Back in 1987 when I finished delivering dustbins and got my first job in ‘computing’, it was with an international food company. We ran several of the subdivisions of that company on a Hewlett Packard 3000 centralised mini-computer. It was about 5m x 1.5m x 1m (including 2 service bays where you plugged everything in) and had a massive 8 megabytes of memory. We ran stock control, sales order processing, sales/purchase/nominal ledgers and sales-budgets on it for all those subdivisions. There was a whole separate sub-company of people to maintain and administer this thing.

The disk storage was 5 x 404 megabyte rather large disk drives (total = 2.2Gb) Each was about the size of a washing machine and vibrated more than a washing machine on full spin with a brick in it to make it wobble more. It took over 25 x 12” reel to reel tapes to back it all up

I have just upgraded Johnno’s Sony PSP to 2 gigabytes – the memory chip was the size of a small stamp.

Frightening – innit?

30 years too late and I have gone in to the recording business.

I’ve nicked some mixing software to put on my computer, acquired a digital recording device (Boss BR-600 see picture) and a Korg PX4D amp modeller (other picture) and have been torturing my own eardrums with high volume 70’s rock that I can actually make myself!

Once I’ve worked out how to make it vaguely commercially acceptable rather than totally obscure, AND got my own space on myspace.com (Don’t look – I haven’t done it yet!) you’ll all be able to torture your OWN eardrums!

Someone tell Jan the Fisherman that I need his help.

Being as it’s taken me about 8 months to get this far – you could be in for a bit of a wait – hopefully NOT another 30 years…. But then that could be a good thing!?

Now there's hardly anyone left (in my part of the world) it makes carrying out a purge so much easier....... so I'm having a rest!