ABSTRACT
Later, British concert companies started making their own desks, a term they liked to use instead
of console or boards. An early manual preset board by Electrosonics, a British company (which still exists, although today they only develop video gear such as servers), was based on a layout concept Jim brought to them and was probably the first mass-produced board to use flash buttons and pin matrices (Figure 17.1). It was aimed specifically at the concert market. Showlites, the London rental company started by Eric Pearce in the early 1970s, began manufacturing Alderham lighting console products to accompany dimming systems in 1976, which remained in use until well into the 1980s. These rock & roll desks, as they were called, had two presets, each with 60 faders, 20 submasters, and a 20-3 x 60 pin matrix. The Alderham 602 model did not have a microprocessor and was all hand-wired. Ian “Avo” Whalley, a touring technician at the time, continued its development and started Avolites a couple of years later.
