Like everyone else my age, I don’t feel old. But when I think back to life when I was in my 20s I realise that the world is a very different place. I bought a book in 1983 called ‘The Timetable of Technology’ and it listed all the major technological innovations of the 20th century. Of course, it missed out the last 18 years, but it did have a few pages at the end which speculated on future advancements. Re-reading it recently, what struck me wasn’t the ‘vision of the future’ bit, but how many technological achievements of the 1970s and 80s are now just taken for granted, or in some cases, have already become obsolete! For example:
I remember in perhaps 1980 when I was in the early full bloom of love, I would often find myself travelling to Uxbridge to see Geraldine at university and my mind would begin to calculate how far I was away from her. My mind would generate a mental image of the country where I could place our relative locations. I used to imagine some device that would always let me know how far apart we were. Now, I no longer need to imagine; everyone in the country can be located to pinpoint accuracy simply by carrying a mobile phone. Other devices are available that you can put in a bag, on a bike or even on a dog collar that allow it to be tracked anywhere in the world and they only cost a few pounds. I could only imagine this in 1980, but I never expected it to become a reality. Technology has crept up on me without me realising.
An aside. I remember a wonderful quote from Douglas Adams which I now believe to be true, but I didn’t always. “Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.” Just think how much has been invented since 1994 and you can imagine why I sometimes find it hard to navigate the world.
An electronic calculator was a magical device when I bought my first one in 1975 although it cost a fortune. I was recommended to buy one by the tutor on my engineering ONC course. I was still using a slide rule (which I still have), but I felt that since calculators were allowed at college (they weren’t at school) I should move with the times. I also didn’t want my fellow students gaining an unfair advantage over me. I bought a Prinztronic Mini Scientific model from Dixon’s which was powered by four AAA batteries and it cost £17.95. That was very expensive, especially when you consider that my first wage packet as an apprentice was just £16. Prinztronic was Dixon’s own brand name for electronic goods and had a poor reputation for quality, but the device worked for a couple of years until certain keys occasionally failed to respond when pressed thus making it unreliable.
By the time I had started on the HNC in 1977, I needed to buy a new calculator and this time I bought a Commodore SR-1800 which ran off three AA batteries. I still have that machine now and I think if I put new batteries in it, it would still work with its tiny, green LED display. I had a scare in 1979 when I was sat at a small desk in an examination room with all the stuff I needed arranged in front of me. I somehow managed to knock the calculator onto the floor and, with it being a big heavy thing, it burst open scattering batteries and bits of plastic casing around the examination hall. I just managed to reassemble everything before the exam started and amazingly, it still worked.
In January 1977 I also splashed out and bought myself a quartz crystal watch. I still had a cheap clockwork watch, but my friends all seemed to be wearing the fancy new digital watches which had just started to become available. These were almost invariably of the LED type which only lit up when a button was pressed to save flattening the battery too quickly. I never saw the appeal of these – if I wanted to see the time, I didn’t want to have to use both hands to achieve that. Therefore, when I saw an advert for an LCD watch whose display showed all the time, I knew that I had to own one. It was a known make (Accurist) and although it cost £60, I didn’t care – I just wanted it. I’d admired it for several months before I bought it with my Christmas money. I was the first person I knew to own such a device and was9 very proud of it. I still have it today and even now it looks cool and stylish
Around then I recall a tutor at college talking about Japanese goods. He admitted that the electronic items then being produced by Japan were amazing. He used to say in blunt terms “I fought those b****rs in the war but I have to give it to ’em, their calculators are marvellous”. The tutor was a very large man and I was always amazed how he managed to fold himself into his tiny Fiat 500. He may not quite have forgiven the Japanese for their part in the last war, but he seemed to have no qualms about driving an Italian car. This was 1979 and it wasn’t at all unusual to meet people who’d fought in the war.
An aside. In 1979 the war had only ended 34 years previously. Looking back over the same duration today only gets me to 1990 – no time at all! When I was growing up, the war was still very much present in people’s minds, and there were constant reminders of it through references in film (The Great Escape, The Guns of Navarone) and on TV (Dad’s Army, Colditz, A Family at War, It Ain’t Half Hot Mum). I knew people with war injuries, most memorably, the family grocer who only had a thumb and one finger. He would scrabble around for change to give to Mum and I was always fascinated by his deformed hand. Mum told the story of her brother, Jack, who got married during the war when she believed he was still suffering from what he’d seen. Apparently, when he was asked by the priest “Do you take this woman…” he snapped to attention and shouted, “Yes sir!” Like many of his generation, he never spoke of his war experiences.
