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THE WAY I SEE IT By NEVILLE WILLIAMS Information has its place what about knowledge? It's possible to assemble any amount of routine information about such things as the steam age, the gramophone era or the birth of radio and hifi in Australia but, sadly and in the normal course of events, many of us carry to the grave a wealth of first-hand knowledge of how things really were, when it was all happening. You may quibble about my choice of the two key words in the above heading and introduction but by "information" I mean routine references to dates, people, facts and situations which can be found in books, journals, newspapers and documents, much prized by those who delight in researching and reconstructing history - accurately or otherwise. By "knowledge", on the other hand, I am referring to an innate familiarity based on actual personal experience, or acquired or communicated at that level. It is important, as I see it, to differentiate between the two, not just in the context of history but of the present and future as well. Let's think about it. I'm becoming increasingly aware of the distinction, as there seems to be more than usual interest in the past at the moment. You've probably noticed the recurring historic themes on television, the emphasis on restored buildings, the proliferation of antique dealers in country towns, and so on. Doubtless, some of this can be put down to nostalgia, fond 82 SILICON CHIP memories of times and situations where people may have felt better able to cope. But, beyond that, the past has its own unique interest, and its own unique value as a reference with which to compare the present and the future. ABC's "Talking History" For me, the matter was brought into focus when I was contacted by Stephen Rapley, presenter for the ABC's Social History Unit. Their program series "Talking History" is currently being broadcast over ABC Radio National and by satellite to regional centres each Saturday after the 1.30pm news (1.00pm in South Australia). The series covers a whole range of subjects of social historical interest, but Stephen Rapley has most recently been researching for a future presentation on "Radio and Telecommunications" in Australia. At least that is the formal subject title in the ABC's "Talking History" brochure. In a news item published in the September IREE "Monitor", interest was expressed in topics such as the contribution of Australia's pioneer wireless but amateurs and engineers, the emergence of broadcast stations in the early '20s, local receiver manufacture from the same period, the Royal Flying Doctor Service, the School of the Air, the vital role of telecommunications in Australia's development, the impact of television, the FM story and so on. When he subsequently called to see me, Stephen Rapley explained the philosophy behind the series in more detail. Dates and facts have their rightful place, he said, but on their own they're pretty dry fare, especially for broadcasting. The idea behind ''Talking History" or oral history, if you like, is to record for posterity the voices and the impressions of people who were actually involved in or lived through the relevant periods. Their stories and their first-hand account of events and situations can breathe life into regular but often dry documented information. Putting his theories into action over morning tea, Stephen encouraged me to reminisce about my life as a lad in a small country town, dependent for amusement and information in those days on purely local sources. We had no telephone, no gramophone, no wireless and only irregular, shared newspapers. Talking "historians"? How did we occupy our time in the evenings? As kids, I said, we did our chores and played with other kids until dark during the summer, sat around shivering during the winter and went off to bed with a No runaround - when it was most needed! The first two articles in this series carried stories of people who had received the runaround instead of prompt electronic service. This story has a different slant. It concerns a disabled pensioner lady who wanted a "runaround" and couldn't get it. The runaround in question is an electric motorised wheelchair on which she depends for mobility outside the house. With its help, she can do shopping or attend the occasional social gathering. But recently, in the middle of such an outing, the drive system went dead and she and her chair had to be brought back home in a neighbour's panel van. Rather nervous about the cost of getting it fixed , she rang the local agent, who suggested that the fault was probably iii the speed control system . It was concentrated on an easily removeable component board and it might be possible to have it removed by warm iron wrapped up in a towel at our feet! When did I first hear a wireless set? On headphones or a loudspeaker? What was it like when we got a set of our own? What were those early receivers like? How did a country boy come to get involved in radio as a career? What was it like, working in a '30s style radio factory? And so on. None of this was actually recorded. As I talked, Stephen Rapley scribbled industriously in his note pad and fired back more prompts and more questions. He was identifying possible subject themes to be pursued and developed in the weeks that followed. Finally, what about other people with whom I had shared the wireless, radio, hifi and TV scene during my working life? And here I must confess to "dabbing in" a few associates from past days cautiously, because I was not in all cases aware of their present circumstances. But some, I knew, had a story to tell. For example: • Winston Muscio, ex STC & BSR, someone on the spot and sent in for checking. This she was about to arrange. When the board was duly removed, it was draped with the exploded remains of what had apparently been an electrolytic capacitor but there was no way of telling whether this had been the cause of the breakdown or the result of it. Sufficient to say, the board was despatched to the agent forthwith for what he had tipped to be a couple of hours' work. However, when she rang a few days later to inquire about progress, she was told that it had been sent interstate to their central service centre. When she had still heard nothing a couple of weeks later, she wrote direct to the service centre, who phoned her back to say that the unit had been extensively damaged by someone having reversed the connections to the battery this, despite her insistence that the chair had been operating normally author