Where Now?

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It's a strange thing, but our understanding of and our relationship to computers has passed from one of distant observation in the sixties and seventies: as in the film "Billion Dollar Brain"; via vague familiarity during the eighties, with a mainly business-based association through work and maybe youthful hobbyist tinkering, to now, when computing has pretty much been subsumed by the 'White Goods' ethos, particularly in the realm of the smartphone, which most users would never consider in the same light as a 'computer'.

Despite this lack of regard for the depth and complexity or the rich history of the technology that most folks simply and naively take as 'my internet, my socials, my camera', the fact is that current smartphones have more processing power than the first supercomputers, developed in the 1970s, costing the equivalent of billions of dollars, affordable only by governments and the military. Today's iPhone, costing around a grand, could wipe the floor with a roomful of Cray 1 computers and still have time and the processing power to take a selfie.

I've observed the development of computers - which were just publicly emerging during my childhood, for sixty-odd years now, and they are a continuing source of fascination to me, but something of the 'otherness' and mystery to these devices has been lost along the way; partly through personal experience and understanding, partly due to the now mundane ubiquity of the technology. My first real interest in computing goes back to the age of nine or ten, and the Museum of Science & Technology Birmingham [blog posts passim]. There was a display there which was a machine against which one could play the old board game of Fox and Geese - a sort of limited version of draughts [checkers] - entirely powered by ex General Post Office electromechanical relays, uniselectors and sundry other repurposed gubbins. 

This thing fascinated me, and I always harboured some vague vision that I might build some like device in the future. That of course never came to pass, but my imagination was nevertheless piqued. Nothing much in this department happened until I found myself working at Birmingham University in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the end of the 1970s, when I discovered microcomputers and programming for the first time [blog posts passim]. By the early 1990s I had a computer of my own and a dial-up connection using a lash-up of an ex BT exchange modem with a homemade power supply, which gave me access, pre modern internet, to Bulletin Board Systems across the world. All of which is a primitive far cry from picking up my iPhone and having instant access to computing power that even thirty years ago would have been deemed too extreme even for a Star Trek storyline...

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