I’ve finally accepted that I’m getting older. I realised this when I heard myself saying “It wasn’t like this when I was a lad”.

It happened just a couple of weeks ago. A friend of mine is currently travelling around Australia, and regularly updates friends and family via their mobile phone and facebook. I travelled around Australia nearly fifteen years ago and spent just under a year on the road, but I didn’t have the luxury of the technology (and the reasonable price of this technology) that is available today.

When I crossed the 1200km of semi desert known as the Nullarbor Plain in my 20 year old station wagon I was out of contact from civilisation for three days. No mobile phones for emergency use back then, or if there was it was well beyond my budget at the time. Contacting the folks back home every couple of weeks was either by air mail letter, or if I had just been paid I would drop dollar after dollar into the thirsty ‘Telstra’ payphones and call home for a very brief few minutes. I think that the internet was only just beginning to make an appearance into peoples homes. Looking back I’m pleased that this is how it was – it seemed much more of an adventure! I recently re-read a letter that I wrote in Australia and sent to my father, and I laughed when I read the part about asking him if he had an “email number”! I had no idea what the internet was, how it worked, and certainly had no idea that it would play such an important part later in life, for both a career and for personal use.

So, this got me thinking about how my father used to always talk about the things they didn’t have back in his day. I think that we often take technology for granted, so I’ve had a look back through the years and made a very quick list of the things I use now, and the equivalent that I had when I was younger.

So, where to start? Why not with computers. My first computer was a ZX Spectrum+. This had a ‘massive’ 48kb memory, a 3.5MHz processor, no hard disk, software that needed to be loaded in from a cassette recorder and cost the princely sum of £129 back in the mid 1980′s.

To put that in perspective, 20 years later I use an Apple Mac Pro with four 2800MHz processors, 10,000,000 kb of memory and four internal hard disks. When I was a kid the Spectrum was just amazing, but I recently dug out the old games and installed an emulator on the Mac, and for the sake of prosperity played them again for the first time in a decade. And boy they were awful!

Now, on to cameras. I had a couple of manual focus SLR’s before this, but my first autofocus SLR was a Nikon F401.  And it wasn’t at all bad to be honest! The big difference between this camera and the one I use now is that the F401 used this strange thing called ‘film’.

You had to buy a roll of this ‘film’ and pop it in the camera. You then had either 24 or 36 exposures, and you had to wait until you had the film developed before you could see your images! The big advantage in film though is that a lot of the technology is in the film itself. A Nikon F401 (retailing at around £300 in the 90′s) loaded with the same film and with the same Nikon lens as the F4s (retailing at nearer £1200) would take the same image in the same circumstances. With digital cameras a larger, higher resolution sensor is the key, so a more expensive camera generally takes a technically better image.

It’s difficult to compare the actual technology here as film and digital are so different, but what is important is the end result. There have been some simply magnificent images taken on film, and I really believe that ultimately you shouldn’t be able to tell whether an image has been taken on film or digital, it should stand up on its own merit and simply be an outstanding photograph. It’s not really that important how it is taken so long as you get the end result you wanted.

The last item I want to look at isn’t work related, but it still plays an important part in my life. It’s my first proper bike! It was a Raleigh Strika, it had no gears, no suspension, but was built like a tank.

I wasn’t big enough to have the ‘Grifter’ with it’s bigger wheels and three gears, but the Strika fitted me well and was a load of fun.

Things change though, my current equivalent steed is a Commencal mountain bike, with its 27 gears, hydraulic disk brakes, suspension and high quality aluminium frame.

So, to conclude this increasingly long trip down memory lane I guess that what I’m saying is that the important part is the experience at the time. ‘When I was a lad’ this was all cutting edge technology, and we were as proud to own it and as impressed with its capabilities just the same as we are now with the latest gizmos that appear in the stores every year. Kids are increasingly comfortable with technology, and we now have the first generation who have never experienced life without the internet, mobile phones or HD TV. So what’s next?

I imagine that the day where our grand children talk about how they didn’t have teleportation and time travel when they were kids will eventually be upon us!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 5th, 2009 at 9:32 pm and is filed under Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.