Day 745, Off, on, off, on

In, in, out, out - in, out, in, in.

For best results it would be ideal to be in rather than out.

In the case of the DE9 or DB9 subset of the RS232 standard the pins are configured like this:

1	Data Carrier Detect	in
2	Receive Data	in
3	Transmit Data	out
4	Data Terminal Ready	out
5	Signal Ground	-
6	Data Set Ready	in
7	Request to Send	out
8	Clear to Send	in
9	Ring Indicator	in

Interestingly the 'ins' outnumber the 'outs' by a ratio of 62.5:37.5

Surely it ought to be more equitable however you look at it.

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Day 744, On balance

This should have been obvious, hard disk drive spindles have balance weights added to ensure smooth running.

It never occurred to me that they would have balance weights, but then I've never thought about it in any particular depth.  But hey, when did ignorance of a subject stop people from making massive assumptions.*

So why are there balance weights and why should it be obvious?

An imbalance can occur in a rotating object when there is a disparity between the centre of gravity of the rotating system and the centre of rotation for the rotating system.  An imbalance in a rotating system causes vibration.**

Let's consider this in the context of motor vehicles and their wheels.  A vibrating car wheel can be felt through the steering column and will be noticeable in uneven wear of the tyre, there is also a strong likelihood of earlier than normal failure of a wheel bearing due to the increase in stress and wear.

In a system such as a hard disk drive assembly, where there is are very fine tolerance of distance between read/write heads and the disk surface, a few nanometers,*** any vibration of the disk surface will lead to an increase in data read and write errors.  Over time there will also be greater wear on the hard drive spindle which will exacerbate the existing imbalance and lead to premature failure of the disk drive.

In both the case of the motor vehicle and the disk drive spindle small weights are added in places appropriate to remove the imbalance in the rotating system.  When you next walk along a pavement take a look at the shoulder of car wheels, just next to the tyre, and it won't be long before you start to spot the lead balance weights attached to the wheel rim.

If you've ever heard of wheel balancing before, for cars, bikes, buses, etc, then why would it not be obvious after a small amount of consideration that there might be a similar requirement in other types of rotating system.  Of course it would only be obvious if you have a particular amount and type of prior knowledge.****

The tiny weights below shown removed from the disk spindle, presumably colour coded to indicate different mass.

* You know what I'm getting at.
** Don't take my word for it, here are some experts explaining this at great length in a patent application.
*** Don't take my word for it, here's an article from IEEE Transactions on Magnetics where some experts explain it at great length and in great detail.
**** I actually went "oh look, balance weights!" and was momentarily (a few nanoseconds) surprised, thus giving me an excuse for an overly verbose blog.


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Day 743, Off track

Here it is, an off-track, on-roller, turbo-trainer tyre.

I have no idea whether any of the hyphenated words above needed hyphens or not.

It should probably be 'turbo trainer'.

However, it doesn't really matter does it.

Just get on and ride off.

Although essentially there is no 'off' as you will be stationary.

Unlike an envelope.*

* e for envelope - stationery.

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Day 742, This is not a language

The BBC Master, kit off, chips out.*

The BBC Master below is displaying all the signs of having lost its settings, the batteries are dead.

In fact the batteries aren't just dead, they are also giving off decompositional fluids.  How very delightful.

Leaking batteries?  No problem, first check to see whether the batteries are alkaline or acid - these are alkaline.

Use white vinegar to clean alkaline battery leaks.  Once the batteries were removed from the container I poured white wine vinegar (all I had available) over all the affected parts until they stopped hissing.  Once the fizzing and hissing stops that indicates that the alkali has been neutralised.

For situations where acid batteries have leaked then use bicarbonate of soda - bicarb can also be used to stop reflux if you've run out of a proprietary remedy, it is disgusting but better than reflux...**

Even though it wasn't possible to do any further testing until the battery compartment dried out after cleaning I did type the ROMS command.  This machine appears to be chock-full of add-ons, albeit ones it hasn't loaded due to the lost CMOS settings.

