Rock
Record 1979 |
History
Short history
of Terry Hounsome Record Researcher the books and CD-ROMs with pictures
where available
I started collecting
the information for these projects from the mid 70's as a hobby and in
1978 I have enough to put out a small book: Rockmaster, I cannot even
find a copy of this book, I know I had one somewhere.
Only a few
of these ever appeared. By 1979 I had learned from the mistakes in the
first book and worked quite hard making sure that the information was
much better.
The first two
books were produced in house, each entry was typed in on an electric typewriter
and kept on sheets of paper. The first Rock Record in 1979 was made up
of hundreds of small sheets and made in to pages staples together, these
were taken to a local printer who made printing plates. I bought a small
print press and started printing the books in my spare time. It was a
very time consuming job as the 300+ pages had to be printed one set at
a time then sorted into the book. Tim came in to help and took over the
index of the musicians, which was also kept on small slips of paper. The
house was full of boxes of paper with various pages store in them. Me
and the print machine did not get on, It would decide to jam on a whim.
Some of the first rock record had a magenta index as I was given this
ink to try. It was OK apart from the fact that I had bright pink hands
for a few days after using it as nothing seemed to remove it. I was working
full time and all this was done during evenings and weekends. The cover
was printed at a local printer in Poole, I "Designed it in the car
park with letterset during my lunch break. I took the finished books at
weekend to record and books shops in various places around the country.
The interest far exceeded my expectations.
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New Rock Record
1981 (UK)
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I
had two publishers contacting me to take over the book. I resisted the first.
By the rime Blandford press contacted me I had been working 18 to 20 hour
days for months and decided that I would be easier if they took over the
publishing. I signed a 3 books deal and they changed the name to New Rock
Record. 1981 The publishers bought a text editor, which was an electric
typewriter with a disk drive to save the data. It had a small one line screen
and you had to print out the page to see what was on it. The disks only
stored 64K in 16 X 4k sections, which meant the data stored on hundreds
of disks in small bits. A large wall chart was used to keep track
of what was on which disk. A technical nightmare, But two books were produced
this was 1981 and 1983 editions. |
Rock
Record 1981 USA |
The pages in the book were directly printed from the golf ball part of the
text editor onto B4 sheets, then reduced down by the printers. The American
publishers Facts on File used the same pages butt put a different cover
with the stupid "Every Thing you ever wanted to know " One of
my first experiences of the publisher knows best. |
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New Rock Record
2 (UK)
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Rock Record
1983 was also produced on this system, This was driving us crazy as it
was so easy to save any new work into the wrong sector on the disk and
overwrite previously saved data.
The cover was
bright to say the least, It looks better now after all these years the
colour has faded a bit.
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New Rock Record
2 USA
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Facts
on file again put a different cover, It seemed to me they were both trying
to out do each other in the lurid colour stakes. |
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New Rock Record
3rd Edition
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I then talked
the publisher into supplying a proper computer and they eventually bought
an Olivetti m24 a IBM compatible. It had a large external box with the
20 Mb hard disk which at the time 1984 cost a small fortune.. I had the
computer delivered with two software programs. dBase 2 and WordStar both
DOS programs. I had no idea on what to do with them. Stuart Gordon who
then lived in Dorset wrote several small routines to show me how to get
started. The main problem was that dBase2 could only open 2 files at one
time and the natural design needed at least 3. One for the records, one
for the musicians and one for the artist. (Later tracks were added which
,meant 4 files), This was done by swopping the browse windows and files
to just the 2 that were most needed at the time.. I managed to re key
the whole book into the computer using some simple input programs and
a link ID system which I still use today (in a much modified way). Stuart
wrote a small routine to out put the files to a text file which could
be used by the WordStar for formatting the pages.
Disaster struck
when the hard disk case fan jammed and filled the room with smoke, lots
of data was missing and had to be again re keyed, I learned the hard way
to keep lots of back up's.
The next problem
was to get the data from the computer into a format that could be used
for printing. A customer of my day job in Bournemouth did this type of
work and agreed to spend some time on a Sunday to sort it out. Terry Fairmiloe
and myself sorted it out and had a usable format within a hour or two.
This was the final format that was used in Rock Record 3rd Edition It
was the same in all editions and was released in Paperback and hard cover.
Although it was the most successful of the books I have done in sales
terms it was one that I liked least. It took months for the book to be
produced and I found that so much space had been wasted in the layout.
That concluded by contract with Blandford
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Single File
1990
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I
had to wait until 1990 until they releases the rights back to me to use
the data myself. In the mean time I started seriously collecting singles
data. I bought myself a PC and stored the rock Record data on to floppies
for safe keeping (hard disks were still several hundred pounds for a 20mb
disk) I had one disk on the 1512 Amstrad that I bought. My family at different
time all keyed a few of the lists of singles that I had collected. Beano's
the record shop in Croydon contacted me and turned over a massive collection
of box files that they had collected over the years.. It had around 50,000
singles with all the details that I needed. I finally finished adding data
up to 1989 and published the book Single file in 1990. Just 2000 were printed
and they took several years to sell out. Not a world beater but it steady
seller most by word of mouth I am still asked for copies of this book, But
I only have copies in my office and they are not for sale. Most of the data
saved from single File was on the RockBase CD-ROMs and now of course it
is on my own CD-ROM RockRom |
Rock
Record 4 1991 |
I then had
the rights to rock record returned to me. The single file data was in
turn removed to floppy disks for storage and the rock record data reinstated
to the hard disk. By this time I had moved from dbase 2 to 3 and it was
much more advanced in it's functions. In 1991 I published rock record
4 and it within a short time it was reprinted to meet the demand.
