Closing the floodgates

Back in the days before the ark, when it came to sophisticated communication and entertainment media all we had in our family home was a phone, a record player, a radio and a TV (and only one of each, in case you were wondering). Radios started multipying first, followed by record players and cassette decks as I and my brother got into music, then a colour TV, another portable and, years later, a VCR. We were quite late to this last development – Betamax had passed us by completely – so by th...