The battery compartment with it's payload of unpleasant alkaline residue, like the stuff left after a massive coal-fired party from the last century, is pictured below.  These batteries are dated January 1999.***

The BBC Master would originally have had a rechargeable Lithium battery but that has long since failed, this BBC has been modified to work with non-rechargeable batteries.  The cable connected to the top of the battery pack has had a resistor and a diode inserted in-line in the positive power cable, this is to prevent the BBC Master from being able to recharge non-rechargeable batteries.

To recover and reset the CMOS memory the BBC has to be powered on with the R key held down, then press CTRL F BREAK, then type in these three star commands (each followed by Enter):

*CONFIGURE LANG 12
*CONFIGURE FILE 9
*CONFIGURE MODE 7

Assuming you've also replaced the batteries then when you power it off and back on again it will present the standard BBC BASIC prompt.


* This is a Partridgism.
** Better still, prevent reflux by eating earlier, changing your diet (eat less fat), and getting more exercise.  Partridge, again.
*** Party like it's...


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Day 741, Hissing Model B

It's not the most erudite piece of BASIC coding ever but it shows the machine works.*

After quite some faffing about to get the video working it became apparent that I actually had the right sort of input on one of my monitors.  With a bit of judicious wire poking into the BNC socket on the back of the BBC Model B it released some video, and below is the output.

It was obvious that the PSU on the Model B was suffering slightly so I didn't want to leave it on for too long.  The capacitors were making a high pitched whistling sound indicating that they need replacing, which is to be expected on a machine this age.  I'll replace the capacitors.

As can be seen by the 1770 DFS displayed at boot time it has successfully detected the disk ROM, there are also a couple of disk drives, although I have no disks.  I should have typed the ROMS command in case it hadn't revealed all at startup, that command will list all installed ROM chips.

* Far less rude than the sort of things that used to be displayed on any early 1980's department store computer which they had been foolish enough to allow adolescent boys near unsupervised.  I never did such things myself.

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Day 740, Draughty BASIC

Connect the Apple replica 1 to a serial port, launch Tera Term, configure the char and line settings, fiddle with the baud rate if data transfer is flakey, and we're off.

That's it (basically.)

I tested a couple of BASIC games, Rock, Paper, Scissors, and Checkers, or draughts as we call it.

As I've completely forgotten the rules for draughts I managed to eventually crash the game with an overflow error.  Go* me - there's only so much error checking it had been programmed to deal with and an idiot wasn't in their game plan.

Phewee, it really doesn't get more exciting than this.

Next up, World of Wozcraft.**

* Go.  That's a different game entirely, and not suitable for such an underpowered machine.
** Apparently that isn't a thing.



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Day 739, Trigger Level

There's a fine line between tolerating something and being offended by it.

Different people have the tolerance/offence line in different locations.  How is it possible to present anything to any group of people without simultaneously infuriating some of those people who aren't 'triggered' by what is about to be presented but are 'triggered' by the mention of 'trigger warnings'?

Some of those people that are 'triggered' by 'trigger warnings' have provided a definition of the phrase here.  At least it keeps those people all in one place, or perhaps it doesn't, I'm mistaking an online forum for some type of physical public location for containing debate.*

My suggestion is that we don't complain about trigger warnings, that we recognise that there are a lot of things in the world likely to cause offence, and that we can't pretend those things don't exist.

This argument clearly needs some development, so until then what I propose is that we use the handy device pictured below.

As well as being a Universal Counter Timer, it also has a handy "Trigger Level" control knob.  The control knob can be used to effectively reset your own personal trigger threshold to either extreme, for example at the most sensitive level the use of the word 'knob' in a piece of text might bring the operator out in hives and cause smoke to come out of their ears.

