Obsolete phrases was: stamps & tokens 2800

Don't remember. But I learned to type as an office-boy circa 1947, from an instruction manual from the 20s, on an Underwood also from the 20s with roughly 2 inch key travel. This kept me looking extremely busy so that various officious office types didn't find things for me to do. (There are disadvantages to being on the extreme heap bottom). Got up to about 60 wpm on that.

My electronics education was at about the regenerative receiver point, and there was a lot of attractive war surplus hardware about. Nobody had heard of a transistor, but there was an April Fool issue of some radio-electronics magazine announcing the development of a cold cathode vacuum tube, based on a radioactive cathode. The power savings due to eliminating the heaters were immense. This was about the time that Williams tubes were being developed at Manchester, but I knew nothing about them then.

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