You can never be too thin, too rich, or have too many computers…..

 I don’t think Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor, would have approved of this version of her favourite saying.  But, as I am never going to become too thin or too rich, I will have to make do with the last one, and I’ll say it again –you can never have too many computers.

 I don’t know when I came into this state of mind regarding techno-tat, but as newer and newer gadgets come pouring out into the market place, “must have” has become firmly installed in our language.

Not just kids, either.  I hoped that, after many years spent in the School of Hard Knocks, I would have some immunity to this all-out advertising drive to hook our brains up to our computers.  But, lo and behold, who is that standing in the store gazing enviously at the latest cell phone, the thinnest tablet and counting her money?  Yup, its me.    Well, at least I have the good manners to do the number crunching at home.

 From being a “no computer oldie”. I now find that I have surrounded myself with a desktop,
an iPad ,an iPod and an iPhone.  I already have a perfectly good old cell phone, an earlier Nokia , which in fact is smaller than the new phones and works perfectly well.  However, you never know.  My fame as a blogger might spread and I will start to get text messages, maybe from aliens from outer space!!

 And while I am talking about texting, did you know that, what you think of as this
new-fangled, newly discovered, pursuit, is in fact a swept-up version of  the cables being transmitted more than a century ago!!  I think this was an Edison invention. Clever man.   In the olden days, telegrams (have you even heard of these?) and news stories etc were transmitted by teleprinter, a machine which used a paper tape fed through the transmitter and broadcast  to the receiving machines around the world.  Have you seen the “ticker tape” parades in America, well, this is the kind of tape being used long ago. It punched holes through the paper tape, looking much like Braille, and of course, some smart alecks among us could even sight read these messages. Not me, however. The tapes could then be fed back through another machine, which decoded the messages into print.  In order to save time and money, the abbreviations of words were widely used.

When I worked in the newsroom at the ABC Sydney, I can remember working with wax cylinders on which I recorded  the BBC News, which was then transcribed to an antique Underwood manual typewriter,(the kind you see in museums these days), and read over the national radio station. Talk about high quality, high tech, news gathering.

So there!!!!