Electronics

When I was younger, I supplemented my income by repairing musical instruments and amplification, as well as the occasional television set, etc. I did lots of guitars and keyboards, both being easily damaged by the sort of mishandling received in a life 'on the road'.

I worked for a number of years on BT's TXE2 reed matrix exchanges, becoming the Regional Liaison Officer for maintenance in the South Western Region. This job had one major advantage over most office-based BT jobs: I got to travel around the region, visiting the exchanges, and analysing (and sometimes curing) awkward faults. I have to admit that I never managed to find an opportunity (excuse?) to visit the Scilly Isles, although I travelled into Cornwall fairly frequently. I also designed some electronic test equipment (computer based) for testing in exchanges.

It seemed to me at that time that computers were more use in real time (for driving test gear and washing machines) than for processing textual data, but that was before the invention of the wordprocessor and the spreadsheet. There seemed to be a real future in designing interfaces between 50v (-ve) telephone exchanges and 5v (+ve) TTL chips. I can remember some horrendous disasters by people who forgot the difference.... I have always held the opinion that the future of computers was in doing things in real time - batch processing was an essential but uninteresting blind alley, however large the mainframe or involved the calculation. Hence my machines always tended to operate relays or measure voltages or count events!

I moved on to linking Mitel SX200 PABXs to VAX computers; because the VAX is not the best real-time machine, and because the SX200 was prolific in its data output, I ended up building an interface between the 2 systems using 8085-based processor boards, and in-house designed interface cards. This allowed us to extract the dialled digit information (on calls which were directly dialled into the switch) and use this in making a routing decision for the switch. It was at this stage I became involved with Computer Telephony Integration and started writing software in earnest!

Now, I have a small electronics workshop at home, but don't seem to do much with it. If only I had more time, I could build all those useless gadgets you see in all the magazines....