So there we have it ! 65 today ! The next stage of my journey begins !!
Fifty years ago
today, Jet Harris and Tony Meehan topped the charts with “Diamonds” My mum and dad presented me with a Dansette
record player, which would only play 33 r.p.m. L.P.’s and 45 r.p.m and 78
r.p.m. singles. Unbelievably it cost my dad more than a full-time weeks wages
!! Today we can buy a CD system for less than a day at minimum wage. How times change !
But, having said that, the trusty Dansette served me well for nearly fifteen years. Today's bargain mini-hifi's barely last beyond the guarantee period.
A few months later The Beatles, and the Mersey sound, would change the face of the U.K. music charts forever. Each week my dad would come home with a selection of last years records from a local electrical store. Among them was a song by Cliff Richard ...
The Young Ones shouldn't be afraid
To live, love, while the flame is strong
Cos , we may not be the Young Ones very long ...
Prophetic words. Seems to me that the angry young men of the nineteen-sixties, became the grumpy old men of the twenty-teens. Looking back, nostalgia certainly isn't what it used to be.
The following year Harold Wilson made his "white heat of technology speech, and I started work in a bank. Like many of my fellow "baby-boomers" leaving school that year I had a choice of careers, and job opportunities. The big selling point of the job with the bank was that if I kept my nose clean, worked hard, and passed all my exams, I could be earning £1000.00 a year. Yes, you read it right, One thousand pounds a year !! Like I said, times have changed.
By 1969 the bank was looking to replace it's mechanical accounting systems with a computer. To everyone's amazement (including mine) I passed an aptitude test, and joined an elite band of analyst/programmers working on an I.B.M. 360 / 40 , and so began my love / hate relationship with computers and technology which has persisted all my working life.
The following year Harold Wilson made his "white heat of technology speech, and I started work in a bank. Like many of my fellow "baby-boomers" leaving school that year I had a choice of careers, and job opportunities. The big selling point of the job with the bank was that if I kept my nose clean, worked hard, and passed all my exams, I could be earning £1000.00 a year. Yes, you read it right, One thousand pounds a year !! Like I said, times have changed.
By 1969 the bank was looking to replace it's mechanical accounting systems with a computer. To everyone's amazement (including mine) I passed an aptitude test, and joined an elite band of analyst/programmers working on an I.B.M. 360 / 40 , and so began my love / hate relationship with computers and technology which has persisted all my working life.
Now that brings back memories ! With decimalization fast approaching , programmers like myself were at a premium, and I was headhunted to work for a mail-order company with a 50% increase in salary, and as I was getting married that year, it was an offer I couldn't refuse ! A year later with the decimalization changes complete, the bubble burst, and programmers were ten penny. I changed careers to accountancy, where I spent the next forty years.
Technology promised so much, we were told that we could look forward to full employment, shorter working hours, increased leisure time, as the computers took over much of the mundane drudgery of our working lives. Well, technology has certainly changed our lives, not just the way we work, but the way we play and socialize. It has helped fuel the "take, make, break, throw away" cycle of cyclical consumption , which in turn has driven our boom and bust economy of the past forty years.
Seems to me that technology promised to take us to San Jose, but finished up taking us to San Quentin. Mobile telecomunications can connect us instantly to anyone, anywhere in the world - providing we can get a signal ! We have become so dependent on this technology that a new word has been coined ... nomophobia "the fear of being out of mobile phone contact" - yes, seriously ! http://tinyurl.com/bunk6je
Computers too have changed out of all recognition - compare the latest technology with that I.B.M 360/40 from 1970. As an American author friend of ours wrote in his latest book "the world's new technologies have placed more information at the fingertips of a 15-year old today than that to which the President of the United States had a few years ago." For me the snag has been that the more powerful the devices are the smaller they get.Miniaturisation has become almost an obsession. What a shame they haven't found a way to miniaturize my fingers :-)
Technology has revolutionized every aspect of our lives. And that is just one of the things that have changed, ever more rapidly it seems, over the past fify years. We live in an information age. But as Einstein wrote - "Information is not knowledge" To become knowledge - information must be combined with experience - and that is something we "silver surfers" can offer - life experience.
We've lived through the immediate post-war austerity years of the 1950's, through the Swinging Sixties, the inflation of the 1970's, the Thatcher years of the 1980's, the boom and bust years of the 1990's, and the economic crisis of the 2000's, and, it seems, we are back again in the austerity years, facing the threat of a triple dip recession. We've seen the cycle go full circle - and we have a lot to share.
But we "baby-boomers" can learn too from the children of the Eighties and Nineties.
I'm going to close this post with a quote from David McNally ...
Mitakuye Oyasin
Mike Pendragon
Technology promised so much, we were told that we could look forward to full employment, shorter working hours, increased leisure time, as the computers took over much of the mundane drudgery of our working lives. Well, technology has certainly changed our lives, not just the way we work, but the way we play and socialize. It has helped fuel the "take, make, break, throw away" cycle of cyclical consumption , which in turn has driven our boom and bust economy of the past forty years.
Seems to me that technology promised to take us to San Jose, but finished up taking us to San Quentin. Mobile telecomunications can connect us instantly to anyone, anywhere in the world - providing we can get a signal ! We have become so dependent on this technology that a new word has been coined ... nomophobia "the fear of being out of mobile phone contact" - yes, seriously ! http://tinyurl.com/bunk6je
Computers too have changed out of all recognition - compare the latest technology with that I.B.M 360/40 from 1970. As an American author friend of ours wrote in his latest book "the world's new technologies have placed more information at the fingertips of a 15-year old today than that to which the President of the United States had a few years ago." For me the snag has been that the more powerful the devices are the smaller they get.Miniaturisation has become almost an obsession. What a shame they haven't found a way to miniaturize my fingers :-)
Technology has revolutionized every aspect of our lives. And that is just one of the things that have changed, ever more rapidly it seems, over the past fify years. We live in an information age. But as Einstein wrote - "Information is not knowledge" To become knowledge - information must be combined with experience - and that is something we "silver surfers" can offer - life experience.
We've lived through the immediate post-war austerity years of the 1950's, through the Swinging Sixties, the inflation of the 1970's, the Thatcher years of the 1980's, the boom and bust years of the 1990's, and the economic crisis of the 2000's, and, it seems, we are back again in the austerity years, facing the threat of a triple dip recession. We've seen the cycle go full circle - and we have a lot to share.
But we "baby-boomers" can learn too from the children of the Eighties and Nineties.
I'm going to close this post with a quote from David McNally ...
In my next post I'm going to look at the reason - the true reason - why I have started out on this journey ...
Mitakuye Oyasin
Mike Pendragon
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