well.
So you can, when I was having problems with my microphone,
we were able to say, baby, then can you hear me?
You know, some stuff over the text, which is quite cool.
Yeah, yeah, it's a favourable word.
We just had a wee chat before we hit the record button.
And I did have a weeb cam many years ago and I gave it to my mother
and I thought, did you ever use it?
So next time I see her from a distance,
it's a socially acceptable distance.
I'll ask her if she can place it somewhere between us
and I can pick it up.
Yeah, that'd be quite good.
I should say, by the way, just as a digression,
I'm sitting in my back room with my house,
but sort of back kitchen, dining room,
with the back door open,
because it's really nice weather.
And my name's Kate's right.
I'm passionate about it.
So you will hear noises off,
but it's all part of the ambience, I think.
Yeah, I'm sitting in the spare room,
hobby room, stroke video room,
and it's cooking.
So yeah, I'm sure it'll manage.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's just,
I forget sometimes,
because I've done recordings like this in the past,
and then I'm listening to them and they think,
oh, it's bird song on it.
You know, there's this,
some twittering bird outside in the back garden
or a crow or something shouting.
And you think, oh,
what the hell that comes across to people at the end?
Yeah, well, I actually had that.
I think I had another diada.
I was down in the garden at the back of the garden.
It's not, I think it was garden.
And I had a tablet with me,
and I gave my mother a call,
and it was really weird,
because I had to turn the brightness
fairly high up on the screen, obviously.
But, you know, it was fine.
And of course, she could see all the greenery in the garden
and whatnot.
And I was surprised, you know,
the life I signal held up really nice.
And we found our internet connection has been good
and solid so far,
so of course,
all these people online,
it might be an issue,
but we've been doing all right, you know?
Yeah, I can't complain either.
It's been pretty good.
I'm actually on an internet connection,
because I've got a lot of wiring in my house,
so I like to use that over the wire,
rather than the Wi-Fi for a lot of things.
But that's just me.
My kids would not bother at all if they were here.
They don't use it.
Even the way, I'm actually got an eight-port network switch
on the kitchen table here,
so sometimes when they come to visit for dinner or something,
the laptops and tablets and things come out
and they say,
Dad, is there a port I could use on that
and they plug in?
And so it's a new fitting on the dining and table these days,
which is, I don't know if that's ultra geeky or just realistic.
Yeah, that kind of made people
that have a multi-port switch
and they're hubbing the room table.
It works, it works.
But you see my daughter,
I'm not seeing them much,
they don't live with me at the moment,
but they do come in for a quick visit every so often.
You know, we sit the right,
because the distance apart.
But my daughter earlier on this year was doing a lot of study
and she used to like to come over here
and use this big kitchen table for stuff
and she'd say,
oh, can I just plug my laptop in?
To get a better signal than on the Wi-Fi.
But it's a fairly rare thing.
I think it's just sort of getting access to weird systems
and stuff,
or maybe the university's system
that she's using or something like that.
So it seemed like the right thing to do, though.
Maybe there's a time will come when there won't be an eight-port switch
on the table here, but we'll see.
I used to have an old BT router
and it was hacked, not by myself,
but obviously it was originally locked down to BT,
and I had a very limited number of ports on the back.
So I've got myself a cheap switch
and I used that for a while.
So I don't have something like that here,
but now we have another router
which has got a few more ports on it.
I don't actually have as many ports as I used to have,
because with the switch I had more,
but I can just about squeeze into the four ports on the back
and I use Wi-Fi for the other bits and pieces.
But I tell you, I think I noticed was,
when I got this tablet,
I discovered obviously Wi-Fi's, I think I'm very touched on this before,
obviously the Wi-Fi standards have gone up and up and up,
and my Nexus 7 was so key,
but I've discovered that my Wi-Fi speed across the network,
because just transferring from machine to machine
is way faster than the Ethernet,
so it's just surprising.
Yeah, well, yes, you're right, you're right.
I've actually got two routers in the house.
I probably mentioned this before,
but I had one that my ISP said was failing.
You know, the Wi-Fi network side was failing,
which happens.
I don't disbelieve them,
but of course the rest of it was working,
so I've actually transferred it through to the back of the house,
and I'm just using it as a bridge system,
so it's got network switches, network ports on it,
but it's also got a whole load more wireless connection,
so maybe that's why my kids tend to not to be asking for direct connection
so much these days,
because the wireless is better, but yeah, yeah.
I see that nowadays a lot of,
if you go and buy some of the more upmarket routers,
they come as a sort of cluster of machines, in some cases.
