Since I was born...

[Mr Mystery]

How do!

I'm being a right chatterbox this weekend!

This one stems from conversations I've been having with colleagues at work, mostly about our respective childhoods. I have the privilege of working with quite a wide range of ages, so such conversations usually prove entertaining.


It was during one such convo that I got talking about how the world has changed since I was popped out of Mumsie Mystery. And considering I'm a spritely 32 years old, a hell of a lot has happened.

Think about it. Although it was started a few years earlier, I saw the home computing era truly dawn. From the old rubber keyed Spectrum (genius!) up to a recognisable desktop with 5 1/4" disk drive, onwards to DVD drives, I've seen it all profilerate into peoples houses. And as for the internet, even I struggle to comprehend how I managed without it. Yet my entire education? Interwebs free. No Wikipedia. No useful websites. Just sourcebooks, textbooks and long, boring hours in the Library trying to hunt down a specific nuggets of info I can now find within seconds.

Even home entertainment has changed drastically. VHS was quite the luxury round my way. Gran and Grandad had one, and I think one of my friend's parents had one. But that was it. Until around 1988, I made do with just a colour telly (so old itself where you pressed for Channel 4, the button was labelled 'ITV2'...). From there, Satellite and Cable hit the UK, filling our televisions with a veritable deluge of ****e nobody actually watched, but bizarrely paid for anyway. My first telly, a pressie from the grandparents, was a black and white set with a dial. Yup, I had to manually tune to change the channel. That was a pain in the arse. I've witnessed pretty much every step since then, right up to my PS3, which is made of win.

Even commericialism truly hit it's stride during my lifetime. Sure you'd get tie in toys before the 80's, but to the best of my knowledge, never a TV series designed to promote and sell a toy line.

Music? I remember getting a Walkman one chrimbo, and a couple of tapes. Now I walk around with my iphone in my pocket, with a ridiculous amount of music on it.

Movies. CGI was just about squeaking in as an effect in itself when I was a sprog. I remember being quite staggered by The Last Starfighter (if you haven't seen it, you suck. Simple as). Nowadays of course entire films are made from CGI. The puppetry of the past is sadly a dying art, which to me is a great shame. No more Ludo.... :(

And that's just the stuff that springs immediately to mind. In a scant 32 years, the world has changed so rapidly, and yet seemingly pretty smoothly. But if you were to transport someone from 1980 to the modern day, I think they'd have a brain explosion at just how much has happened. I really am absolutely staggered at how much has happened in my life time, and I can't help but wonder just how much further along we'll be when I hit 64. After all, our progress is appearing exponential...

[Wildeybeast]

Like me you will have seen the Hoff single handedly end the Cold War and few brief years of peace (at least in the developed world) until 9/11 shattered that and ushered in a new era of death. In our lifetimes phones have gone from being limited to houses and really expensive car to being able to small enough to fit in your pocket. And we have seen porn go from a few 'erotic' French films to an interactive, HD, multi million dollar business.

[Psychosplodge]

TBF even trailing you you by the best part of half a decade and could write it pretty much the same lol.
Remember BBC micros at school? :D

@Wildey, in fact we've seen the rise and fall, as the internet has made it that accessible and freely available by people literally giving it away, it's like the .com bubble all over again...

[Mr Mystery]

Very true.

I think I was a bit too young to fully appreciate the Berlin Wall coming down, but oddly I do remember Wacaday giving away bits of it as competition prizes, so I knew it was pretty big news.

But yeah, the end of the Cold War is definitely a significant step forward in terms of world peace. Ever since, the chance of another global war has just kept going down and down. Sure there are still strained global relations, but we are so much further forward than ever before.

We're also seeing the power vacuum of the post colonial-era starting to come to an end. All those third world countries that Europe so mercilessly exploited are slowly but surely calming down. The end result remains a long, long way off, but the seeds have been sown. I mean look at last years Arab spring. It might seem a flash in the pan, but it's a start.

