Poppies in the Riverside Gardens.

The photo above shows Erith Riverside Gardens at about quarter to five last Friday afternoon. The gardens are looking a little bleak and unloved at the moment, due to the wintery weather and huge amounts of rain that has fallen in the last couple of months. Garry "Tadge" Taylor, the chap behind the annual Erith Riverside Festival has come up with an original and very creative idea to commemorate the forthcoming centenary of the start of World War One. Tadge is recruiting a small band of volunteers (myself included) to help plant poppy seeds in the Riverside Gardens flower beds, so that later in the year the whole garden will be a sea of red poppies. Bexley Council had not planned to carry out anything to commemorate the centenary; it takes local residents to come up with ideas for such undertakings. The council once again show a shocking lack of both imagination and innovation.

James Watt Way, the road that runs around the outside of Morrison’s car park is never quiet for long. Recently a group of scrotes has taken to riding illegal, unlicenced and uninsured quad bikes in the road, pulling wheelies, setting up jumps made from old pallets in the middle of the road, and generally being antisocial. The Police are aware of the matter, but actually catching the criminals in the act will prove challenging. It will not take long for one of the bikers to collide with one of the scrap vans that patrol the road like vultures, waiting for people to illegally fly tip old fridges and the like round at the recycling centre at the end of the road, round by the back of Morrison’s.  On top of this, adjacent to the recycling facility, the patch of waste land that used to house a couple of traveller ponies, but has been empty for the last few months is now back in use. I am quite surprised that a new pony is now in residence on the little patch of land; I thought that once the last couple went, that would be the end of the matter. Ponies are now commercially worthless – an adult will now only fetch around £5 in a sale, as they are now regarded as nothing other than walking pet food. This is one of the reasons why so many ponies are being found abandoned on common land and in parks, not to mention the appalling way some have been dumped locally, where they were found dying or dead, as was recently reported by the News Shopper.

You may recall that last week I asked if any Maggot Sandwich readers had memories of Hedley Mitchells. I go the following very evocative reply from a lady called Pam:- “I lived in Avenue Road Erith from the age of 1 until 22 when I got married and now live on Bexleyheath / Crayford border. I am now 66.  I loved the town with all the little shops and as a school girl worked in a hairdressers up by the Post Office called Veronique as a Saturday girl for 3 years. I used to go into Mitchells with my mum, and yes, it was on a par with John Lewis. Must say the Ladies Toilets were very posh, had liquid soap which I had never seen before.  I also went to the Dancing School over Burtons and learnt Ballroom and the Jive .  Bill Hayley's Rock around the Clock was the record for that Jive.  I think I was about 8/9.  I think the lady teacher was called Lesley but I could be wrong, she was tall, slim and her hair was in a French Pleat, very elegant. My silver dancing shoes were bought in Mitchells and a while later as I was going to a Dance I was bought a rather pretty but expensive dress to wear from Mitchells. As everyone says, Erith was ruined when they built the concrete jungle, it was a lovely place to shop, catered for everyone and everything.  Erith was such a big part of my life when I was growing up. Pre school years I went every day except Sunday because our mum shopped on a daily basis for fresh meat and veg for our dinners. There was a lovely large man called George who had a fish stall on a Friday at the side of Burtons and the large blocks of ice fascinated me on his display, so he used to cut me off a chunk, wrap it in newspaper for me to take home. So many lovely memories from my childhood. School friends and I often go down memory lane about the Erith we loved”. Thanks very much Pam – a fascinating recollection of a much missed time.