of "Australian Radio - the Technical Story"? "I already have some source material from him on tape", said Stephen R. • Neville Thiele, of vented enclosure fame, prominent EMI engineer, more recently retired from the ABC? "Initial contact had already been made''. • Ernest Benson, former AW A engineer/editor, writer and lecturer and pioneer electronic organ enthusiast? "How do I get in touch?" • Reg Boyle, retired PMG senior engineer, who saw broadcasting and telecommunications from the inside? "I've already made contact with him through the IREE". There were other long-time acquaintances who came to mind as we chatted and doubtless, still others who will respond positively to the news item in the IREE " Monitor". If you want to follow it up, Stephen Rapley can be contacted at the Social History Unit, ABC Radio, GPO Box 9994, Sydney, NSW 2001 (Phone 02 339 0211, Ext 2683). for months and that the breakdown had occurred quite spontaneously. As far as they ,could tell from their paperwork, the board had been repaired and despatched; it must have gone astray somewhere. They'd have to check around and let her know in due course. Where they looked and where they found the board they never admitted but the local agent did ultimately ring to say that it had just been despatched. In the meantime, she'd been sitting around for five full weeks waiting for someone to do a two-hour job! It could just be that there's a bright side to the story: she's had the runaround now for two weeks or more, without any sign of the bill. "Maybe they've also mislaid the paperwork", she said, "or they may feel bad enough about it not to charge me for replacing the little gadget" . Time will tell! Typical recording session In my case, Stephen Rapley's intention had been to record a more structured but still informal chat in my own home but intermittent traffic noise put paid to that. We ended up in an ABC studio in William St, Sydney, for the best part of three hours while I responded to questions and prompts, some from the interviewer's notes, others quite spontaneous, arising from what had just been said. I found myself having to explain the uncertainty about the time of day in the pre-wireless era. How domestic mantel clocks would vary with the temperature and whether or not they had been inadvertently under-wound or over-wound. How they could be 10-15 minutes out and we wouldn't know, unless somebody noticed the clock in the stationmaster's office on the way home and worked out that ours just had to be wrong. The chiming town clock? The nearest one would have been eleven miles (18km) of rutted road away! Wireless solved that proJANUA RY 1988 83 Problems? ... and you don't have our 112 page catalogue ... you've got real problems! ARISTA ... your one-stop problem solver. Audio leads ... Batteries ... Chargers ... Battery holders ... Cables ... Car accessories ... CD accessories ... Converters ... "Cutec" ... Earphones .. . Fuses ... Headphones ... Intercoms ... Knobs .. . Microphones and accessories ... Mixers ... Multimeters ... Plugs/Sockets, etc ... Plug adaptors ... Power packs and leads ... PA ... Disc and Tape care ... Security equipment ... Signal modifiers ... Solderless terminals ... Storage boxes ... Switches ... Telephone and TV accessories ... Tools and Technical aids .. . Video accessories ... Wiring accessories ... You name it and we're bound to have it ... Try us ... NOW! Get your catalogue ... it'II solve a whole lot of your problems! Just send $2 + 50c p&h and your return address to: ARIST~ ELECTRONICS PTY LTD PO BOX 191, LIDCOMBE, NSW 2141 84 SILICON CHIP blem, as well as providing up-todate (though not always accurate) weather reports. I recalled searching the scrub with my father for a couple of tall saplings to support the mandatory 30ft (10m) high aerial; contriving an effective earth in parched ground and adding a lightning arrester vital in an area prone to thunderstorms and virtually devoid of other overhead wires. Oh yes, and the need to ration family listening to one or two broadcasts a day. Why? To conserve batteries - because in those days a set of new batteries, railed from the city, could make an awful mess of a week's wages! Mention of a week's wages prompted further recollection of the dismay when the primary winding of one of the interstage transformers in the family Colmovox burned out. What did my father do but carefully dismantle the whole thing, unwinding thousands of turns of hair-fine wire until he had located and repaired the break. Then he successfully rewound it, entirely by hand - a feat at which I still boggle. Reliving these and many other such situations, it became abundantly evident how far removed the ABC's "talking history" was from the documented information that broadcasting stations commenced operation at certain times and places, allowing battery-powered receivers of the period to bring news, weather reports and entertainment to hitherto isolated listeners. How much of the recorded material gets to air, or in what form, is not for me to say. The present intention is to edit selected segments into suitably instructive and hopefully entertaining sessions, after which the master tapes will be passed over to the national archives. Contrast that with the following. Are computers addictive? While involved in this and other historically oriented projects, I've had reason to chase through sundry references in an effort to pinpoint particular events and dates. You know how it is: you're certain you have the information somewhere; you remember having seen it when looking for something else; now you can't find it! Wouldn't it be great to have it on computer? You could simply put it up on screen, scan through it yourself or, easier still, request the computer to find this, that or the other for you - which it can do in seconds flat! So, one wet and lazy day, I reached down my copy of the Macquarie "Book of Events" and abridged the contents of the chapter on "Radio & Television" into a series of one line entries into the computer. It looked promising, even in that very abridged form and, since then, I've dropped in quite a few more dates and events as I came across them. Providing I don't decide to do it some other way, the list seems all set to grow like the proverbial Topsy. The main reason why it hasn't already reached maturity is that I've had to give priority to other, more urgent tasks. But I'm conscious that the embryo list has a certain on-going fascination (did I say addiction?); a compulsion to generate an original personalised chronological listing, almost as an