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Great stories of yesterday: in the early days of New Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ the question
was raised about what happened to obsolete computers when they were superseded
by more advanced systems (then, computers were more masterpieces of engineering
than electronic wizards, with valves which glowed attractively in the dark).)

IBM revealed that it broke up its redundant machines using a pickaxe.
The company explained that US anti-trust laws barred it from giving them
away to universities or schools for fear that the gifts would induce the
educationalists to ‘buy IBM’ rather than rival products thereafter. They
could not be given to charities because the cost of maintaining an obsolete
machine would be more than a charity could afford. And it was uneconomic
to store them, pending eventual cannibalisation, because the cost of warehouse
space in Park Royal, in West London, then was 7s 6d (about 37p today) per
cubic foot. So they were literally smashed up with a pick-axe. The man who
wielded the axe, when asked what he thought of while he was destroying all
that beautiful machinery, replied: ‘I think of my wife.’

Today, IBM still breaks up its old machines – but not with an axe. ‘Every
computer is reviewed for its recyclable value,’ the company tells Feedback.
‘It is stripped down to its basics – metal frames, magnets, motors – and
these become raw materials for the next generation, to save the energy needed
to manufacture them. VDU screens are crushed and we are developing ways
of recovering cadmium and copper from the electron gun. Some 1200 tonnes
of parts are recovered annually, worth between Pounds sterling 200 and
Pounds sterling 700 a tonne. This represents about 80 per cent of each machine.
Our target is 100 per cent.’

Presumably IBM wives breathe more easily these days, too . . .

* * *

London’s Science Museum has obtained a quantity of those sturdy, black
Bakelite telephones with the silver dial which the old GPO used to rent
out to customers from 1930 onwards. The museum is selling them at Pounds
sterling 84 each. The telephones have been fully reconditioned and adapted
to fit modern sockets, but BT has not approved them. Why not? ‘They are
pretty powerful,’ a spokesperson for the museum told Feedback. ‘You can’t
just plug them into any old socket – they might blow the whole thing up.’
Another example of BT not being as powerful as it was?

* * *

Nowadays ‘image’ is all important to industry. The chemicals industry
is leaving no stone unturned in its efforts to persuade the public that
it is cleaning up its act. After 25 years, the Chemical Industries Association,
to which more than 200 companies belong, is considering alternatives to
its logo, which has in the past appeared on notepaper, publications and
a much sought-after tie, simply as ‘CIA’. As yet, the association has only
gone as far as instructing its switchboard operators to answer ‘Chemical
Industries’ to each caller and not ‘CIA’. ‘There has been too much confusion
in the public mind,’ the association told Feedback. ‘We don’t wish to be
mistaken for the other CIA. After all, they give out information only on
the basis of the ‘need to know’, whereas we want the public to know what
we’re up to.’

* * *

Blether of the month (brought to us by Hansard) came in a short exchange
during question time in the House of Commons on 3 February. Dennis Skinner,
MP, affectionately known as the Beast of Bolsover, asked Tim Renton, minister
for the civil service: ‘How many civil servants in employment at the latest
date are (a) men or (b) women? Quick as a flash came the reply from the
minister: ‘All of them.’

Later, Renton scored a second point when he commented ‘Even with his
(Skinner’s) fancifulness, it is hard to imagine the civil service employing
anyone who is not either a man or woman.’

* * *

As charge and countercharge of atrocity and cultural/ecological genocide
fly back and forth across what used to be Yugoslavia, the Belgrade Vecernje
Novosti (Evening News) has discovered a new ‘war crime’ of which to accuse
the Croats: planning a nuclear power station.

According to the paper, President Tudjman’s government is intending
to build such a station, with German assistance, at Dalj, a town on the
Danube, which divides Croatia from Vojvodina (an ‘autonomous province’ within
Serbia). The Germans ‘who have had no order for a power plant for quite
some time’, are said to be offering a 4 x 1000-megawatt power plant for
which Croatia would pay ‘with deliveries of electricity to Europe’ (sic).

As for President Tudjman’s urging that the presecession borders of Croatia
must be restored, and the territories of Western Slavonia, currently in
the hands of the Serbs, handed back, all is now revealed. The Croats, the
paper says, are planning to use the area to store their own and German nuclear
waste.

* * *

Desperate times for the diplomatic corps this month after Prime Minister
John Major, currently chairing the G7 group of rich countries, told environmental
organisations that he had asked the other six leaders to improve the world’s
satellite programme for monitoring the Earth’s environment. Whoops. After
the Financial Times ran a story saying that Major wanted a new green satellite,
startled hacks were whisked into the Department of the Environment to be
told: (a) there was no new satellite; (b) the letter to the G7 leaders had
not actually been sent yet; and (c) please, please, please could we run
the correction quickly so that the weekly review of the British press in
overseas capitals would not give the wrong impression to the world’s leaders.