₦airaland Forum

Superman

This is the Superman game. I never understood this game.

Spiderman

This is the Spiderman game. The objective is quite simple. You are to try to climb to the top of the skyscraper. You win the game if you get to the top.

You gain extra points if you save the people at the window. You lose lives if you are hit by the bombs in the windows. I don't see it here, but I remember that there was a goblin that also threw bombs at you.

You can climb up the building and you can also spin webs and swing up the building, but you've got to be careful because your webs are finite. It could finish while you are trying to swing and you'd fall to the ground and lose a life.


Spiderman (Atari 2600).


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZzGaFiyezY

Maze Craze

This is the Atari 2600 and this was my favourite game.

It's called Maze Craze.

Basically, you were cops and you were trying to get out of the maze while also trying to avoid the criminals.

The game was usually played by two people (there were two cops) and there were two or more criminals. You can increase the speed of the criminals and there were several difficulty settings.

The person that played the game in this video kind of ruined it because he kept changing the maze. There are settings that can make either the entire maze or part of it to be invisible. I usually played it with the maze completely visible.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMxGpj6Q4dg

Pacman

This is the most famous game ever created by mankind.

It was so popular that it even had its own 7up advert.


The objective is to go through the maze and eat the squares and numbers in order to get points while avoiding the ghosts that can kill you. The number of ghosts increase as you advance in the game.


Pac-man (Atari 2600).



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HL2p2ANFlQ4

Atari 2600

This came around 1984 or 1985 and it gave me so much joy. This was sooo much better than the Binatone and it brought me great happiness. It was in colour! It had Pac Man, Maze Craze, Spiderman (probably my favourite game) and a Superman game that I couldn't understand. The games were in cartridges.

JVC hi-fi

My mum brought this exact type of home audio system back from the UK in 1979. It's a JVC and it was one of my favourites. It had a radio, cassette and record player. Unlike the home system that we had before it, the JVC did not have an 8 track tape player (8 track cartridges were going out of fashion in 1979).

I hooked up the antenna of the old black and white TV to this system and I could get the BBC, VOA, RFI and other international stations clearly. The only FM station, Radio Nigeria 2, began broadcasting in 1979 and it was close to my house so the signal was clear.

It was on this radio that I monitored the 1983, 1985 and 1990 coups. I remember that CNN began broadcasting on FM around the time of the Gulf Crisis, but the Federal Military Government forced them to shut down.

Colour TV

In 1979 we got a colour TV in addition to the black and white TV. I remember that we got that TV set in 1979, but I don't remember what happened to it afterwards. The body was wood brown and it had push buttons instead of the usual VHF and UHF dials. It's not exactly the same, but it was kind of simar to the TV in the first picture.


We later got an Orion colour TV. It was silver and had UHF and VHF dials. It kind of looks like the TV in the second picture, but it's not exactly the same.

In 1985 my dad went to Japan and came back with a futuristic TV set. I had never seen anything like it. It was my favourite. It was a Panasonic. It was completely different from the other TV sets in the house. This TV set had numerous buttons, could get 100 channels and had 25 spaces to store channels. No other TV set in the house had that. It also had a cordless remote control! It kind of looks like the TV in the third pucture, but it was slightly different. Ours had a panel with a door that easily blended into the rest of the TV. The many buttons were behind the door.

There was a time that we damaged all the TVs around a week or two before Christmas. My dad was very happy. At last there would be peace. He refused to repair the TVs. There was no TV on Christmas Day. We had to wait for my dad to go to sleep, then we would put on the old black and white TV (which had volume problems) and then someone would sit close to the TV (to hear what was being said) and that person would tell everyone else what was happening on Another Life or whatever series we didn't want to miss.

My dad eventually fixed the TVs before New Year's Day.

Video cassette recorder (VCR)

We got our very first VCR in 1979. It was a top loading VHS VCR. The video cassette was loaded into the VCR from the top.

I've just remembered something funny. We sometimes banged the top of the VCR when the picture was not clear and it would become clear.

I thought our situation was bad, but I didn't know anything.

I spent my holiday with family friends in Ikeja in 1985 and you needed to see the way that they banged their VCR. In fact, someone suggested that they should take their VCR outside and ride their bikes on it.

Of course I knew how to use methylated spirit and tissue to clean the video head when it was dirty (although we sometimes had video head cleaning cassettes).


The VCR in the first picture looks very much like the type that we bought in 1979, but I can also see some differences (the socket for the remote control is not there). It was a top loading VCR and although we got other more modern VCRs, this one lasted until 1993.


