A Eng Funds no.21 September 1988

Another BBC photo from a couple of decades ago! There's me in the back row. Mark Chambers (rear left) and I shared a flat - he worked in OBs at Kendal Avenue. Tim Cowin (between me and Mark) worked in Radio and Jim Binks (below Tim) now works at EMS.
Anyone else you know?

My first week at the Beeb

Check out my turn-ups and white socks (it was the eighties, after all!) - I'm the forth one from the left sitting down and looking nervous!

I'm very proud!

On Saturday we went to Evesham for the day to celebrate Sarah's Auntie and Uncle 50th Anniversary. Joe, Dan and James played - they did Lean on Me.

IBA Tech Report from 1970

After writing about the new Tek WFM7100 last Friday I came across this brilliant document - it is the Chief Engineer's report to the IBA board and contains lots of info about the state of broadcast technology thirty-five years ago. There is a description of how they were upgrading the ITV network for colour and how the use of twin-lense telecines were taking off - Mk.1 Cintels I'm assuming - the Mk.2 was either a jump-scan or "digi-scan" depending on vintage (we had a few of those in TV news at the Beeb - I was quite a dab-hand at repairing the memory boards). Automated measurement using Vax PDP-series mini-computers is examined as well and serves as another parallel with the Tek. This picture shows how they did screen-grabs back then - using a polaroid camera mount!
Anyhow - give it a read - I was gratified to see how much of it tied in with what I learnt at BBC Evesham in the late eighties. It is a big 12-meg PDF but worth the download.