Aussie Bloggers

Cellobella got me started on this with her post on meeting deadlines. I have just had my appraisal at work and this was front and centre with my boss. I have a big issue with report deadlines, which is our major work product. Perhaps it is my chronic procrastination which caused me to miss the deadline for this post. I prefer to blame real life commitments.

That said, I would not consider myself an expert in this area and am certainly not going to offer advice when it comes to meeting deadlines and keeping your customers happy, so I will move on to something that I know even less about, The Mulgaphone.

This originated across the Nullarbor in Western Australia so that people in the early years of the last century could tune into Big Brother on the radio. Only 1,200 were ever made and they stopped manufacture in 1929, a lifespan of five years. Kyle and Jackie O are trying to revive Big Brother without much luck Perhaps it is just a metaphor for the speed with which the things around us change. Perhaps Big Brother is past its used by date?

At the risk of sounding old, this got me thinking about my experience with communications technology and just how quickly it goes out of fashion.

While I was not around in the era of the Mulgaphone, much of the technology available when I was little was not so different from that era. We had a wind up 78 player, a radio, a Box Brownie Camera, a large reel tape recorder and a record player when we were little.

Growing up in Scotland in the 1960s, there was only a few radio stations. My mum had it on all the time as she did her chores. Living in the country, the rhythm of the day was broken up by the different programmes. I remember the World at One, which was on for half an hour before a quarter hour childrens programme. We didn’t have a television in the house and only saw it when we visited Granny. My brother and I were scared shitless by the Daleks and hid behind the couch.

Our telephone was a black rotary bakelite with a party line. Imagine sharing a telephone line now? We had to verbally connect with an operator to make a long distance call. I can remember getting our first telegram from my dad who used it as a lame excuse to go drinking with his buddies rather than coming to our school concert.

Our major technology purchases when I was in high school was a small black and white television and a Sinclair Scientific Calculator. We had to do major begging to get our stone age technology parents to break down and buy those necessary tools of civilisation. Of course most other people were moving on to colour televisions by then. Pot Black (Snooker) on a black and white television brings back great memories for many of that generation.

At University in the 1980s, the switchboard was manual and I marvelled at the ladies, who would manage the lines by manually snaking the cables and plugging them in. It was just not the same when I went back to see them 10 years later and they had a small PABX system.

High technolgy when I first went to University were main frames to manage accounting functions, but computers were definitely for geeks who liked to code with cards. Even when I went to University in the 80s, most of the computers were just terminals.

I can’t say that I really came in contact with personal computers until I was in my late twenties when I was at the University of Maryland in the late 90s. It was only then that personal computers were starting to take off. Some of my colleagues were much more up to speed, but not me. I had a scientific calculator with reverse polish notation. Now that was geeky. Talking of geeky, Sergei Brin was there at the same time.

In my first job, the company was almost entirely Apple Macintosh because the person who moved them out of the post mainframe era was a Mac devotee. We had LCs, classics and other fun dinosaurs and one PC for the serious stuff like formatting scientific tables.

The sole PC was camped out in a separate room with the VAX terminal, used for accounting and electronic mail. I hesitate to call it email. It was pretty basic. I would sit on the PC generating a lot of tables for scientific reports. We had Lotus 123 and we had a separate formatting programme to put in the pretty borders. People would come in and use the one dedicated terminal to huff and puff their complaints to California and the one dedicated VAX, which ran the whole company.
My first purchase was an LC, which was slow as a dodo, but could run Word and Excel. A 40 megabyte hard disk and 4 megs of RAM. Eat your heart out Vista. Scrolling down through documents was like pouring vegemite out of the jar. What was fun, was the games, which you had to run off the floppy disc. I liked Golf, which my friend and I played for the last half hour of the day. That and screen savers. Remember them? Snow blowers and Loony Tunes. Later on I was able to dial up to AOL when it really was a walled garden.

Our first email was Quick Mail. We had a somewhat dedicated line. Being on the east coast, with the company being based in California. Colleagues would be pounding out emails, which would be pounded out in adjacent offices, only to be bounced out of Los Angeles.

I can remember my first internal email, which I got from my first wife, who had just moved to Nepal with a long list of tasks for me to do before I joined her in Kathmandu. I can still remember me telling everybody in the building about getting an email from Nepal. Big deal at the time. Just before I went to Nepal I bought a Macintosh Laptop. I was able to hook up to the internet and send crude

I got my first mobile phone when I lived in Singapore in the mid 90s. Singaporeans are early adopters and in the few years that I was there, pagers, which had been very prevelant when I first arrived almost vanished from site. I bought a Motorola StarTAC. I managed to move on to a purple Ericsson, which we still have in one of the kids play baskets.

And so it continues. Most of the communications technology, from my early childhood: tape recording, radio, camera, filming, music playing and shock horror, talking on the phone are available to me on my mobile phone, which I can put in my pocket and which has more memory than my first computer.

Well I hope my ramble hasn’t made you late. I wonder where will all the current technology will be in a few years time? No doubt I will find out if I am there on time.