Whereas if the dial is moved to the most insensitive level then a person could endure the most cretinous UKIPpy, Tory, brexity toss-wank possible, where it is plain that the speakers haven't got a 'Scooby-Doo' what they are on about or what they are going to do, yet the listener is as unmoved as if they'd spent the afternoon consuming a quarter of an ounce of Acapulco Gold until the smoke came out of their ears.**†

I think this is the most sensible solution for all involved.  In anything.

* You know, like a forum.
** I have never experienced Acapulco Gold but the mellow is supposedly très mellow.
† It might be more appropriate to consume some EU barn-grown Dutch classic giant such as White Widow to 'trigger' the brexiters - I'd never heard of White Widow before, I looked it up purely for the purposes of making a cheap joke.


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Day 738, Replica 1 test

On Saturday morning I plugged in the remaining IC's and tested the Woz monitor.

If you look on The YouTube you may see people plugging IC's into sockets as easily as plugging in a MagSafe power connector.  Do not be fooled, a great deal of care needs to be taken in the preparation to have the IC pins aligned neatly with the socket.  Make sure that there are no bent pins or pins out of alignment with the others, check to see far away from a close fit the pins currently are by offering the IC up to the socket.  Use a firm surface to press gently all of the pins on one side at once slightly inward and keep alternating sides until the spacing of the pins match that of the socket spacing.

If a pin is already bent there is a good chance it will break, this may not be a problem if the wider part of the pin is still intact as it could still make good contact with the socket.  If a pin breaks and there isn't good contact then push an off-cut piece of wire from a resistor into the socket and use that to connect to the IC, with solder if needed, although take care not to apply heat for too long here.

After assembling the final parts, shoes-off to prevent build up of static and component damage from electrostatic discharge (ESD), I reconnected the replica 1 to my monitor.  It didn't work.  I checked all connections again and nothing appeared out of place, I then realised I'd set the monitor to the wrong input type...

All was well.  The replica 1 booted into the Woz monitor.  The Woz monitor is the utility Steve Wozniak wrote to access memory locations, write to them and execute simple programs.

I entered these values from memory location 0300 using this syntax:

300: A9 0 AA 20 EF FF E8 8A 4C 2 3

Then I executed the hex code using the command 300R - 300 for the memory location to start from and R for Run.

It didn't work.

I set the caps lock on on the keyboard, entered the hex values again and executed the code from the memory location.  This time it set off printing a continuous stream of characters as can be seen in the bottom image.

Apple 1 Basic can also be loaded from the Woz monitor, basic is included in the EEPROM chip.  I'll get round to doing something with Basic later.

So far so good, nothing destroyed by standing on, generally clumsiness or ESD, the next task is to put it in some sort of protective container.*

* This is too easy, perhaps it would be an idea to build a replica machine from scratch.

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Day 737, Replica 1 assembly

I spent Friday soldering components onto the the replica 1 plus board.

The replica 1 plus, designed by Vince Briel, is a functional replica of the original Apple 1.  Vince's design was used in the book Apple 1 Replica Creation: Back to the garage.  The book is available to download in PDF form here.

There are some optimisations in this updated design, these are mainly to reduce the number of logic IC's needed, in particular those IC's used for I/O.  I/O in this design is catered for by the use of the large IC visible on the right in the picture below, the Parallax Propeller IC.  The small IC next to the Propeller chip is a 24LC256, an industrial I2C EEPROM, often used in conjunction with a Propeller chip

Another modern addition is the USB to serial interface.  This serves the dual purpose of powering the replica 1 and providing a built in converter to enable a serial interface to another computer to be made using a USB cable.  If you've ever tried to use a serial-USB converter cable you'll understand why this is such an excellent feature - I have a skip full of converter cables with different chipsets that have all failed to work, your mileage may vary, but frankly they are crap.

The chip reduction is a nod to the techniques Steve Wozniak used to design the original Apple 1.

By the end of Friday the board looked as below but without the two IC's - prior to installing the Propellor and EEPROM chips I checked that each IC socket was receiving either 5v or 3.3v at the correct pins and that the ground pins on each were also working.  Vcc (power in) and ground are not always in the same place and some browsing of datasheets was needed to locate the correct set of pins for each different IC type.