I've not really got into this.
I'm sure other people will know a lot more about this,
and I do.
I see some like the Google selling routers,
and they come as a sort of a cluster,
which you put all over the house,
and they network between each other.
I made a sort of matrix,
or whatever you'd call it,
mesh, I think, mesh networking between them.
Obviously dealing with the instance where
your reception is good here,
but not so good there, because of the walls in the wire or whatever.
Which is interesting.
It's quite interesting.
Yeah, yeah, it's funny.
I don't know, I do have people who have,
they should have had issues with the Wi-Fi and whatnot,
maybe because the house isn't so big,
and I don't know.
I was at the bottom of the garden,
and I had a video conference,
and it was working fine as well.
I don't really need any extenders,
but I think it's probably more to do the fact
that the house isn't anything else.
I think the walls are not like solar stone or anything like that,
so jobs that absorb some of my growth and whatnot.
Wi-Fi is okay for me to be.
My work in IT at the university down the road
is from here.
Again, Wi-Fi around that place was a nightmare,
because a lot of the buildings are steel framed things.
When they build a good structure,
and then they do glass fill,
or a concrete panel or something in between,
and so to get reception wise,
reception through them was a total nightmare.
No, I think I was involved with it,
but even though the guys had to do that swearing about it.
The building we were in had a sort of corrugated iron skin on the outside.
It was not corrugated iron,
but it was a sort of metallic skin on the outside of the building,
because it was trendy in architects thought it was good.
Of course, that led to all sorts of problems as well.
Couldn't get a...
Still can't get a phone signal in the place.
You have to go out to use your phone.
So, also, it's a clever thing.
Wow.
That's all court, yeah.
I've got to...
It's just a standard router that came with ISP,
and it got slated.
The router, when it came out,
and just recently I got an alternative stone.
If you send it for another so many months,
we'll make it cheaper, and you'll get a new router.
So, I've got that anyway, but I don't want a new router.
I'm happy the one I've got.
Just give me the cheaper contract,
but it no longer end up with my new router,
but it doesn't even take me to the box.
So, I'm quite happy with this one.
It's all set up, and I can't be bothered
if we can figure it out on a router.
So, I've just missed it.
I've just missed it.
I've just missed it.
It's...
They seem to be fairly disposable these things, don't they?
My daughter had a...
when she was away at university,
living in a flat with some friends and stuff.
And it came with the router,
and then at the end of the contract, when they left,
said, well, do you want your router back?
Said, oh, no, you can have it.
So, it's in this house somewhere,
so I'm not quite sure what to do with it.
It's probably something you do with it.
It's probably hackable,
but there's too many things to play with here,
so I haven't done anything with it.
Yeah, and that's a double of these things.
Like the BT, this one, that one will be a lot to talk talk.
So, I'll give you a couple of other talk talks
I'll mix that up.
So, you won't really use it,
unless you hack it as you see.
Yeah, yeah.
There's also facts that you can come across.
I've not looked on looking for that particular one,
but other ones I've seen where people show that,
if you bridge these two points on the circuit board,
then you can do a fact you reset on it,
and then your liberty to do whatever you like,
even put new firmware on some of them.
So, you know, some of the ones that are compatible
with OpenWRT and that type of thing.
Which is feel than used to be,
but you can do it.
Oh, yeah, it's OpenWRT.
I looked into that,
because I had myself one of these slugs.
I didn't actually end up doing anything with it,
but remember the open...
What was it doing?
Yeah, the slug thing.
Yeah, yeah.
I don't remember.
It was probably nine mores.
Yeah, yeah.
I've known a number of people have these over the years,
and they were quite a thing at one time.
They're a bit slow now, I think.
Yeah, well, that's it.
I never really got anywhere with it.
I had great plans for doing something with it,
but I never did.
So, it was always the time, really.
Yeah.
I am in the early days of household computing and stuff.
I bought myself,
way before the Raspberry Pi era,
I bought myself one of these plug computer things,
which was...
What was it called?
Oh, Shiva plug.
Shiva plug.
So, that's just a little arm processor in a box.
It wasn't actually part of the plug,
but some of them were.
It was a separate box on the end of a cable.
But it ran devian,
and I used to use it quite a lot, actually, for a while.
It was pretty weedy, especially when the Raspberry Pi started to come out.
It looked quite feeble.
But I still got it, and I was thinking the other day,
I wonder if I could actually put something useful on there
and get it back to life again?
