John Topley’s Weblog

Time for a quick quiz. What do the following have in common?

• The Compact Disc
• Mark Thatcher gets lost
• The Mary Rose

If you answered “the year 1982” then maybe you remembered those events from the time, or perhaps you just guessed from the title of this post. A bit of a give-away, that. My main memories of that year also include:

• The Falklands War
• The Sinclair ZX Spectrum
• Channel Four
• The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾
• The Ford Sierra

Why am I telling you this? It’s because I can’t quite believe it’s twenty five years ago and specifically, it’s a quarter of a century this month since my father took me to the Birmingham International Motor Show, where we were party to the UK launch of the Ford Sierra: Man and Machine in Perfect Harmony. Much more on that later.

I don’t remember a great deal about 1982 as I was only eight years old, but I recall watching live television showing the Mary Rose being raised from the depths of The Solent, where she’d rested since 1545. Specifically, I remember the TV commentary being a bit more exciting than the pictures, which as far as I could tell showed huge yellow cranes lifting up a few old planks of wood. Fortunately, I have a better developed sense of history and occasion now!

Channel Four Television launched in November 1982, a fact that only comes to mind because it’s referenced in that hilarious book of the year, Sue Townsend’s “The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾”. I remember reading the fictional diary whilst staying with an uncle and auntie and for some truly bizarre reason I spent the first half of the book thinking that Adrian Mole was a girl! Anyway, having a fourth UK terrestrial television channel was a big deal, because this was at a time when television was only on in the evenings—if I remember correctly, apart from school programmes you got the test card during the day (breakfast television didn’t start in the UK until 1983).

My memory of The Falklands War is simply of it being on the news a lot and of doing a school project on it whilst it was going on. Predictably, it seemed like an exciting event to a young boy at the time. I don’t remember having much of a sense of the horror and suffering of it, although perhaps I did and those memories have faded.

I probably saw the newfangled Compact Disc demonstrated on Tomorrow’s World at some point that year, although I didn’t actually get to hold, own or listen to one until 1990! I was still impressed though. I wish the BBC would bring Tomorrow’s World back as I used to really enjoy watching it, even if most of the inventions and breakthroughs they showed didn’t end up making it into our everyday lives. Perhaps it’s because of the age I was that the early 1980s seemed like a very exciting time, technologically. We seemed to be on the verge of some golden new technology age, the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the 1950s and 60s. Digital technology was starting to come through with digital audio and fibre optic cabling and with computers starting to appear in homes.

I suspect that like many households, our first home computer—if you ignore a Binatone TV Master games console from the late 70s: were they even computers?—made it through the door under the guise of being able to help with the household accounts or being good for John’s homework. Naturally our 16K Sinclair ZX Spectrum soon earned its keep as a games machine!

My memory of the arrival of the little rubber-keyed black box of magic is that for some reason my Dad ordered it directly from Sinclair Research in Cambridge rather than buying it from a shop. I think the parcel may have come on a Friday and we spent hours that night trying to set the damn thing up correctly! There was no monitor, you connected it to your TV which had to be tuned to the computer signal. I think that may have been the problem. Fortunately we eventually got it all working and were able to load the bundled Psion “Horizons” cassette of demo programs and were soon playing the “Brick the Wall” game, which you probably know as “Breakout”. There was some crazy stuff on that tape, I can tell you. Such as a biorhythms program—still not entirely sure what they are—and a program that simulated population growth in rabbits! Good times.

No one born after about 1985 can possibly appreciate the sheer excitement and feeling that you’re living in the future that came from having a home computer in the early 1980s, in the same way that I probably can’t appreciate those thoughts and feelings arising as a result of building an Altair or owning an Apple ][ in the 1970s.

Some time in the autumn of 1982 my Dad asked, apropos of nothing, if I’d like to go to the forthcoming Motor Show, a biannual event then held at the huge Birmingham NEC complex. Although I don’t think I was particularly into cars, I did have an interest in things shiny and mechanical so I eagerly agreed. The day arrived and we hit the road early. I think it was on this first Motor Show trip that I sat in the passenger seat and decided to break up a dull motorway journey by giving the thumbs-up sign to any lorry drivers that we overtook. Surprisingly, they all cheerfully reciprocated. You should try it some time. On second thoughts, it probably works best if you’re eight or under!