By the time I started with the Open University in 1985 I felt that I deserved a new calculator and so I bought my third machine which this time was a Casio which was solar powered. This device weighed nothing and was in daily service until quite recently. I still use it for more complicated calculations that my phone can’t manage. I actually wondered when I bought it whether it was a wise move, since solar power was fairly new to me, and I had doubts that it would still work in artificial light. It does.
The Commodore calculator that I purchased in 1977 cost about £18 and eight years later the Casio cost about the same, but by then I was taking home about £130 per week so calculators, and technological items in general, were becoming much more affordable. The Casio calculator is still too clever for me. It wasn’t programmable (they cost an extra fiver!), but even so it still boasts many functions that I still don’t know how to use.
My introduction to computers took place gradually over many years. In those days, things appeared to happen in much slower time. I was conscious of the digital revolution that was about to irreversibly change our lives, and I was cautiously looking to see how I could get involved (see Douglas Adams’ quote above). My job at the time didn’t involve computers and I couldn’t really see how they were going to have a direct impact on my life, but I had a strong sense that they would.
At Preston Polytechnic in about 1980 I had to do a bit of computer programming in Fortran as part of my engineering course and for that, I created a programme on paper to perform a simple task. This information was transferred onto punch cards by someone during the week and the following week we loaded the punch cards into the mainframe computer to run the programme. Sometimes it worked, but very often it didn’t, and then I would have to analyse what had gone wrong. If the programme worked, all it did was something simple like draw a mathematical shape such as a rectangle or a circle on a piece of paper.
My Mum had an ancient Imperial typewriter when I was growing up and I always enjoyed typing on it. It had a fault, though: the letter ‘g’ had been broken off and so anything requiring that letter had to be inked in later.
For reasons I no longer remember, I really wanted to buy a typewriter in 1981. I recall looking longingly at the new electronic word processors which were just becoming available. They were simply electric typewriters which displayed the characters on a tiny screen prior to printing them onto paper. These machines had the advantage of allowing the correction of errors before they were committed to paper, but they were also quite costly. They used the modern ‘daisy-wheel’ type of keys which meant that different fonts could be used as required which appealed to me.
However, after much consideration, I eventually bought a manual typewriter for about £60 which then saw considerable use over the next few years. I offered to type up the monthly minutes for Horwich Cycling Club and performed this task for several years until I left the club in 1986. The biggest use for my typewriter however was in 1982 when I suspect that it actually paid for itself. Geraldine was writing a dissertation for her degree and I offered to type it up for her to save the expense of having it professionally produced. This action was made much more complicated because she was 200 miles away at the time. She’d write a few pages, parcel them up, post them to me and then I’d type them up and post them back to her. I really don’t know how we managed this, because there was no way of Geraldine reviewing what she’d already written while the pages were travelling up and down the country courtesy of Royal Mail. But we achieved it and also managed to save some money. Eventually, I gave my Mum the typewriter but I’m not sure whether she ever really used it. I must have disposed of it when clearing her house after she died in 2007 although I don’t know where it went.
In 1987, I started an Open University module called The Digital Computer and for that course, I was loaned a very early type of Personal Computer (PC). I don’t remember very much about it, nor even about the course, but I know that it made me realise that computing wasn’t really my thing. It taught more about how a computer manages to do what it does and there was a lot of theory about memory storage and access and a little bit of programming in BASIC.
From about 1987 I had a very limited use of a PC at work, although the main work I did used a dumb terminal connected to a mainframe computer. In 1988 I moved to a team working on the European Fighter Aircraft (which was eventually given the name Typhoon) and one of the roles I had in the team was to assess various bids being received from suppliers. I had access to a PC which used 5¼-inch floppy discs and it was on these that I stored my analysis of the various bids. I was only using some early word processing software (probably WordPerfect) but I thought I was really pushing back the technological boundaries at the time.
Eventually I bought my own first PC in 1997 and I paid a staggering £1,928 for it. Home computing opened up a whole new world, though. I bought my PC from Time Computing who at the time, were the biggest company selling computers in the UK. Their adverts were everywhere and each week I’d watch as the specification improved and different deals were offered. Although the price never seemed to fall, the processor speeds increased and although I knew very little about this, I was reluctant to commit to a particular processor fearing that a new, better one would be released as soon as I’d bought something. I can’t remember what I bought in the end, but I know that the PC came with a bundle. This was another new idea to me; selling an item and then piling on lots of other things that you didn’t really want to ‘sweeten the deal’ whilst trying to justify the high price. So I ended up with a PC, a 14” monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers and a microphone. Oh, and a load of games and programmes that were all but useless to me.
