It was Alan Black's 65th birthday on Tuesday, June 22. That is a significant date for anyone in the UK, where Alan's jukebox manufacturing company is based, for it is the traditional retirement age and the age when the hard-working citizens of the UK can relax and claim their state pension.

On that date, however, Alan Black was not at the local Post Office queuing for his pension - he was at his desk in the company’s Leeds headquarters, doing what he likes to do best - working with technology.

Black’s desk, indeed his whole office, is more akin to a computer workshop than a company chairman’s office. But Alan Black is an electronics engineer who has never fallen out of love with the technology - or the industry. Spurred on by his lifetime friend, partner and mentor, Eddie Moss, who was himself a notable operator and co-founder of Sound Leisure, Black has spent 40 years working for himself and building up his company.

Sound Leisure is now one of the world’s biggest manufacturers of jukeboxes, builds amusement games as well, and has pioneered many elements of technological improvements in the jukebox business. Today, the company is wisely adjusting its business base to take in nostalgia jukebox lines for home use and generally developing the hard-won technological skills it has acquired into allied sectors away from the entertainment business. "We have a keen understanding of where the industry is going and we have a genuine concern for its long-term future," said Black, "which is why we are giving ourselves some ‘insurance’ by reducing our total dependence upon one sector."

Black watched the industry develop from his earliest days in 1966 when as an electronics engineer at college he was asked by an operator to help fix electronic Seeburg jukeboxes. "It was a different world; when I took the schematics into college the lecturer was as flabbergasted at the technology as I was." He fell in love with the industry and after nine years working as a jukebox engineer, he took £50 and started his own business; and has run his own businesses ever since.

"What we were seeing then was the introduction of computer technology to jukeboxes; then we saw computer technology’s effects on the AWP business; Mel Yates at Coin Equipment Manufacturing must take much of the credit for that early pioneering work. Then computer technology entered every facet of the industry and transformed it.

"We went to the AMOA show at the Hyatt Regency in Chicago in 1974 and saw the Seeburgs and the new all electronic NSMs, we saw the video games from Atari. The Japanese partnered the Americans in applying computer technology to our industry and even in the UK we played our part. But it was the advance of more sophisticated technology, which was to prove the downturn in the industry’s fortunes. Someone said: "What they are doing in pubs, bars and arcades, we can do in the home."

That, he maintains, put the out-of-home coin-operated amusement and entertainment industry on notice. Today technology has developed into 3D without glasses, brilliant for gamers but in their own homes. "Technology and games and gaming are still there, but much of it is now online and this may be where it is going. The challenge for our industry is to recognise this and adapt to it, channelling our expertise into this new sector."