Redundancy built in part one.

I must just be unlucky I guess. Its not always been like this, I mean when I was young, things were so much easier. If you bought a record player, you got a Dansett Popular, a standard player for the modern family. On it you could stack up to 6 singles at a time, and each one would drop down neatly onto the turntable, the needle arm would glide across and gently lower the needle onto the record, where you would sit and listen in perfect mono to such wonders as jailhouse rock, good golly miss molly, Peggy sue, or how much is that doggy in the window. Of course memory is a funny thing, it was never really like that, you would stack 6 records on the changer, and switch it on, and watch as the record failed to fall onto the turntable, and the needle would try to play a song from the rubber turntable mat. You would reset it, try again, and this time two records would fall together, the needle would drop with a loud crack onto the disc, and the loudspeaker would burst into life with a collection of hisses, snaps, crackles and pops that inspired Kellogg’s to make a breakfast cereal.

I think back over the past 40+ years since I was old enough to earn a wage to buy the latest gadgets, and find myself wondering where it all went wrong. Take the entertainment equipment I purchased that became redundant while I was carrying them out of the shop. I paid a fortune for a quadrophonic Hi Fi stereo system, spent hours positioning the four speakers to get the best sound reproduction, bought all six LP’s that were made in Quadrophonic stereo only to find that it went out of fashion while I was making a cup of tea.

I was the one who also bought an eight track stereo player. Now I was never a fan of the cassette tape. Horrible noisy, hissy things. I would buy the finest quality metal tape, use only Bang & Olufsen record deck, and amplifier, religiously clean the record before I played it, and still, after recording it onto a cassette it sounded like a bunch of snakes trying to sing like Mick Jagger. So I bought an eight track. The sound quality was much better than a cassette, but that was its only advantage, it was too big, you couldn’t record on it, and you could only buy the same six albums on eight track, as you could get in quadrophonic stereo.

Next came the “pocket” calculator. I bought one of the first Texas instruments portable “pocket” calculators. It would just about fit into a large pocket, but was so heavy, you would walk with a limp for days afterwards. Plugged in it was great, but the built in rechargeable battery lasted just long enough to type in 77345 7i0, then turn it upside down to display the words “shell oil”

Then along came Sir Clive Sinclair. No, I didn’t buy one of his C5’s, but I did buy a ZX81, complete with 16MB memory extension, and a thermal printer that looked more like a till roll. I  would spend days writing and rewriting BASIC , I would save each command line, then after it was complete, watch my TV burst forth with a dazzling display of multi-colour lines while my “computer” loaded the program. I would then be presented with a black screen, on each side was a small white line and in the centre, a white dot that would move towards the side of the screen, until I moved one of the white lines, or bat as it was known, until it hit the white spot, or ball, back across the screen. Oh what fun we had. I upgraded to a Spectrum, complete with built in cassette player, but I could still only play bloody tennis on it.

Then it was the turn of Video. There were 3 main rivals for the Video standard, VHS, Betamax and video 2000, guess which one I chose? Now video 2000 was by far the best, with reversible tapes lasting twice as long as the other two systems, and far better quality, but a very weak sales team. The European manufacturers tried hard to compete against the Japanese, Philips, Grundig etc., but they just couldn’t sell the product as well as the Asian firms. So, after a year or two of trying to survive with a Video 2000 machine, I went out and bought………………………….a VHS machine! Bet you thought I was going to say Betamax! Then there was the Camcorder, my first one was the size of a small semi detached house. It used full size VHS tapes, gave great pictures, and was used at Christmas, birthdays and special occasions. I still  have an incriminating tape made at my 40^th birthday party, where a lot of my friends and colleagues let their hair down. I’ve been able to blackmail them ever since. Another use of these were “candid” films, you know the ones, made in private, me and the ex-wife tried it once, but after we watched it back once, she immediately tape over it with an episode of home and away.

I took it to Florida so that we could video the kids enjoying a family holiday of a lifetime, After carrying it around all day on my shoulder, I developed a pronounced list to port of 45 degrees. My lasting memory of Florida is a small place, about an inch square, where everything was in black and white.