With the first two IC's installed the replica 1 can be hooked up to a monitor/tv and tested.  The second image shows the expected output if the board is functioning, a screen full of garbage characters.  The output is in colour due to the modern Propeller chip being able to generate colour output - garbage characters include colour as well as mono.

From bare board and bag of bits to assembly and first test on day one, no soldering errors, no broken components - result.  The next step is to add the rest of the IC's and do further tests.

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Day 736, Mixed media

I needed some sort of boot media while fixing a PC.  The first thing I considered was a USB stick but unfortunately the PC BIOS was too old to support that.  Ok then let's try a CD, do I have one?

It's interesting that it didn't really cross my mind to use a floppy disk, there probably are some in a box somewhere but would they even still be readable?  I certainly couldn't have easily written to one as my PC doesn't have a floppy drive - I would anticipate a 'bzrrrr, grrrrrrr, whzzzrrrrr' sound from the read head struggling to access something resembling data if I'd had a drive available.  You know the noise, the sound of 'data error reading drive A:'.

As it turns out I had a handful of CDR's, still sealed in their original packaging, but there was also a CDRW.  Rather than open the antique TDK and SONY recordable CD's, that must date from the late 90's, I opted for the CDRW.  Let's see if this magical item, which had a brief moment in the sun at the turn of the century before USB sticks became a decent size, would function.

The CDRW was easily formatted and had a bootable ISO image written to it and booted an operating system to recover the stricken PC, and that was that for a walk down memory lane.

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Day 735, Dog sick

It never occurred to me that dogs could become seasick, but then I've never been at sea with a dog.

Some of the dogs that sailed with Sir Earnest Shackleton on board Endurance were treated for seasickness, and with what appears to be the same bottle of patent remedy that any other member of crew would have used.

Here's a dog having a healthy glug of remedy poured into it and not appearing to like the taste.

If only the dog had known it would have to eat seal blubber for the next 9 months it might have asked for some of the remedy to be saved to wash away the irony taste.*

* Although I expect dogs might actually like the irony, gamey flavour of seal meat.


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Day 734, Your assignment today

Question 1.

Write 450 words on the use of controlled feedback as a thematic device in Boston's More Than a Feeling

Question 2.

The cowbell used in the recording of (Don't Fear) The Reaper by the band Blue Öyster Cult has become an internet meme.  Discuss in 250 words why April 2000 and July 2004 are relevant, making particular reference to the actor Christoper Walken.

Question 3.

Discuss the impact of the Neil Young song Heart of Gold on the work of Douglas Adams and whether or not it has any relevance.  Use no more than 150 words.

Question 4.

The Janis Joplin song Piece of my Heart refers to a part of human anatomy, which piece of that particular part of human anatomy is responsible for the third verse?  Express your answer using De Morgan's laws, write no more than two lines.

Question 5.

The image below contains a reference to the popular recording artist Nancy Sinatra, explain the reference and its relevance using a prime number of words beginning with alternate letters of the alphabet only, be sensible in the length of your answer.

Hand in your finished question paper to Mr Sumner, but don't get too near.

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Day 733, Rubbish RAID, rubbish disk

Marvellous.  Definition.  Something which has had any reason to marvel about it removed.

For some reason when I passed on one of my old PC's to someone else I configured it with a mirrored pair of disks using the on-board Marvell RAID controller.  I was obviously thinking at the time that this would save effort in the event that a disk failed.

Ha ha, what a thinking ahead smartypants I am.

Ha ha ha, what an idiot.

I wasn't counting on how piss-poor the RAID controller actually was - I'm used to enterprise grade RAID controllers that, among other things, let you know a disk has failed and can be used to rebuild arrays in a simple and time-efficient manner.