This day at the Motor Show is possibly one of my most treasured childhood memories, so you’ll have to indulge me whilst I write about it at length for a bit. My overriding memory is that I found it incredibly exciting. For lots of reasons—a boys’ day out with my Dad, the overwhelming excitement of going to my first Motor Show and the fact that it marked the British debut of the new Ford Sierra.

It’s difficult for me to convey just how radical the Sierra was when it was launched. This was the car that replaced twenty years of the Ford Cortina, a favourite with both fleet and family buyers in Britain. By 1982 the Cortina was looking pretty tired. It was still a best seller but by all accounts it wasn’t a great drive and the technology was pretty agricultural. In spite of which, Britain was still buying masses of them.

By contrast, the new Sierra looked like nothing else around, aside from the even more radical Audi 100 which came out at the same time. I think the Sierra was more important though because it was a mass market rather than executive car. Ford put on a huge splash to introduce the Sierra to the vital UK market at the Birmingham show. I remember that they had a massive stand that was packed with promotional material such as videos and cutaway displays as well as plenty of the actual cars. Undoubtedly the Ford hype machine was in top gear but it was very exciting to me at the time and it must also have been pretty stimulating for the adults present. It’s not often that something genuinely sensational comes along that marks a complete break with what’s gone before. I remember being blown away by the sheer effort that Ford must have put into their new car, because from reading the launch brochure it seemed like it was breaking ground in so many new areas, although principally in fuel-saving aerodynamics, a direct consequence of the fuel crises of the 1970s.

It’s hard to believe now, but people used to stop in the street and stare when they saw a new Sierra on the road, as if it were a spaceship. Sure, the Sierra had four wheels, an engine and a body but it had impact resistant, moulded aerodynamic bumpers made from polycarbonite, when other cars made do with a bent bit of steel bolted onto the front and back. It had an ergonomically designed dashboard with a centre console that was angled towards the driver like in a BMW, with controls that were arranged in logical zones. I remember that the brochure proudly proclaimed that the steering wheel, pedals and driver’s seat were all aligned, whereas in most cars they’re slightly askew. I read somewhere that the design brief was to “make the driver feel important”.

Ford were proud to show off their high technology in the Sierra brochure. It was all about how Ford’s computers had helped design the car and how robots would build it. There was talk of how Finite Element Analysis had enabled the car to be built using less metal and how those same computers that had produced the Sierra had helped NASA to design the space shuttle, which had had its maiden flight only a year earlier.

The Sierra was lighter, roomier, more fuel efficient, quieter, safer and much more aerodynamic than its predecessor. In fact, when new the Sierra was 21% more aerodynamic than the class average. By contrast, modern cars tend to be bigger and heavier than the cars they replace. Some of this is undoubtedly down to much tougher safety legislation and market forces but I can’t help thinking that sometimes the car makers just aren’t trying as hard. The only car in modern times that has struck me as outstanding in the same way that the Sierra did was another Ford: the original Focus. Even then, it was a brilliant complete package with original styling, rather than the major technology-driven step ahead for all cars that the Sierra represented.

I came away from that Motor Show feeling inspired. In those days I used to love drawing and I remember spending hours afterwards churning out endless pictures of the Sierra. I think it must have been about that time that I got my first inkling of what I wanted to be when I grew up: a car designer! The trend continued and Dad and I went to subsequent Motor Shows—1984: radical new aerodynamic Vauxhall Astra!—and even the Motorfairs held on odd-numbered years at Earls Court in London. However, none of these shows seemed quite as good as the first time. In fact, they seemed to get worse each year in the sense that the car manufacturers didn’t seem to put as much effort into their stands, or maybe it was just because I was older and less susceptible to marketing hype.

In a fit of nostalgia I recently used eBay to track down a few issues of Car Magazine from that era just to satisfy myself that this car really was big news in the motoring world and had not gained extra significance in the over-active imagination of an impressionable eight year old. I’m pleased to report that my memory doesn’t fail me and that the Sierra really was big news for 1982. October 1982’s Car had “Sierra Shock: It really is a good car” on the cover and a glowing report inside. From reading that issue it’s clear that everyone thought that the Sierra was going to be a massive sales success and maintain or increase Ford’s 35% share of the British car market. Of course it didn’t turn out that way, a turn of events that I took surprisingly personally at the time, for I couldn’t understand why seemingly nobody else understood what an exciting and brilliant car the Sierra was!

