The Fox Report
Barry Fox’s technology column
tekkiepix.com
images, taught myself to build an amateur
website, bought the domain name www.
tekkiepix.com, paid for hosting and
posted some of the pictures for anyone
to look at. The Royal Television Society
gave me a small grant, so I concentrated
on posting pictures of TV and video tech.
It was all very amateurish and stayed that
way until Covid lockdown.
W
hy – you may well ask
– have I spent most of my
lockdown year building a
website (www.tekkiepix.com) that has
no obvious way of recouping what I
have spent on it in time and hard cash?
Why has another tech journalist, Richard Dean, who edited video magazines
I worked with 20 or more years ago, put
in his time and money too?
It’s simply because we want to prevent
a slice of consumer electronics history
from being lost for ever. We couldn’t go
out from our bubbles, so we stayed in
and worked on the website.
Today, tech companies promote products with publicity shots that are digitally
shot, and digitally sent to the press and
websites. The pictures are digitally stored
and digitally indexed. Therefore, they are
easily searched out, accessed and copied.
But up to around ten years ago, in the
‘Days Before Digital’, tech companies
had to spend huge sums of money on
using ‘wet file’ photography and sending out large quantities of professionally
produced glossy paper prints and colour
transparencies to the magazine and
newspaper press, in the hope that a few
might publish them.
Most of those ‘physical’ photos quickly
ended up in waste bins. Some were filed
away by magazines for future use, but
many of those publications have since
Experimental VERA (Vision Electronic
Recording Apparatus) linear VTR developed
by the BBC in the 1950s.
gone out of business, so their photo libraries have also ended up in waste bins.
Many of the companies that sent out the
photos have either disappeared or been
taken over by venture capitalists. Their
photo libraries were often junked or are
gathering dust – but who knows where?
Many years ago, I decided to keep,
rather than throw away, the most interesting and significant photos that postmen
and couriers were delivering to my office.
I was sure they would one day come in
useful to me or someone else. Being busy
with earning a living I just put them in
loosely sorted box files and stashed them
in my attic and garage.
A few years ago, I sorted through a few
of the box files, laboriously scanned a few
Iridium – a very expensive and not
very successful satellite venture from
Motorola to support analogue cell
phones and pagers.
Bob Tomalski, a technical editor for
What Cell Phone? magazine, managed
to borrow an Iridium cell phone to try in
Europe. ‘Speech quality is appalling’,
he reported. ‘It sounds like talking
underwater through bubbles. At
2.4kilobits, it would take all day and cost
a fortune to send a picture. It’s Stone Age
technology trapped in Space.’
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Practical Electronics | May | 2021
In the early 1970s the market for blank
cassette tapes was pretty cut-throat.
US company Memorex was looking for
a way to stand out, and hit on the idea
of ‘shattering glass’. TV adverts showed
singer Ella Fitzgerald breaking a wine
glass, as Caruso had supposedly done as
a party trick.
The Memorex twist was that Ella
recorded to a cassette that was then played
back to shatter the glass – with the slogan
‘Is it live, or is it Memorex?’
Hi-Fi buffs were up in arms. They did not
question the fact that Ella’s recorded voice
could shatter a glass, if she hit a note that
made the glass resonate, and playback
was loud enough to make the resonance
destructive. Memorex gave demonstrations
to prove the trick worked, at public and
trade exhibitions.
Witnesses were given certificates to prove
that they had seen a glass break. But they
had to wear ear protectors.
What Hi-Fi buffs did not like was any
suggestion that it needed an especially
good tape to do the job; it would have
been hard to find a tape that did not
fit the bill. A technical paper released
by respected audio consultants Bolt,
Beranek and Newman in 1973 revealed
that the sound level used was well
over 140 dB, which is way beyond the
threshold of pain.
