As we all prepare for a very long weekend of street parties, river pageants and the like to celebrate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, I thought I might look back at 1952. I’m probably one of a very few HotViews readers alive at the time as I’d just celebrated my 5th birthday when the news came in.
The Queen has been an ever present rock throughout my life. With the sole exception of my older sister, there is no other person that has been that rock throughout the last 60 years. In the UK we often understate how important that stability is.
Life as a 5 year old in 1952 was very different to my own bunch of little ones today. There was no TV. We were the first in our road to buy a TV for the Coronation in 1953 and I really do remember sitting on a bench with all the other children from our road watching the fuzzy black and white pictures from Westminster Abbey. Music was from a gramophone playing 78rpm records where you had to change the steel needles. I remember winding it up for my Dad. Main entertainment was the wireless. My Dad was a Commercial Traveller – or salesman as we now call them. He drove around shops collecting orders for stationary. This meant he had to have a telephone to call these into head office each night. Again, we were the only house in the street with a phone which meant we were always the first to hear bad news about our neighbours.
As a kid I mainly played outside in all weathers. When forced inside it was board games. My earliest memory was of the smog caused by all the coal fires. Tens of thousands died in 1952 from th
e effects of smog.
I have long suggested that our IT industry was born with the launch of the IBM S/360 in 1963. But 1952 was highly significant in our industry too as it saw the launch of the IBM 701 – the first ever IBM business computer. It had 1k of Ram and was the first to have a magnetic tape drive. I have often quoted Thomas Watson’s saying in 1952 that ‘there would only be a worldwide market for five electronic computers”. Whilst researching for this article, I realise that he was misquoted as his quote related to his estimate for sales of the IBM 701 (it actually achieved worldwide sales of 17!) But I still like the quote as there is every chance it might come true. The only question will be who will control those 5 massive data centres which run all the world’s IT in the cloud?
How far we have come in the 60 years that the Queen has ‘reigned over us’’. I for one will be waving my union flag and saying a big congratulations for a job really well done!