Unfortunately when it went on sale the Sierra was a bit too radical for the British public and Ford initially had trouble shifting them. The car was soon nicknamed the jelly mould and the early models had a well-publicised stability problem in cross-winds. If you look carefully you’ll see that all but the very earliest Sierras have little plastic “ears” behind their rear three-quarter lights which Ford fitted to cure the problem, at the slight expense of adding extra drag. The Ford sales organisation went into overdrive and the introduction of sporty models to the range such as the XR4i and later the infamous Sierra Cosworth helped to lift the car’s image and sales figures, although it never did the business in Britain that the Cortina had.

By 1987 the Sierra was given a mid-life facelift and no longer looked like the odd one out, for the style of aerodynamic design it had pioneered was now mainstream. In the early 1990s it was finally replaced by the Mondeo, a thoroughly modern, competent and boring car. It was telling that Ford decided to drop the Sierra name, as they were haunted by the spectre of its relative failure for years afterwards and following the equally radical Granada/Scopio retreated back into conservative design for much of the 1980s. Fortunately they found their bold streak again in the 1990s with “New Edge” designs such as the Ka, Puma and Focus.

People who know me may be surprised to read all this car talk, for the supreme irony is that I can’t drive! I guess I’ve always been more interested in cars as technology, engineering or object d’art than as a personal means of transportation. I think I appreciate cars in a more abstract way now, when the reality is environmental damage, traffic jam misery, speed cameras and increasing ownership and running costs. However, if I were to come across a pristine silver 2.3 Sierra Ghia on a Y plate then I might be tempted to buy it. For posterity’s sake you understand…

I can’t remember the last Motor Show I went to with my Dad—I think it was in the mid-1990s—but as you’ve read I can certainly still remember the first one we went to in October 1982. Sadly I wasn’t able to reminisce about all this with the one person I shared the experience with, as my father died early last year. When memories are the most personal thing that you have left of somebody it makes you realise how precious they are and how soon and easily the present fades into years ago.

Two amazing facts that you may not know about atoms:

1. There are more atoms in a glass of water than there are glasses of water in all the world’s oceans
2. If you were to remove all the empty space from all the atoms that make up the six billion+ people in the world, then the whole of humanity would occupy less volume than an apple:

I was born too late for the Apollo era. If I could choose to observe any momentous moment in history, then I wouldn’t choose to see the invention of the wheel because we don’t know when it was invented or by whom. There probably wasn’t much to see anyway—some guy discovering that you can more easily roll a round rock than a square one. Viewing the Big Bang is out because I think even the TARDIS would struggle with the physics of being present at the creation of everything without getting sucked into it all. No, I’d choose to go back to July 1969 to witness the culmination of eight years of incredible effort with the first moon landing. I really can’t think of anything more significant that Mankind has achieved.

Sadly it looks like the closest I’m going to get is via third-party sources such as books and DVDs, although I do always enjoy seeing the Apollo 10 Command Module whenever I visit the Science Museum in London. I just stare and think about the fact that the strange-coloured small thing in front of me has actually travelled a quarter of a million miles and orbited the moon. It looks primitive when you see it for real, with its thick copper-coloured exterior and big bolts that give it the look of a piece of heavy engineering from Victorian times. That tiny cramped capsule did the job though, and how.

I just bought a DVD of the excellent From the Earth to the Moon twelve part TV series that came out in 1998. Sort of following on from Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 film, it tells the story of various aspects of the Apollo space programme, from the tragedy of the loss of the Apollo 1 crew, to the Grumman engineers who gave seven years of their lives to the development of the Lunar Module. Like the Apollo 13 film, Tom Hanks is involved too, although he only briefly appears on-screen to give an introduction to each episode. He’s obviously a space nut and From the Earth to the Moon is great viewing if you have any sort of interest in that great endeavour of the 1960s and early 1970s.

