Driver-less cars on the roads...

[miasmum]

My cousin and her husband had a Volkswagon Tiaguen (sp) that could park itself, except we never saw it in action because it could never find a space big enough. Honest, it was worse than me

[Suff]

I don't know, I was born into a world with B&W tv and not everyone had one of them. At school it was expected that I would get a slide rule if I wanted to do any advanced maths or science and we learned log tables. It wasn't until my 5th year and O levels that I got a scientific calculator with a pregnant bump out the back for it's PP9 battery. Home computers were for the computer science buffs as the C64 and the Sinclair Spectrum didn't exist then.

However I guess that things were changing even then. But even then with all of that I didn't touch my own first home computer till 1985 and I didn't do much with even that till I was in College and doing a HND in computing.

My father is even more in this mould. He didn't touch computers until the RAF in the early 90's. My Mother did all the computing stuff with the school compatible BBC micro. I bought my father his first computer, which was an old IBM XT machine. My father and I have walked our way through many upgrades. My brother just used to do stuff for him and shout at him when things went wrong. But I've been teaching him for more than a decade now and he is the master of his home PC, home network and networked printers. He does all his scanning, printing, connection of peripherals such as camera's, phones and PDA's. Although I still have to do the extremely arcane mobile configuration for someone who has 5 email accounts, everything else he does himself. I'm exceptionally proud of him and he's 78 this year.

I must admit I stand in an odd world today. I'm years ahead of the masses. I've been doing mobile data for more than a decade. I have 3 mobile phones, one of which is a Nokia basic phone with no more features than a basic phone. It lasts forever on a charge and does my ultra cheap international phone calls.

I'm about to get a new mobile prepay sim here in Belgium which I will put into my second phone and connect to a device I just bought for £5, which I will then connect to one of my mobile charging batteries. It will create a mobile wireless network for my main Vodafone phone and my laptop wherever I am in Belgium and throughout the office at work. I was using dual sim phones more than a decade ago and they are all the rage today. I started my home media streaming back in 2006/7 and Apple TV was nowhere in sight. Today I have networking around the home and multiple points on which you can just run up a box with an IR remote and select any of 550 films and half a dozen complete TV series.

In the end it comes down to what you are interested in and how much effort you put into it. Although I will grant you that being born at the beginning of the revolutionary changes was a boon.

[pederito1]

Alright for you Suff, I joined an era with no TV, silent movies and the "wireless" had valves like milk bottles. Parents car had a red triangle on the back with a notice saying "Four wheel brakes". I wonder what the others had, that did not stop my mother hitting the back of a tram and I recall a very cross tram driver making a fuss that some paint had been knocked off his tram. Things sure have changed in ninety years.

[Suff]

They certainly have. But I believe things have changed more in the last 10 years than people actually realise. Computers finally became powerful enough to be truly useful in a broad spectrum of society. Computer software and the internet has pervaded into every walk of our lives.

I read that before WW1 Most people (circa 90%), in the UK, had never been more than 10 miles from where they were born.