History

For those who follow my blog regularly you will know that I am a notaphilist or, if you prefer, someone who collects old banknotes. I can’t help myself. As the Bank of England seeks to replace Winston Churchill with a fish … … and Alan Turing with a hedgehog … … I was fascinated to stumble across…

I’m not big on theology but did stumble across Mammon the other day and am surprised I didn’t know more about this ancient character. He appears in the Bible quite often, and Jesus makes clear that ‘you cannot serve both God and Mammon (Matt 6.24 as well as Luke 16.9, 11 and 13). Mammon promotes the ‘deceitfulness of wealth’…

It’s quite strange when you think about money as a lot of money has disappeared or been recreated over the years. 250 years ago, there was no US dollar as such; the Chinese currency called the renminbi (RMB) was introduced on December 1, 1948, by the newly founded People’s Bank of China; and the euro…

I just saw an interview with Tim Roth who appears in the new Peaky Blinders movie as Beckett, an East London fascist. The movie launches tomorrow on Netflix and focuses upon the Nazi plan in the Second World War to flood Britain with fake currency to bring down the economy. Codenamed Operation Bernhard, the goal…

You may know Wells Fargo, one of the largest American banks. I know them well, having worked with some of their key people over the years. Their brand is all based around the old Pony Express … Note: stamp is dated 1940 … but you may not know their real history, so here we go….

Being raised on an independent island, I learned lots about British history. For my GCSE’s, it was all about learning Henry VIII’s story of leaving the Holy Empire of Rome to marry Anne Boleyn and the story of the first and second World Wars. We knew nothing about Europe, let alone the rest of the…

It’s time to wind down for the summer hols, so I will be posting less for the next two weeks. In that context, I thought you might like a story about how to make the most of your downtime by talking about time. We all know and probably would like to own a Rolex watch….

Having spent all my life in computing, it’s interesting to look at the development of technology from where it came from to where it is going to. When joining the industry many years ago, we talked about the S/360 instruction set that was the basis of IBM’s systems; we talked about BASIC, Fortran, COBOL and…

For those who read me regularly, you will know that I’m a bit of a numismatist. What’s that? A nerd. Well, no, not really. It’s someone who is really enthusiastic about studying, collecting and talking about money, coins, cash, medals and related items. That’s me. Sorry. I’m one of them. Weirdly, I’ve collected a lot…

I don’t know about you, but I remember getting my first computer back in the 1980s. It was OK, but quite difficult to use and pretty expensive. In around 1990, I got my first laptop and can remember it cost around £2,000. It wasn’t worth it. Ever since, like most people, I’ve probably changed computers…