My trip down old technology lane
by Carine Zaayman
I am writing this while waiting for (a really cheap) flight to Johannesburg from Cape Town. Is it important? Maybe not, but then again, I am on my way to visit my parents in a small Free State dorpie where I do not have twenty-four hour access to the internet, and I need to meet my deadline for this article. In the context of journeys home, and nostalgia for old technologies, I spent some time thinking about the ways in which we remember our experiences with these technologies.
Like many other people, I think back to my childhood with a mix of horror and nostalgia, but mostly a curious sense of incongruity; was that which now seem so alien to me, really my reality?
I suppose that the incongruity one feels when thinking about one's childhood is due to the simple fact that time passes and things change. But the way that things change, as well as the speed with which and extent to which they do so, has lately been under much discussion among people interested in the effects that recent technological advances have had on our lives. But I like to think of these things in a personal, perhaps even autobiographical, kind of way.
For instance, this same house that I am on my way to visit, was also the place where I remember doing some of my first basic programming. In fact, I was programming in BASIC. It was some kind of text story about butterflies and princesses, complete with ASCII drawings of said butterflies. That little program must be the most childishly feminine thing ever created in BASIC
At this moment though, I am waiting to find out whether our flight has or has not been delayed for half an hour. And while I am happily typing away in order to meet my deadline in the convenience of an airport "lounge" on my super new Apple Powerbook (with a lot of RAM, and a Superdrive, I might add) I am struck by the enormous contrast between the technology I grew up with and what I am carrying with me today.
This does not, however, change the fact that I am waiting.
***
The flight did get delayed, and for longer than half an hour. So, with time-wasting technology heavy on my mind, I made my way back to my childhood home. This house, I recalled, is also the location of many household computers I remember well: our first XT, successive 286, 386 and 486s, the first Pentium; and earlier, our first one Gigabyte hard disc (the biggest one in town!), even our first mouse. Today, these stand in stark contrast to my glorious laptop, and all the family fun to be had with sending images of our separate families of cats via Bluetooth to each other's cell phones.
Along the way, I also remembered that in 1995, travelling up to Pretoria (currently Tshwane), to visit a friend. He was speaking in hushed tones about a thing called the Internet. I was of course very curious to find out what he was so excited about, and we waited until midnight (when there would be very little traffic on the lines) and went online for the first time. It was a bit disappointing, as it was mostly text browsing, and I did not really understand what I was doing.
I was sure that my reminiscences are not unique, but suspected that many people have endeavoured to capture some of their own experiences online. There are two things one can say about the Internet with complete certainty: the first is that it contains a wealth of information (I am not saying anything about the quality), and the second is that it is pretty self-congratulatory. One can therefore expect to find a number of sources on the development of the Internet and related technologies here.
In this respect, I was not disappointed. Here are some of the useful links to material on the development of the Internet that I found: http://surveycentral.org/survey/
19779.html (an amusing survey on people's first experiences of going online), www.unity.edu/sari/1999/kjking/experience.html (an example of the arbitrary kind of ramblings about experiencing the wonder of the Internet), and www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline (a very good and thorough account of the development of the Internet by Robert H'obbes Zakon. This selection is in itself surely arbitrary but somehow quite representative.
Ultimately, after all the travelling, waiting, and reminiscing, I am even more convinced than ever that the Internet (as a specific example of a pervasive technology), is never really about the hardware. It is more precisely about the experiences and the way in which we make computers part of our lives.
