My five life-changing products of the past five decades
5x5 Continuing my alliterative crusade to theme 5x5, I’ve decided to inaugurate Wonder Wednesday with a list of life-changing products through the four-and-a-bit decades I’ve survived. It’s inspired by a addictive thread on the UK TJPR Facebook group, where Which? magazine asked about group members’ most important products for its 60th anniversary.
1 The 1970s: LEGO To be fair, a good chunk of the 80s was also a celebration of Lego, particularly the Lego Space range that came out in 1978 and let you build things with swept wings and bases on their moonscape building boards. My brother’s Lego Technic was also very useful for providing structural strength to open-bodied spaceships that my little spacemen could move about in. By the way, Lego does not go back into the boxes and packets it came in; it goes into big boxes of different types of bricks that you sort through for the right part when you’re building new things. WTF?!
2 The 1980s: the Amstrad CPC 6128 Sometime in the early 80s, my dad brought home a Sinclair ZX81 that he’d been given to teach him about computers. My brother taught himself programming, I learned to accurately input hundreds of lines of game code from magazines as fast as I could, to play before the ZX81 overheated and crashed. I was jealous of my friends with the ZX Spectrum, but the eventual arrival of an Amstrad CPC 6128 was a revolution. You could load games quickly from disc, or by tape if you couldn’t afford them, and save games as well. Chuckie Egg, Spindizzy, Elite, Spellbound, Knight Thyme, Tau Ceti… There was a dedicated monitor and hi-res(-ish) audio. Later there was a dot-matrix printer and I could use a word processor to type up essays (releasing me and my teachers from my terrible handwriting). There were creativity tools that unlocked new ways of thinking about writing. Nerd-gasm.
3 The 1990s: The CD and the audio cassette University, journalism college and first jobs meant a lot of moving around in cars and on trains, so cassette-based portable audio was the only way to go, but you didn’t want to buy cassettes that wore out (or even melted when left on the dashboard on a hot day). What you needed was a CD (bought in the HMV sale, borrowed from a friend, or rented from the library), a tape recorder and lots of C90s. Hey presto! And writing out the tape inserts meant I actually knew what some of the songs were called, unlike today when I couldn’t name the tracks on some of my favourite albums. Can’t say I’m sad to see the back of a wall of CDs or lugging tapes around, but they were happy, lo-fi days.
4 The Noughties: Sky+ A job at What Satellite TV meant I was lucky enough to have Sky+ from the start in 2001, and within a few years I’d forgotten what it was to have TV where you couldn’t pause live, skip through the ads, or record at the touch of a button. This wasn’t a VCR or even a DVD recorder, this was a step change. It felt like visiting the dark ages to go to a house where you couldn’t press the pause button or browse through a list of recordings. iPlayer and Netflix have taken this to new levels, but to me they’re just extensions of that first escape from the tyranny of TV schedules into creating my own. I was also lucky enough to try many of the competitors as they arrived, but no-one has matched the ease and simplicity of Sky+, although TiVo came close.
5 The horrible decade we’re in now that has no universally agreed name but let’s go with the Teenies: Google stuff A Bluetooth speaker was going to fill this final slot — it’s an indispensable part of my luggage —but it would be nothing without the services driving it, and most of those come through Google, one way or another. My Android phone is more flexible and customisable than iOS, Google Maps has replaced all my satnav needs, Google Music now holds all of my (legally) ripped CDs and purchased digital music, Google Sky Map makes stargazing easy, Google Books has made reading portable, the Google Camera app is better than most proprietary camera apps, Google Docs has given me a go-anywhere office desktop for years now, Google Fit tracks my activity, Google Translate is remarkable when you’re travelling, Chrome is my default browser, and then there’s Gmail. Now there’s Chromecast too. Lots of other apps and services run on top and alongside of course, but then Android’s a perfect platform for that.
