I’ve recently joined a new Farcebark group for the old Gita of the R&D facility of a formally significant player in the global telecommunications industry. It’s caused me to reflect on some of the cutting edge stuff I’ve been involved with, some of it now fundamental to our way of life. Yes, a lot of it has succumbed to the relentless progress of technological change, but there’s some significant stuff you rely on every day that I was part of the rollout.
But it’s not these monumental projects and programmes that really cause me nostalgia, partly I suspect because I now realise the opportunities I missed by not fully understanding the social implications when I was knee deep in tech. No, the things I feel nostalgic for are the technologies I was involved with at in their death throes. Electromagnetic telephone switching, analogue transmission systems. 9600 baud modems with modular quantisation. Telex. Batch processing tape or card stored programmes. Again I do cringe at some of the opportunities I let slip through my life long motivational issues, but life was so much slower when you had to wait until tomorrow to discover if you’d done your coding right.
Nostalgia. It’s a strange mistress.
