it is now more than 55 years since I arrived in England as a young (and both innocent and immature) graduate Electrical engineer, and it is 30 years since I first worked with a graduate engineer who hadn't been born when I graduated.

It is difficult for today's young graduate to realise just how much things have changed in the last half-century. I was reminded of this when the Jan / Feb 2005 issue of PC Update published an article written by Frank Osowski about a strange glass object he had found among a collection of junk under a sign "free office furniture".

I immediately recognised it as a vacuum tube, or, in English, "valve" as I had spent four years studying these strange devices during my four years course in electrical engineering at Melbourne University, and I had been using a rather more sophisticated, but in principle almost interchangeable, valve as a decoration on my desk for the past 60 years.

JAN 833A