Talking of Apollo, NASA are running a story on their website about how one of their teams have been inspecting the umbilical connection that supplied electricity and oxygen etc. from the Apollo Service Module to the Command Module. They’re looking at it to improve the design of the Orion spacecraft that will replace the Space Shuttle. The article says that they had difficulty finding an intact umbilical—it was normally severed before the CM returned to Earth—but that they got a break when they came across a family’s holiday photos on the Internet that showed an intact unit at the Saturn V complex in the Kennedy Space Centre. This worries me. A lot. Don’t NASA even have a list of the Command Modules that were built and where they ended up? Why not just work through the list until you’ve inspected all the surviving CSMs that are on Earth? It’s not like these things change hands on eBay. Isn’t leaving it to a chance encounter on the Internet a bit hit and miss?! And what about the original plans? Have NASA lost those?

The proposed design of the Orion spacecraft is strikingly similar to the Apollo CSM. It’s like the Space Shuttle never happened. I guess it shows just how much the people who worked on Apollo got right forty years ago. It makes sense to stick with things that are well understood when you’re risking people’s necks by sending them a quarter of a million miles to the moon. Of course, Orion will benefit from the significant technological advances that have been made in materials, computing and other areas and will be able to carry more astronauts.

I don’t know if Americans felt like they were being heavily taxed in the 1960s, but the United States has been a rich country since the end of the Second World War and I don’t think the ordinary folks of the time were crippled by high living costs. They were almost certainly paying a pittance for fuel compared to their European counterparts and still are in fact. The Apollo project was costing about 4% of the total federal budget, which sounds like a lot until you learn that the Vietnam War was costing about 12%. Somehow we can always find money for killing people.

It’s too early to say if Project Constellation is going to be a success. NASA’s last big idea of a low-cost, reusable space plane didn’t turn out to be a resounding success in either of those two objectives. The Space Shuttle now seems to be regarded as a failure and as not really having delivered much for the money. I’m sure there are many people who are closely involved who would strongly disagree, and I’d cite the Hubble space telescope alone as being worth the cost of admission, but my perception is that people are no longer interested in the Shuttle. Perhaps the tragic loss of two crews has tainted the whole endeavour forever. It’s a shame because I remember my seven year old self being excited by the Shuttle when it first flew in 1981.

Unfortunately flying about in Earth orbit doesn’t really capture the imagination of the general public, who when it comes to space exploration, are only ever going to be observers rather than participants. Apollo had that vision thing and at one stage NASA even had plans to use the mighty Saturn V for a manned flyby of Venus. You couldn’t say NASA were lacking in ambition at the time! However, the public got bored very quickly with the moon programme after the highs of Apollo 11. It took the near-disaster of Apollo 13 to re-awaken interest and show that this stuff is far from routine or ordinary.

George W Bush is no JFK and there’s no Cold War imperative to drive the project forward through seemingly impossible barriers. I do hope it works out. It would be really exciting to watch a moon landing sometime in the 2020s. Even though it’s been done before, there are a lot of us who weren’t around to see it first time around and who feel like we’ve missed out. Sometimes I just stare up at the moon and imagine seeing the Earth at the same scale from space. Or I stretch out an arm and hold my thumb up and imagine it obscuring the Earth and the whole of the rest of humanity. It’s easy to see why Apollo 8’s “Earthrise” photo is so affecting. We should go back to the moon and not stop this time. There are still so many things to do and learn there. Then let’s go to Mars.

Enterprise Java leads us to a point where choice becomes a bad thing.

I’m no mobile phone expert. My current phone is a Sony Ericsson Z200 which is a few years old and doesn’t have a camera, FM radio or MP3 player. I bought it because you can make calls with it and because it’s very small and quite robust. I don’t even use it enough to justify having a contract—it’s Pay-As-You-Go all the way with me. So I’m hardly qualified to comment on Apple’s glorious new iPhone, but I’m going to anyway.