And with the global recession, we're seeing a more politically savvy populace starting to develop. I've just been on the BBC Website where they have an article about Ebay's seeming tax avoidance, alongside that of Starbucks and other big names in the consumer world. Given austerity measures pretty much Europe wide (not sure about the states and the other colonies) I don't see the populace standing for such shenanigans much longer. When you're being squeezed for every penny, and you see people with less being squeezed just as hard, if not harder, you become naturally less tolerant of seeing people dodging their obligations. The excesses of the 80's (at least that's my perspective) are being exposed ever more, and people don't like what they're hearing. And it's just as well for me. Had it not been for the banks mis-selling PPI, I may not have the awesome job I have now helping to sort the whole mess out.

I think my newfound sense of wonder stems from my traditional history education being typically world war centric, when it wasn't medieval or victorian in nature. I almost forget sometimes that my own lifetime is now part of history, and a fantastically varied and fascinating era I have grown up in to boot. I feel it's important to stand up and be proud of my involvement in that, even as a bystander!

[Mr Mystery]

Psychosplodge....I do remember those. I also remember not knowing what a spacebar was....

My school's one and only computer was in the Nurses room (why, I dunno. It just was!). And our 'lessons' were perhaps 30 minutes, once in a blue moon. The educational game, dimly remembered involved escaping a Witch or something. You never knew where the Witch was, and it was a graphically represented multi-choice text adventure. I would love to play that again. Just no idea what it's called!

And seriously, look at the difference between say, 1945 and 1977. Same time period, still lots of change (moon landings, supersonic flight) but nothing with quite the impact of the life of the everyman. Granted being post-war it's not exactly a fair comparisson (lots of years spent picking the nation up and dusting it down...) but still an interesting comparisson. Though I think the biggest changes in those years (bearing in mind I didn't witness them) were social rather than technological in nature. The inexorable rise of 'yoof kultur' started then, and really took off when the baby boomers came of age.

[Psychosplodge]

That sounds awesome, our educational software involved a program where you programmed a triangle to draw shapes by telling it how to move.

In terms of transport we've really gone backwards with the retirement of Concorde, and the plan to spend billions to shave twenty minutes off London to Birmingham - leeds, rather than build Japanese style bullet trains.

A proper fibre optic rollout would allow the next leap forward imo.

In terms of kulture, do we still have any?

[Mr Mystery]

Yoof kultur? Nah. The arseholes just copy the USA these day. Be it Gangsta, Hipster or Emo, none of it is home grown.

Hell, dance fans don't even appreciate the KLF, and that's just a crime.

And there's another thing I've seen develop over the course of my life, the modern music. Indy hasn't really changed since the 60's, Hip Hop has risen to (inexplicable) dominance despite it's generally terribad quality. Dance music evolved from Disco roots.

Oh, and of course, the recent phenomena of the 'retro-****s'. YOU WEREN'T THERE SO IT'S NOT RETRO FOR YOU, TOSSER.

[SotonShades]

I think it is a bit of a misnomer to say we have gone backward from concorde! Don't get me wrong, I think the old bird is and was a wonder, but the technology in her dated back to the end of the second world war. Modern airliners, while not as fast, are so vastly superior. If you are talking about how quickly you can get significant number of passanger across the pond, Concorde always has and did become woefully inadequet. If you want to look at getting small number across at speed and in first class style/luxury, there are several small business jets that can handle speeds noticably in excess of mach 1. Maybe not quite Mach 2, but still significantly cuts down the time. AND they are allowed to go supersonic over land because their smaller sonic booms dissapate before they hit the ground, meaning the overall journey time becomes more comparable with Concorde.

I was just thinking about this (broarder) topic the other day. Come the end of the year, I will have reached my quarter century. When I was little, I don't think I remember more than one or two family friends who had more than one car, unless one of them was a work vehicle. I also remember Petrol being about 60p a litre! How I wish I could just pop back and fill my tank up at that price!