end in itself. This, despite the fact that a long list of dates and abridged information on a computer screen is deadly dull! A comprehensive list would undoubtedly prove very useful but, in the process of its compilation, I personally would become little the wiser. By its use, I might even become the poorer for not having occasionally to search through the literature and be reminded of other things in the process. The way I see it, instant access to computerised information must be seen as an efficient tool in the execution of certain tasks. In no sense is it a substitute for assimilated knowledge or innate knowledge of the kind possessed by people who have "been there and done that"! My own embryo dates/events list could be regarded as a miniature version of a much wider scene. Any number of computer databases already exist out there, with the largest collection of information stored in a publicly accessible computer, in Australia, being that in "CSX", maintained by the CSIRO. The overall system is reputedly so large and diverse that the people who have access to it are said to understand only the part which they actually use. It is doubtful whether anyone is aware of its total contents. I gather that much the same applies to other larger databases around the world for the same basic reason: like CSX, they have simply grown over a period of time, without sufficient attention having been given to the problem of gaining easy access to all the information that has accumulated. For most private computer users though, databases are still something that they read about. But massive changes in the recording and dissemination of information are already visible on the horizon. Huge quantities of reference information can now be stored on derivatives of the compact disc - typically more than 500 gigabytes per disc, equivalent to 150,000 pages of printed A4 text or a complete set of a large encyclopaedia. Grolier's American Academic Encyclopaedia has already been transferred to a single disc (words only) while the UK-based Commonwealth Agricultural Bureau has been making its database abstracts available on CD-ROM on a 2-year subscription basis although currently a rather expensive option. It will only be a matter of time though, before these databases become available at a price within reach of most people with access to a suitably specified CD player and personal computer. About then, we will have entered the era of what Gareth Powell, computer feature writer for the Sydney Morning Herald , has variously described as hyperlearning , hyperteaching, h yperwriting, hyper-reading, or hyperfiling. Oddly, and according to my dictionary, the prefix " hyper" means "over" , implying excess or exaggeration. That aside, I'll go along with the terms hyperwriting and hyperfiling, because they imply a staggering concentration of information. That it certainly would be, or is. But these terms get back to my earlier objection. Access to a huge amount of information may be both practical and useful to those who need it for specific reasons, but it has no 1:1 connection with acquisition, as implied by reading, teaching or learning; in short, with acquired knowledge. In case you feel that I am expressing a purely personal view, let me quote a systems manager with whom I discussed the generalities of computer databases: "It is important to realise that they are simply capacious data files ... sources of information ... nothing more." How many families already display in their living rooms a nice1y bound multi-volume en- Personal Phone Ringer natural resonance of the transducer. You can also vary the frequency of modulation of the oscillator by using different values for Cs although we assume that most constructors will stick with the value of O.lµF which we have nominated. Installation Installing your new phone ringer is easy. Just identify the connections to the bell ringer coil(s) and substitute the two leads to the phone ringer instead. Before you make the connections though, you should work out where and how to mount both the printed circuit ctd from p.25 board and the piezo transducer. This will take some ingenuity in some cases because even though there is usually quite a lot of waste space inside most phones, much of it is unusable. On the Telecom BOO-series telephones which are installed in most homes, the bell ringer coil is connected between terminals Pl and GS5. To disable the internal bell, we suggest you connect both ringer coil leads to Pl and then wire the new ringer circuit between Pl and GS5. Doing it this way makes it easy to restore the phone to original condition if necessary. We installed our prototype in an cyclopaedia, containing a wealth of information? It could be the source of considerable knowledge but may not, in fact, be consulted from one year to the next. Is there any reason then why electronic encyclopaedias and databases should be any different, whether on disc or at the end of an incoming fibre optic cable? I'm not averse to encyclopaedias and databases on chips or discs but please, don't let's confuse mere access to information with knowledge, however acquired. Is there any real basis for such apprehension? Is there any indication of data being substituted for knowledge? I believe there is, right here in our own industry. Electronic "Living History", 1987 style, can still call on people who, in their day, shared at first hand in the application of basic technology; who were involved in the design and production of everything from small components, through consumer equipment to the largest transmitters; who enjoyed an easy rapport with their peers from overseas. Next time around, another Stephen Rapley may be less fortunate . The old timers may remember the trends, components and user manuals imported from overseas but, apart from a few isolated high-tech areas, innate knowledge will be a rare commodity. That's the way I see it! It: BOO series phone by glueing the board to one of the flat metal pillars which support the dial mechanism, The piezo ringer was then glued edge-on to the base plate close by. Five-minute epoxy was the adhesive used. Tricky, huh? Incidentally, glueing the transducer edge-on renders it louder than if it is secured on the flat. The end result was quite a bit louder than the original bells so we detuned it a little by adjusting the trimpot. As a final note, this circuit can be used as an alarm wherever a DC voltage of 20 to 30 volts is available. It is loud, arresting but not unpleasant and its current consumption is low, at around lmA. ~ JAN UARY 1988 85