So, it's not actually dead,
but it will have a very, very, very old Linux version on it,
and I think a lot of the support for these things is gone.
But be quite nice to resurrect it just so I can say,
you know, it's still usable.
Yeah, I remember with these Shiva plug things,
looking in the envy of thinking,
oh, I should have bought that rather than the slug thing,
because I think we bit after the slug,
and they did look a bit more fun,
and there was a bit more you could do with it.
So, well, I remember it was a typical Cany Scott.
I bought this thing.
I've not been buying another one.
No, no, it's probably very wise.
I changed my own issue once the Raspberry Pi came out,
and started to buy them whenever they took me,
because they're so relatively cheap,
especially the zeroes for a five,
or whatever it was in the first instance.
Amazing, so you have a few of those knocking around the house.
Yeah, I never bought a Pi zero,
and I never got down to that,
and it's so cheap,
but I've got three or four Pi's around the house,
and I think there's a Pi three years,
and most recently I haven't got the four,
but yeah, I've got very, very useful,
great devices, you know.
Absolutely.
But Pi four is a bit of a mixed blessing,
still I think it's with all the heat issues,
and the fact that you can't boot them off the USB,
which is what I'd been doing,
which is the way my Pi three is set up.
I've just got the one three, I can't remember that.
So I've got SSDs,
and plugged them into these various machines,
and it was great to be able to put the entire operating system
on the SSD, and then boot it from there,
without the need for an SD card at all, you know.
That was entirely possible,
but it's not possible with four at the moment.
So you've dropped out there, Dave?
Oh, you hear me?
Yes, yes, but it was great to be able to put the entire,
and then you dropped out of that moment out of my ear.
That's very strange.
You hear me still?
Yeah, loud and clear.
Maybe in my finger slipped off the push to tool button or something.
No, just to say that being able to boot off the SSD
without needing an SD card at all,
I thought it was quite good,
you can just do the boot of the SD card on the Pi4,
and then do the rest of the SSD,
but I haven't got around to setting that up yet.
But why didn't it make that available from day one, I don't know?
Yeah, I've never taken any of that.
I've always been very, very happy with the SD card.
It's funny, people have complained,
I've had people complain,
oh, I've been, about, about, about,
tracking SD cards in their Pi,
and also about the sound as well.
And it's funny that the SD card,
I've never had a single SD card failing any of my Pi's.
I think I've probably still got the original SD card
that had my very, very first Pi kicking out here somewhere.
And I've got a Pi3,
which runs every single day, non-stop,
and it's never crashed,
and I've upgraded the card a few, a couple of times.
And all the audio as well,
you know, okay, it was a little bit clicking,
popping in the early days,
and I used a lot of processing,
if you checked, you know,
the top of whatever you'd see,
but using a bit of the processing.
But now, there's so much firmware hacking going on
by the Pi Institute, you know,
that it uses halfway any processing,
and I think I'll do sounds great.
I mean, I use it on my colours headphones,
and certainly more than good enough for voice,
and I'd probably even good enough for music,
as well with Arca, you know?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that sounds good.
Yeah, you're right, it has come on a lot, hasn't it?
And a lot of clever add-ons,
hardware add-ons for the pies,
for the improved things a lot.
It's a very fancy audio add-ons.
I see quite expensive ones,
in some cases, that you can, you can burn.
So yeah, a lot of possibilities,
sticking with the Pi, regardless, I guess, is the way.
I haven't had one SD card fail, I think.
I think it did.
My original Pi,
the first generation of the Model A,
or whatever it was called.
So what it was called, I've forgotten.
It's just here on the shelf beside me,
but I was using that for a while,
as a cups driver for my old inkjet printer.
It's a laser jet, now it's just an inkjet.
I didn't, I didn't waste my show about it,
but it failed eventually than the Pi.
And I think it was the card,
though I've not actually investigated.
It's here because I was going to try and resurrect it
with a new card and put one of these very minimal versions
of something on it,
and, according to Miranda,
did a show recently where he was talking about.
And it was tiny cool.
Did he put one more of these?
So I was going to give that a shot,
to see if that was usable on the top.
Yeah, tiny cool.
I've had a wee clip of that many, many years ago.
That was fun.
And quite amazing, we distro.
And I was speaking to you,
I think last time in time,
to work with this small minimal distro,
I've been playing with, before,
it was populinix, that was a one.
I couldn't remember the name of it,
but populinix.
Well, you knew that, didn't you remember?
Is that still going?
I don't think so.
No, I think it's moved on.
Somebody was talking about that on a podcast recently.