That VCR had a remote control, but it came with a cord that you had to attach to the VCR before it could function.

Here is a picture of that exact type of remote control (second picture).


I made that remote my microphone.

1979 redecoration

In 1979 we got three huge room dividers. Each one was bigger than the previous one. Most of the things listed below were placed in these three room dividers.

We had one big shelf/cabinet/room divider that contained the TV set, hi-fi and Binatone TV Master.

Portable record player

This was a small record player that could be plugged in to mains electricity and could also be powered by batteries.

It also had a radio tuner with MW and SW bands and it had a telescopic antenna.

We would sometimes bring this record player outside when we had picnics. I remember that we also used it during the 1978, 1979, 1980 and 1981 New Year's Eve celebrations.

The Indians, Americans and Ghanaians would come over and we'd have a huge feast on the lawn. Jollof rice, curry rice, meat pies and sausage rolls. We'd bring out the portable record player. There'd also be fireworks (7 colours, etc).
The feast would go on till around 10pm.

I remember that the NTA had a tradition of showing the Scarlet Pimpernel movie at night on New Year's Eve.

My dad had a joke he played on us (back in the 1970s), he would say that anyone that didn't have his bath before midnight would be dirty throughout the year.

The fire brigade was always way too early. Sometimes they'd be 5 or even 10 minutes too early. We'd hear the siren wail from the fire house at around 11:55.

The harbour master was always more reliable. On the stroke of midnight you would hear a massive foghorn - BOOO, followed by all the other foghorns. Then the fireworks would light up the night sky all the way from Marina to Falomo. The Lagos Yacht Club fired red stars into the sky from Five Cowrie Creek and the Lagos Harbour.

Then I would go in to watch President Shagari's speech. The NTA showed the President's new year speech at midnight (and then repeated it in the morning).

During the Military Era the new year speech was the same as the budget speech. There was no National Assembly to review the budget, so the president usually read the budget speech in the morning on New Year's Day. For that reason, the budget speech and the new year speech became intertwined in my mind.

This is not the exact same record player but it is very similar. The radio tuner was where you have the silver strip in the photo below and there was a telescopic antenna at the side of the device.

Portable radio

Well, this wasn't always in the parlour, but it was there during certain specific times.

My dad had a portable radio that he kept in his room and took to work. The radio could be plugged in and powered by public electricity or it could be battery powered.

This radio had MW, SW and LW bands, but no FM band.

There are names of certain politicians that bring flashback to me because I remember eating breakfast at the same time as my dad (on a weekday) as we both prepared to leave home and start our day and listening to the Radio Nigeria 7am Network News and hearing names like, "The Anambra State governor, Mr Jim Nwobodo" or Melford Okilo, or Solomon Lar and all those other names.

Sometimes when we are watching a football match and the tension is too much, my dad would tell us to come and call him if they score. Then he would go to his room. I would go to call him when they score, only to discover that he's listening to commentaries on Radio Nigeria with this radio.

But this radio is relevant on this thread for a reason. Electricity supply was more stable back then. Nigeria's population was less and so was the demand for electricity. We had power cuts, but they would usually restore power within an hour or two. You could go an entire day or two without any power cuts.

In fact, someone once gave us an electricity generator as a present, but my dad gave it to someone else so he could use it in his village house. He said that we didn't need an electricity generator.

Back then, when there was a power cut, we would search the telephone directory for NEPA's number and call them. We would get NEPA Awolowo Road and they would direct us to NEPA Berkley. We would call NEPA Berkley and cry that we couldn't do our homework because there was a power cut. They would promise to restore power in 15 minutes or 30 minutes and sure enough, the power would be back by that time.

But sometimes things were different. There were times that it seemed like there was no power throughout the whole day. My dad would bring out this radio, put batteries in it and put it in the parlour. That's why there are song that I call "Radio Nigeria songs". These are songs that I listened to late at night on Radio Nigeria when there was no power.

Sure enough they would usually announce on the 10pm Network News that there was a fault somewhere and they would usually tell us when the fault would be repaired or how long the blackout would last. Power would usually be restored at that time.

It was similar with water. Water almost always came out of the taps back then and local government councils placed public taps on street corners. There would usually be an announcement on the radio whenever there was going to be an outage. They would tell you that they wanted to fix this or that pipeline or that there was a problem at Iju Waterworks and so there would be no water from this day till that day.

I had an aunt that lived at Glover Road in Ikoyi and Glover Road had its own separate mini waterworks and they always had water, so we would put jerrycans in the car and go to fetch water from my aunt's house. Their water was different from the regular tap water (I think it had a little too much chlorine).