The protests against the KFC Erith drive through application to effectively open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week continue. It would appear that the complaint web page that I directed people to in good faith is incorrect; the messages that were left on the Bexley Council Licensing Complaints Website have not been recorded.  Councillor Chris Ball has kindly been investigating. Instead complaints about the fast food drive through extending the hours it opens can be addressed to licensing.office@bexley.gov.uk Best to act quickly if you wish your views to be known. Objections to KFC’s request for vastly longer opening hours must be made before the end of the month. I logged an Email of protest, and got a very full and detailed response from the Council. Part of their Email reads as follows:- “You should be aware that the licensing process requires the Council to provide the applicant with the details of any representations received. This means that a copy of your correspondence will be sent to the applicant.  Furthermore, a copy of your correspondence will be included in the report prepared for the licensing hearing.  This report is a public document. You will be invited to attend the licensing hearing to support your representations, at which time a copy of the Council’s procedure and hearing regulations will be sent to you. If, however, you require these documents sooner please contact me and I will be happy to provide you with copies straight away. You may represent yourself at the licensing hearing alternatively, you may wish to be represented by a Solicitor or Barrister or any other person. Your local Ward Councillor may be prepared to represent you, but you will have to contact them direct to enquire. If you do not know who your Ward Councillors are, you can contact this office and we will supply you with the names and contact details. Alternatively, you can find out who your local Ward Councillors are by visiting www.bexley.gov.uk If you are making representations on behalf of a "body". i.e. representing persons who live or are involved in businesses within the vicinity of the premises, you may be asked by the applicant or Sub-Committee for the following information: The area covered by the body and the detail of the members who live or have a business in the vicinity of the applicant premises; and Evidence that the representations reflect the view of the members of the body. This may be achieved by having available a copy of the minutes of the meeting of the body where it's members decided to make representations to the application. However, it is a matter for the body to decide how it would best respond to any request for this information. Please be aware that should your representations be challenged, and you do not have the information available, there is a risk that your representations will not carry the maximum weight, or in certain circumstances not taken into account. In preparing for the licensing hearing you should bear in mind that all decisions made by the Sub Committee have, as a matter of law, to be based upon one or more of the licensing objectives, which are the prevention of crime and disorder, public safety, the prevention of public nuisance and the protection of children from harm. Therefore for the evidence you give at the meeting to have an influence upon the Sub -Committee it must relate to one of these objectives, and can only relate to matters you have raised in your letter making representations.  In other words if your letter is about noise from the premises you cannot at the hearing give evidence about the danger to which children may be exposed to at the premises”. This is all very informative stuff, but even reading it back now, it is worded in a way that could be construed as somewhat hostile to the complainant. I fully appreciate that the council need to operate in a way that is seen as being fair and even handed to all parties involved in the dispute, but for a private individual making a one – off objection, it does seem quite an intimidating and onerous process. Time will tell how this will all pan out, but I suspect that KFC will have an uphill battle to obtain round the clock opening rights, located as it is, opposite Sherwood House, a residential care home and sheltered housing scheme for elderly and disabled people, and surrounded on three sides by residential property, plus the vociferous protests of long time Erith residents.

Last Tuesday Mayor Boris announced that a project to link the CCTV cameras that form part of the London congestion charge and low emission zone monitoring system to the Police Automatic Number Plate Recognition system (ANPR). The ANPR system does what it says on the tin – car number plates are automatically identified, recorded and checked against a database of known criminals and stolen cars. The system is going under a period of public consultation as to how appropriate a “joined up” system of ANPR enabled cameras over the whole of Greater London would be. The Police already have access to a number of ANPR cameras, principally those which form a cordon around central London, and those on the M25 and A2 which already monitor all vehicles travelling on those roads. Adding the transport for London Cameras to the ANPR system will bring the total number of “intelligent” cameras to 1,300 – effectively tripling the number in service. Boris and the Police both give a great amount of exposure to a number of crimes that were solved by the use of ANPR evidence. Some examples they quoted were:- “The rape of a 14 year old girl, in June 2013. She alleged that she was raped by two males in their twenties. The vehicle registration number was placed on the ANPR system and four hours later, the vehicle was stopped by uniform officers and both suspects arrested. In June 2013, the ANPR system was instrumental in locating a vehicle belonging to a suspect who had allegedly assaulted his partner. After making enquiries to locate the suspect, his vehicle details were placed onto the Police National Computer in order that he could be arrested. Within 5 hours, the suspect was stopped in another police area and arrested for the offence. A male was slashed across the chest with a Stanley knife in Ilford during an argument about money. The suspect was believed to live in Manchester but his address was not known. His vehicle registration number was placed onto the Police National Computer system and just over a day later, the suspect was stopped and arrested for the offence by officers from Greater Manchester Police after his vehicle triggered an ANPR camera. At court he was convicted and received a 40 month sentence. A known burglar whose vehicle details were put into the ANPR system was stopped with two other males in Romford. One of three occupants was found to be wanted for a drugs offence, he was arrested remanded in custody and subsequently found guilty at court.” This is excellent stuff, but unfortunately it does not address the flipside of the issue. ANPR cameras don’t like rain, road spray, fog or dirt, as this impedes their ability to recognise number plates. There are already a slow but steady stream of “false positives” where innocent drivers are targeted by traffic police for offences they did not commit – and the default presumption is guilt; you have to prove yourself innocent, rather than the Police or courts prove you guilty. There was a case featured in the Telegraph last Saturday where a man was accused of some traffic offences after being caught by an ANPR camera on the M25 in Kent. The chap had proof that he was actually visiting his wife in hospital in Surrey at the time. It transpired that his car number plate had been cloned by crooks – something that is increasingly common nowadays. The more ANPR cameras are deployed, the more the real crooks are going to find ways to circumvent them, and in the meantime innocent members of the public may be presumed guilty of crimes they did not commit. It is a difficult balance – keeping the public safe versus accusations of bringing about a Police state. ANPR cameras are also – with suitable software, capable of facial recognition, though again, it is relatively easy to fool the system – some facial recognition applications can be fooled by the simple expedient of tilting the head at an angle of fifteen degrees or greater from the vertical. Both ANPR and facial recognition technologies are not as mature and error resistant as the Mayor and the Met would have the public believe. I am not going to bang on about the implications to civil liberties that such technologies may bring; time and again it has been shown that if a new technology enables something to happen, it will, whatever the philosophical or moral reservations the public may have. The whole NSA / GCHQ monitoring saga is a good recent example – if something can technically be done, it will be done, irrespective of legality / morality.