I don't remember the details.
I think it's changed name,
and it's been sort of subsumed into something else.
I believe, but I don't know the details.
Yeah, well, funny feeling,
did it not bark when you put it up or something like that?
Something better than that.
I think I ran it because,
did it not come with a bunch of useful tools
for investigating discs and that type of stuff?
So you could use that as a means of looking
over a possibly dead disc from another system.
Possibly.
Am I confusing over something else?
Well, am I, am I, am I, am I, am I, am I, am I, am I, am I,
maybe I'm getting confused with pop,
the different type of populinix.
Well, I remember, was it dance mallinix?
Was that the other one I tried?
I can't remember.
There was a few I did try.
There was one I was using on a machine,
which, which wasn't mine.
There was just a way to get a,
a Linux prompt to experiment sort of thing.
I can't remember whether it was dance mallinix
or popularinix or one of these,
these ones anyway.
So, but I can't remember very much about it.
It was really interested in getting that,
a bash prompt rather than else, you know?
Absolutely, absolutely.
No, I think I just played around it.
I've seen years and years and, you know,
and it's too, too, to any great degree.
But, too, it was cool.
Maybe it was an old laptop or something else.
I ran it on a curry.
I really can't remember.
I still have,
still got my daughter's old laptop,
which is pretty weedy now.
I'm trying to think what to put on that.
So, trouble is though.
You go and resurrect old machines.
Then,
there's always, there's not always a good use on them.
And with the Raspberry Pi,
they're not using it much power.
Whereas, you know,
using old desktop or an old laptop,
then you can potentially have this thing running,
running along each time.
And then using up quite a lot of electricity.
It just goes against the grain a bit.
Yeah, yeah, that's right.
You were talking about the,
what's it now?
Or it was a print server using cut sandwiches.
I did that for a while as well,
on my old compact server.
And that I was planning on using
my Raspberry Pi to take over from that.
But it ever happened.
And I just thought,
I kind of moved it close to the print,
the PC anyway,
so that I could just plug this USB plug in and that'll fix it.
That was just too easy.
Yeah, yeah.
It was just one of those challenges I set myself.
And it was really happy when I actually managed to solve it.
In fact, it's one of those printers with a scanner in it.
And I think within the past couple of months,
maybe a bit longer now,
my daughter came in saying,
Dad, I've got this thing.
Can you scan it?
And I was thinking, wow.
And yes, the answer was yes,
I could scan it from my desktop machine,
believing me,
the other one was in the front of the house.
The printer.
And I was able to grab the scan off it still.
It was quite surprised that
I've got to put a different pie on it to act as the cup server.
I knew a pie.
So yeah, it did work.
But it's just once a year you get asked to do things like that.
I find that.
And I've very, very rarely scanned stuff myself.
Yeah, I've got a bog stand-up sort of,
kind of scan off which is compatible with on it.
That works fine.
Canon scan, I think it is.
But it's funny, I am.
I had, when I had my network printer set up through cups
on my server.
I had a, the printer could print onto DVDs and CDs.
You remember, and that was all the rage.
So there was a dedicated CD DVD printing application
that came with the printer,
or maybe I bought a Canon member.
And of course, that only ran on Windows, of course.
I guess it was maybe Windows XP or something like that.
And I had my, and of course I didn't.
I didn't really.
I mean, I tend to use Linux when I can.
And I very rarely use Windows.
But I had this happen.
Of course, there's an option to print to a network printer.
And it's not the standard Windows network printer.
It's, it's where you'll know more, I can't really remember
enough little bit of cups now.
But it was actually able to get Windows to talk this cup server.
And it would actually spit out a desk.
No, I've got an error at the end of it.
Or there's a critical error that didn't work.
And then out came the desk.
And I said, oh, that's my perfect way.
So, yeah.
So I was amazed.
I could print something in XP through these cups on my server.
Let's say the room.
So I think.
The cups are actually pretty good.
We did a lot of work with that at work.
You know, we used it a lot is what I mean.
Because in the, in the various days when PCs appeared,
getting stuff printed off PCs was a, was a real pain.
And there were, there were various.
There was things like LPR.
It was a thing called LPRNG.
It was called LPR next generation.
And then cups, as I recall, that let you do some quite smart things.
We had a photocopier.
It was a big photocopier, which I think it was mainly used by the department
to produce documentation and stuff.
It was a huge great thing.
And it, I discovered, it was on the network.
It can put on the network.
And I discovered that it was actually just a printer.
