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. |
| New Rock Record 1981 (UK) |
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. |
| 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. |
| New Rock Record 3rd Edition
Top Of Page |
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 |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| Hounsomes RockBase v12
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Of Page
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 July 2002 >Version 8 of RockRom this
has a similar interface as version 7 with more features. The data has
been again increased, this time by a massive amount.
New in september 2003 version 9 of RockRom
more features search shortcuts and many new items
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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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