One Xmas, perhaps 25 years ago, my Dad marvelled at the tanks bouncing blocks off of walls in the immensely playable "Combat" that shipped with the Atari 2600.
In the Commodore64 I was a space trader exploring a huge space that couldn't possibly fit inside that tiny machine. (OK so Fibannacci played his part... but when later in life you find out how it's done it only brings greater wonder at the ingenuity of those B&B boffins.)
At Uni a friend had a PC with its own hard drive. We could write our essays and make them pretty. Without tippex. He shared it with us.
A while after starting work I was allocated a brick of a phone to stay in touch with the office. It worked whenever the roads went over the crest of hills.
In the mid 90's a Leicester firm showed me this thing called Yahoo. For a fee they'd give me a phone number my computer could call, and then I could look at pages of information. I actually asked the guy "why would I want to do that?" and didn't sign up for a month or so.
I upgraded from 33 to 56 - and marvelled at only 2 mins per MB.
My brick got smaller and worked in more places.
In 2000 I got broadband and considered a Psion to run my life. Decided to pass.
In 2010 my phone handles all sorts of communication. Live video, photo, documents, spreadsheets. My calendar, everything. In one small block. I can sit in my car, and use my phone to run every aspect of my business, from sales to production. It even lets me play Sonic the Hedgehog.
I went to the cinema, donned some glasses to watch Avatar. An average plot but in an environment like no other I've experienced. The entertainment genre moved forward again.
Games consoles using wands that record your movement, and soon a games console that simply watches your movement for its controls. Next Windows will become "Boxes" and you'll work in three dimensions without a mouse.
Every era has its wars, it's disasters, it's crises. But there was only one wild west, one age of steam, one industrial revolution, and I've been lucky enough to experience the information age.
Last year, a man who saw further than most left us. But Arthur C Clarke left us three laws:
- When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
- The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
- Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
I wonder what my boy will marvel at.