The Marvell RAID controller doesn't let you know a disk has failed other than at some point, an inexplicable time later, the PC refuses to boot as the BIOS decides to disable the on-board RAID BIOS.  This happens some time after the disk has failed, not on the first reboot.  It also gives no indication that there is a fault at the startup screen.

Re-enabling the RAID BIOS from the motherboard BIOS allows the PC to boot - sometimes.  It also enables access to the RAID BIOS utility (CTRL-M at startup), which would be good if it was of any actual use.  The RAID BIOS showed a single disk with no indication that there was a disk missing other than the state of the array being DEGRADED.  I worked out which disk had failed and replaced it with one of the multiple spares I'd left in the PC chassis.

The replacement disk was recognised in the RAID BIOS.  Unfortunately there was no option to rebuild the array, which was odd.   I could configure the single added disk as RAID 0, which was of no use whatsoever.

With the replacement disk added to the array controlled the PC then refused to boot.  I disconnected the disk, booted the PC, then plugged in the SATA cable after startup... It's a SAS disk so theoretically it should be possible to 'hot add' - your mileage may vary and I cannot be held responsible for you breaking anything, anywhere, at anytime, or indeed killing yourself due to a poorly earthed PSU.

I downloaded the Marvell RAID Utility from some place on the internet - easier than it sounds, the Marvell website was not in any way helpful.  The utility showed the working disk and the added disk.  However the added disk also appeared to be broken in some way as even though it was identified correctly there was no way to assign it to the array or even as a spare.  I had a further two spare disks in the chassis - this machine had had a large RAID array configured previously.  The next disk was recognised by the RAID Utility in Windows and did start to rebuild, although it failed shortly after 13% and then the disk was marked as 'unplugged'.

The final disk was connected.  This rebuilt completely.

Then shortly after the rebuild this disk was marked as 'shut down'.  There was no way to bring it back.  Rebooting into the BIOS RAID utility the new disk was marked as SPARE, which seemed hopeful, however there was still no way to change the status of the disk in what is supposedly the main configuration source for this type of RAID array.

A restart of the PC showed the disk still as 'shut down' and checking the properties of the disk showed that 'the disk is not well' and there would be risk if it was used.  So all three spare disks had given up the ghost, which is odd as they'd been sitting still for quite some time, they were all working previously and should have had plenty of life in them.

Bollocks.

"What did you do during your day off?"

I'm afraid I spent a substantial amount of it dicking about with a really crap array controller and some really crap disks, other than that it's been fine...

It's not as if there were pleasant, non-IT related things to do.

Argghgghhhhhhhhh.

Arrrrrrggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhh.

Arrrrrgrrgrgrgrgrgrgrgrgrgrrrrrggggggggghhhhhhhhh.

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Day 732, Fallen leaves and candlesticks

As you put your winter drawers on and the nights turn cold it's time to break out the sole source of heating.  That's assuming the candles made from the rendered fat of the neighbours you had to eviscerate when they tried to steal you last tin of pickled quinoa haven't been eaten by mice.

Here in the post 'event' world oop-north things are tough, but not as tough as those in That London.  Even before the event That Londoner had to have bars on the inside of their windows.  The bars weren't, as was commonly assumed, to prevent entryists from swinging the balance of cheese ownership into the favour of someone else.  No.  The bars were there for when the Londonista waking from Stilton based nightmares realise the nightmare is less bad than the reality and proceeds to attempt to hurl themself out of the window, often with the effect that they fell upwards of a metre to the pavement.  Now however there is no cheese, things are very much worse...

With the candle successfully lit, after a brief battle with the ferrocerium rod, it's time to warm up the crisp autumn leaves.  Autumn leaves, according to Eddie McGee, can be a vital source of mineral nutrients when times are hard, particularly the minerals phosphorous, nitrogen, potassium and magnesium.  Grylls and Mears owe a lot to Eddie, without him they wouldn't be carrying so much adipose tissue after their visits to the woods and their mineral content would see their daily average intake being well below WHO guidelines.

