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  • The Bamber Bridge Incident

    A fair few videos are popping up at the moment responding to a description of the Bamber Bridge incident. This post is mostly adding a few points from the British perspective.

    US military authorities insisted that local British authorities impose a colour bar

    The British pubs co-operated and stuck up signs saying “Black troops only” – which is obviously not what the US authorities wanted.

    Well of course they did – under what kind of authority do the ‘US military authorities’ have to impose a colour bar? They are after all nothing more than guests in the country, so of course British pub owners would interpret it “perversely”.

    It is nice to think that this is an indication that the British of the time weren’t racist. Wrong of course – Bamber Bridge is just a couple of hours away from Hartlepool where according to legend a ship-wrecked monkey was hanged for being a French spy. The British regarded themselves as better than anyone else (so just like everybody else then), but the presence of non-whites was very low especially in a small town without a port.

    And besides, the British were told to be nice to visiting US troops and nobody mentioned that it wasn’t supposed to apply to non-white US troops. And of course there is sympathy for the underdog.

    What Happened Afterwards?

    At least the videos I’ve seen neglect to mention what happened after the incident. Except to say that many of the black troops were court-martialed.

    But what also happened was that the general in charge (Ira Eaker) placed most of the blame on the white officers and MPs, merged the unit with other trucking units, and purged the new unit of racist and inexperienced officers. Which is supposed to have improved things considerably for black troops.

    British Racism?

    It is easy to assume that the British attitude during the incident means that the British aren’t racist. The fact is that black people were relatively rare in Britain during WWII and were most likely concentrated in the great port cities rather than a small village in rural Lancashire.

    Immigration of black British from the colonies was strongly encouraged after the war, and with their arrival racism reared its ugly head. I would argue that the racism in Britain against black people was never quite as bad as in the USA, but I’m white, so what the hell do I know?

    Posts leading out to the sea.
    Into The Water; Stillness and Motion

  • The Odd Ones

    In The Crack
    Wooden and Concrete Seating

  • Visit to Tenby

    Tenby RNLI Slipway
    Tenby’s Fort

  • What Is A Dumb Terminal?

    Ah yes! Well the first thing to answer is what a terminal is.

    A terminal is a device for communicating with text (graphics was possible but relatively rare especially in the early days) with a computer – you would type in a command in text and the computer would respond in text :-

    » ls
1  2  bad-directory

    Although the “terminal” is still available today in the form of a gooey program, the early terminals communicated with the computer with some form of serial port (usually RS232). The first terminals were modified teleprinters (often called “Teletypes” due to the domination of that company in the USA). These were large electromechanical devices where the display was paper – they were printing terminals.

    The first terminals that displayed on a screen were very much like the printing terminals – they would “print” output from the computer on the last line of the screen and scroll for additional lines. Just like on a printing terminal except that once things scrolled off the top of the screen they were lost.

    At this point in computing history, we’re just at the start of the microcomputer age; in fact one of the uses for which Intel’s second processor (the 8008) was developed was to operate as the heart of a computer terminal.

    As the microprocessor controlled terminal was essentially run by software, programmers started adding in new features that would do things like clear the screen, move the cursor around the screen so you could display text anywhere you wanted.

    At this point one definition of “dumb terminal” can be found – a terminal that just emulated a printing terminal was a dumb terminal; ones with additional features weren’t so dumb.

    As the 1970s progressed, terminals gained more and more features and eventually some became capable of downloading software from the computer they were connected to and running that software locally. Such as (optionally) the HP 2647. Or the Bell Labs blit terminal.

    Such terminals could be termed “smart” and their predecessors “dumb”. And if you notice a similarity with the somewhat later “thin clients“, you wouldn’t be entirely wrong.

    Alternatively, some terminals (such as the IBM “green screen” terminals) operated in block mode where the terminal would allow a certain amount of editing within the terminal and send the result back to the computer a screen at a time. These necessarily had to have a certain amount of “smarts” built in, so they were smarter than character at a time terminals (thus “dumb”).

    "Dumb" Terminal
    A “dumb” terminal

    So to an extent there is no real agreement on what a “dumb terminal” really is. Pick one that you like!

  • A Word To The ULEZ Whiners

    Or perhaps more than just a word given the level of dumbness displayed by the usual ULEZ opponents.

    1. It isn’t solely a Labour policy; the ULEZ zone in central London was first introduced by a Tory major (Boris Johnson) and extended by the current Labour major. The Tory opposition to ULEZ during the Uxbridge by-election was a cheap political stunt to distract from the atrocious record the Tories have in central government. Which seemingly worked on the more gullible.
    2. The penalty charge for the ULEZ zone is only paid by the most polluting vehicles – diesel cars older than 8 years old and petrol cars older than 17 years. Which is a tiny minority of the cars on the road.
    3. This isn’t targeting the poor; the poor in our society can’t afford cars at all. Besides there’s a scrappage scheme which pays people to scrap the smellier cars.
    4. This isn’t about CO2 emissions; it’s about NOx emissions.
    5. And frankly none of the objections (even if real) come close to outweighing the advantages of fewer deaths from pollution.
    Ceci n’est pas une cabane de plage