Notes and Queries 12

The broadest BAnd I've ever seen was the Combined Scottish regiments, plus the Indian and Nepalese Army band, Earls Court, circa 76 ish



Terrace 'B' next to Mav, Shaddo, AB, Jeremy and Spud.

Obviousy the broader the band, the higher the band width. This means the greater range of frequencies involved. In that case, it'd have to be the Bee Gees and Barry White.

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A 15 minute radio serial? Well it'd have to be about a bunch of well meaning cyber saddo's and their addiction to an underachieving rugby club who meet on Friday's for "A" drink. The Frooners! Dum de dum de dum de dum...dum de dum de dum dum. These chaps have one goal in life: to rid the world of the plank who decided to replace poppers with buttons on duvet covers!

Ah, you see St Rich's post is bourne out of jealously and rancour but , as in many such outburts, it has an element of truth.

The next "soap" opera should be set in a pub in deepest Northamptonshire. It should involve such characters as Ancient Pierre, and the Ghost, Saint Windsor and Normal sphericles. (names have been changed to protect the innocent (or senile), it could run for years with its own theme tune. Oh da de dum, oh da de dum dum dum de dum....and it would always be centered around a complex plot to conquer europe. Can inspector Barnes foil their plans ? Can constable Morris spell his name correctly ? All will be revealed in "The premiership" Coming to a television near you next Saturday...or is it Sunday....or Friday..maybe Thursday...oh who cares just take the money.


Saint til I die

Jealous of the duvet bloke Malcolm? Surely you don't mean the frooners? I'm not jealous, I admire their wife escaping abilities. I also think you'll find the name cybersaddo is now an ironic term of endearment rather than a slur.

Broadband

This is the modern-day equivalent of the old office staple and the item that no self-respecting postie would be without - the rubber band.

If you just had a few bits and bobs to keep together - a couple or three ballpoint pens, birthday cards for the little girl at number ninety-eight - a common or garden rubber band does the trick. The pens find themselves tucked away in the back top of the top drawer never to be used again, the little boy rips his bundle apart. The bog-standard rubber band did not need to have much capacity, any real need to be durable and no functionality to speak of that wasn't as it said on the pack - rubber band.

As the information age dawned, this contributor found himself in a career called electronic data processing. Most of we young men ignored the "electronic" bit as a computer was collection of wardrobes in the bowels of the building. An area of approaching half an acre given over to computing power and data storage that is now dwarfed by an i-Phone (other devices are available).

To us DP was all about coding sheets, punched cards and reams and reams of 130-character, music-lined, continuous stationery. One of the things we were taught was that computers are stupid. They do exactly what you tell them. If they go wrong, it's your fault. What they didn't tell us was that the punched-card operator was stupid, typed everything on the coding sheet (yeah, right - it would have been me and not Bill Gates if that had been true) and was unable to distinguish between something written and something erased with a tablet of indiarubber.

In my new career, it became obvious that bog-standard would not meet the needs of the new electronic world. Computer programs would extend to hundreds of instructions - this, in turn meant hundreds of punched cards. Imagine scrabbling around indoors to find all the playing cards in your house and assembling them into one deck - odds and ends, too - not just complete packs. Bigger, thicker, broader rubber bands were needed if this new electronic age were not to end in a game of 5,252-card pickup on the floor of the computer room as my box of cards was being used aa a goal-post in the operators' midnight game of 5-a-side in the aisle between the tape drives and the printers.

"Brian! Where were you when your shift was playing football in the computer room?*"

"In goal, sir."

[* the ball was, of course, a huge ball of bundled up rubber bands]

Technology was required to keep pace with the requirements of this new electronic age. Bigger and better rubber bands were required to cope with the amount of paper generated by the machines touted as the foundation of the paperless office.

The broadest band I ever saw was waiting on my desk one Tuesday morning. For some reason, the PL/I optimising compiler had seen fit to award me a record number of critical, severe and warning messages. Thank goodness the information messages were screened out. My program module of fewer than 200 statements had generated nearly half-a-box of stationery to tell me what an imbecile I was. (Thank-you for that, IBM).

Once I had removed the broadest, strongest rubber band I have ever seen - it went on to have a career in motor sport when it provided the transmission on a Mobylette in the Paris-Dhakar Rally - I discovered to my horror that my beautifully crafted sequences and iterations of finely tuned logic was a mess. Instead of appearing as neat, concise blocks of helpfully commented instructions, words, phrases and data names were scattered in a seemingly random order. Instead of everything being neatly aligned to the left margin, characters swam before me all over the page. All over page after page after page. Two reams of approximately A3, music-lined, continuous stationery had been sacrificed because the punched card operator had decided that the speck of indiarubber that had adhered itself to column 51 of card 77 deserved life as a quotation mark.

Computers were never that stupid!

The Romans came here first on holiday, liked it so much they stayed.

Julius Caesar gets all the plaudits but a century earlier Fredi Pontinicus and Billus Butlinicus had set up fortified holiday camps along the east coast at Skegus and Fileyinium.

Your old Roman centurion liked nothing better than after a winter of battling Asterix in Gaul than gathering the wife and kids together hopping on the Eurostarius and heading for Albion.

Once there he'd enter into the holiday mood by drinking great amounts of mead then scrapping with the locals believing his superioity.

The locals, seeing that the Roman were more cultured than them, eyed a gap in the market and befor you knew it thousands of Anglo Saxons were being packed off to Iberia by Tomas Cuek for their hols.

Once there he'd enter into the holiday mood by drinking great amounts of wine then scrapping with the locals believing their superioity.

A fine British tradition that lasts today.

We could teach them romans a thing or two about Empire...