The Wonders of Technology

If I can pinpoint anything that has changed society during my life, it must be the rate at which technology has developed. Colour TV and video, pocket calculators, computers, compact discs and DVDs, the internet, digital cameras and mobile phones are all things that did not exist when I was born. Indeed on my iPhone 4, I can watch TV programmes, use it as a calculator, play computer games, listen to music, surf the internet, take digital photos and make phone or video calls or send text messages, and more, all on one pocket sized device.

Each of these developments came with it, a sense of wonder. It's difficult to imagine, given the pace at which the changes have happened, how things will be in the next few decades to come.

Colour TV

My primary school years were spent watching TV in black and white. This was not a problem because we didn't know any different. But like today's children we had our favourite programmes growing up. In the early years it was Playschool and Andy Pandy. Later it was Blue Peter. Sometimes you'd be lucky and there would be a European football match on live and as for snooker, well try working out the coloured balls when they are all shades of grey! I remember one time someone gave us a plastic "screen" that fitted over the front of the TV. It was basically a sheet of transparent coloured plastic that was tinted blue at the top, green on the bottom and light orange brown in the middle. In an outdoor scene you could just about imagine it as being colour!

There were only three channels too (in those days we referred to them as TV "stations"). They were the licence funded BBC1 and BBC2 and the commercial network ITV (Independent Television). There were no remote controls either. Each station had its own button on a panel on the front of the TV and to change channels you got up from the settee, went over to the TV and pressed a button. A lot of people in Dundee had what was called "piped" TV provided by British Relay. This was a cable that ran into your house and had a proprietary connection to the TV which your rented from them also. In some ways it was a forerunner of cable TV but you didn't buy your TV set. You rented it as part of the overall package.

Having only three channels you can imagine the excitement when Channel 4 was launched! This happened in 1982. The first programme to go on air was the game show Countdown which is still running to this day. Channel 4 also broadcast the popular soap opera Brookside, set in Liverpool. Channel 4 was supposed to be the channel that would show programmes the other stations wouldn't touch. It therefore made a name for itself in showing music arts programmes and those of a minority interest. Later it showed some very popular mainstream programmes such as the American Friends and ER and popularised the reality TV format with Big Brother.

Pocket Calculators

Texas TI-30 Scientific Pocket Calculator

Research on the web accredits American company Texas Instruments with the production of the first pocket calculator in the late 1960s but my first memory of them would have in the early 1970s. I saw one at a neighbour's house. It had very basic functions, addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. The cost at that time was as I recall, £20, an astronomical price then which cost about £240 in today's money. A great game at the time was to turn the calculator upside down and try to make words with the numbers showing upside down. By 1976 I had a Texas Instruments TI-30 scientific calculator. Prices were coming down by then and at £11 this seemed good value. I used it a lot, especially as I was in 3rd year of high school by then and doing O Grade maths and arithmetic. Compared to that first calculator, this was a much more sophisticated beast. Indeed such was its popularity that this has been seen as an iconic model and even now it looks quite modern I think.

The TI-30 was first introduced in 1976 so I must have got it soon after it was released. Having 17 different scientific functions including trigonometric and logarithmic, it was notable for its very low cost for the time and much less than the retail prices of other scientific calculators. This was produced until 1983. I seem to recall still using it after I left school and started higher education in 1980. Although he actual calculator has undergone several design revisions the TI-30 brand is still alive albeit and thus it remains an icon of its time.

Computers

When did I see my first computer? I think it would have been in my final (6th) year at high school on a trip to Kingsway Technical College in 1980. When I went on that year, to study at Dundee College of Technology, there was what was known then as a mainframe computer in the building. Basically a whole room was given over to powering a few VDUs which could display only letters or numbers on a bright green colour against a black background. I don't know how much memory they had but it was tiny compared to one average domestic computer now. Indeed it is said that today's home computers are more powerful than the computer used to send the Apollo spacecraft to the Moon.

Sinclair ZX Spectrum

In 1982 the movement towards having a computer in the home must have been started by the Sinclair ZX Spectrum computer. This was the creation of inventor and electronics boffin Clive Sinclair. Indeed the Timex watch factory in Dundee was where they were made. The computer was basically the size of a small keyboard and you connected it to the aerial input of a portable television. The Spectrum is remembered with fondness for its rubber keyboard. It had a colour display and you could run games on it which were stored on audio cassette. Depending on the size of the game you would have to wait several minutes while "loading" it onto the computer from your cassette player. This was a really popular machine which I learned to do some programming on in a language called BASIC. However the real attraction of this machine was the number of games you could buy. It could be regarded as the first games console because some games became very very popular. The games I remember most were Atic Atac (an arcade game) , Manic Miner (a platform game) and Chequered Flag (a racing simulator). Apparently over twenty three thousand games have been released for the Spectrum.

