
At 104, John Logie Baird colleague recalls first TV demonstration - ColinWright
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-38080275
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ImTalking
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.

~~~
DanBC
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](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.

~~~
mrlambchop
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).

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rmason
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?

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

~~~
UweSchmidt
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.

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Animats
Baird is still alive? Wow.

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

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