I remember once when I fell ill and I had to receive this terrible injection every day for a week and this coincided with a water outage. I and the driver would go to the clinic on Gerard Road and they would give me this very painful injection, then I would go to my aunt's house to fetch water.

Sometimes we had to carry jerrycans and buckets and walk all the way to the army or police barracks to fetch water.

This is not the exact type of radio, but it looks very similar to this.

Binatone TV Master

This was the first video game that I ever saw.

This is the Binatone Tv Master. I don't even know when we got it.

I remember realising one day that this thing had been in my house for as long as I could remember and I didn't even know what it was.

That's when I began experimenting and investigating and I discovered that it was a video game. Can you believe that this thing could work on the gigantic black and white TV as well as the colour TV??

 I only remember the tennis game. Can't remember any other. It was a white dot going back and forth across a white line (yes, the games were in black and white). There were no cartridges, CDs or anything like that. The games were on a chip that was embedded in the console.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfVZ9YtzuiE

Antenna

Now here's the thing. I remember quite well that the black and white TV set had a very powerful indoor antenna. I remember tuning that antenna back in the 1970s. The antenna was not inbuilt. It had two very long telescopic antennas that were connected to a base and you could do something to that base (I no longer remember what) to increase the signal strength and it had a particular kind of cable (I'm not even going to try to describe the cable) that you could connect to the TV. There was a dial on the base, but I don't remember how it was used to increase the signal strength.

We switched to an outdoor antenna (on the roof of the house) during the 1979 redecoration.

Well, since we stopped using the black and white TV, I made the antenna mine and converted it to another use. I discovered that I could get greater reception on the home audio system if I connected that antenna to it. It made no difference on MW, but it made all the difference on SW.  Foreign radio stations like the BBC and VOA became much clearer.

It looked very similar to the first antenna and it had the same colour as the second antenna.

Television

We had a huge black and white TV with retractable doors. I sometimes imagined that there was a city behind the screen and the retractable door was the railway.

The TV had VHF and UHF dials and a V-Hold to stabilise the picture. I was basically like my dad's tv operator and human remote control (can you imagine that my dad would sometimes call one of us from the rooms to come and change the channel for him? And he's sitting right in front of the TV!)

One Christmas, years later, we had damaged several colour TVs and my dad exclaimed, "Thank God"! when the last one got spoiled. He decided that we were going to spend the Christmas without TV. We had other ideas.

There were two things that we did, first, the big black and white TV still showed pictures, but the volume was very low. My dad ordered that we must not put it on because we would damage it even more. We put it on whenever he was in his room and someone would sit near the speaker and tell everybody what was happening. His door made a distinct sound, so we would switch off the TV when we heard it.

Secondly, we had a spare key to his room and he had a small TV in that room, so we would bring out the small TV whenever he was not at home. I would keep watch by the window to warn everybody when he was coming back.

The TV is similar to the TV in the picture below, but ours had UHF and VHF dials. I think it was a National TV, but I can't remember for sure.

8 track tape

This is an 8 track tape. We called it cartridge. This is what we used before there were audio cassettes. Hi-fi systems had 8 track players and there were 8 track players in cars.

Hi-Fi

We also had a hi-fi system. It consisted of a record player (with the hook that allows you to stack records), a casette player and an 8 track tape player (cartridge). It also had a radio and I remember that the radio dial was iluminated with green light.

This (the photo below) is not the exact type of hi-fi system, but it is similar. Ours had the same kind of glass cover over the record player and cassette player. I think the 8-track tape player was more central.

There were little shelves at opposite ends of the sitting room and they were for the speakers for the audio system (I assume that it produced better stereo sound in those locations). The telephone was on a similar but lower shelf at another end of the sitting room.

Radiogram

We had a radiogram. It consisted of a radio (the radio dial was across the front side face of the cabinet) and a record player (which was inside the cabinet) there was space inside the cabinet to keep your record collection.

Our radiogram also had the radio dial on the side (like the radiogram in the first picture below). The record player was also inside the cabinet like the one in the picture. The space beside the record player was for your stack of records.

Our radiogram was so big that I could hide in the space for the records.

If I remember correctly, the radiogram had medium wave (MW), shortwave (SW) and long wave (LW) bands.

Things that were in my parlour in the 1970s and 1980s.

We had a major redecoration in 1979 and these were the things that were in the sitting room just before and just after the redecoration.

These are things that were in the sitting room before the redecoration.