My first memory of IT at school was an old beaten up BBC Computer, all green screen, dusty key board and floppy discs.
At home, my brothers and I would bust out computer games on cassettes through our Atari ‘games console’ at a speed slower than it would take a frog to flash its way across a busy intersection.
I am Generation X and it was the mid 1980’s. Computer games were boarder-line cool and computers were almost certainly not cool.
Time progressed. Schools in the UK replaced BBC with Nimbus. I remember my dad joyousness upgrading from a 386 to a 486. Over the moon that we could now play Wolfenstein 3D in 16-bit technicolour with our state of the art VGA graphics card, two megabytes of RAM and joy stick.
Information Technology was merely an idea, a potential. It was certainly not life changing. Faxes and microfiche, pagers, Walkmans and Speak and Spells. The advances were slow and each new step forward was a slight nudge compared to the exponential bounds that we see in today’s world.
Then Personal Technology started to make an impact. It was the early 1990’s and email was beginning to appear. In the workplace, you could actually send someone a message from your keyboard, without getting up out of your chair and it would arrive at the sender almost instantly. The mobile phone. You could make plans on the move, keep track of one another, be connected and more spontaneous. Discmans meant that you could carry around your music on something smaller than a brick and skip through tracks at will. The internet was just around the corner. People began to get actual games consoles at home, with games so fast that you no longer needed to get up and have a real game of football down the park with your friends, while you were waiting for your football computer game to load on screen. Read more…
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