Listening to Music - From Vinyl to mp3

The developments in technology have equalled those of computers and transformed the way we listen to music. If you wanted to listen to high quality music then there was only one medium to choose and that was the gramophone record otherwise known as vinyl, because that's what it was made of, or more popularly, records. Armed with a decent hi-fi system (which was not cheap) and some well produced records (yes records not albums), the listen experience was second to none and some say that the quality of digital music still doesn't surpass this. In those days you needed a decent turntable (record player) fitted with a decent tonearm which was fitted with a decent cartridge (needle). Revolving at 33 1/3 rpm and at 12 inches in diameter, you placed the record on the turntable and lowered the needle gently onto the outer edge of the record. As the music played, the arm and needle retained its place in the groove of the record and slowly moved towards the centre of the record. Each record had two sides, and each side had a limit of about 25-30 minutes. Therefore one record gave you a listening experience of just under an hour.

Rega Planar 3 Turntable

Being mechanical, the tonearm was weighed, which meant that you wanted the needle to just sit on the record with enough force that it tracked the groove and didn't gouge it out by being too heavy. Too light however, and it would lift itself off the platter. This wasn't usually a problem but it did mean one thing, which was that record players didn't like vibrations and if people were dancing or jumping next to it, the needle would jump and the music would be unlistenable. The other disadvantage to records was that they got scratched easily and they also retained dust. This induced cracks, pops and crackle which would be very evident on playback, especially during quite passages. You therefore had to handle records with care, and avoid touching the actual surface of them as finger prints pressed the dust into the groove and cause crackles.

Philips Portable Cassette Player / Recorder

Cassette Tape

The cassette tape (or compact cassette as it was correctly called) was a small plastic case about the size of a mobile phone in which was contained magnetic tape. You inserted the cassette into the cassette player and pressed the play button. The tape then rotated across the playback head. Like vinyl there were two sides and at the end of the first side you removed the cassette and put it back in the machine the other way round. It was a good development because there were no such problems with crackles although the sound quality was poor compared with vinyl. Cassettes always had a background hiss which was evident between songs and at quiet passages. What cassettes did do however was introduce some portability into playing music. My first cassette player was a Philips portable which I got for Christmas, probably around the age of 13. It was perhaps slightly smaller than a sheet of A4 paper and it had a little speaker which produced reasonable volume. It wasn't Hi-Fi sound by any matter of means but it was good to be able to lug your music around. The invention of the Sony Walkman cassette players made cassettes truly portable. They were the mp3 players of their day.

Philips Compact Disc Player

compact discs

Move forward to 1983 and I'm in the second half of my degree course at Dundee College of Technology. The compact disc player appears in the shops for the first time. It's hard to believe that this media is now nearly thirty years old. CDs really kicked started the revolution in digital music. Playing music with superb clarity and with no background noise whatsoever, the CD was received with great enthusiasm. As more titles became available and the cost of CD players came down, the CD quickly replaced vinyl and the music medium of choice. The Sony Walkman abandoned cassettes and started producing CD Walkmans so that the same high quality listening experience could be heard on the move. You could even play CDs on your computer.

ipod nano

If the CD defines the eighties then it is mp3 that defines the nineties and beyond. Designed for the computer age, mp3 files were the first non-mechanical method for listening to music. Stored as digital data on a hard-drive or flash drive, mp3 has a low file size, meaning that you can store thousands of songs on a single device. The ability to share mp3 files on the internet meant that files "ripped" from CDs onto computer could be easily spread on the internet and file sharing sites such as Audio Galaxy and Napster soon became very popular. Free software mp3 players such as Winamp with interchangeable skins enhanced the overall experience by allowing you to create playlists. Portable hardware mp3 players soon followed, the most notable being the ipod, which quickly became the fashion device to be seen with.

The growth of mp3 and other similar digital music formats has now become mainstream. Unauthorised peer-to-peer files sharing networks (e.g. torrents) have spread to the extent that it has become difficult for the record industry to stop this activity. However files can be legally downloaded from download sites such as Amazon and eMusic and this is a popular method of music sales alongside CDs which continue to sell albeit to a reduced level. Today I listen to music stored either on my iphone or my computer. I have something in the region of thirteen thousand songs stored on an external hard drive which is no bigger than the size of one compact cassette. There is no noise, the sound quality is great and access to your favourite music is just seconds away.

Beyond storing your own mp3 files, streaming media has also become a popular way of listening music. In this model, the music is held by a streaming provider and, for a small monthly fee, you play the music through their own media player. You never own the music files, but you can listen to everything on the streaming provider's catalogue. Spotify is one of the most popular online services and you can choose from hundreds of thousands of tracks covering all music genres.