Gold Medallions

Another great band you might not have heard/forgotten about (with an all-to-brief Wikipedia entry) is “Tucky Buzzard”. They managed to produce five albums over a period of four years between the late 1960s and the early 1970s. Some of the band members had been around the block a few times playing a large variety of musical styles as the sixties moved from Beat to Psychedelia as “The End”.  The 1973 shuddabinnahit single “Gold Medallions” alone is enough to put them firmly into the Magic Robot Hall of Fame.

For more info visit the website of (their producer) Bill Wyman.

Combo Man

Can you find the 14 Marvel characters that make up Combo Man???? To be honest, the most I can find is 13 ?!?

Where is Lola Drake???

Back in the dawn of time (early/mid 1960s) I purchased “Suspense” 14. I was immediately disappointed that the odd intriguing cover bore little relation to the actual story inside.

It probably took me a decade to finally track down the details of the issue number of “Mystery Tales” that contained the original (in colour!) story. Pre-Interweb the world moved at a very different pace!

Where’s the news?

Where’s the news?

Twenty years ago

After Jim Shooter had left Marvel…and Valiant…and Defiant comics he became involved in yet another comic company. Broadway comics only lasted for 33 issues across 12 series (many of them one-shots) over a 12 month period twenty years ago.

It was twenty years ago when I thankfully ditched my godawful Windows 3.1 PC and entered the “modern” world of Windows 95 with its built-in browser, although the hard drive still didn’t have the capacity to actually download anything more than the odd image, and, of course, as long as the modem was on I couldn’t receive incoming phonecalls.

Interestingly in this Broadway comic from early 1996 they still list the Internet and the World Wide Web as being two completely different things. I suppose they were. The Internet had only recently evolved from what had been a number of separate systems like ARPANET and TELENET mostly used by colleges and scientific geeks. The “World Wide Web” and the concept of “http” is accepted as being instigated by Tim Berners-Lee and CERN in 1989. It was only by the early 1990s that browsers and rudimentary search engines were available. Google wouldn’t take its first faltering steps until 1998. Google succeeded immediately by letting people search for keywords rather than just titles of websites, and by introducing algorithms that placed sites in order of popularity/number of visits for the first time.

All this waffle is because just this weekend I pulled a box out of the loft that was full of hundreds of 3.5in floppy discs. Each disc could store the massive amount of 720 Kb or even 1.44 MB of data!!!

Most of them were the ones you got “free” sellotaped to the front of magazines. As I threw them all into the wheely bin it did cross my mind that I’d soon be doing the same thing to all those CD ROMs from a decade ago.

Nuff Said 55