[Radio Wrangler]

I remember in the early 70's coming to the end of secondary school and into the hands of the careers department. They told me that with colour, theTV repair course took 6 years to qualification. A degree looked easier, and probably was. The careers lot seemed rather fixated on whether my colour vision was good enough. In the junior school we all got tested. We weren't told a thing about what it was or what it was for. They just plopped a thing in front of me and asked me which number I could see. I didn't bother with all the coloured dots, there was a nice clear number printed bottom left, a PROPER number so I read them that.... "No no, just the first number you see" so I read them the first digit of what must have been the serial number of each successive page they showed me. I now know what it was and what went wrong. They failed to explain that there were numbers hidden in the dots, they failed to be suspicious that I never hesitated. So there is a paper record somewhere in my educational history saying I'm totally colourblind. The careers lot knew perfect colour vision was essential to fixing TVs, and also that good colour vision was needed for all the coloured wires in electronics.... and that was as much as they knew!

Oddly enough there was plenty of colour TV in the degree and I designed a PAL colour synthesiser as a project.

David