Talking ‘Bout My G-G-Generation

When it comes to the latest thing, that's exactly what I always seem to be - late. Digital watches came out in the early seventies; I held doggedly to my old analog for years, swearing that it was better than any newfangled nonsense. Then, sometime in the eighties, the darn thing broke and I had no option but to get one of these cheapo digital things. It was a revelation to me; no winding required, information instantly viewable, accurate to within a few seconds a year - I loved it. Of course, in the meantime, everyone was changing to the new watches with analog faces.

I can remember a friend of mine way back in the sixties trying to explain to me what a brilliant invention stereo record players were. I was unconvinced and maintained it was a just a passing fad. A few years later I bought a huge, thumping stereo system with speakers as big as bedside tables. Wonderful, it was. In my defense, I must mention that it was also one of the last to be made with valves rather than transistors...

A curious result of this resistance to the immediate adoption of new technology has been that I become an ardent fan when I do give in and buy one of the things. I still marvel at the beauty of CDs, the way they catch the light and contain so much information. It was less than ten years ago that I bought my first CD, you see, and they remain a thing of wonder to me. Nostalgia for vinyl? You must be joking!

I got into computers in 1995. That makes me a ten year veteran. But it also ignores the fact that I first met the computer in the sixties. Another friend of mine was exceptional for those days in that he went straight into the computing industry, a fledgling, unknown and freaky thing at the time. He tried very hard to interest me in those weird monsters, even taking me to his workplace to have a look at their resident specimen. It filled a large room, lining the walls from floor to ceiling, huge metal cabinets with whirring tape decks and incomprehensible dials covering their faces. I was terrified by it and never stopped to consider what it was for.

I was not to think about computers for fifteen years after that. Then the era of the home computer dawned and teenagers disappeared into darkened bedrooms to stare into tiny screens and tap out some oddly-truncated version of English on their rubbery keyboards. I stared over their shoulders, wondered what was the point and wandered off again.

But, in the end, I had to face the fact that the modern world expected everyone to know about computers. I bit the bullet and learned. That was when I found out what they're for and it was a revelation to me. They are tools! Tools to do just about anything you want to, from writing to painting to drawing to accounting to gaming to communication, anything. I was hooked from the first and remain a complete convert.

Even so, I am still a child of the sixties. Though I exist quite happily in the 21st Century virtual reality with new gadgets appearing every day, the language metamorphosing around me and the possibilities exploding from new technologies like a plague from the future, I'm still cool in a way that the young of today cannot understand. I have not forgotten the dreams we dreamed in those far off days.

There is a book that I have planned for twenty years. It nears the point where I can begin it and, on days like these, the urge to write it becomes so strong that I can think of nothing else. I look around me and see how the dream of the sixties has been so influential in creating the world we know today, how our ideals have been taken and twisted and marketed and mistaken and I want desperately to shout out that the point has been missed.

It's a brave new world, certainly. But it's not the new technology, so often resisted and then embraced by me, that has made it so. It's what goes on in our heads that makes the world as it is, that puts on those colored spectacles that affect everything we see. And there were things we learned in the sixties that have been lost in the rising cacophony that followed. There are moments when I see in the eyes of other old fogies like me that they too have not forgotten those barely-grasped moments of inspiration that seemed to infect my generation like a worldwide disease. But we're getting old and soon will start to die out. It needs to be said, what we glimpsed and then let fall from our fingertips as the fog of war and power and money closed in about us.

That's what I want to write about...