Progress?

It was one of the least original thoughts I've ever had but I'll share it with you anyway.

As I was walking home tonight listening to a podcast (A Single Serving of Coke) on my trusty iPod, I couldn't help but harken back to the days before all this new fangled technology "enriched" my life. Do those quotes convey the fact that I was being mildy sarcastic - I'm unsure.

I used to have a ZX81 computer; I think I got it during my first year of intermediate school. This was a pretty sweet little thing, with it's 16k of RAM (yeah, I had the expansion pack) and audio tape storage. A game would take about seven and a half minutes to load. That's about ... 290bps so in actual fact I'd be suprised if it wasnt exactly 300. I remember at the time I thought this was pretty slow but since I couldn't type that fast, I figured that the tape storage was ok.

Later I encountered an acoustic modem. I'm pretty sure this was during my first year of high school. It was one of those really old style buggers where you'd dial a number on a normal (rotary) phone and then place the handset in the modem. Big rubber mits covered the microphone and earphone bits. This would have been 300 baud as well but it was connecting to another computer somewhere else. Nice. I can't remember what sort of computer it was hooked up to but the comms software must have really sucked since what I do remember that is was painfully slow to read the text as it scrolled accross the screen. But hey, this was communication from somewhere else. It was good enough.

Then there was university and, well, everything was faster. This was the uni network though and there wasn't really anything like that available for home. There were Bulletin Board Systems which I'd connect to with a 14.4kbps modem and I could send email round the world but it was a relay system and slow as molasses on a cold day.

Then there was Compuserve and it was ... better. Better because I didn't know any better. Expensive though. We're talking about a dollar a minute or something silly like that. When you sent an email, you make sure you said something worthwhile otherwise you're just waiting your time.

Usenet was a different beast. I guess because most people who used it were using it free though a university account, there was a lot less thought going into the communications. Well, so it appeared to me anyway.

Then I left uni and started working at an internet company. Soon everyone using email to send all sorts of crap to random people. The people starting getting their own web pages. Where strangers could come along and read whatever crap they wanted to put up there. With pictures too!

Eventually blogging became "the next big thing" and more volumous nonsence spewed forth.

Now we're at the point where podcasts are really taking off. There are a <insert-large-plural-adjective> of them popping up all over the place and so far it appears that it's just more of the same old crap, just using more bandwidth.

I guess next up we'll have videocasts or something. People taling on camera about what their cat had for breakfast and other fascinating stuff.

Bah, I'm so over it all.

Now where did I leave my ZX81?



Podcasts I've currently got on my iPod:

• A Single Serving of Coke - Stupid
  
• Nobody Likes Onions - Lame
• Open Source Sex - Boring
  
• Podfinder - Lame
  
• Geek Speak Radio - Unheard (yet)
  
• Digital Photography Tips From The Top Floor - Unheard (yet)
• Space Junk Radio - Unheard (yet)
• Science Friday - Making Science Radioactive - Unheard (yet)