Net Work November 2024

Celebrating our Diamond Jubilee

This month’s Net Work column celebrates 60 years of Practical Electronics, and recounts the tale of how the magazine actually came about to begin with. Net Work also gives an account of Britain’s often overlooked influence when the Internet’s foundations were first taking shape.

This month’s edition sees us reaching our diamond jubilee, as the November 2024 issue marks sixty years of successful publication of Practical Electronics.

In the 1930s, a London-based publisher, George Newnes Ltd. produced ‘Hobbies and Practical Wireless’ which contained a very broad array of projects catering for wholesome DIY hobbies. It included plans for multi-valve wireless receivers, three-valve circuits being the most popular. An astonishing range of every conceivable radio component was sold by a thriving mail order industry, as interest in radio broadcasting captured the imagination of the British public.

A Newnes editor, the now legendary F.J. Camm, then started a range of ‘Practical’ magazine titles aimed at the many hands-on, sleeves-up home mechanics, motorists and wireless enthusiasts. The magazine Practical Wireless would become a stand-alone title, and became a very familiar sight on British newsstands, sales reaching 120,000 copies a month as interest in radio technology continued unabated.

With the transistor arriving on the electronics scene from the late 1950s, new circuit techniques were fast being developed and more magazine pages were also needed to cater for an abundance of advertisers.

In this month’s column I describe how Practical Electronics was eventually created out of Practical Wireless when this new title received the go-ahead to launch in 1964. Edited by Fred Bennett, the first November 1964 issue of Practical Electronics was a success, with 115,000 copies being sold.

< How it all started. An original copy of Hobbies and Practical Wireless magazine, published in April 1932 by George Newnes Ltd.

^ The very first edition of Practical Electronics in November 1964 catered for constructors seeking to build a wide range of semiconductor-based projects.

An Everyday experience

^ Everyday Electronics was designed to offer simpler projects and tutorials for beginners and younger hobbyists. Shown here is the free cover-mounted stripboard of Issue 1.

A sister magazine that was launched in 1971 – Everyday Electronics – was written by the same team and was aimed at beginners and younger readers looking to construct less challenging electronic circuits and gadgets. It had a free piece of Veroboard™ stripboard on the cover – my photo shows a very rare example of the stripboard in its paper envelope.

Fred Bennett passed away in 2006, aged 85, and a tribute written by Mike Kenward appeared on our legacy website which is still online at http://www.epemag.com/vault/0306.htm
I’ve previously described in more detail the often tumultuous journey of the magazines in my 50 Years celebration in 2014, which can still be downloaded as PDFs from https://www.epemag.com/resources.html.

The two titles would go their separate ways before merging as Everyday Practical Electronics (EPE). Several competing titles were absorbed into EPE along the way. Finally, Practical Electronics reverted to a stand-alone title. From 2024 – 60 years after its inception – it is now owned by Australia’s Silicon Chip Publications but still serves the British and overseas hobby electronics markets as before.

Additional resources describing the history of, and people behind, both titles were written by former Editor Mike Kenward and currently remain online at our legacy website, see https://www.epemag.com/epe-history.html

The Internet’s early days

A single page Net Work column first appeared in the August 1996 issue and a URL then appeared on the cover shortly afterwards. In this month’s column I also re-visit the roots of the technology that gave rise to this column to begin with.

Britain had more influence on the Internet’s early development than it’s given credit for, and I recommend a book “Inventing the Internet” by Janet Abbate (ISBN 0-262-01172-7, 1999, MIT Press, 246pp), a thoroughly researched work that describes in commendable detail the Internet’s early days.

As we know, the launch of Sputnik by the USSR in 1957 galvanised America into developing a “survivable” communications network for military use. The US non-profit RAND Corporation (for ‘Research & Development’) researched military projects and credit goes to a young RAND engineer, Paul Baran, for designing an early form of distributed communications or ‘message switching’ system for the military that could withstand an enemy hit. There is more background to this at https://www.rand.org/about/history/baran.html. As I explain, the concept went largely undeveloped at the time until ARPANET was created.

Facing the White Heat of Technology

Here in Britain, Harold Wilson’s Labour government championed the drive for new technologies and industries. The British Library website hosts a recording of his famous ‘white heat of technology’ 1963 conference speech at https://blogs.bl.uk/sound-and-vision/2023/10/recording-of-the-week-harold-wilsons-1963-pledge-to-harness-the-white-heat-of-a-scientific-revolutio.html.

^ Donald Davies of the National Physical Laboratory describes the concept of packet switching in a 1998 TV interview for the Open University. (BBC TV.)

A major part of Britain’s computer research was carried out by the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) where one celebrated NPL computing engineer from Wales, Donald Davies, is credited with coining the term ‘packet switching’.

^ Roger Scantlebury of the NPL presented the concept of packet switching to an American audience. It was then embraced in the foundations of the US ARPANET. (BBC/ Open University.)

In 1966, America’s ARPANET was just the germ of an idea and it seems the developers were originally unaware of Paul Baran’s pioneering work. In 1967 NPL’s Roger Scantlebury presented a paper in the USA describing their work on packet switching, and they explained NPL’s ongoing research into building its own network, being called the Mark I. It’s now clear that NPL’s own research heavily influenced the design of the American ARPANET.

Furthermore, British NPL scientists are credited with ‘joining the dots’ that brought RAND’s original work and ARPANET’s developers together, to create a resilient packet-switching network. Donald Davies is also recognised as the proponent of a dedicated network interface computer or ‘router’.

He also convinced the Americans that network bandwidth would be the key to everything, so, according to Janet Abbate, ARPANET’s Larry Roberts duly upped the network spec. to a dizzying 56 kilobits per second, the maximum possible over analogue phone lines (as every dial-up modem user of the 1990s would later discover).

Much of the outstanding work done at the National Physical Laboratory by Donald Davies and his team was technically ahead of its time but, lacking funds, it could never compete with America’s fully-funded military ARPANET. Davies died in 2000, and we’ll never know what the ‘net might have looked like if the National Physical Laboratory had managed to design a messaging system on a much grander scale. At least Britain’s hand was on the tiller when the idea of packet switching networks was first floated nearly sixty years ago.

You’ll find fuller details in this month’s magazine column. In next month’s Net Work, I’ll continue with the story of F.J. Camm and return to another Net Work topic, the use of uninterruptible power supplies to keep a home network running in the event of a power cut.

– ARW