The photo above shows the old Cannon and Gaze flour mill on Erith High Street; it was taken in (I think) around 1934, as the mill was demolished shortly thereafter in 1936, and in time the Erith Riverside Gardens were constructed on the site. The mill ground flour mainly from imported American wheat, which arrived by freighter - having a river side mill made a lot of sense at the time. I don't think any part of Erith has changed more over the years. Whilst the general feeling is that the 1960's concrete town centre redevelopment was a step backwards from the Victorian old town, I think that nobody would argue that the modern Erith Riverside Gardens is a vast improvement to the heavy industrial scene in the photo above. In fact, if you scroll back up to the contemporary photo of the Riverside Gardens which I took on Friday afternoon, you will see that it was taken from as close as I could get to the same position as the 1934 black and white photo above. The old flour mill was located where the open grass area in the Gardens is now. The road layout has changed slightly, and of course the row of shops to the right of the photo are no longer there, but nevertheless it gives you a pretty good impression of the changes that have taken place over the years. Who says I don't plan the Maggot Sandwich?

Back in October 2012 I originally wrote that London Resort Company Holdings (LRCH) propose to build the World’s fourth largest theme park for Paramount Entertainment on the site of the derelict quarry site at Swanscombe. This has got to be excellent news for the entire region, if not the country as a whole. The proposed site features Europe’s largest indoor water park, theatres, hotels, restaurants and all manner of themed rides, all in a site spread over approximately 872 acres. The bill (at least now, but it is bound to escalate) is estimated to be in the region of £2 billion, and the park will employ 27,000 people, many of them from the local area. If this plan gets the green light (and I seriously doubt it won’t) it will be a massive boost for the economy for the whole of North Kent and South East London. Much of this story is detailed on the News Shopper website here. What amazes me (quite apart from my usual misgivings about the quality of talkbacks and lack of moderation on their website) is the naysayers who are already moaning about the increase in traffic and likely disruption that the construction work will undoubtedly cause. These small minded people seem to completely miss the fact that the park will be a complete economic game changer for an area that will stretch from around Woolwich to down well past Gillingham. Once the park is built and running there will be all sorts of permanent jobs needed to keep the place ticking over – electricians, security, engineers, cleaners, administrators – the list is as long as your imagination. Ironically the brown field site in Swanscombe was the location of the destruction of Top Gear’s old “reasonably priced car” when local company Erith Construction blew up the old LaFarge factory chimney onto the hapless vehicle, as part of a stunt for the show. Since the announcement of the theme park project, much has happened, though until this week it has all been kept very quiet by those involved. Independent economic think tank The Centre for London has published a paper which proposes the construction of a new town near Ebbsfleet which would be of a similar size to Milton Keynes, and as such, the first new town in Britain since the late 1960’s. The proposed new town would have around 35,000 houses and flats, and would be linked to the high speed rail link to enable commuting into central London in around twenty minutes or so. The whole new town would be close to the Paramount theme park, and I would surmise that a fair percentage of the staff would live locally. The proposal document also strongly recommends the formation of a development corporation that would resolve any conflicting planning issues, fund the required upgrades to local infrastructure, and possibly most importantly having the power to build new bridges or tunnels across the lower stretches of the River Thames; at present many economists say that the whole North Kent area is being held back financially by the fact that there is only the Dartford River Crossing East of Tower Bridge, and nothing whatsoever further down river. A new town to accompany the giant theme park would have other benefits; the hard pressed housing market in South East London and North Kent would get a boost, and finally the Thames Estuary would get the development that has been promised for at least the last twenty years. The area also has the benefit that it is mostly brown field, rather than green belt land, and the report also identifies that a new town in North Kent would be far more attractive to prospective new residents than a garden city or development on green belt land in another part of the country. For better or worse, London and the South East of England are the most attractive parts of the United Kingdom, and it is where people want to live.

