Swinging Airlines

Do you remember the days when Air travel was still glamorous. When being a Pilot or an Air Hostess was the coolest of professions?

This is a typical publicity shot of the late 60s or early 70s - It seemed as if you weren't so much buying a seat on a plane as buying the company of a beautiful woman. Marketing an airline had more in common with an escort agency than the traditional idea of in-flight service.

Incidentally someone recently asked who the first Air Hostess was. I had a quick look on Wikipedia. The first male steward was believed to be on a Zeppelin airship in 1911 (no name given). The first female was Ellen Church (25 years old) on United Airlines flight in 1930. So now you know!

If you want to read more try:
Have Budget Airlines killed the Glamour of Flying?.

Green Energy?

This promotional photo from the 1950s extols the virtue of air conditioning although at first sight it looks like a giant radio set.

It would be nice to think it was powered by a solar array on the roof, a wind turbine or a hydroelectric scheme but in reality it was probably powered by coal or oil-fired generation. The 1950s lady luxuriating and possibly orgasming in the icy blast doesn't seem too worried about such weighty moral dilemmas.

Electronic Mail

This goes back to the days before we ordinary folk knew what email was. Those distant times when the Beatles topped every chart and when computers were the size of a London bus. The public weren't allowed to touch them because they were so valuable. If you were privileged, you might view the 'mainframe' through toughened glass.

Who can forget the magnificent IBM 360 or Burroughs, Univac and Honeywell? Or magnetic tapes drives the size of a garden shed? Happy days when IT folk wrote programs in FORTRAN and stored them on punched cards stored in metal boxes.

Pinball Wizard

Here we have an Iconic piece of RetroTechnology - the pinball machine. Somehow the original looks so much better than the modern, computer-based replacement (Ann-Margret helps too).

The ad links the machine to the movie Pinball Wizard by the Who. I was there for the famous 'Live at Leeds' Gig the Who did in '69. I couldn't get a ticket but my room was so near the Student Refectory, where it was recorded that I heard every chord.

If I'd been daft enough to complain about the noise then perhaps the legendary album would never have been made?

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