vance
of the first TEST COLOUR TRANSMISSIONS from the BBC • had himself
been offered a job at Goonhilly Down, by GPO Telecommunications,
well before researchers started to investigate packet switching • a
technology that sends a message in portions to its destination
asynchronously without passing it through a centralised mainframe •
but having travelled there by train from where the family were living in
Kentish Town, North London, he was unable to find somewhere for the
family to live locally, and so could not take up the position that he had
been offered. Thankfully not long after, the doctor who was attending
Linnie’s brother Terry, who suffered terribly during the days of the
smog in London, arranged for the family to move to their new home in
Borehamwood. When I started training as an Air Traffic Controller,
cutting my teeth so to speak, on the study of IBM 64K core-store
mainframe systems analysis, as well as all things technologically
related to primary and secondary radar systems, you can just imagine
the conversations that I had with Ron, and not long after I had asked
him for his daughter’s hand in marriage, that a telecommunications
network protocol emerged which constituted the beginnings of the
ARPANET, which by 1981 had grown to 213 nodes. ARPANET
eventually merged with other networks to form the INTERNET
and while Internet development was a focus of the Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF) who published a series of Request for Comment
documents, other networking advancement occurred in industrial
laboratories, such as the local area network (LAN) developments of
Ethernet (1983) and the Token Ring Protocol of 1984.
…
Boeing 747 land at Heathrow after I had guided it onto approach from London Radar, which was situated then on the north side of the airport.
Whether or not the delayed take-off of the return flight, due to mechanical failure, was a harbinger of things to come it was this exact same plane that was lost in the horrific accident at Los Rodeos Airport, Tenerife, which resulted in -
the worst air crash ever, when a KLM 747 smashed into this self same PanAm 747 on the runway in March 1977.
It was during the time between these two events that Linnie & I were both happy for me to be seconded to the Eurocontrol upper airspace agency in the early 1970s prior to the UK becoming a member of the EEC - because of our commitment to the idea of a union of the peoples of Europe - but we soon, even then, became very aware of the burgeoning bureaucracy of that system and the corruptive payments that the EEC were making to the likes of bargees travelling to and fro across borders to claim "subsidies" several times over - without a shed of cargo on board. As an Air Traffic Radar Controller with the specific task of keeping aircraft at least 5miles and 1000ft apart it was certainly a wake up call to realise that each of the nationalities in Eurocontrol had a different common-sense attitude towards the task in hand - despite the fact English was the only language of communication for air traffic movements. The next 3 years or so of living with the peoples of Europe could not have been bettered but it was eventually the dissolution of those very people with the European Project, themselves, that influenced our decision to return to the UK - and we have never regretted that decision despite many subsequent trips to places throughout Europe and return visits to the friends that we made.
…