It’s an interesting question for sure. I ‘manage’ a few apprentices, late teens / early 20s, and I’ve very much turned into my grandad despite my best efforts. “When I was your age…” I’m basically a walking Facebook meme.
When I was a teenager, we got all giddy when a fourth TV channel was announced. My first bedroom TV as a kid was a 12″ monochrome set which had a loop aerial and had to be tuned in manually every time you wanted to change channel. My first computer had 48kB of RAM. My first actual PC had less storage space than I currently have on my key ring.
Everyone caught measles. And chickenpox. And mumps. And German measles. A bloke used to come to the house once a week collecting a little envelope with money for a polio charity. I had tonsillitis and almost died from it.
We had the Internet in the early 90s but no World Wide Web (that really breaks their heads). There were no search engines – you found new sites by word of mouth, arcane text files buried in dark corners of the system by last year’s students, or well-thumbed fan-fold printouts passed around. Actually connecting to those sites involved leapfrogging from system to system in order to reach something which had an open route to the destination. Your Internet bookmarks and password managers were an A5 notebook you guarded with your life.
Mobile phones would be a decade away from being commonplace (I got my first mobile in 1999), hacking public telephones to get free calls was a holy grail and phones with buttons rather than a dial were a novelty. If you were a kid wanting to talk to your mates you’d have to ring their mum going “is Steven in?” or schlep round to their house and knock on the door, hopefully not to be told to bugger off because he was having his tea. As we got a few years older, if we arranged to meet somewhere and someone didn’t turn up then we… did absolutely nothing about it because there was nothing we could do.
You could smoke, well, anywhere. Not just pubs but cinemas, restaurants, buses… Coming home after a night in a club, the morning after your clothes would smell like you were a 40-a-day man even if you didn’t smoke.
Music on the move was either a cassette Walkman, a ‘pocket’ CD player if you were posh, or a ghettoblaster / boom box that took eight D-cell batteries and needed to be carried on your shoulder. A tape held one album, or two if you were a dirty pirate, which literally everyone was. Taking photos involved waiting until you’d taken a couple of dozen and then sending the film away to be developed. No-one took a selfie, ever. Recording your own videos required a hugely expensive camera which took tapes the size of a hardback book.
Cars didn’t routinely come with stereos, unless they were fancy. After-market head units were routinely stolen and sold in the local pubs for a tenth of their value (only to be bought, fitted and re-stolen, the circle of life). Manufacturers came up with easily removable stereos – so you literally carried the entire thing around with you when you left your car. There was no power steering; no central locking; no ABS; no alarms or immobilisers unless you fitted one yourself; windows were usually opened by winding a handle and if you got in a car with electric windows you felt like the most pretentious tosspot ever.
I’m sure I could go on. Even typing this out just now it all feels like an eternity away, a different world. And yet all this has changed in, what, the last 30 years? It astounds me. And the rate of change of technology appears to be accelerating (or is that just my perception?)
I can’t even begin to speculate what my apprentices will be telling their apprentices in another 20-30 years. “When I was your age, we didn’t have neural interfaces, we actually had to pick up a phone and dial numbers to talk to people. We had to make do with 42″ TVs, none of this holographic projection business.” (“Wow, you’re old. And what’s an ‘inch’?”)
We live in interesting times.
Posted 5 years ago