After prolonged debate, the UK’s
Advertising Standards Authority approved
the adverts saying, ‘although it is most
unlikely that this effect could be related to
the domestic situation, the Authority took
the view that the advertiser was entitled
to emphasise the qualities of his product
by describing how it might operate in
exceptional circumstances.’
Memorex – and Ella – had the last
laugh though. The slogan stuck until
Memorex was sold off and run down
in the 1980s. And it broadened Ella’s
appeal at a time when rock music was
ousting jazz.
Practical Electronics | May | 2021
With time forced on my hands I sorted
and scanned some more images. After a
chance online re-connection with Richard
Dean, the tekkiepix site has now been
revamped and relaunched in a far more
professional form.
Have a look and see what you think. It
costs nothing to access. There is a page
for constructive comments; and a PayPal
donation button for anyone who likes
what they see and would also like it to
continue and grow.
Whether this happens, with more
pictures and the stories behind them
added, now depends entirely on what
donations roll in and whether any tech
company, trade body, historic society
or benefactor thinks the site and work
worth funding.
There are still many thousands of photo
prints, large format transparencies and
35mm negatives and slides that I shot
in factories and at exhibitions round
the world, left to be digitised, indexed
and posted on the site. For example,
somewhere among the negs there will
be some shots I took of a UK factory
where most of the staff were smoking
while assembling electronic equipment!
For the next year I’ll pay what it takes
to keep tekkiepix up and running, and
maybe add some more content. After
that all bets are off, because without
support the site could shut down and
the un-scanned images end up in landfill.
What reaction so far? Mainly positive
and encouraging, albeit with one request
from an ex-executive of failed satellite broadcaster BSB that I use what he
reckons to be a more flattering mug shot
of him. And no sign yet of any interest
from any trade bodies or big companies.
In the early 1980s Sinclair announced a
£5m, four-year investment programme
in a pocket FM radio/television receiver
to be called Microvision. But the idea of
a squashed tube was already doomed.
At the Tokyo Electronics Show in 1980
Toshiba unveiled a pocket TV with a
2-inch monochrome LCD. The pictures
were rotten, and smeared on motion,
but it signposted the future.
Urban myth or scam?
Repeating web hearsay in capital letters,
even underlining it in green ink, does
not make it true, or alter technical basics.
As reported, it’s become a factoid of
the Internet that if we answer an incoming phone call from an IVR (Interactive
Voice Response) call centre and do as the
recorded voice says and ‘Press 1 to speak
to an adviser’, a scammer can somehow,
magically, connect us to a premium line
costing several pounds per minute.
When I asked purveyors of this unsubstantiated scare story for hard evidence of how even the cleverest scammer can play the technically impossible
trick of converting an incoming call
into an outgoing call at the press of a
single button, I was pointed to other
Internet postings, such as an article in
a Northern newspaper that quotes an
anonymous policeman who apparently
knows zilch about telecoms technology:
http://bit.ly/pe-may21-myth
So, for the benefit of anyone who
is interested in hard facts rather than
cyber pub gossip, I spoke to Ofcom,
the body which controls all telecoms
in the UK. If such misuse of our phone
system were possible, Ofcom’s duty
would be to stop it.
And Ofcom confirms: ‘We have not
seen any evidence to suggest that pressing 1 or any other digit can turn these
kinds of calls into premium rate calls…
pressing a digit is part of an IVR and the
call is transferred to an actual person. It
could be that in the script the consumer
is being told to call back to a premium
rate number – which could be where
the call charges then happen.’
Of course, for most people it will be
simplest just to hang up when a scam
call centre says, ‘Press 1’. And always
remember the golden rule – never, ever
give out genuine personal details to any
cold caller, or phone any number the
cold caller volunteers. But for those
who feel confident in having some
fun by wasting scammers’ time and so
eating into their opportunity to scam
others more vulnerable, we now have
it confirmed by Ofcom: simply pressing
1 during an incoming call cannot initiate an outgoing call to a premium line.
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