Enough already; some time ago I wrote a piece about LENR (Low Energy Nuclear Reaction) and how it possibly might be a revolution in the way were generate power. LENR used to be called “Cold Fusion” in the late 1980’s / early 1990’s, and the public perception is now that it was a discredited field, and basically all of the claims made by researchers about LENR and the ability to generate boundless amounts of clean, cheap energy were little more than outright fraud. The court of public opinion – fuelled mainly by the tabloid press – was keen to expose the researchers as confidence tricksters. More sober minds have revisited the experiments carried out all of those years ago, and the results astonished them. Over the last five or so years, LENR technology has gone from being regarded as at best a fringe area of esoteric science to now developing slowly in the mainstream. An Italian inventor called Andrea Rossi has developed a generator which he calls the E-Cat (short for Energy Catalyser) which it has been claimed generates hundreds of kilowatts of power from a generator roughly the size of a shipping container. Rossi has gone into partnership with an undisclosed U.S industrial partner, who has insisted on a comprehensive confidentiality agreement, effectively muzzling Rossi from talking to the press. Others have been less secretive about their research – an American company called Brillouin Energy Corporation have signed a multimillion dollar licensing deal with a South Korean manufacturing company; they intend to manufacture LENR reactors to replace existing gas or coal powered boilers in conventional power stations. Bob George, the CEO of Brillouin, says that the new LENR reactors will produce electricity at a cost of two U.S cents per kilowatt hour – about a third of the cost of generating power using advanced, high efficiency gas boilers, and more importantly with no greenhouse gas emissions. The big breakthrough that Brillouin claim is that they have found a way to control the reaction process - effectively giving them the ability to "throttle up and down" the reaction on command - something that at present no other experimenter has been able to do - you can see a video of a lab experiment that shows this here. On top of this, the U.S Government is now funding LENR research in a big way.  The U.S Department of Energy is now accepting funding requests from organisations undertaking LENR research, in the hope that they can then commercialise the results. I still have some doubts; anything that sounds too good to be true generally is. If LENR technology is as good as the proponents say, it will still take a lot of testing and engineering development to make it commercially viable, and more importantly safe. The public detest any mention of “radiation” and would be understandably suspicious of a technology that was dismissed as fraudulent within many lifetimes. Having said that, the early aeronautic research work carried out by Hiram Maxim, and later the Wright brothers was poo – pooed by many at the time as being as an impossible dream, yet today our skies are filled by aeroplanes. We may be on the verge of a clean, cheap and safe energy revolution – I sincerely hope so.

I have not featured a music video for many weeks; I thought I would remedy that now. Below is the video for the latest track from a group called “Sound of Contact”. If the singer in the video looks vaguely familiar, and his voice sounds very familiar, that is with good reason. His name is Simon Collins, and he’s the son of Phil Collins. I bought Sound of Contact’s debut album “Dimensionaut” last year, and I am very fond of it. The band sound like Genesis circa 1976, if they had been produced by Steve Hillage or Dave Brock using today's state of the art recording techniques. Not everybody’s cup of tea, I guess, but if you like melodic, slightly spacey prog rock, you are in for a bit of a treat. The track below is called “Pale Blue Dot”. Give it a watch; you might even like it. Feel free to leave a comment below, or Email me at hugh.neal@gmail.com.

Sound of Contact.

Travellers are still keeping Cob Ponies on the unlicenced enclosure that is sandwiched between the back of Erith Morrison's supermarket and the Council recycling facility. I have had several local people express concerns as to the health and wellbeing of the animals, and I have spoken to the RSPCA on a couple of occasions this year. I am led to understand that as long as the ponies are fed and watered, there is very little that the authorities can actually do. I believe the owner of the small parcel of scrub land is the Orbit housing association, but the precise details are somewhat sketchy and unclear. It would appear that the lands' legal owners are unconcerned about the use to which it is currently being put. "Pony squatting" is increasingly common in London and the South East, with the high cost of stabling for animals which essentially have zero financial value being quoted as one of the main reasons. 