Moving on I remember getting the internet for the first time in our home. Having to check that we weren't expecting any phone calls, only being allowed on for half an hour. Maybe longer if it was for homework. And then the slow introduction to wireless networks. Far too unreliable. We'd never have them in our house becaus even if we could have a decent connection, we would use up our data too quickly and it would be too expensive. I think if you had told us then we'd be running 5 PCs/Laptops simultaneously without ever worrying about how much data, all sharing files and printers (including an A0 plan plotter!) continuously, and having a gaming console that could be used while watching TV via the internet in another room, we would have laughed in your face and expected that to remain the reserve of companies and millionaires. I actually distinctly remember being told I would never be allowed to have a TV in my room because it would be too expensive and we would only ever be watching the same thing on the 4 channels anyway. Admittedly I don't have a TV in my room now, but that is only because my digital HD flat screen is broken and I need to buy a new one. First world problems, eh?

[Sean_OBrien]

Damned whipper snappers - when I was your age...

I saw bell bottoms be in style, go out of style and come back into style yet again. Same really applies across the board with the vast majority of things. I remember when I was 4 or 5 years old, I received a telegram from my Uncle who was in the Navy on a boat somewhere in the South Pacific. Not too much after that, I saw my first cell phone and then video conferencing became feasible. And now...I can send a text message? Blah.

Rather depressing honestly. Especially when you compare it against the various prediction articles which were in magazines growing up (or as backdrops for TV and movies). I'm not even talking about Jetson's type stuff...just take a browse through the back issues of Popular Science or Popular Mechanics (available for free on Google). So many targets set and missed...though it also shows just how little has actually changed in my lifetime.


Though I think the biggest changes in those years (bearing in mind I didn't witness them) were social rather than technological in nature.

Keep in mind - most the technological advances which you see now actually came about way back in the day (much as a result of things like the space programs). Most of the "advances" in the past 20-30 years or so haven't really been in actual new technology, rather in miniaturization (smaller integrated circuits) and in manufacturing (cheaper). For old codgers like me who have been stuck in technology since before there was an internet - we have been waiting for something new for quite awhile. Although there have been some nice things, most is just the same stuff...only a bit cheaper (which gets it onto the shelves of your local big box store as opposed to specialist dealers).

Need a good old fashioned Cold War, World War or Space Race or something along those lines to stimulate new developments.


I think it is a bit of a misnomer to say we have gone backward from concorde! Don't get me wrong, I think the old bird is and was a wonder, but the technology in her dated back to the end of the second world war. Modern airliners, while not as fast, are so vastly superior. If you are talking about how quickly you can get significant number of passanger across the pond, Concorde always has and did become woefully inadequet.

Think it was with the X-24 test platform, but at the time...the engineers who were working on that program were predicting a hypersonic transport which would be capable of carrying 200-300 people from Paris to Tokyo faster than the Concord could cross the Atlantic by the year 2000.

[Wildeybeast]

My school's one and only computer was in the Nurses room (why, I dunno. It just was!). And our 'lessons' were perhaps 30 minutes, once in a blue moon. The educational game, dimly remembered involved escaping a Witch or something. You never knew where the Witch was, and it was a graphically represented multi-choice text adventure. I would love to play that again. Just no idea what it's called!

Granny's Garden?
Man, text adventures were the best. So much more imagination and creativity than the mindless shooters today's yoof are addicted to.

[Psychosplodge]

Wasn't there one on the acorn where you had to voyage to the new world?

[Mr Mystery]

Granny's Garden?
Man, text adventures were the best. So much more imagination and creativity than the mindless shooters today's yoof are addicted to.

Give yourself a gold star!!!

[Wildeybeast]

Possibly. I don't think we had Acorns at school, just BBC's. It makes me sad to think that I'm old enough to remember when a floppy disc was actually floppy and most kids don't even know what one is nowadays. Still, having more storage space on a stick the size of my finger than a whole room of floppy's does compensate somewhat.

[Wildeybeast]

Give yourself a gold star!!!

Go me! Makes a nice change from giving them out.

