Technology, Ancient and Modern

Just musing on technology.  The power of this little laptop computer is hugely greater than my first little Compaq LTE which had, back then in 1990, a 286 processor, a mind-blowing 30 Mb of hard disk memory and none of yer Windows nonsense.  It communicated with the office via a dial-up modem connexion, running at a staggering 2.4 kB/sec, using an external modem which was close on the size of the computer itself, plugged into a phone socket for the separate line that I had to have for data traffic.  Yesterday, once this machine had recovered, thanks to 24 hours in the airing cupboard, from my emptying a mug of tea into it, I set to and did a rather belated back-up.  The photos and documents I copied would have taken close to 200 of my old LTE hard disks to store.  Now, they’re all stored on a USB stick that I carry around on my key ring (and I’d better not forget to back it up to my desktop).  The laptop communicates via an internal radio modem to a router that shares the phone line with voice traffic, and does so at tens of Mb/sec, which often, these days, seems maddeningly slow.  And I'm hardly using the dernier cri of technology.

At the heavier end of the world of technology, I’ve been watching the first flight of the Airbus A350.  Not only on TV, but, via the computer and a webcast from the Toulouse TV station.  All one can say at this point is that it flies: we’ll find out later how well.  It’s nice to know, not wishing to seem too jingoistic, that there’s a bit of British technology in it: the engines, the wings and the landing gear are made in the UK.  As I write, I’m following the flight in real time on flightradar24.com which, I warn you, is seriously habit forming.  In a minute or two the aeroplane will be visible from the terrace of the Grand Café in Limoux, where we have often sat and watched a somewhat more prosaic world go by.

I was less enthusiastic about some slightly older technology on Wednesday night.  On arriving home after a more than usually strenuous day at the unmentionable hobby, I went to get the by then necessary wine out of the boot.  It was raining, so I was cowering under the small overhang of the garage door, and caught myself on the forehead with the tailgate, freeing the odd square centimetre of skin.  Scalps bleed profusely, of course, so it seemed quite dramatic for a moment or two.  Healing nicely now, though.

I guess one shouldn't be too surprised at the pace of technological change.  After all, in my father's lifetime, aviation progressed from the Sopwith Camel to the Concorde.  When my mother was young, she wrote with a pen dipped in ink.  When she died, she had a typewriter with an electronic memory, and I was using a Pentium-powered Compaq computer.  At this rate, speech and touch too will have been rendered obsolete by the turn of the century!