Local paper the News Shopper have recently announced that they are restarting their very effective "Shop A Yob" campaign. The campaign which ran for several years showed CCTV and other photos of local criminals when caught in the act - for example. vandalising bus interiors. The original campaign was very successful in identifying and prosecuting local low lives and scum bags. Whilst most of the offences were of the anti social behaviour kind, it did stop some offenders from going on to commit more serious crimes. On top of this it sent the message that the local community would not stand for criminal behaviour. I am fully behind "Shop A Yob", and have managed to get clear photos of criminals in the act myself in the past. 

When I visited the Erith Riverside Festival a couple of weeks ago, most of the Maggot Sandwich readers who approached me to say “hello” asked me the same question. They all wanted to know where the name of this blog came from, as it appears so surreal and unusual. Well, I have told the story once before, but it was rather a long time ago, and I seem to have picked up quite a few readers since, so I suppose the story could do with repeating. It all dates back to the beginning of 1987, when I first got involved with Bexleyheath based FM pirate station Radio Lumberjack (see the photo above of me taken in the studio in March 1987, a couple of years before I moved to Radio Caroline, and a big step up in the radio world). I got named “Arthur Pewty” by the chap who ran the station, after the meek and mild accountant character from the Monty Python sketch. Now  I had a radio pseudonym, I needed a name for my late night show, which featured mainly album tracks. I was reading a book on the history of offshore radio at the time, and had come across the story of John Peel and his show on Radio London, which was called “The Perfumed Garden”. I was trying to think of a suitably satirical alternative to this, when an incident from a few years previously popped into my mind. For a couple of years I took up coarse (fresh water) fishing, and would spend much of the school summer holidays either at Dartford lakes or at Horton Kirby, unsuccessfully trying to catch a few fish. I sometimes used to go with a friend, who had a somewhat unique idea of practical jokes. On one occasion I was about to take a bite of a cheese and coleslaw salad sandwich when I noticed something wriggling around in the filling. I opened up the sandwich to find a small mound of maggots! My compatriot had filled the sandwich from his bait tin when I was not looking. Nice chap. Anyway, the idea came to me that how could I combine the bland and anodyne (Arthur Pewty) with something uniquely revolting (the Maggot Sandwich) and the name for my show was born. When I started blogging seven years ago, it seemed logical that my web based voice to the world would follow my radio based venture from years before. The idea stuck, and back in 2010 it was voted the most unusual blog name in London, at the Online Conference hosted by Ofcom. So now you know.

I think that Bexley Council would be more open and honest in its’ dealings if it was headed by Kim Jong-Un, rather than Teresa O’Neill. At least the North Korean dictator is starting to talk to his opponents around the world now, unlike Bexley Council, who for a second time are directly disobeying an order issued by Eric Pickles, the Local Government Secretary, who said on the 14th June that “I want to stand up for the rights of journalists and taxpayers to scrutinise and challenge decisions of the state. Modern technology has created a new cadre of bloggers and hyper-local journalists, and councils should open their digital doors and not cling to analogue interpretations of council rules. Councillors shouldn’t be shy about the public seeing the good work they do in championing local communities and local interests”. Quite, well said mister Pickles; the trouble is that Bexley Council are having none of it. They have re-stated their long standing policy that filming and audio recording of council sessions is forbidden. The council say that they are concerned that the data protection act may be contravened (Pickles explicitly says that it will not), and the privacy of people attending the council meetings may be affected. The fact remains that if you walk down Bexleyheath Broadway at any time, day or night,  you will be recorded by a plethora of CCTV cameras, both publicly and privately owned. I recently counted seventy cameras between the Council offices and as far down the Broadway as Asda – and I am pretty certain that I missed some. The council argument is utter rubbish, and they know it. They don’t want to be recorded as they don’t want to be held accountable for the decisions that they take. It is like something from Eastern Germany circa 1983. One of my sources – a person very much in a position to know, not long ago told me that if Bexley Council were to transmit council meetings live on YouTube (which some other local authorities have been doing for some considerable time) most viewers would either fall asleep or click away onto content that was less tedious. Most Council meetings are actually very boring to the observer – nevertheless, I, and many others feel that we have the right to know what our elected local officials get up to – after all, they answer to us, not the other way round as some in the Council would have you believe. I know that Malcolm Knight of Bexley is Bonkers also feels very strongly on this subject, and has been directly involved in the issue on several occasions in the past, and attended a council meeting only this week where a person was repeatedly threatened with Police intervention when he made an audio recording of the proceedings; I get the feeling that this story has a lot further to run – we shall have to wait and observe developments. I would not be at all surprised if this story did not become of national interest very soon.