Ahh, food of the old, pre 'event', world.

We can now only dream.

But we're the lucky ones.

If only they had such luxuries in That London as trees, candlesticks, and neighbours.*

* This is what happens when you don't speak to anyone all day and you've run out of different ways to put the tea cosy on your head.


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Day 731, Devalued

Just got some of those new fivers from the cashpoint, it's clever how they make them devalue in real time.

No five pound notes were harmed in the making of this gif.*

* Unlike by this brexit lunacy.


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Day 730, Phew, it worked

If you are going to do backups of your data you also need to be sure that you can recover that data.

Don't laugh, there are lots of people that never check whether backed up data is recoverable or not.  In fact most people are so blasé about the subject that they never bother to check, or if they aren't the people doing the backup they don't ask those responsible whether they have checked.  Ok, yes, this is anecdotal evidence.  However, it is based on over 20 years experience of working in IT in a variety of different environments and businesses.

If you can't recover the data then why bother spending any money on a system or method of backing it up.  The reality is that more effort, and cash, should be put into designing and building the process to make sure that recovery is possible.  Focus on recovery if the data is of value.  Once you understand what you want from recovery then work on how to do the backup in as non-invasive a manner as possible to give you the platform for the recovery.  This will ensure that the way that backup is carried out is more appropriate to your requirements, and actually works in a timely manner.

What is it you want from the process?

All your data back in exactly the same form as before?

Every system back and running in the same form as before?

Bear in mind that any changes to data and systems since a backup was taken will be lost, unless there is a much more costly 'continuous data protection' type backup in place.

Below is just a desktop PC that has the C: drive occasionally imaged off to a backup disk  Here the recovery of the entire image was successful after booting from a pre-configured USB stick.  This is not something that it's convenient to test that often, but it works.  The general changes to the system, patches and reconfiguration, haven't broken the software and it is simple enough that it is recoverable when needed - in this case migrating to a larger SSD.  It is still time consuming and fiddly, but it is manageable for a single system.

Imagine recovering tens of hundreds of servers, and hundreds of TeraBytes of storage.  However well thought out the process to recover that scale of data it is going to take some time - assuming that the hardware is available.

What's the lead time on enterprise grade hardware from multiple different vendors...

Obviously, if your data has no value whatsoever then forget about it, in fact why not just set fire to your computer right now, clearly you don't need it.

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Day 729, Now you see it

Where did it go?

What did I do?

Get-command for Powershell on the Mac shows Get-MacOsXsysteminformation appeared as an available function.

Now you see it.

Then some minutes later it has mysteriously disappeared.

I have no idea why.

And now you don't.

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Day 728, Not a broken octopus

This is an absolutely astonishing piece of kit, it's top quality, you don't get many of these to the pound, and if you want this one you're going to have to buy it in USD.

$$$

No way am I accepting your stinking sterling, the longer you take to hand over the cash the less it is worth.  Any transaction could be devalued by 10% before the money has been exchanged, to the detriment of the seller, which is why I would've banged a 50% premium on it if selling in pounds, but sod that, who needs instability in their currency?

Alternatively, if you have a handful of Matabele gumbo beads or a fistful of Rentenmarks then we can do business.

This fine piece of late twentieth century MIDI technology was used by bands such as:

Hotslack Crimsofiends
Neurofester
And the Deeply Hip
The Hawkfelchers
Nutty Slack

and the quite overrated, no idea why they would make any list let alone this very select one

Cromford's Undergarments

Indeed this very beat-box could possibly have been used by, maybe, almost certainly, perhaps, one of the better of the well known bands listed above.

It even has such sublime and exotic features as aftertouch threshold, dynamic bend, velocity curve, and morning glory.

Yours for only 100 US Dollars.

You know it makes sense.

Buy it.

Buy it now you wanker.*

* A typical eBay technique is to abuse customers as it increases the number of watchers, viewers, and potential buyers.  Check it out, I never make anything up, not ever.