Although Time went bust a few years later, when I bought my first PC, the staff on their help desk were very good. The problem was, the computers were so unreliable, I was almost on first name terms with them since I needed to call every few weeks (well, it felt like that). I look back at that time with mixed emotions. The machine was frustrating because it would often go wrong and I’d no idea how to fix it, but generally, I was thrilled to have things never before possible at my fingertips. This was through the dubious use of dial-up internet. To get access, the computer modem had to take over your telephone land line (mobiles were only just starting to become available to all) so if you were using the internet, you couldn’t make or receive telephone calls.
The sound the modem made was very distinctive and if I ever hear that sound now, I am instantly transported back over 25 years. The internet search engines were a bit primitive (I mainly used Yahoo or Ask Jeeves), but even so, I discovered all manner of wonderful things online. I particularly enjoyed looking at a webcam which was installed in a yellow taxi driving around New York. Another would be focussed on the nest of a bird of prey in Scotland, but that never really worked since it was always dark when I was logged on. Remember that all the time I was logged on to the internet, I was paying to keep open an expensive telephone line. I only ever went online after 6pm when it was cheaper. Thinking back, it is hard to appreciate just how much this cost.
To have such access to those live images whilst I was sat in my own home was truly remarkable. What wasn’t so much fun was re-loading programmes after they’d crashed. This often involved running about ten 3.5” floppy disks in turn. And I was forever upgrading to the next ‘future-proof’ system, except they never were future proof.
I now have a friendly computer engineer who I call on every few years to come and fix some problem or other. Only last week my PC began to freeze regularly so I had to ask Brian to come and take a look. His first question was “Is that the PC that you had since forever?” I had to admit that it was, but I also pointed out that it’s probably only the chassis that’s truly ancient. I know that he upgraded lots of stuff (apart from the chassis) in 2010 and then fitted a solid state something-or-other in 2018 that he said would see me right for several years, and he’s been right. He’s only been back once since then to replace the power supply, but that didn’t change the basic configuration. I suppose I’m due a new computer soon.
As I write this, my PC is operating under a death warrant. Brian called yesterday and pointed out that although he’s upgraded many bits and pieces over the years, the basic machine is from 2007 and he can’t upgrade it any more. I am using Windows 10 operating system, but he advised that this is now unsupported and that from October 2025, Microsoft will no longer provide security updates. So it looks as though my trusty tower desktop machine will have to be replaced by a laptop. That’s not something I’m looking forward to. I hate going into shops like Currys since the teenage sales staff talk an entirely different language to me, and I suspect they are on commission to sell me something I neither want nor need. But if I were to buy something online, what do I need? I might finish up with something that doesn’t do what I want or is far more capable (and expensive) than I need. Like my Casio calculator.
I have less of a love-hate relationship with mobile phone technology. I’ve owned a mobile since 2000 when I followed Geraldine’s lead and bought a Philips Savvy.
This little phone was great, but I only rented it from Virgin Media and so when the contract ran out, I upgraded it. This was the pattern for several years, even after I moved onto smart phones in 2012. Recently, I’ve noticed that the phones are no longer getting markedly better each year so I now own my phone and only replace it when it actually dies on me. I have always enjoyed photography, and whenever I went on holiday or just out for the day, I’d take a camera with me. About three years ago, I bought a Google Pixel phone and I quickly realised that this device took better pictures than my camera! And since I almost always had it on me, the camera soon became superfluous. I can now take photos at night just as well as in the day and the results are amazing. I realise that it isn’t my skill that makes them so good, but even so, I wouldn’t go back to hauling a camera round with me now.
Many things I grew up with have now disappeared from my life, and sometimes this is for the better, since technological advances can sometimes move a bit too fast. As I child, I was taken to Mangnalls, the main shoe shop in Chorley, for all my footwear. It was great to use the fancy machine they had which took an image of my feet wearing the new shoes. The fascinating thing about it was that it was an X-ray machine, and it showed an image of the bones in my foot, with the fleshy toes showing as a fainter shadow.