I don’t know how many Maggot Sandwich readers read the comments that are posted by others at the bottom of most entries; I do get some fascinating feedback. Comments don’t go live automatically, as for a long period of time I was beset by (mainly Chinese) spammers who were posing as genuine comment makers. Google have improved the filtering now, and things are a lot better, but I still have to moderate comments – and I do publish negative ones on the odd occasion that they are submitted – I don’t censor other than to remove spam. Last week I had a very interesting message from a chap called Brett Smith, who is a presenter on a web based radio station called Radio Sutch. The original Radio Sutch was a station that was set up on the 27th May 1964, and was based on the old WWII Shivering Sands army sea fort. It was run by “Screaming Lord Sutch” and broadcast (intermittently) on 194 metres (1542kHz) medium wave. The broadcasting hours of Radio Sutch were somewhat variable – DJ’s would wake up late for their shows, or the studio equipment would experience regular breakdowns. Even the transmitter was a total lash – up, based on a heavily modified wartime Royal Navy H.F unit re – crystalled for medium wave, which powered from a bunch of truck and milk float batteries. After four months, Sutch got tired of running the station, and sold it on to businessman Reg Calvert for a reported £5000, who renamed it as Radio City, and re-launched it. The new station has the same musical format as the original Radio Sutch – basically music from the 50’s and 60’s that was considered “left field” at the time. You can read more about the re-launched Radio Sutch by clicking here. You can also listen online to their pre – recorded and live shows. I think it is great to get a really unusual niche station broadcasting online – the FM and AM bands are full of so much generic rubbish nowadays, that it takes an online broadcaster to do something significantly different and a sight more adventurous. Let me know what you think by leaving a comment below.

The News Shopper have been very active in promoting Ray Hurley’s Welling based Micro Pub,  “The Door Hinge”. This week they have given the place a second write – up, complete with an embedded video, which is an unusual touch from them. You can see their coverage by clicking here. It will be interesting to see whether the place gets considered for Bexley CAMRA pub of the year next year; the Robin Hood and Little John will not be eligible to enter (under Bexley CAMRA rules, a pub that wins one year is not allowed to enter the competition the following year – this was brought in a while ago to stop the Robin Hood and Little John winning every year, as it had done for the previous ten years in a solid row). I think the Door Hinge is an excellent little place with much to commend it; about the only down side for me is the location, which in practical terms means a cab ride, as the journey by bus from darkest Erith is on the tortuous side, involving a change and much hanging around in areas like Bexleyheath Broadway – not somewhere I am keen to venture at night. Having said that, the Door Hinge is a congenial and welcoming place; Ray is an excellent landlord (like his namesake in the Robin Hood and Little John) and the novelty of a micro pub in the locality is a bonus too. It helps that the beer is of superb quality and very well kept. Do give it a try.

