American toilets

[Andy Hall]

yes, but it was France.....

[Brian Reay]

But similar arrangements are common- sometimes, for example, business units are allowed to return less margin to the central pot, holding some back to fund development etc.

Investment has to be funded somehow and I don't thing GEC were really any worse than other major UK companies for this. It seems a UK trait to look for a quick return and not look at the long, or even medium, turn.

Yes, I wonder how different this would have been if Simon hadn't died.

I don't recall where the replacement came from but, if it was Lucas, I also don't think they were exactly thriving then.

read it. Sadly we in the UK tolerate our standard of living been screwed up by poor government and we are too apathetic to do anything about it.

Brian

[Doctor Drivel]

We had a siphon cistern and washdown pan. The yanks had the opposite.

[JAF]

You're wrong then, innit?

[JAF]

Oh Yush. applied liberally.

- Is not this common practice in

It's fine for bug-icide, but it doesn't remove the muck.

[Andrew Cox]

Per anum?

[JAF]

Easily. I do it (or not) at least two days a week.

[JAF]

Not everyone does. . .

[Evpuneq Erivf]

A few germs will toughen you up, no? As long as it's not actually covered in enough shit to be visible, of course, which is not a given in every public toilet.

[Huge]

You might be happy to have a stranger's shit on your hands, but I for one am not.

[Mary Pegg]

Zackly.

[Huge]

Or in other words "Eat shit and die."

[John]

Ever followed someone out who hadn't washed their hands - then realised that you have just touched the door handle with your washed hands. Ah well - when did you last see a door handle being cleaned anyway.

[Jim Michaels]

No, I do not doubt your experience.

I was merely commenting that it is not common.

Remove SPAMX from email address

[Andy Hall]

Well....

I've been in several different office buildings and shopping centres this past week and all had doors of this kind of height. Very disconcerting.....

The only thing that I found more strange was the concern over the welfare of a young Mexican boy at a football match. The whole crowd sang about it as well:

"Jose can you see?"

[Roger]

The message from "Bob Eager" contains these words:

I have only just come across this so excuse the late reply but IIRC Bob has misremembered his history.

AEI was taken over by GEC some years before GEC took over English Electric. The EECo takeover would have been somewhere around 1967.

Marconi was a wholly owned subsidiary (one of many) of English Electric who also had an interest in ICL. ICL may well have been formed by a merger with EECos computer interests but EECo per se did not merge with the other computer firms.

Marconi was eventually selected as the name for the rump GEC which was left after the better enterprises were all sold off. I don't know if the name had remained in use for the whole of the intervening period but it easily could have.

[Roger]

The message from "Brian Reay" contains these words:

Weinstock was a short termist of the worst hue. By the time he died this had been recognised and his obituary in one of the broadshirts was as spiteful a denounciation as I as I have ever seen in an obituary.

The coming of Weinstock (or Swinestock as we called him) led to a high turnover of staff at Stafford as the able (and some of the less able, myself among them) jumped ship. Being required to wait until the cheaper afternoon rates to make trunk calls would have saved a bit on the phone bill but it wasted far more on the wages bill as continuity of thought was replaced by shuffling less important work to pad out the time until the phone could be used.

[Chris J Dixon]

In 1967, I joined AEI on a thin sandwich course. GEC took them over later that year. See:

[Roger]

The message from Chris J Dixon contains these words:

Memory fades and I had forgotten that the 2 takeovers were so close together.

If AEI hadn't been so dilatory in arranging an interview I might have been there on a thin sandwich in 1962 but as it was I was about to accept EECos offer by the time they invited me to interview. Stafford had been a hard enough place to get to from NE Essex in Easter 1962 and Manchester would have been worse so I declined.

bias. Stafford was EECos headquarters but you couldn't tell that from the write-up and you could search the production range with a magnifying glass and not find the slightest hint of what had been manufactured there. If nothing else a list of the power stations they made generators for would seem to have more relevance than a list of obscure diesel units.

[Andrew Gabriel]

GEC owned the Marconi name since the late 1960's, and some GEC Companies continued using it. In the late 1990's, GEC decided that the Marconi brand was better known worldwide than the GEC name, and so they switched the name to Marconi, ditching the GEC and GPT names. There were many attempts by various GEC companies over the years to get the GEC logo updated to something modern, but Weinstock wouldn't pay the worldwide costs of doing so.

ICT got only the data processing part of Elliotts, which was mainly the rebadged NCR Elliott 4100 systems. All the rest of Elliotts (the computer systems they designed themselves and all the non computing parts of the business) moved into GEC. I have the slides shown to the workforce when this happened, and I put some online at

the split into GEC and ICT, GEC were not permitted to operate in the Data Processing business for 5 years, and ICT were not permitted to operate in the real-time, process control, and military market areas for 5 years.

The computing part of Elliotts was renamed GEC Computers in 1971, and remained in the former Elliott main building until around 2002. That's also about the time the last Elliott commercial computer system ceased being on maintenance (it was used for traffic light control, in Birmingham IIRC). Some of the Elliott military systems may still be in use.