X-rays were discovered in 1895 and very quickly they were being used to view bones in the human body, so it was a good marketing idea for shoe shops to use them for this purpose, and they even boasted about this. However, health concerns about such use were raised in the 1940s and by the 1950s, some US states had banned these machines, and yet I was still being subjected to x-rays in the 1960s. I went for an x-ray on my collar bone last week, and the radiographer there was very careful to stand behind a screen before she activated the machine to protect her from harmful radiation. Anyway, long story short, I survived the foot x-ray machines, and my feet aren’t deformed, but in 1999, Time magazine placed shoe-store x-rays on a list of the worst ideas of the 20th century. The list also included DDT & hydrogen-filled airships.
So what else has technology changed? Telephone boxes, at least those containing a telephone, telephone directories, pagers, cheque books, fax machines, Dictaphones, paper maps, postcards and the Encyclopaedia Britannica. I know some of these haven’t completely disappeared, but they have become irrelevant in my life. I can’t recall the last time I ever made a phone call from a phone box. I no longer have a telephone directory which was almost 2” thick (well, the Preston one was) and it always lived beside the phone, which itself was wired into the wall. I still have a cheque book, but I noticed that the last cheque was written in 2020. I also have dozens of paper maps, but I keep these as a wonderful historical reminder of a simpler time. My old maps were out of date as soon as they were printed, and now if you compare the footprint of towns to what they were 40 years ago, the evidence of urban sprawl is remarkable, even shocking.
Before I owned a mobile phone, I used to carry a pager at work. I’m never sure why my boss wanted me to have one of these, but I carried one for about a decade from the mid-90s. For those unfamiliar, these were small devices, about the size of a matchbox which you clipped to your belt. If someone wanted you and you were away from your desk phone, you could be paged and the little device would vibrate and emit a howl. Once alerted to this, you would check the device’s screen which would display the number of the person trying to call you. You’d then grab the nearest phone and call them back. Simple and yet very effective. Growing up watching the TV programme ‘Casualty’, each week you’d always see one of the consultants get paged and immediately he’d spring into action to deal with the latest emergency. My calls were never that urgent, but it did mean that I was always contactable by anyone. It made me feel important, but that’s about all.
I also owned a Dictaphone at one time, too. I think I picked it up second had somewhere, but I did like it. It was about the size of a TV remote and held a tiny cassette upon which dictated messages were stored. If I was driving between sites at work, or even to or from work and I thought of something I needed to do, I’d speak into the Dictaphone and then deal with the issue when I was back at my desk. I used driving as my thinking time and so I often had random thoughts come to me which I didn’t want to forget.
The Encyclopaedia Britannica deserves a special mention. This was something that I always craved as a child but never expected to own. The 14th edition came in 24 volumes and was updated roughly every year until 1973. In the late 90s, I was offered a complete set from someone who was moving to the USA. Wow, just what I’d always wanted! I excitedly hauled the books home and set them up on a couple of shelves in my house, but after scanning through them a few times, I realised that I would never actually use them let alone read them. By then, I owned a PC and it came supplied with the Encarta encyclopaedia. OK, it mightn’t have been as good as the Britannica, but it was readily accessible and so much easier to search. I can no longer remember how I disposed of all the books I longed for as a boy, but I haven’t had them for many years.
Earlier, when I was discussing amateur radio, what I failed to mention was the role played by postcards in that hobby. Once radio contact was made through amateur radio, the two parties would send a confirmation postcard to record the event. These were known as QSL cards and Laurie Williams had quite a large collection of them when I knew him. His favourite card was one he received from King Hussain of Jordan, himself a radio ham who would talk over the radio without ever mentioning his heritage. I suppose that email has now completely stopped that quaint activity.
Has technology made my life richer and more fulfilling? Undoubtedly. Does it drive me to distraction? Regularly. Would I willingly go back to my childhood when everything was analogue and so much slower? Probably not. For all its problems, technological advancement is something that we all must learn to live with. But I often wonder how my mum would have coped using mobile phones, on-line banking and the internet. I know she would have resisted it. She never really accepted the idea that she could get electricity provided by British Gas. At the moment I’m just about keeping up with technology but I’m not sure for how much longer. I only recently moved onto a TV streaming service and I’m still at a loss how it works. Only yesterday I saw an advert on TV that suggested that if I had a streaming service, I didn’t need a TV aerial. Goodness knows if this is true, but I daren’t unplug the aerial just in case everything stops working and won’t restart.