WilF's Technology Pages

In brief. WilF has spent his working life in industry. having trained as an electronics engineer and later having done some management and business training he has had a varied career working in a diverse number of industrial and technical environments over approximately 40 years. About three quarters of that time he was either self-employed or engaged as a director running small companies, having realised fairly early in life that he was not a particulary good employee. Good employees need to be able to take orders from above and WilF was never good at that! Anyway he started his working life with Post Office Telephones in 1961 as a 'Youth-in-Training' which was the rather quaint way that the GPO described its apprentices back then. Quaint or not the training was actually a very good one and WilF did some interesting jobs ranging from installing telephones and wiring in customers houses and businesses (customers were called 'subscribers' then) to replacing old and putting up new telegraph poles (2 men and a dog did this job back then, sometimes with a boy apprentice, now it takes at least a gang of five with three vehicles to do the same job); we did several poles in a day, now they are doing well to put up one in a day! Other jobs were new exchange construction, exchange maintenance and a strange job that I ended up being seconded to: 'Trunking and Grading' - this was all to do with ensuring that telephone exchanges had enough equipment to do their jobs efficiently.

http://www.gracesguide.co.uk/wiki/The_Basic_Industries_of_Great_Britain_by_Aberconway

Watch this space ............... WilF

Last updated: 26th January 2010 - On 26 January 1788, Captain Arthur Phillip guides a fleet of 11 British ships carrying convicts to the colony of New South Wales, effectively founding Australia.

A potted history of computing. Please note that this is a complex subject and only a few of the key developments are mentioned here.

In 1801 Joseph Marie Charles (nicknamed Jacquard) invented a mechanical weaving loom (the Jacquard Loom) that simplified the manufacture of textiles with complex patterns. Controlled by a set of punched cards, multiple rows of holes are punched on each card and a series of cards are strung together in the correct order so that a mechanical 'card reader' can control the manufacturing process.

On 14th June 1822 Charles Babbage proposed a design for a calculating machine to the Royal Astronomical Society, which was based on an earlier proposal by J H Muller, an engineer in 1786. Later, Babbage went on to design his 'Analytical Engine' and later still between 1847 and 1849 his 'Difference Engine number 2'. At this time the state of mechanical engineering skills were not sufficiently developed to build a fully working machine (but it should be noted that the London Science Museum has built a working example, thus proving that Babbage's original design was viable).

There have been a number of examples of the use of punched card control, for example, in 1890 Herman Hollerith encoded the 1890 US Census on punched cards.

The first recognizable electrically powered computers were developed during the 1940s. Colossus is considered by many to be the first 'real' electronic computer. The design of Colossus started in March 1943. By December 1943 all the various circuits were working and the 1,500 valve Mark 1 Colossus was dismantled, shipped to Bletchley Park, and assembled in F Block over Christmas 1943. The Mark 1 was operational in January 1944 and successful on its first test against a real enciphered message tape. The concept for Colossus was worked out by Max Newman but the design and construction were masterminded by Tommy Flowers a brilliant Post Office electronics engineer.

The Mark 1 was rapidly succeeded by the Mark 2 Colossus in June 1944 and eight more were built to handle the increase in message density. The Mark 1 was upgraded to a Mark 2 and there were thus ten Mark 2 Colossi in Bletchley Park by the end of the war. By the end of hostilities, 63 million characters of high grade German messages had been decrypted.

One of the next most important developments was the Invention of the Transistor at The Bell Laboratories, USA, by William B. Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter H. Brattain at the end of 1947. It is difficult to overestimate the importance of the transistor and is believed by many people to be the most important invention of the 20th century.

To be continued ....