Blast from the Past

It seems to be a week of blasts from the past in the news this week.
I read a couple of days ago about Clive Sinclair talking about flying cars (possibly not the best choice of topic because he never lived down the whole C5 electric car incident). I now read about Alan Sugar stepping down from Amstrad.
I know Sugar is not a blast from the past in some ways (thanks to his TV coverage on The Apprentice) but the name Amstrad is certainly a throwback to the 80s where they made their name in early personal computers (with a varying degree of success).
Of course, Sugar bought the Spectrum from Sinclair - which is possibly why the two names rang such loud bells in my head.

Any talk of stepping down from long held posts is bound to bring thoughts of Bill Gates right now, with lots of talk of ends of eras and soforth. It strikes me that you can look at that particular exit in two ways - either as a man who is satisfied with the buisness he's built moving on to bolder and better things, or as a coward jumping ships before the whole edifice crumbles around him.

Mostly Harmless and insecure pink fish

Having spent the last few days pondering on my previous post about the last decade, one thing - or rather one persion - keeps popping into my mind.

In the late 70s, when I was in my formative, primary school years and you could still have a good night out for 3 and 6 and have change for the bus fare home (I gest), I happened across a recording of a radio show that one of my cousins had made. Although I didn't quite understand it all (and as time went on, I realised how little I _did_ understand) it grabbed me in a way that nothing had before, shook me by the lapels and made me realise that radio wasn't all about the music charts (which I was a little too young to be in to) and The Archers (which, living in a small rural town, was just like normal life - only with more cows giving birth).

The show was The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy and it went on to have quite an effect on me, but that probably wasn't apparent at the time. Over a long time I've come to realise that my slightly odd sense of humor and my love of words and language came directly from this influence. The dense, multileveled language of both the radio series and the books opened up new possibilities for the written word to me and later insired me to write all kinds of odd things in all kinds of odd places, including poetry, music lyrics and endless nonsense such as this. I already had a well developed interest in technology by the time I first heard the Guide, but it showed me that technology wasn't all serious - like it was on Tomorrow's World - we could have Nutrimat machines, depressed robots and chatty doors.

Later, after listening to the radio series more times that I care to contemplate and having read the first four books a ludicrious number of times, I also came to hear of the author's after-dinner speaking on technology and related topics. And he had a lot to say. And it made sense - proper sense, not just some technologist babbling. Later still, he became entranced with the natural world and with ecology and conservation, and he showed his natural flair for getting across an idea intact with feeling, context and emotion.

I met Douglas Adams once, at a book signing. Being quite a fan I was totaly unable, of course, to come up with anything spontaneous and witty to say to him when my 5 seconds of proximity came along. I've thought of lots of things since - but actually prefer it that way.

I only bring it up because thinking back on the last decade it was one seminal moment - he died in 2001, very suddenly. I'd have liked to have a chance to hear him talk and I'd like to have read a couple more of the books that he never wrote (he was, after all, terrible at actually getting down to the whole buisness of writing - but when he finally did, the results were always excellent). I do, however, take great comfort in the fact that a number of his phrases seem to crop up in the English language now - often without the user having any concept of where the phrase came from - a little like Shakespear.

So when I hear "Life, the Universe and everything", "Share and enjoy", "When you are tired of you are tired of life" or the number 42 - it gives me a small tinge of enjoyment - much like a Poghril telling their favourite joke (q.v.).

Landmark

I was 40 this week.

Seems very strange to be saying that, since I think I'd only just about got used to being in my 30s.

Lots of things I can remember so clearly (and don't really seem that long ago) are now 2 decades in my past - at a time when I only HAD 2 decades of past.

Looking back, I feel that my 30s have been my best decade to date. I think I found out a lot about myself, did a lot of things I should have done a long time before and generally finally felt OK about being me. My 20s were much more about being irresponsible and having fun - not that I don't continue to do these things - from time to time. Getting married is probably the most obvious example of the change in me - I can't imagine even thinking about it when I was 28 or 29.

I grew up in an age where in 1999 the moon left the oribit of the Earth and in 2001 we found signs of intelligent life on the moon (must have come back by then). So much was predicted "by 2000" - including thinking machines, nuclear war and space travel for all. It's easy to think that little has really changed, but in fact much has, although in more subtle and insideous ways that we could ever have imagined.

I was just turning 30 when I had my first real exposure to the internet - and now I find it hard to imagine a single day without it. I had my first mobile phone just a couple of years before that - and by the time I was 30, GSM was making big headways and we all got introduced to SMS. We now routinely use computers in our homes and offices which are incomprehensibly powerful and can store ridiculous amounts of information - however because the software running on a lot of them is so poor, we hardly notice.

Some things seem to be cyclical, though. Having spent years moving computing power away from huge mainframes onto the desktop, we're now told cloud computing is the way forward - back to the big data centres - albeit in a far more elegant way. I, once again, drive a Mini - having learnt in Minis and last driven one back in the early 90s. OK, so it's not a _real_ Mini, but it still has the same feel (for me, anyway).

And so, as I wave farewell to that decade, I can reflect that it's really the first decade of my life I was really aware about entering and leaving. Too many other new things were going on when I entered my 20s that I didn't really notice (and it didn't seem such a big deal).

What will the next decade bring for me? Probably about time for a mid-life crisis, I think.