One of my favoured sources of accurate and up to date information on IT and technical related issues is the excellent website – The Register. Stories that get into the general press usually break on The Register at least a day earlier, and in greater detail. The site is very tongue in cheek, and often finds a humorous angle on technology issues. It broke a story earlier in the week that caught my attention; an employment agency are looking for programmers who have skills in writing and maintaining software for the DEC PDP-11 series of mini computers. What is so unusual about that? I hear some of you ask. Well, the PDP 11 computer range was first introduced in 1970, and went out of general production in 1990. The machines were large – even a relatively small installation would be the equivalent of three or four full height fridge freezers, plus a terminal the size of a small school desk. By modern standards they are museum pieces – indeed, the National Museum of Computing does have some examples of PDP hardware in its’ collection. When they were first offered for sale, they offered a relatively cheap and reliable entry into business and industrial computing; indeed many PDP 11’s were used to control machine tools in factories – some of the early car welding robots were  controlled in this way. Other key users were (and in some cases still are) large banks and insurance companies, who require reliability and very high up time over performance and the latest features. Quite often the old computers such as the PDP 11 range are still employed on the “back end” systems that the customers (and indeed many of the staff) never see. Many of such organisations are exceptionally risk averse, and would rather support an ancient technology than take a chance on upgrading to a modern alternative that may have new and undocumented bugs, possibly causing loss of earnings and damage to reputation. I know that there are a small handful of independent contractors who earn a very good living continuing to support these old clunkers – because the knowledge required to maintain and repair the hardware and software is so specialised, they are able to charge pretty much what they like for their services, as they have their clients “over a barrel” – nice work if you can get it.  My first foray into the world of “serious” computers was back in the early 1980’s, when I had a Saturday job as an assistant in Silica Shop in Sidcup. During the 1980’s, Silica Shop were the largest privately owned, independent computer retailers in the UK. They specialised in the early 8 – bit home computers, especially the range made by Atari – for whom they were the European dealers.  Silica Shop had its’ HQ in Hatherley Road, Sidcup, where there was a large retail unit on the lower floor of the two storey building, and on the upstairs was a warehouse, an office, and an air conditioned computer room, which housed a large DEC PDP 11- 44 mini  computer - almost identical to the one in the photograph above. As well as working in the shop on Saturdays, I was also able to work during school holidays; during this time I would sometimes be called out of the shop to help the computer system administrator, who for a while made me his unofficial assistant. I learned lots about working with large scale business computers, and all of the basics of system administration – adding and removing users, changing security settings, creating files, running batch processes and the like.  Even back then, the 11-44 was quite an elderly piece of kit – the company having purchased the machine second hand, as new they were well over two hundred thousand pounds, depending on the specification and peripherals required. One quirk of the 11-44 operating system was that you could not reformat the large 8 inch floppy disks it used (earlier versions of the machine used reels of magnetic tape). In order to re – use the expensive floppy disks, you first had to manually wipe them of data using a degaussing machine – which was basically a large electromagnet. I think everyone was scared of the degausser – it hummed and buzzed, occasionally emitting a crackle of electricity, accompanied by a faint smell of ozone. I think even by the lax health and safety standards of the time, the machine should have been condemned! What I did to avoid the dreaded machine was looking back, pretty imaginative. The computer room had several old – style telephones with rotary dials. I would place a small pile of disks underneath a phone, then ring it from another extension. The bell ringer built into the phone was an electromagnet, and in ringing it would wipe the disks! Silica Shop wrote their own customer database; what would nowadays be called a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system. Whenever someone came into the shop and bought something, a sales docket would be completed by the shop assistant. It included the buyers’ name, address and what they bought, along with an itemised total. Each item of stock was allocated a unique part number, which staff could look up on VT100 computer terminals in the shop, which would also record how many of that particular item were left in stock; the real old hands would know most, if not all of the popular stock item codes off the top of their heads. When the stock level got down to a certain point, the system would automatically place a re – order, and debit the company account accordingly. The system would also target postal advertising at customers according to what they had already purchased – there was no point in sending a leaflet on Atari 800XL software to a customer who had bought a Commodore 64 for example. You can see an example of a typical Silica Shop advertising flyer below - notice the large amount of detailed text - this was a Silica Shop trait - they lumped huge amounts of technical detail into all of their advertising; something that would put off a lot of potential shoppers today. All this is targetted advertising is routine nowadays, but back in 1983 it was unique, and debatably the most sophisticated customer database used anywhere in the United Kingdom. My own thoughts are that if Silica Shop had taken this ground breaking business software and ported it onto the then new IBM PC, they would have had a huge business in selling and supporting enterprise level CRM applications now. Instead they continued to shift boxes of home computers, and eventually went out of business in the mid 1990’s. If the management had employed a more creative vision, Silica could have been a global software name like Oracle now. I have to say that I learned more about computing in my few years working at Silica shop than I have learned anywhere else. My entire career in IT has been built on stuff I picked up in a quiet side street in Sidcup.

Unusually there are two ending videos this week; they are both from a brand new band that have just released their debut album, which is called "Dimensionaut" and the group is called "Sound of Contact". I would be interested in what you think of the two videos below. The first was filmed out Sound of Contact's first ever live gig; the second is a more conventional music video designed for use online and on television. If the singer / drummer looks and sounds somewhat familiar, it is not too surprising. His name is Simon Collins, and his dad is Phil. Watch the videos and please feel free to leave your comments below.