So you could print, so you could do double-sided A3 with it.
And I think you could also print stuff.
And it had a binding capability.
And no idea why we had this sort of printing and binding capability
in the, in the department.
But we did.
And I say to be the only one who used most of it at one time.
Great.
Great stuff.
Yeah, very good.
Of course, because the tattoo did an episode, one of the great episodes,
because it became a, by mistake, it became a bit of a cups' experience.
So, and I know what you, it was since I think about how he sort of stumbled
across the bit behind, you know, the cup server.
And you know, you look through your suit as a web client.
It seems to me, you pop your address in the bar at the top.
And then you get right into cups.
So I think it's like, oh, this is the stack, it's a new little sort of thing, you know?
Yeah, yeah, it's got a lot of features.
It's really quite cool.
And a lot of these network printers and stuff also have quite sophisticated interface.
You can access through web servers in my fairly limited experience.
So, but yes, the whole business of printing on fancy stationery and stuff is quite fun.
But the university worked out, there was a point at which our land printers on a mainframe,
we used to generate the student matriculational cards.
And they had special stationery, which had, you know, sheet of paper with a card,
stuck to it.
And the printer would have to go and print their name and, you know,
a matriculation number, all sorts of stuff on this card.
And then spit it out.
And then somebody took the card off the sheet of paper and handed it to the student,
because they've got pre printed for the students arrived.
And, yeah, so I was a little bit involved in in that and say now, I can so forth.
It is enormous fun.
It's a university is a stranger like that, because you can, there's a certain element of messing about
or, you know, having a bit more leisure to get a thing to work, or there was.
That was the case back in the 80s and 90s and stuff, less so now.
But, yeah, a lot of fun in that area.
Yeah, it's funny.
I think, I think, I don't know whether it's an age thing, you know,
whether, you know, you just remember things with rose tinted glasses and stuff.
But I hear this all over and over again that, you know, you had more time to do things in the past
and things more satisfying, you know, you get hands on and there's less and less in that now.
It's just, everything's just, just sit on the computer and say,
we used to do big print jobs.
We did with, it was like folded,
don't make friction with these kind of, what do you call it?
If the folded sheets, they go, you know, left, right, left, right,
and a big, big pile, basically.
You can go back and forward and come in and tear bits off,
you should do big print ones sort of thing of computer program listings and whatnot.
So, yeah, that was, that was.
Yeah, that was pretty much the stuff I was involved with when I first started working in IT.
Fan fold, 132 column line printer paper stuff.
The sort that you, you would get and it had alternate green and white bars on it or something like that.
That's right, fan fold, I couldn't think of a word.
That's exactly it, yes.
It's quite holds down the side and all that sort of good stuff.
Yeah, yeah, we also work for these great big, the able of discs.
You know, huge big things are like a big giant pizza,
that's sort of like a pizza box.
And you pull the front face down on the device and on the drive.
I mean, it was a size of a coffee table and it would hold,
I think it holds a hell of a massive five megabytes of data.
And see, you slide it into the front, the machine and you've lifted the wall.
I was almost like a bit like a big, often nut or almost like a,
so if you were a toaster or something, you'd pull the thing down and you would slide the big,
drive into it and then push it back up again and you'd flick a switch from,
from a load to run and it would slowly build up and build up and build up and you'd,
you know, a big clunk and a big flag would pop up this show that the heads had engaged.
And yeah, five megabytes of hell.
Yeah, I do remember those times, oh wow, yeah, yeah.
I probably told the story before, but in 1987 I remember the year very,
very clearly because at the University I was at the,
because it was in the days when universities used to get funded centrally for their
computer facilities and they got mainframes and stuff.
We finished the seven years that we were funded for our mainframe at the time
and we were allowed by government.
This is a government body that had all that money to buy a new,
a new machine for the students and stuff.
And we ended up spending about 1.1 million,
which is a lot in 1987 on a couple of deck faxes.
Yeah, one point, one point one million it was,
it felt a big real two massive big machines networking with handle
or something like 200 and odd simultaneous connections from terminals,
of course, and they had always a ray of big machines with disks in them.
So there was like a stack of disks one on top of the other and they stood almost as
high as, you know, sort of fridge freezer does these days.
You know, the sort of big, big almost walk in fridge freezes you see nowadays,
each one of these and they had like three disks in them.
And the total disk capacity for this 1.1 million quid's worth of machine was
one gigabyte from the entire university.
Wow.
People just can't comprehend how things would, you know,
if you have a certain age, you just wouldn't comprehend that.