1. The iPhone name seems to have caught everyone by surprise, not least because it’s currently owned by Cisco.
2. You’re not going to be able to use an iPhone with a Pay-As-You-Go contract like I have. If you’re not using the device’s Internet features then you’re not getting value from it.
3. The screen lock slider is classic Apple design: eminently practical yet a bit flashy.
4. The user interface is almost entirely software, which means that it’s really easy for Apple to change and enhance.
5. I remember reading about Apple’s patent on the pinch gesture used in the touch screen interface a few years ago. It’s great that it’s finally seen the light of day.
6. The Visual Voicemail feature is really neat. Serial access (i.e. having to scroll through stuff to get to what you want) is so unsatisfying, whether it be voicemail or videotape.
7. I remember watching Star Trek: The Next Generation and seeing crew members walking around with little black tablets with a software interface in their hands. Now we can have them too!
8. People say that $599 is a lot of money for a phone. It is a lot of money, but think of it as a new top-end video iPod—albeit currently without the top-end storage capacity—along with a mobile Internet device that you can also make phone calls with.
9. It’s hard to see how the next iPod can continue with the same form factor now the iPhone has been revealed. People are going to want that flippable screen on their iPod. Software scroll wheel anyone?
10. Can you run OS X’s Terminal.app on it? If you can’t, then someone will find a way.
11. Can you have a message engraved on the back like you can with an iPod?
12. Will the casing be more scratch-resistant than the iPod’s?
13. Hopefully Apple have invented a new type of plastic for the screen that really will be fingerprint resistant and easy to clean. Yeah right. We haven’t even got suction cups that don’t come off the surface they’re supposed to be attached to yet.
14. Expect an open-source project/competition to be announced in June with a prize going to the first person to get Linux running on an iPhone.
15. Expect Amit Singh to write an article about how to make phone calls by typing commands directly into the iPhone’s fireware interface. The commands will be surprisingly intuitive like:
    fs0:\> call 1-800-my-apple
16. The on-screen keyboard looks quite cramped and might be hard to use without any tactile feedback.
17. The iPhone looks too big to fit in a trouser pocket, which is a major problem for me as that’s where I like to keep my phone in the summer when I don’t wear a coat.
18. Expect a galaxy of third-party cases/pouchs/screen protectors, all of which make you look like a dork.
19. There’s no mention of what CPU the iPhone uses.
20. I don’t know anything about mobile phone networks, but from reading people’s reactions to the device, lots of Americans really don’t like Cingular.
21. Expect a plethora of music videos filled with gangsta rappers flashing their iPhones into the camera. Bling!
22. Is the battery replaceable?
23. Every phone I’ve ever used is full of undocumented features that are hidden away in dark crevices of the UI. For example, on my current phone, there’s one called Minute Minder and I have no idea what it is. The iPhone won’t be like that. No dark crevices.
24. How long before the first mugging where the victim was attacked for their iPhone? How long before the first murder?

I’ve just run my ISP’s speed test tool which is something that I occasionally like to do to see how fast my broadband Internet connection is, and to see whether I’m getting anywhere near the 8 Mbps that I’m supposed to. So imagine my surprise when it came back and told me that I’m connected at nearly 31 Mbps!—

My connection feels snappy, but not that snappy. I thought I was in France for a minute. I took a look at my router’s status screen to see what was really going on:

At least I do appear to be getting my full speed quota, which is more than can be said for many people who were upgraded from 2 Mbps, judging by some of the posts on my ISP’s forums.

It’s hard to believe, but the World Wide Web turned fifteen on the 6th of August. Hard to believe because the Web has more or less gone away. Before you think I’ve gone completely mad in the face of its ubiquity and pervasiveness, allow me to explain.

We no longer notice when we’re using the Web. Have you noticed how almost all of the URLs you see on adverts or in magazines or on the television are no longer prefixed with http://? That’s because the fact that Web URLs need to start with it has been assimilated into popular culture. That and the fact that browsers add it automatically anyway. Besides, it looks quite ugly in print. Have you also noticed that increasingly URLs don’t even have “www” in front of them any more? With good reason—usually we no longer need to draw attention to the fact that the resource we’re accessing is on the Web. For years I thought there was something special about that “www”, until I learned that it’s just another subdomain.

Most people have never made a distinction between the Internet (which has been around in one form or another since 1969) and the Web, which can be thought of as just another application that uses the Internet, as e-mail, FTP, Archie and Gopher all are. As far as the majority are concerned, the Web is the Internet. All of which just goes to show how successful Tim Berners-Lee’s original idea has been, in all but one area. In spite of the explosion in the number of blogs and user-driven sites like Digg, the balance of the Web is still overwhelmingly weighted towards consumers over producers. It’s still largely read-only.