15 December 2007

Technological advances

Sometimes I feel really old. And I don't mean this in a condescending 'aren'tIwonderfullyyoungpleaseremindmethatIam' kind of way.

I can't help but think back to when I first started university in September 2002. I'm astonished at how much things have changed within this time frame of 5 years.

Take mobile phones for example. The highlight of mine in 2002 was that you could program it to play tunes. No colour screen, no camera (these just started to appear in 2002) no polyphonic or realtones. No MP3 player, radio or internet. Just bogstandard texts and phone calls.

My camera: a 35mm film non-zoom from Boots. I spent a fortune on developing photographs when I was in my first degree. I didn't acquire a digital camera until (I think) my 3rd year. Even then, it was a cheap £45 german non-branded thing from eBay. The plus side of having no digital camera is that photos of my undergrad rarely appear on facebook. Given that I had a perm and orange hair at the time, this really is a godsend.

My computer: I was given a handmedown laptop when I started uni. It didn't even have USB ports, so getting a printer to run on it was challenging. It served me well until I finally bought a desktop computer in my 3rd year.

Music: I religiously used a NetMD minidisc walkman throughout my first degree. It was my favourite and most expensive piece of kit. Worth more than the laptop, camera and phone combined. I still have it, and it gets a reprieve by being used as a dictophone.

It just makes me smile now that university students (including myself) have more kit than I could have ever dreamt of.

I now regularly carry around in my rucksack to uni a 30Gb iPod video, a Samsung G600 phone with a 5MP camera on it, and sometimes even my 5MP camera itself, as well as a laptop for taking notes in lectures.*

Sometimes I love the simplicity of university in 2002. Sometimes I wonder how the hell I coped....



* I am insured, but please don't mug me

3 comments:

Fat Doctor said...

Hello, Merys. Thanks for following me on Twitter. I'm following you now, too.

BTW, I remember our first microwave oven, 1984, HUGE and took up a whole kitchen counter. I thought then it was a trend that wouldn't catch on.

Yesterday in the hospital I saw a woman cursing at her cell phone, which had dropped a call on the bottom floor of a seven story building.

I said, "Remember when cell phones were a luxury?" and I thought her look might kill me!

Anonymous said...

This resonates with me! When I started uni just a few years before you mobile phones were a luxury and several of my friends used pagers. By the time I finished, phones were ubiquitous. I acquired a CD walkman during my 2nd year but by my 6th year I had my first iPod.

The speed of change is scary!

Anonymous said...

When i started uni, I was the ONLY student in the halls with a computer, and it was pre-windows, with orange text on a black background... we had to use the payphone in the corridor whilst everyone else queued and listened to your conversaion, great.

The students I see now all wear the latest fashions (e.g expensive leather boots!) whereas I wore the same 2 pairs of jeans for 3 years and "lumberjack" shirts from the army and navy store.

Surprisingly this was only back in 1992...

However, I did work in a shop evening / weekends all the way through uni, so some things don't change.