From my perhaps rather jaundiced viewpoint by now, I think Waitrose have "done too little, too late" for Tom Boyd.

Two years later, after 11 years loyal service as a partner, where is my own pension fund?  I'm aged 66 - I need that money in my retirement. 

 
From the BBC:

 
And it is back on the radar...

https://planning.cornwall.gov.uk/online-applications/applicationDetails.do?keyVal=T49YSUFG1Z500&activeTab=summary

 
From the BBC:

 
Harry Basham, age 17.



RIP.

CfN.

 
Yes. RIP.

I've just learnt that I went to school, same year and shared subject classes, with the father of the victim. I had a pint with him the week before last and we chatted about our respective offspring. Such sad, devastating news.

BTP press release if you'd prefer not to have all of the adverts and pop-ups from the Local World website.

https://www.btp.police.uk/news/btp/news/england/family-of-brilliant-and-funny-teenager-who-died-on-the-railway-pay-tribute-to-him/

 
The other side of that coin being the software that does what it does with impeccable precision and ease, while the present day equivalent drags its sorry way across people's lives and work. I'm immediately thinking of Office 365 vs Windows 'Write' - I can't recall the sorry date that 'Write' was retired though.

Another issue with the stuff is the software that cuts a valley in a similar way to a river - aeons later and we all wonder why, say, the Avon gorge exists. I can't quite see where I'm going with this metaphor, mind...

Mark

 
A major development at Pershore this week another 12 car park spaces have been marked out in the area in font of the Carlton-Smith works west of the station entrance.

 
Very sad.

 
An update, from the BBC:

 
More philosophically, there are few things more sad and obsolete than code written for a long-dead computer system. All that time and effort spent crafting clever ways of doing something with that limited hardware, and a few years later you could buy a box to do the same thing for a few pounds.

 

On a similar tack. Here's an image of Norwich City Council having a computer delivered in 1957. Thirteen (at least) men needed to get it into the building. The image above, from over 60 years later, is someone holding a device with more computing power than the 1950s behemoth.

 
RIP

https://www.plymouthherald.co.uk/news/brilliant-funny-boy-dies-westcountry-10598642?utm_source=linkCopy&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=sharebar

 
I guess that's a 4014, in the photo with its trousers down!

We had a 4010 - too small to be very useful, a couple of 4014s and a 4016 with it's massive 25 inch screen in EC&M at Rolls-Royce in the eighties. I can just about conjure up the special smell of the 4361 Hard Copy Device in action, if I try really hard. In their latter years, we had the terminals souped up to run at 9600 baud.

Kids today: they don't know they're born...

 

You could be right there.

I do remember one of those 4000 series terminals - and waiting for it to redraw. But it's an indistinct memory (like the output from those thermal printers). It must have been when I was a postgrad at Cambridge, though what pictures it was bought to draw I cannot recall. As this was in the speech group it may have been for drawing bits of the vocal tract, as modelled for synthesis. But if was me getting it to draw pictures it may have been the engineer's usual reaction to any new bit of kit -  what fun things can I get that to do?

You also mention (in the blog) Perkin Elmer, who took over Interdata to use their computers in big complex instruments like mass spectrometers, and renamed it. But I was using an Interdata M70 which we got about 1974, and a bit later we got an M80 and an M85. These were all microcoded machines, and the M85 gave users access to the micro-machine and a microcode memory. So, needing a real-time vector display someone built one, interfaced as part of this machine. That was definitely fun to program - I did the basics of a billiard table simulator: lines for the table and cue, circles for the balls, and model the physics of the ball/cue and ball/ball contacts!

In 1977 I joined a company with "microwave" in its name, so the Tek instruments I used were mostly spectrum analysers, oscilloscopes etc. The computer side was mostly from DEC or HP (Tektronix's big competitor). Having looked at what old stuff I can easily find, that's mainly DEC manuals and the like, but I do have some old Tek 4000 thermal printout out of a program! A bit dark, but it's not been in the light so it's still quite readable - as much as it ever was.

Your blog also mentions Tek offering APL keyboards; that I never came across. But I do remember an IBM luggable (the 5100, it seems) that was built to run APL, so it could have a built-in screen (which only had to be small). That was down to someone I knew who had a consultancy in London doing business computing in APL. It takes all kinds ...