You know, I think I'm sure the first company PC in office,
I think there's something like 100,000 pounds,
something like that.
I can't remember.
Something crazy like that for one PC or something like that.
Yeah, the things were just so expensive.
Even a dot, even a dot meat expenter would be
positively expensive for the everyday person, you know.
Yeah, yeah.
It was all, it was probably, they were so rare.
I guess that was part of why the process was so high.
They wouldn't become commodities at that point.
There's also a massive markup on it, I suspect.
It's the machine that we got rid of in 1987.
It was a boroughs mainframe, boroughs being a company that's long gone now.
But great, great chunk of a thing.
And I think two guys arrived in, we sold it for square.
Two guys arrived in sort of low loader thingies
and thought left did it the bits of it into the bag of it.
And you can see the suspension on these things sort of way down at the bottom.
No way they wanted to go over any significant bumps.
But the stories once, those were going to be sold into Africa.
Are they probably going to be put back into years again?
You know, it was a, it was a very scientific world then.
Yeah, yeah.
But I think we tended to have a equipment that was, you know, old heart,
probably even when I joined, because we were using punch card machines.
They were amazing because they were like, it's like a big hoover.
You know, you would, you would power up the whole hopper back.
I need to have your stack of cards, which you were very careful not to drop.
Because if you did, you'd have a hell of a job getting them back in the right order again.
So put them in a hop bar and you push the button and it would build up.
For all of us, it seemed like a great big hoover.
I need to get a giant sucking noise.
I would just fly through this machine or often not just jam halfway through.
And that was to boot the machine up, you know, computer up.
Yeah, I see those sorts of things.
Yeah, the boroughs machine that we had before had, it was all, love it was punch cards.
And as a student, I had, you used to get a thing with like a small suitcase,
which was the width of a 80 column punch card.
And you, you put your card deck in there and then it was sort of locked.
It was locked the lid down and there's a handly controller around it.
Because, well, the target, if you, if you ever dropped that a lot, as you say,
you find and putting them all back together in order of the nightmare.
Even though in those days people would, there was a machine that would put sequence numbers on them,
on the columns from, whether it was 72 onwards or something,
they'd put a sequence on them and you could actually take that deck to a collater
and get sorted according to that number.
But you'd need to have been really careful about putting anything you added to that card deck
you would have to make sure that you put numbers on it on the cards which interleaved
in the right place with the cards already there, you know.
So yeah, had a little bit, so there's never dropped one.
Well, we never had anything as fancy as that.
You know, we were the collaters if we dropped it, we had to fix it.
And then I've seen, I've seen great big piles up in the desk, you know,
a few feet high sort of thing, but I've seen people carrying big piles of them.
You know, you just tap rubber bands out of it.
You know, that's how we was going to keep them together with a big rubber band.
Yeah, yeah. I've seen that as well. I've seen that as well.
I once saw that this was a Manchester University when I was a student.
I saw a guy come from the computer department with his punch cards
and a big pile of printer on the top of it.
There's something which must have been six, eight inches thick or something like that,
maybe even more.
And he had that balance on top of his cards and he walked around the corner
and he'd have anything on the top of the printer just wet down and it was a windy day.
And then between the buildings of the university,
you used to get some incredible, you know,
winds and little mini tornadoes and stuff.
And his entire stack of printout just got sucked up into the air by a mini tornado
and disappeared.
It was tragic.
I think it was completely wrecked because it sort of mashed up and sent all over the place.
Oh, yeah, yes.
Of course with the dice.
Oh, Craig, that's something else.
You're talking about suitcases.
Just reminding me, these Diablo discs, as I say, they were.
I mean, if you imagine the size of the, you know, the seating,
the seat cushion of the seating portion of a room office seat.
And it was probably that diameter, maybe even more than that, in fact.
And they had case thing, maybe, I would lower the low and then she'd eat something like that.
And I remember that are with a clerk in office and he was given this fancy device,
it was a big, it was a big sort of aluminum clad suitcase.
And it looked, honestly, it looked like something out of either a mission impossible thing
or something, maybe James Bond or maybe Joe Ninth or something like that, people have certainly
as well know all these sort of things. It was a silver chrome thing all around even chrome
and really really expensive. What's going to be inside this thing is amazing. You know,
it looks so, so high-tech and you open it up and it was almost like a record deck thing
and you basically placed the Diablo disc on this device and it had base attachments
he clipped on in various places and opened the, there's a kind of slice it would open
so the head could get in and then there was like vena calipers that lay on top of the
disc surface and you could rotate the disc and look for wobble, you know, as a disc
buckled by more than x percentage if it is then it will refueled and all this. It's
just to check the integrity of the disc sort of thing, you know.
