At 104, John Logie Baird colleague recalls first TV demonstration | Hacker News Reader

At 104, John Logie Baird colleague recalls first TV demonstration

bbc.co.uk

48 pointsColinWright17 comments

It always saddens me when the people with all these amazing memories and stories die. It seems such a shame. It's like when my parents died and all those memories of my childhood were gone. My mother (like all mothers) would bring-out memories like "Oh, I remember when you were 4, and this and this happened" and I could almost picture the scene. And all those memories and stories died when she did.

Maybe we will eventually have the ability to capture and store all memories. But not now unfortunately.

Ditto. My grandfather is 99 and can tell some nice stories about hitchiking from FL to CA in the 30's to work as aerospace machinist. Strange to think he was older than myself, now, during the Apollo landing.

BBC Radio 4, in conjunction with the Imperial War Museum, has a programme that interviewed people who fought in WWI - Voices of the First World War.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03t7p9l

It's hard to describe what it's like listening to these stories, from people who are now dead, about a horrific time in their life.

I hate to "enjoy" listening to these stories, but I always take the time to hear a speaker out when available from either war. I feel its not just critical to record but also replay these stories, to explain this historic period to our children and the overwhelming sense of scale that ideas, individuals and culture can play in our very modern world.

My grandparents played out their roles in the second world war, yet even through death, they never talked about the war years or their contribution. In part, a strong British backbone but mostly, a sense that its gone and forgotten and it does "no body any good to dig up the war" (quoting maternal grandma).

I was thinking consumer VR could possibly do a decent job of the capturing the memories thing. This can happen quite frictionlessly once we all have 360 VR cameras on our phones as a standard feature.

Technology isn't the answer to everything. A pixel perfect VR video of your grandfather travelling across the country is never going to rival him telling you the story, what he'd been doing before, what he was thinking, how he was feeling...

You would really enjoy The Reality Dysfunction by Peter F. Hamilton.

An interesting set of books, that trilogy. I liked the scale of the story, but found it too heavy on the explainations of imagined tech that makes no sense (because it's fictional) and does little to drive the plot. Also it felt uncomfortably racist at times, albeit perhaps unintentional.

I am curious which tech you didn't think made sense?

The affinity is to me something we are moving further and further towards to a certain extent we are already moving there.

The memories of the our grandfathers also something I can see being used somehow in the future.

Going into symbiosis with your tech like with the spaceships is also something I can see is needed if humans are to live in space further down the line.

And it touched on a very interesting issue which is whether it's possible to transcend the "ghost in the shell" into tech or whether it's left behind.

With regards to the racism I read it when I was a teenager and didn't pick that up any different than I did with playing Warcraft. Any mention of different species are by definition racist but that does not mean in a bad way.

To be honest I can't remember right now exactly. It was years ago. But I remember being bored by a few pages devoted to how a ship worked or something similar. That then made me notice all following technobabble stuff. In fairness this is just a question of taste. I just prefer the way people like Iain Banks approached that side of things.

As for the racism stuff I think there was a world or habitat populated by black people which was rife with stereotypes. Hope I'm not confusing it with some other book now. Apologies if so.

Well, in a way, that's what books are, both fiction and non-fiction (especially memoirs).

Think of Homer's Iliad -- it's a story of the ten-year siege of Troy... think of it as the bronze-age version of the WWI/WWII stories mentioned below.

Interestingly (from a nerd perspective) it's a compressed memory -- when you suggest recording "all memories", well, that's going to be an awful lot to go through!

I think we have to admire the authors who are good enough to take a story, and summarize it (ten years of war!) skillfully so that it's a great read, but doesn't take ten years to read.

My dad told me the first time that he saw a television was in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1947. He went on a sales call and noticed there was a crowd of fifty people on the sidewalk in front of a business.

He returned thirty minutes later and there were now a hundred people so he found a parking space and walked across the street. Everyone was standing around a storefront window watching a baseball game being broadcast on a tiny round screen, probably an early Zenith.

Wonder if there's any technology that would draw a crowd to a store window like that today?

a few years ago an apple launch would do that. they smartly built the stores large enough to contain the crowds, though.

That wasn't about the technology though. I don't imagine the technology of those apple products in a boring package would have drawn the same crowd.

Baird is still alive? Wow.

Read more closely - it's a colleague of JLB. Baird himself died in 1946.

And this colleague has also died in the last week or so

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