This is The Modern World

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Apple across the decades (and a couple of Psions)

 

 

I think my increasing love of the analogue, arcane and just plain retro is probably down to the fact that I was a very early adopter of all things digital and networked, having had some form of 'tech' around the house for decades, now. As I wrote before, I started using what were then called 'Microcomputers' around 1979/80 when I worked at Birmingham University. By the early '90's we had a dial-up internet connection and computers around the house all the time. I don't think any of my son's friends parents actually knew what a computer was, let alone any knowledge of the fledgling internet.

There was no Amazon, no eBay, not even search was possible: you had to find stuff by knowing exactly where it was in the first place. It's so hard to visualise that Google was simply just one search option among many when the technology first came along and not the monolithic behemoth we now know and love/hate. As for cleaving to the retro/analogue world, I'm not turning my back on the present day, Rees-Mogg-like (Heaven forfend, Sirrah!); something that's fairly self-evident from this little blog. Having been networked as a matter of daily course for so long, it would be very difficult to backtrack to a pre-internet era way of working. Rather I use the old fashioned to leaven the experience of technological life; it allows me to filter out some of the noise I've referred to in previous posts. This affords a level of focus that we have largely lost, having traded it off for the multiple, often simultaneous data-flows that we are hooked into on a daily basis. Social media, Twitter being a particularly good example, encourage an always-alert state of mind; they play on the natural tendency that people have to simply not miss out on stuff. Sometimes, the off-grid devices like this one [the AlphaSmart] help me to just get on with the thing I'm meant to be doing, i.e. writing this. At the same time, most of my retro tech has been bought online. I find the combination and juxtaposition of the two spheres fascinating in itself, as well as just plain useful.

A long-term goal I've got in this melding of past and present technologies, is to finally find a way of getting internet access via the old Mac Classic that I inherited from my late friend and colleague Jean-Charles Boude.  He was intending to get this very limited old beast online just before he died and I would very much like to finish his project one day if at all feasible. What would be a corker of a follow-up to that if it is, would be to get HyperCard - the software I mentioned vis a vis the Zettelkasten - to be the networked software that it could have been in the 1980s, had it's inventor - the great Bill Atkinson - had that sideways leap of imagination at the time. As he later would have it, HyperCard presaged the fundamental mechanisms of the World Wide Web, HTML, document-linking across networks and what we take for granted to the point where it's invisible to most of us: the web browser. Now that would the perfect mix of old and new. 

Postscript: I've just been reminded that limited connectivity via LAN using HyperCard was being looked at in the early '90s - a good place to start!

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