And of course the heads of the disc was too wobbly I think.
Yeah and that's exactly it, you know, so the whole host of, you checked for, you checked
that sort of edge to make sure it wasn't moving in and out basically and also up and down
as well and in VH other tests he did another thing, you know, and there was counters and
all sorts of things but I thought it just looked so high tech, I think it came from America
typical, you know, it helps the Americans make things look very flashy and look, you
know, like something out of a movie sort of thing, I was just to pass with the way it
looked basically.
Yeah, yeah, some of the technology back in those days it did look very, very impressive
isn't it? Yeah, yeah, it's, so I was, something I was seeing recently, I can't remember
where I saw it on the, on the web some web apps, there was some excitement over the ability
back in the day to visualise the contents of magnetic tape, I think maybe something like
that. I have seen that done, you know, magnetic tape has got sort of recording in, I mean
computer stuff, half inch stuff, it did get recorded in chunks with tape marks in between
and stuff like that, so there was this thing, there was a liquid you could get which was
very, very, very fine iron filings in some sort of a medium, I don't know what it was
like alcohol or something like that and you had to put your tape out onto a flat smooth
surface and paint this stuff onto it with a little, little brush thing and then it would
all align itself according to the magnetic recording on the tape, so you could, the idea
was that you could spot in a faulty tape where to cut it or splice it around where the
tape marks were, because the tape marks were just sort of clear, clear spots on the tape
so yeah, I remember seeing somebody doing that and then being taught how to do it was
often, because I had the job of doing some mag tape restoration or recovery after they
got wrecked, you know, they got jammed in the machine and stretched and then you'd cut it
at the coming point and then try and re-read from the sort of last good spot on the tape,
I'd never seen them spliced actually, because it would be really hard, they moved so fast
if a splice caught inside the machinery, it would wreck even further, I would imagine,
but yeah, it's, oh, it seemed like clearly cool stuff now, it sounds okay, I can read,
no?
Well, it's funny, I know we're talking about, there was, I saw an episode, because it was
a series, it was in the 80s when Channel 4 here in the UK was called The Secret Life
of Machines and it was done by, I think, a chap called Tim Hunkin and he was, he did
one on the video recorder and of course, he took it from the very early, so he just
didn't know how, how, how, how did we first record things, it was about wax cylinders
and whatnot and all the way up to eventually get the video recorder, oh, I just had to
climb this just now, hold on a wee second, and that was my mother trying to call me, she
wondered what's happened and hope she doesn't try again, oh no, anyway, so they, they've
actually got to the, you know, magnetic recording and he swiped stuff onto the surface of
the tape to show, he actually recorded blips on a bandsaw and they had a coil around the
bandsaw, it's a bandsaw went down slowly and then made the magnetic, moving coil,
licked up and down to show how we recorded it, it's really clever, he's got a lot of clever
ideas and now, what else did he do now that I'm telling, boy, so what he did eventually was
to show what a tape is, he took, he took a piece of cello tape and then he got some iron
filings and rubbed it over the sticky bit of the iron filings and then it looked into the tape
mechanism of a tape recorder, I know I'm real to real, but it just held both ends basically
and as they let it slide through his fingers, you see, this is recorded in a sticky tape and rust,
and he put it back into the heads and pushed the play button out of the cave.
Wow, yeah, yeah, the technology was, it was effective, but it was, it was very primitive,
I guess. Yeah, I was listening, funny, I was listening, I've got one of these,
you know, it's funny, I've got one of these Google speaker things, which I got given,
and it was, it would have been a thing I would never, ever have bought, you know, but this is one of
these things, you know, I've got given it and actually I found it useful, so I ended up keeping
the thing, and it was talking about, thank you for listening to this, and if you have a
certain age, you might have been listening to, instead you could have been listening to
an invention tapes and such like an invention, and I feel old enough, you won't even remember
the 8 track, and of course I looked at Mrs. X's, do you know what an 8 track is, can you remember
an 8 track? Oh no, I don't know what that is, so I'd explain what an 8 track is.
