OT: All white wires ..

Phone cables up to about 4000 pairs use multiple levels of colour codes, one for the "base" wire colour, another colour for a stripe, then groups of wires are bound together within the cable using yet another colour ...

Then smack their little botties. Online databases have existed for quite a while, yea, even unto the thirtieth year ago. And could offer end-to-end tracing across kit such as patch panels.

The same at Westinghouse Brake and Signal's Automation Division on SCADA / telemetry products, 50 years ago.

When they needed a colour other than pink, the pink wire would be drawn through a paint container.

I would expect a (labelled) polarised connector at each end of those cables, such that it would be impossible to connect any cable to the wrong plug/socket.

It's sometimes difficult to determine if a connector is a plug or a socket - so we described them all as "plockets".

I used to work for a UK defence engineering firm. (Yes, that long ago) All single wires, bundled or not, were pink with matching sleeve(s) at each end. Each sleeve had a digit on it and was colour coded - black for zero, brown for one etc.

PA

It's just what you get when you go onto a client's site.

Recalling my first job with GEC Telecommunications many years ago, GPO (which became BT) telephone exchange circuits used the basic colour code blue orange green brown and slate twisted with a white in pair cables or white and red in triples. When the basic colours ran out they were striped with others so became blue-white, blue-orange etc. If the twist with the white or white red was "slow" sometimes the identifier and mate became separated which required care to ensure the correct mate was used when terminating. UG or external cables used a slightly different code I believe but I never worked on those.

I would imagine its protection of some kind. Depends how old the aircraft was. Brian

Talking of ribbon cable. I, when I could see used some of that to make a medium wave loop aerial. you just offset the joins by one and use the last one as a coupling winding and pull it tight around a wooden cross. Worked a treat. Obviously I also incorporated a tuning capacitor and a small amplifier as well. I did used to know the actual sizes you needed to make the sides for Medium wave but smaller ones worked on higher frequencies of course. Brian

But that aircraft was, in the purest sense, just an updated comet was it not? Just like the Awac was an uprated 707.

Brian

In my gap year before I went to university, I worked in a research chemistry lab. They did a lot of work with reagents which changed colour depending on whether or not a given substance was present.

Tony, my supervisor, was always telling me stories about Julian, one of my predecessors, who was "a real character" (*). Julian kept getting colour-change reactions which no-one else could replicate. Tony questioned him and the lad was adamant about the colours that he was getting. Suddenly he came out with the immortal line "I *am* colour-blind - does it matter?". Tony said that he had to stop himself administering "a dry slap" to Julian.

(*) Julian was the archetypal "expensively-educated twit", having been to Marlborough (which he pronounced Morlborough, in the same way that some people pronounce Althorp as Orltrop or Harewood as Harwood) and kept boasting about how he was going up to The House (of Lords) to meet his uncle. He once stopped on the hard shoulder of the motorway because he felt dizzy, and he "discovered" (yeah, right!) an open bottle of ether in his car boot. He also nabbed ampoules of amyl nitrate from the lab, where it was kept as an emergency antidote to cyanide poisoning. He reckoned that gave him "a stonkingly-big stiffy". With substance abuse like that, I wonder if he's still alive... He once went for a walk in woodland in Buckinghamshire and got totally lost, ending up in grounds near a big mansion that was patrolled by policemen carrying guns who challenged him "and they were very aggressive to me". It turned out that he had strayed into the grounds of Chequers. He mentioned that he was the nephew of Lord <Whatever> so Maggie invited him in for tea.