Today I’m going to continue with my riveting new series, entitled: all the fings wot I missed and even a few wot I saw, growin’ up in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s and 100s.

I should include 110s and 120s really because ‘growing up’ is a work in progress. And apparently, not one I’m particularly good at.

And they say that ‘if you remember the 70s then you weren’t really there’, so I must have been really everywhere all during about 5 decades, because I remember so little of it. And not just because of the drugs. But they helped.

I’m so old I remember a time when people actually walked along a street, like, kind’a, looking where they’re going! Rather than staring at a fucking phone and crashing head- first into a lamppost. And of course, I was around in the entire ‘pre-computer’ world.

I took a ‘computer science’ option in my 6th form, in about 1974. Probably because it got me out of some other class I didn’t want, but I did it anyway. And we spent an hour punching holes in little cards, instructing the computer in the only language it understood, called ‘binary’, (Bill Gates didn’t come up with ‘Basic’ for a few years yet, when you could actually just tell a computer in English what you wanted). This would be for an equation, like the Pythagoras one. Simple. Quick even without a calculator. But as an ‘exercise’ we punched it onto cards. Which we then took down the Stratford, about 6 miles away, where the polytechnic let us use their ‘computer’. It was a room. A big one. Filled with mechanical electronic gadgetry. And we gave them our card stacks. Returning next week once the cards had been ‘run’, reassured that the square on the hypotenuse was STILL equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides. Hooray. The wonder of computers. 3 weeks to for something that would take you 5 minutes with a pencil and paper.

When the silicon chip was invented, North East London Poly got their room back.

My brother bought a ‘computer’ in the 70s. A Sinclair ZX81. And it was the first available to normal people. You had to plug it into a tv and it didn’t do very much. But it worked.

I got myself an Amstrad (thank you, Alan Sugar) in the mid-80s and it was brilliant. Not by today’s standards but in green and white (that was all you got) it was a revolution. Then someone created a ‘mouse’ and a disc drive and the rest, like this, is history.

So in 50 years we’ve moved from a massive room in E11 to my phone. Or your watch (because I wouldn’t have such a thing on my wrist), doing 1000 times more stuff a million times faster. And they call that progress? I’m not convinced.

Happy 65 and one day older… day

A xxxx