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Day 727, What's next

I expect everything is going to get more expensive.

By how much?

Plenty.*

And the rest.

* That's just become an odd word, in the way that they do.


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Day 726, Meaningless words

From what I gather from The Twitter the words of David Davis in parliament today were devoid of meaning, other than to cause a fall in the value of the pound every time he stood up to speak, and a rise every time he sat down and shut up.

Which suggests to me that the words he is using are meaningless within the context he is using them and they inspire no confidence whatsoever.

The words below actually start to make some modicum of sense after those used by Davis.

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Day 725, Thank you for the suggestion

But frankly, it wasn't very good was it.

I have no need for spooky fun

I am at work.

This is a work Windows 10 machine.

Spooky just doesn't cut it, although fun on the other hand is perfectly fine.

Why is Windows 10 such an awkward sod, with multiple 'helpful' features activated out of the box that you have to turn off because they are dreadful, and then nearly a year after your installation some other crap, like below, suddenly makes itself visible.

For goodness sake.

I suggest, computer, that you recognise that you are just a tool, not a lifestyle.*

* Arbitrary joke - "It's a tool, not a toy", "No, you're a tool, it's a toy." etc.

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Day 724, Flat battery

This doesn't appear to work, maybe I have the wrong charger.

Maybe a volte-face will help.

Or not.

Hey, I have a load of Euro's I brought back the last time I went to France a few years ago, I'm rich!

I always said that brexit was a good idea.*†

* No I haven't and no it isn't.
† Multilingual pun anyone?  Ok, maybe not.


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Day 723, The Multiple Aged Red Lions

It's The Red Lion, formerly The Old Red Lion, confusingly.

That reverse name change was long before most of our time.

That's right, it was called The Old, etc, before dropping the word 'Old', my guess is there was a further previous Red Lion.

By simple mathematical calculation that makes a minimum of 3 Red Lions over the last 100 years.

More recently this building was called Flares and was accessed by the pub next door, The Reflex.

Those are both terrible names.

The Red Lion or The Old Red Lion are much better appellations, modern people really can be idiots.

The panelling on the far left of the building was originally another door.

In years gone by this may have been an entrance to the lounge bar rather than the public bar or tap-room.

I remember when this differentiation still meant something, such as carpets and a quieter atmosphere.

Although those differences were nothing when compared to the original bar types.

The lounge was generally a fancy room where the beer cost slightly more, and sometimes had waiter service.

The gentlemen would drink in the lounge, the hoi polloi would drink in what was also known as the 'four ale' bar.

I expect fighting was available for free in the four ale bar too.

This separation of bars is mentioned in literature, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists has some discussion, here is an excerpt:

Chapter 19
The bar was arranged in the usual way, being divided into several compartments. First there was the ‘Saloon Bar’: on the glass of the door leading into this was fixed a printed bill: ‘No four ale served in this bar.’ Next to the saloon bar was the jug and bottle department, much appreciated by ladies who wished to indulge in a drop of gin on the quiet. There were also two small ‘private’ bars, only capable of holding two or three persons, where nothing less than fourpennyworth of spirits or glasses of ale at threepence were served. Finally, the public bar, the largest compartment of all. At each end, separating it from the other departments, was a wooden partition, painted and varnished.

Assuming we are still standing after all that booze and fisticuffs let's go back outside.

The taller building visible to the right and across the other side of West Street is, or was, the DHSS building.

In 1937 when this pub was still The Old etc., the DHSS building was the site of The Wharncliffe Arms.

I never drank in The Red Lion and only passed through the door once when leaving quickly after being horrified by The Reflex.

I was always put off the place as during the 80's I heard someone say it was an NF meeting place.

That rumour may be complete nonsense.

Whatever the history it seems unlikely that this pub will ever reopen either as The New Red Lion, The Old Old Red Lion, The New Old Red Lion, or any other combination of lions, old, new or otherwise.

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