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- Watergate
I remember the TV interview with David Frost, Nixon sat there and lied through his teeth without batting an eyelid. I also remember him saying 'people want to know if there President is a crook'. Unfortunately, it turned out he was........ - Miner's Strikes
By the winter of 73, the Unions , and especially the Miners, had become far too powerful. In the face the the Oil Shock, the strongest unions were demanding more and more, while the rest of us got less and less. The mines in particular were colelctively unprofitable and being subsidised by the taxpayer. Scargill was incompetent, unrealistic and a fool. He started the miners strike at the end of the summer, when demand for coal was low and there were huge stocks. BY the time the stock levels were starting to cause concern, the miners had been on strike 8 months and were beaten. Only a fool would have started a coal strike in March, failure were inevitable. If he had had any common sense he would have waited till September, and used the winter as an ally. Scargill was, in the last analysis, a stupid, vainglorious, incompetant, self obbessed dreamer from Communist La La Land, unsuited to running a union. - Dr Emil Savundra
My father was incandescant with rage about this. I'd never seen him so angry! - Crazy Climber
Me and my friend would follow this one machine around as it got moved from pub to pub, and walk in and first game bang the high score up to half a million. Then all the locals that subsequently had a go got ruined because the machine had ramped up the difficulty based on our score. - Monopoly
Monopoly was a 'low strategy' game, ie there was only one winning strategy. This meant parents could beat the children, until the kids learned the strategy. Then the only way to win was steal from the bank............ - Television sets
I was a TV engineer in the 70's. Being a TV engineer in those days was easy. All faults boiled down to certain valves or transistors blowing, all you needed to know was which valve/transistor to change on a certain set to solve a certain problem. IN the 70's solid state selenium rectifiers came out, replacing the valve that did the job. You always knew when that had blown, you walked in the house to the smell of rotten fish. Like cars, certain TV's had certain, known design flaws, known problems. Some Decca TV's had the EHT (high voltage) rectifier in a perspex 'coffin'. After a while the high voltage began to 'track' across, making long sparks, which carbonised the perspex and made it track even more. After a couple of years uncorrected, the perspex coffin disintegrated, and sometime caught fire. The only solution was to chip away the blackened mess and leave the EHT rectifier dangling in space off the back of the LOPT (Line Output Transformer) Another thing you learned not to do was trust the carrying handle on portable TV's which became more common in the late 70's/early 80's. Almost everyone i know did the same as me, carry a portable by the handle and the handle failed, in my case the TV bounced all the way down the stairs of the workshop, and i had to do some serious fixing before the customer came back. Another thing you learned the hard way was that the big glass TV tubed could hold the high voltage charge for days, and if you touched the side connector by accident or stupidity you got an instant 25,000 volt pulse, probably similar to a modern tazer!! - Eight tracks
I was a TV engineer at the time, we were amazed by the sheer cunning of how the cassette worked. It was an infinite loop that spooled our from the ouside and wound back in to the middle. It was very clever. The quality was better than cassette, but its downfall was the limited amount of play time available on the cassettes - about 15 minutes.