I had moved
to FoxPro in 1991 and had a newer computer that could run windows 1992.
So this book was done during the time I changed. I remember the typesetting
program I had on my machine was DOS but actually used a mouse properly.
I had several
people from various countries asking if they could publish a CD ROM with
the data from the book, I did consider making my own but could not settle
on a way of protecting the data.
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Rock Record
6 1994
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The next book
Rock Record 6 was published in 1994 in hard cover I was done in windows
and I used Foxpro 2.6 for windows and I had a 386 and a 286 computer at
that time if I remember right. They both had tiny 12 inch mono screens.
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Hounsomes
RockBase v12
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RockBase
plus V2
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Next came RockBase.
Originally
it was rock record that was going to be in the CD ROM but at my suggestion
I offered what data that could be recovered from the floppies for Single
file could be included. Despite the fact that they had been stored in
a cupboard for about 5 years on loads of 5 1/4 floppies all but one of
the disks worked. These singles were stores in a slightly different format
and it took me several months to merge them into the main database. These
were added to Hounsome's Rockbase. It seems that very few of this version
were sold by the publisher and in the end they were sold of cheap. Many
of my customers will remember this as they may have bought a copy from
me for under a tenner.
RockBase 2
was published in 1996, it contained approx 337,000 releases, 540,000 tracks.
Again basically the content of both books with a few item i had added.
I did not like RockBase very much. I sent my notice to cancel my contract,I
stopped having any involvement with RockBase. I have managed to
convert customers data for them, and will carry on doing so if the
customer contacts me. in 1998 when I brought out my own CD -ROM Database
called RockFile.
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Rock Record
7 Current Version
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I brought out
Rock Record 7 after RockBase 2. I had
to strip out the singles, Duplicate names and decide which of the artists
I could fit in the book, This one was printed in Finland and I could not
believe the speed they worked at. I sent them all the film and the books
were delivered within a very short time. The only problem was with the
truck driver who lost his way and could not find Eve's house. He seemed
to keep missing the end of our lane and I was getting phone calls from
all around the area each time he whizzed by.
Rock Record
7 was the largest book I have published and it contains about twice the
info that I put in New Rock Record 3rd edition the last Blandford book
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I started
redesigning the routines I had used for years into a usable program to
replace RockBase as a front end to the data.. I think that the data is
the main reason to buy and use the CD ROM and many users agree with me..
I decided at this point that any program I produced would be free and
I would charge for the work I do on collecting and sorting the data. I
had most of the routines and searches already written in loads of small
programs. Two problems I had to overcome were a) getting all these small
programs to work together b) make it possible for users to add and change
data that was stored on CD, a read only medium.
I added another
large box of disks that contained American singles that I never published
in book, these were eventually Merged and added to my later CD-ROMs
A few friends
and customers offered to help test and try the program in it's various
formats. I decided to call it RockFile As both books had FILE in the titles.
I went through RockFile making beta version for a couple of friends to
try out. Starting with version 1.00 up to number 2.8. So much to learn,
how to make a usable set up program, How to allow users to put the program
and data where they wanted on the hard disk and so on. RockFile 3 was
finally released in August 1998. It needed a few upgrades as users asked
for new features and changes. Number 4 was release in early 1999 A lot
of new data and new features, it worked but not as well as I would have
liked. Next version and a name change I found that others had used the
name RockFile especially on web sites so I changed the name to RecordFile-RockRom
this was version 5 and had a completely different screen layout which
is the basis for all the programs after. It was noticed that a problem
occurred that had not show up before that was that if the computer running
the software had more than 512mb the program would not run. I upgraded
to a later version of FoxPro which fixed this problem.
By the time
version 6 was ready again I had problems with the name I could not register
the name RecordFile. So during the period of the version 6 I managed to
find a name that was not only unique but also fitted the product. RockRom.
I managed to register both the com and co.uk names . The main problem
with all the programs I have done up to this point is that the main data
is stored on a CD ROM which cannot be changed. This means that any new
or corrected data needs to be stored on the hard disk. This turn causes
problems as the program has to search both sets of data and display the
latest version on screen.
I have kept
on experimenting with better ways to do this and version 6 was quite stable
and worked well. When I wrote version 6 I also wrote a hard disk only
version for my own use so that any data I added would change the main
files directly. I have been using this for some time and added some extra
features that were not easy in the CD ROM version this program is now
available asrockrom7 pro. The CD only version will have the same data
set and will be named RockRom standard. The pro version is much faster
and the data structure is simplified, this makes the whole program/data
set much smaller even though it contains more data.
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New in Oct
2003 Version 9 of RockRom this has a similar interface as version 7/8
with more features. The data has been again increased, this time by a
massive amount.
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Web
Design by Terry Hounsome |
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I have used
the names of previous publishers and acknowledge the rights they have
to the names used.
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