It is time for fleeting nostalgia. Twenty-five years ago this month the Guardian introduced a special section devoted to computers, the grandparent of Technology Guardian. We had been discussing the idea for nearly 18 months amid doubts about the viability of such a strange, untested project.
When finally approved it was called, in caps, Futures Micro Guardian. Tim Radford, our venerable science guru, and I were launch editors.
As we were nearing publication time I realised we ought to have a regular IT columnist. But who? My computer reading in those days was Practical Computing. I rang its editor and asked if he would like to write the first column, and when he said yes, I added that maybe he had better write the following two while he was at it. He was called Jack Schofield.
I remember the launch well, not least because the first two articles I wrote revealed two principles I still regularly fail to grasp. The first is: never underestimate the amazing pace of technology; and the second is that the most dazzling technology often fails.
In the first issue, I interviewed the information technology minister, Kenneth Baker, about his use of the BBC's pioneering computer. It had what were then dizzy specifications, and it could download teletext and send faxes along a phone line. A Conservative government had commendably embraced the machine as a vehicle for change in schools.
When I went to his house, it turned out that Baker hadn't got much of a clue about the machine himself, but fortunately his civil service minder had. But the point is, we all underestimated the technology. The choice then – and it was a difficult choice – was whether to buy the basic version of the Acorn BBC micro with 16K of memory (yes, that's 16,384 bytes) or the more expensive 32K version. Would we ever really need such a large amount of memory? Today, you can get mobile phones with a gigabyte of storage – that's 1,073,741,824 bytes.
Back then, we had absolutely no idea that mobile phones were looming in our future, let alone how many people would have them; or that something called the World Wide Web would be grafted onto the internet. As for being able to run your own global TV channel from a mobile phone (worldtv.com in conjunction with qik.com), that was beyond fantasy.
By contrast a lot of people, including me, were calling for the almost limitless capacity of fibre-optic threads to be laid to the home, something that has still not happened 25 years on.
My article in the second issue was an interview with Cy Endfield, the Hollywood film director who had invented the Microwriter and the AgendA, one of the earliest PDAs, beloved of Douglas Adams. Both used chords, a clever way of entering characters using five keys on the device. Your fingers could mimic all the letters of the alphabet and symbols in a way that was surprisingly easy to learn. I fell in love with it and still have it somewhere. But its mission to displace the all-dominant, though technically inefficient, Qwerty keyboard failed, as have numerous other whizzy bits of technology I have since embraced.
But hang on. Maybe the Microwriter could re-emerge as a touch-screen application for the iPhone to displace the dodgy keypad, one of the iPhone's few weaknesses. Anyone out there listening?
What of the next 25 years? It is easy where we are part of the way up the curve: virtually all of the world's 6.6 billion inhabitants will have a mobile device of some kind, which will take over most of their entertainment and, maybe, work experiences. The web will get smarter, hospital care revolutionised, high-definition virtual worlds inhabited by practically everyone, and so on. But I have no idea what new device or invention will come about. One hopes it will be in the area of sustainable energy sources.
Let me stick my neck out. In 25 years, there will be fibre to the home. There.
Source: guardian.co.uk
