Suffering from natural obsolescence

You know you’re getting old when it dawns on you that you’re outliving technological breakthroughs.

You know the sort of thing – something revolutionary, that heralds a seismic shift it the way the modern world operates. Clever, time-saving, breathtaking and life-changing (and featuring a circuit board). It’s the future, baby!

Until it isn’t any more. I got to pondering this when we laughed heartily in the office about someone asking if our camcorder used “tape”. Tape? Get with the times, Daddy-o! If it ain’t digital then for-get-it!

I then attempted to explain to an impossibly young colleague that video tape in a camcorder was indeed once a “thing”, requiring the carrying of something the size of a briefcase around on your shoulder, containing batteries normally reserved for a bus, and a start-up time from pressing ‘Record’ so lengthy, couples were already getting divorced by the time it was ready to record them saying “I do”.

After explaining what tape was, I realised I’d already lived through the amazement of VHS appearing and being able to record the Kenny Everett Video Show, before waving it farewell when the DVD showed up, all shiny and new.

Even that had a digital dad, with the impossibly large Laserdisc hanging around just long enough to temp the gadget-obsessed into buying a player before the boffins realised they could squish the same stuff onto a thing the size of a CD, and the skip beckoned.

Similarly, whilst the appearance of the audio cassette pre-dates even my less-than-youthful memory, it’s disappearance doesn’t, and it’s predecessor, the 8-track, was killed off long before that. Even DAT and the MiniDisc lived a brief, recordable, life, before being painlessly despatched by the non-physical world of the MP3.

Like Mayflies, they shone momentarily, warming the hearts of the audio purists (and those guys still proclaiming that BetaMax was better), before being unceremoniously consumed by the digital frog of the future.

The Sony Walkman also lived two whole lifetimes inside my one, in it’s cassette and then CD forms, before meeting it’s demise for the same reason.

Back when everything was either beige, brown, burnt orange or mustard yellow (the only colours allowed by law in the 1970s) and the mobile phone became ruler of our lives, there was a time where even the telephone in your house couldn’t move. No cordless wizardry – the stairs was where you sat if you wanted to chat, the phone was wired to the wall, and the cable curly.

Our family’s two-tone Trim Phone was the height of cool, even if you had to turn a dial round a lot to call someone, rather than select their name off a menu. Now a landline seems resolutely old school.

Getting up to switch between one of the three thrilling TV channels may have been substituted with trying to remember where the remote is to flick to channel 789, but even it’s days are now numbered ... there’s an App for that.

Which reminds me – I must rush out and buy the latest 4K OLED curved-screen, retina display TV, or I’ll have nothing to regret in a year’s time.

This post first appeared as my "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column, in the North West Evening Mail, on the 29th of August 2014, where it was retitled 'From high-tec to bye-bye tech', which is pretty damn clever, really! You can read the edited version used by the paper on their website here

It received a fairly sizeable trim from them (around 10%), and I'd already had to remove a paragraph before submitting it to meet their 500 word requirements. What you have above is the full, original version that even the paper's team didn't get to read, and around 75 words longer than the version that made it to their website.

After not having had a comment about one of the columns for months, I was excited to see that one had been added to this one - less so when it turned out it was someone supplying the exact timeframe of Laserdisc's existence is a vaguely know-it-all tone.

I'd like to think I have the moral high ground here. If you know the birth and death dates of a system barely anyone used AND feel the need to point that out to an unpaid columnist who was just trying to give folks a bit of light-hearted reading on a Friday, then it seems (to me at least) that you possibly need to open the front door and step outside once in a while, and put the Radio Shack catalogue from 1989 down first.

(Tunes tonight from The Move Anthology 1966-1972... and I know those dates are right because they're printed on the box.)