One more oddity I had to use was the HP 9100A, called both a personal computer and a programmable scientific calculator. This was big (similar to the IBM 5100), and interfaced to peripherals like printers and plotters, and custom devices. So it was used for controlling laboratory equipment, i.e. as a computer. HP have a history page on it, which notes that buying a computer often needed senior management approval, while a calculator didn't. That was why we had one in a University department - it was easier to get grant funding for.

 
I see that Waitrose has now offered him the job.

 

Which is roughly what happened to Nimrod AEW!

 

Hey ho, and thanks. Shame to have missed everyone!

 
I have also seen an old photograph (late 1960s ?) of a 2MB hard drive being loaded into the rear cargo door of a DC3 geophysics aircraft. It was loaded using a forklift truck and it only just fitted through the door.

It was huge! I reckon with 4MB of storage, the plane would have been unable to take off.

 

Used one of those back in my university days running SAS. You had to dial the computer centre line and get the phone down fast into the cradle once answered or you were deafened by the carrier warble tone.

An accident-prone mate of mine in the same place managed to bring the whole university main-frame down using one; to 'bend a pin' in the then parlance. He rang the help-line when everything stopped working explaining who he was and where he was connected from. Their main question to him was what the *** he had done!

 

That lift was hugely appreciated - and it was a very useful day.     Silver lining - good chance to catch up too.  Bristol TM was in a state of "definite don't know" when John and I were there, and the information was that they were requesting coaches but there weren't any available in Bristol and only 2 in Taunton.

 
Tim Dunn tweeted this morning about this collection - there's 4m46sec of video report too

https://x.com/MrTimDunn/status/1981690080986321209

 
Caught the same item on the BBC lunchtime news. The BBC's John Maguire, along with railway historian and TV presenter Tim Dunn, were investigating the private collection of Peter Rampton, whose family ran the Freeman's catalogue business. He had links with the Brecon Mountain and Vale of Rheidol railways. His collection of rolling stock is mostly narrow guage. He passed away in 2019.

I can't find online links to the news items broadcast today, so BBC iPlayer may be your best bet to watch the item. It was broadcast toward the end of the BBC's main lunchtime bulletin, at around 1.55pm on 24th October 2025.

I have found one article about Peter Rampton written shortly after his death. An extract from the September 2019 issue of The Railway Magazine:

https://www.railwaymagazine.co.uk/11993/the-lasting-legacy-of-preservations-mystery-man/

 
At approximately 0655 on 24th October 2025 a person was struck by 1S37, a CrossCountry service from Plymouth to Edinburgh. The location was the '5/13' foot crossing about a mile east of Taunton station. Major disruption for the rest of the morning with both directions closed for several hours.

'5/13' is a foot crossing with kissing gates each side. No miniature lights or interlocking. Line speed is nominally 100mph but nearly all trains will be accelerating away from, or braking for, Taunton East Junction and the station. The train involved had just departed Taunton.

Confirmed fatality later in the morning.

 

 
Nice to briefly meet you Mark A.

Sadly I'm not able to return for the afternoon session. Mum care needs. I'm sure there will be another opportunity to chat face to face in the future.

 

Bugger. I drove up to Temple Meads to collect Graham and John H. Had I known you were there I'd have offered you the final seat in the car.

The first train toward Taunton, after the line reopened, left at around 0955. Getting to Taunton just after 1100. A handful of TWSW attendees were aboard. Consequently the meeting started late.

Unfortunately, my caring duties have precluded me from attending the afternoon session.

 
I'm watching the set trundle up and down the branch now on berthmaps, so this only resulted in the cancellation of two return trips.

 
I sometimes look at the book of the BBC TV series The Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski. I am sure it is on the web somewhere. Interesting to compare the then state of the art computing.

I have up in the attic one of the modems which you drop the telephone handset into. No plastic, wonderful wooden box! Lots of historic computing hardware in the memory.

Warning I think this thread could be a major diversion.

 
https://bsky.app/profile/crisortunity.bsky.social/post/3m3u5hpgbjc2f

Somebody else noticed the rail opportunity