It still amazes me!

[postman]

I had a carrier bag full of reel to reel tapes.All recorded with a mike taped to a stick and held in front of the telly or wireless.You could sometimes hear the evening paper rustling or a spoon being dropped in the kitchen.If only we knew what was coming.

 

[summerdays]

By way of example, my dad is constantly amazed by the motorway between the border and Dublin, but only because he remembers driving through every town and village between Belfast and Dublin before any bypasses or motorways existed in Ireland!

Our Sat Nav doesn't know that motorway exists either... its starts having fits about finding a road, any road.

Its when I find myself telling the kids ... when I was a kid..... black and white TV, children's TV just for an hour or two, NO computers. And you wonder what experiences you are going to find as beyond you when you get older that haven't even been thought of yet.

 

[dmoan]

And you wonder what experiences you are going to find as beyond you when you get older that haven't even been thought of yet.

Prepare yourself for living on the Moon, with personal jetpacs and hover cars. I'm looking forward to everything except having to wear a goldfish bowl for a helmet...

Oh, hang on, thats what people in the Fifties thought that people in the Eighties would be doing, isn't it?

 

[Rhythm Thief]

Didn't Bill Gates once say that he hoped within his lifetime to see a personal computer in every town in America, or something? That always makes me smile.

 

[Rhythm Thief]

Incidentally, as I write this I'm listening to my Ipod which is playing through a valve amp. So, new technology married to very old technology.

 

[slowmotion]

Incidentally, as I write this I'm listening to my Ipod which is playing through a valve amp. So, new technology married to very old technology.

This one?

 

[Auntie Helen]

...Diesel and then electric trains, jet airplanes and cheap mass air travel....

Ooh Arch, caught you out - that's an Americanism, that is. Over Here we have aeroplanes

 

[Auntie Helen]

Didn't Bill Gates once say that he hoped within his lifetime to see a personal computer in every town in America, or something? That always makes me smile.

Thomas J Watson, former head of IBM, reputedly said: "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers".

 

[Arch]

Ooh Arch, caught you out - that's an Americanism, that is. Over Here we have aeroplanes

You know what? I debated which to use, and remembered that last time I typed aeroplanes, someone accused me of being... I dunno, a snob or something.

I can't blooming win....

I shall be resolutely British in future...

 

[Mr Pig]

I know how they work, but it still amazes me that airplanes stay up! And the wings don't snap off.

 

[rh100]

I know how they work, but it still amazes me that airplanes stay up! And the wings don't snap off.

It's the collective will of the passengers, all praying it will work

 

[Arch]

I know how they work, but it still amazes me that airplanes stay up! And the wings don't snap off.

There's another thing. There are some things that I just don't really know how they work, but they do, and I trust them, although I'm amazed when I try to think the process through in simple steps. (Computers I guess, I know it's representing data in ones and zeros, but beyond that, it's over my head. I can do what I need to, and trust others to do the rest). There are other things, like planes, that I understand how they work, and trust them, but still have that sense of awe that they do work, on the scale they operate in.

I'm trying to think what I don't trust, and I'm afraid it comes down to human nature. Things like ID databases, I should be happy enough to have my info on there, but it's the human interface I don't trust to get things right.... Self driving cars armed with sonar and automatic distance gizmos and all that - yeah, they will work, but give a human being a single item of control, and they'll muck it up eventually...

 

[PaulB]

I know TV and radio would have seemed amazing too at first but the whole time I've been alive, they've both been ever-present and so having grown up with and around them, they don't seem "modern". i-pods on the other hand have replaced the need to have a record player with loads of vinyl or loads of CDs in the car when you go on a journey somewhere. To think that something not much longer than my thumb and considerably thinner can hold hundreds of CDs is incredible.

 

[rh100]

There's another thing. There are some things that I just don't really know how they work, but they do, and I trust them, although I'm amazed when I try to think the process through in simple steps. (Computers I guess, I know it's representing data in ones and zeros, but beyond that, it's over my head. I can do what I need to, and trust others to do the rest). There are other things, like planes, that I understand how they work, and trust them, but still have that sense of awe that they do work, on the scale they operate in.

I'm trying to think what I don't trust, and I'm afraid it comes down to human nature. Things like ID databases, I should be happy enough to have my info on there, but it's the human interface I don't trust to get things right.... Self driving cars armed with sonar and automatic distance gizmos and all that - yeah, they will work, but give a human being a single item of control, and they'll muck it up eventually...

It's like that old saying, "You can make anything idiot proof - but they will just come up with a better idiot"

Technology for the most part, I understand the basic's, and some of it a bit more in depth, so techy gizmo type stuff I'm comfortable with.

However, take plumbing, I'm OK with pipes in the house etc - even the boiler. But how on earth does the waste water get from my house to the sanitation plant several miles away - it just seems impossible.

 

[Mr Pig]

The engine in my car can go around something like six-thousand times in one minute and a F1 car engine is over eighteen! I now it does it, but I cannot get my head around that. How can an engine do three-hundred full cycles in one second?