[Psychosplodge]

It will be the next age verifaction test, you've seen the one that asks the connection between a tape and pencil? :D

[Up The Walls!]

That sounds awesome, our educational software involved a program where you programmed a triangle to draw shapes by telling it how to move.

That wasn't Logo or something with a similar name, was it? I remember that.

My first memory is actually of watching the fall of the Berlin Wall on TV. That was cool. Even in the last ten years, it's been astonishing leaps forwards. I watched a BBC documentary series, the Planets, about six months ago. It's from 2002 and already it's so hideously dated it's scary. You've got interviews with, say, Carolyn Porco about this space probe they're designing to take a look at Saturn, and then eight years later, boom, you've got Wonders of the Solar System chatting about all the stuff Cassini's been doing in the vicinity of Enceladus*.

I think a fun little statistic is the one about there being about twenty-five more countries today than there were in 1986. Places like the Ukraine and Croatia and Slovakia, not to mention East Timor, South Sudan and a couple of micronations in the pacific.

*Which is, of courtse, a moon made of Iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice.

[Psychosplodge]

Yes!!
That's it LOGO! that was bugging since I wrote that post.
Though by the time you started I'd have thought you'd have got acorns?

[Up The Walls!]

move forward 30.
60 degrees left
repeat 6.

And you stick the pencil in one of the holes and wind the tape back in because it's got everywhere.

When I was three, we had a Commodore 64. When I was seven, we had a master system. It was glorious.

[Deadlift]

The chopper and the grifter, proper bikes before the bmx killed them off :)

[Deadlift]

move forward 30.
60 degrees left
repeat 6.

And you stick the pencil in one of the holes and wind the tape back in because it's got everywhere.

When I was three, we had a Commodore 64. When I was seven, we had a master system. It was glorious.

Yeah I wanted one of them and ended up with a pong.

[Psychosplodge]

I think I had a second hand chopper briefly before I got a BMX...

And I know I've got at least one commodore 64 in the loft, maybe two...


Now back in the day of power armour with flak armour on top of it, with marines with power shields wielding shuriken catapults riding jetboards.”

[Up The Walls!]

The thing which made me feel old this week was having QI's first contestant who was younger than I am.

[Psychosplodge]

Who'd they have, I only generally watch them on Dave.

[Up The Walls!]

I don't remember his name, but he was 23 and he absolutely laid into Bono, so I like him.

[Mr Mystery]

If it's Jack Whitehall, he can sod off. Hipster tosspot that he is.

[Deadlift]

If it's Jack Whitehall, he can sod off. Hipster tosspot that he is.

That's the prick that's always going on about how "posh" he is but looks like he has been dragged though a hedge backwards ?

[Mr Mystery]

That's the chap.

Can't stand him. He's about as funny as a newborn with any particular disease.

[Psychosplodge]

What was it QI - wanker edition?

[Up The Walls!]

...Wow, did I get castigated for not hating someone I'd never heard of there?

(He was next to Jimmy Carr, who is, let's be fair, a bit marmite.)

[Uncle Nutsy]

I've seen it go from Betamax to VHS, to DVD to bluray. Vinyl to tapes to CD's to solid-state. I've lived throughout the entire shuttle program, seen concorde's invention to retirement, seen both gulf wars and the dawn of consoles. I still remember what a real videogame arcade looks and smells like.

we've seen more technology appear and evolve than in the last three hundred years.

[Psychosplodge]

...Wow, did I get castigated for not hating someone I'd never heard of there?

(He was next to Jimmy Carr, who is, let's be fair, a bit marmite.)

Jimmy Carr as well? It really was an awful sounding episode...

[Mr Mystery]

...Wow, did I get castigated for not hating someone I'd never heard of there?

(He was next to Jimmy Carr, who is, let's be fair, a bit marmite.)

That's a massively polite way of calling someone 'an onanist beloved of cretins'

[Deadlift]

When wrestling was on tv on a Saturday afternoon. Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks were the real deal, and not steroid junkies who end up either killing themselves or their family's :)