Yeah, yeah, I think I had a cousin here who had an 8 track player in a car or something,
they weren't all that popular over here as I recall, but they did, they did exist, I have seen
Yeah, you know, I never had one, I don't know, it's probably a little bit before my time may be
just, but I have seen one in maybe an operation, and even more interesting I think I saw was,
there's the Museum of Communications, which is over, I don't know, obviously for people,
most of them, there's our Museum of Communications over, let us say to the, what is it now,
it's over, let us say to the fourth road bridge, I can't even remember where it is now, but anyway,
it's a museum, and I've got some really unique pieces of technology, and there's a device that
came from Germany, and it uses, it's like a cartridge thing, and it's got a tape, and it runs through,
but it's surely the thing about it, it isn't, it isn't based on magnetism, it's actually
almost like a record, a bit in tape form, so that the needle gets pressed onto the tape, and as a
tape goes past, it plays a cyclist, and I think depending on where you place the head, you could have
a number of recordings, different tracks, which you can just select, and it will, by switching from
one groove to the next, and it's astonishing, it's just, you know, there's no magnetism,
toruses, it's grooves, and on a tape. Oh, I've never heard of that, that's amazing, I'd like to,
yeah, I'd like to find out where that isn't going, it sounds like a good thing to see.
Yeah, they do the whole host of things, this is the museum of communications, if anyone's in
Edinburgh area, it's only on in certain things of the year, they had a many storage or exchange,
which you can, they've got different things in different years, so you don't know what you're
going to see with the website, and it's called the Museum of Communications, and let's say,
one of the years I had a wee many storage, storage or exchange, and you could pick up the
handset, and turn the dial, and you could heal a whole lot of them, flip to mechanical things,
clunk and round, and brazen, and drooping, and all that sort of fascinating stuff.
Yeah, I do remember them, there was a guy, when I was a student at Manchester University,
there was a guy who was controlling a bank of cameras or something, using an old,
remained at Stroudger, because it basically pulsed, was it some sort of a motor, or was it
stepper motor, was it solar noise or something, because basically you moved an arm around
an arc, I think, didn't you, and it made different connections as it went along, something like that,
I'd only seen this once or twice, but he built a machine, but let him take timelapse,
I think that with timelapse pictures of animals or some sort, I can't remember what,
just remember him saying, or he went to see my new timelapse machine, and it was one of those
inside it. Yeah, that's exactly how it works, it's it's electoral magnets, there's coils
wrapped around that, I'm a ferric core, I guess, and when they put power through the coils,
it turns into a magnet, and draws a thing to the next contact, that's how he's like to a magnet,
I'm sure told the story before, but I believe it was a funeral director or something in America,
it came up with the idea, and it was through necessity, again, this is in the secret life
machines, if you, I think, if anyone gets a chance to watch it, I would really recommend it,
and they were saying that what happened was that there was a, there was a
fist funeral director, and he noticed that the business was getting quiet, and he couldn't work
out what we're going on, and then they realized that one of the neighbors or one of the relatives
was going to the funeral directors down the road, and passing on information about people who
had deceased, and of course he was nicking all these business, so so I'm going to fix this,
you know, or that's it, she would, she worked in the telephone exchange, that was it, that was it,
so she was finding out all of all these deceased people, and so he said I'm going to, you know,
find a way of cutting out the middleman, and having my own exchange, so I don't need a person
to do this, or something to that effect, and it was through necessity, he wasn't even in an
engineering, he just built it out of bits and pieces, you know. That's how some of the best ideas
get done, I think, or used to be anyway, probably got two technical. Yeah, that's quite cool,
that is very cool. Good stuff. Well, we've been chatting now for, getting on for 50, 51 minutes
going to this, so do you want to carry on, and you want to call it quits fairly soon? Yeah,
it's probably done enough, I mean, I was going to talk about, I wasn't going to brief a talk
about how things are, you know, we've never got on to talking about... No, maybe we should do
that another time, I don't know, because we're going to have it that long. Yes, it's typical, isn't it?
We say, Liam got much of an agenda, there's a few things to chat about, and then the thing just
goes on and into all sorts of areas, but yeah, we were originally planning to just sort of cover
how we've been coping with all the lockdown and everything. Well, maybe we get a good excuse to
do this again before too long. Yeah, yeah, what I could say is that there's, I know that everyone
finds some people finding more difficult than others, but I don't know, I'll tell you why not,
it's just too complicated, maybe talking out to them, because we'll get all embroiled in the
losses we also. Yeah, I think that's enough to you, I think. Yeah, okay, fair enough, we'll call
it quits at that point and say goodbye to everybody, okay. Yeah, so how do we say it? How do we,
how do you, you create kin and we finish off a kind of number? Yeah, so we say something like
hanka, and then the other one says public. Radio, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, bye.
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