Pining for the Fiords

I've just finished reading a book that celebrates 20 years of HPCC, the Handheld and Portable Computer Club (formerly PPC-UK), and found myself pining for the Fiords once again.

Before blogging and the web, before PDAs, before PCs, there was a time in my life where hand-held calculators and portable computers provided all the excitement, my first electronic calculator, a four banger Sinclair Cambridge, came into my possession in 1975 and replaced my British Thornton slide rule. In the years that followed during my apprenticeship, several more powerful machines entered my arena, cash permitting.

The cash was usually depleted by the time it was even considered for electronic devices, payday would come around and the rent would be paid, food, train tickets and whatever was left was spent on beer. I've always had a problem with beer. However, sometimes the peer pressure or overwhelming urges for a square root key or some other amazing function would force my hand to upgrade, it's been a thirty year upgrade path folks.

If it wasn't the square root key, it was the ability to program, or save to tape, or print, or play Choplifter on a computer like the Commodore 64 or Attic Attack on the Spectrum, then onto the PCs with Microsoft Flight Simulator, followed by Falcon, then Wolfenstein, then Doom, Quake then Unreal and all the other stuff that excitement was made from at the time.

At the weekend I shelled out a hundred and twenty bucks for a DVD dual layer burner and my reaction after installing it was one of complete disinterest, this is my problem nowadays, upgrades are boring, capabilities improve but the result is the same, it's like that invisible c:\ prompt that is always there, a faster machine that sort of does the same thing that the old one did but bigger and faster and basically boring.

So, back to HPCC and those user groups of the seventies, it seems that quite a few people my age have gone through the same thing and yearn for those days when things were a challenge, when programming was exciting, when standards were in the making. I suppose that's just the process of becoming older, nothing has really changed from a people perspective, it's just the technology has moved beyond the novelty items to the appliance level.