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| Me, imparting wisdom to a close friend, around 1995... |
A BRIEF HISTORY OF MY INTEREST IN COMPUTERS...
I know it sounds as dull as heck, but I figure that if readers understand my background, it might help you decide how valid or relevant my observations and opinions are on the technology I am commenting on. If you feel this is irrelevant, or aren't interested in a young boys world back in the late 1970s/early 1980s then just skip this article.
So, welcome to my new blog about technology. I also write fiction, and have a love of history and nature too, but these posts are all going to be focussed on technology, and mainly mobile technology in particular.
I love computers. For my twelfth birthday my mum and dad bought me a second-hand Sinclair ZX81. This came about after I joined Warden Park's after-school computer club (Warden Park was the secondary school I attended between 1981 and 1985).
Most of the kids at computer club (which was, in the main, unattended) were there to play 'Space Invaders' on the Commodore PET machines. But me and a small handful of others were genuinely interested in learning programming.
I went round in a daze, dreaming of having a PET in my bedroom and writing games like 'Nightmare Park' or 'The Valley' . I had recently got into Dungeons and Dragons by way of an American friend, Hans, and a new series of books had been a craze sweeping through the school - 'fighting fantasy' books, the first being 'The Warlock of Firetop Mountain'
My first computer
Of course, there was no way I was going to get a PET as they were about £800 used at that time - probably the 2013 equivalent of about £2,500 today! But, Clive Sinclair had just brought out an affordable home computer, and my brother recommended I find one second hand with the RAM expansion pack. The standard ZX81 had 1kB of RAM, that is 1024 bytes. For comparative purposes, my current smartphone is an HTC One, which has somewhere in the region of 20GB free space available to use after all the OS etc has been put on. This is 20,971,520 kB! So my HTC One has over 20 million times the storage space of my old ZX81! Even a photo from the camera would need over 2,500 ZX81s to store the average image!
"So," I hear you say, "surely you couldn't do anything with it?"
Well this is why I got a used one with a RAM pack. Then I would only need about 160 ZX81s to display an image from my HTC One! But yes, people did write programs in 1kB memory. Somebody even wrote a chess game in 1k! Of course, you could learn to write in Z80 zilog machine code and that would allow a bit more space and speed, but for a beginner like me, Z80 was gobbledygook. BASIC was the way to go, and luckily that was what I learned on the PET. The ZX81 was a little different, but not too much. You could write programs in BASIC (Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) and then save them on to a music cassette using a normal mono tape recorder. And you could buy games in WH Smith on cassette and 'load' them onto the ZX81 to play them! A company called J. K. Greye were one of the best around and they made a game for the ZX81 called 3D Monster Maze, which was utterly terrifying! You can actually play it online for free here.
It probably seems laughably rubbish now, but at the time the graphics were amazing and seeing the T-Rex spot you, then head towards you really got the adrenaline flowing!
And so my love affair with computers began. The ZX81 had no sound, was only black and white, and had a screen resolution of 64x48 in it's 'hi-res' mode. Yes, you read that correctly, 64 by 48 resolution. And you plugged it into your TV set - usually a small black and white portable. By comparison, my HTC One (M7) phone's screen has a resolution of 1080x1920! On a 4.7 inch screen!
(As a quick aside, in 1983 Chris Sievey AKA Frank Sidebottom, wrote a song called 'Camouflage' and on the vinyl version it had three ZX81 programs you could load into the computer, one being a 'video' to play whilst listening to the song - like a really early interactive computer video! It was practically impossible to load it, but someone has finally managed it and you can see it here!)
Well, after that I went through so many different computers, I loved them! The Sinclair Spectrum (The successor to the ZX81), Commdore VIC-20, the mighty Commodore 64, Texas Instruments TI99/4A, Toshiba MSX, Amstrad CPC464.... in fact, I had about four or five Spectrums because they kept overheating!
The Internet, nearly?
A friend then bought a VTX Modem for his Spectrum, which meant he could connect to a service called 'Prestel' which was like an early text-only internet service! You could send email to people - we regularly conversed with some young teenage girls on a farm in Wales - and there were personals, and you could order stuff too. For instance, British Rail offered a free service to send you brochures and timetables. I remember we ordered them all once and got about 4 heavy boxes full of paperwork delivered to his house! There were chat forums and stuff too. Of course, it all ran via your phone line, so nobody could use the phone whilst you were on-line, and it was slow. To download one of my HTC One camera pictures would have taken it about 5 hours! It would take a minute to download just 9kB!
Pagers and mobile phones
Well, time moved on and I left college with a CEE in Computer Studies and the Personal Computer started it's inexorable climb to dominate. By this time, 1988, it was possible to get phones which were portable. They were very expensive though, and had awful battery life and terrible range. In 1993 I was made redundant and decided to go to University By that time, you could buy a 'pager' fairly cheaply - about £80 for the pager plus £7pm for the paging service. So I bought a Motorola Cello.
So how did this work? Someone dialled your pager and a lady would answer the number and ask for a message of no more than 255 characters! You would slowly quote the message, and then it was transmitted to the pager which would buzz, and the message would appear on an LCD panel on the front.
Well, during the holidays I started working for the council as a touch-typist (thanks to all those years programming) and started making a bit of money. Enough that I could afford to buy myself a mobile phone! After careful consideration I purchased an Ericsson ER500 on Orange. For £25 a month I could get 15 FREE minutes per month! Yes, you read that right - fifteen FREE minutes! After that, it was about 35p off peak and 70p peak per minute I think. The phone also had the capability to send a 'service message' for free to another phone. These proved to be rather popular....
Well, I still have that phone! And it still works perfectly! It's funny, because, you had to charge the phone overnight each night otherwise the battery wouldn't last. And we have now come full circle - my HTC One is exactly the same now!
So the phones came and went and each year as I upgraded the phones became more sophisticated. Then, after the turn of the century in 2002, I was working for an internet design company. I bought a Palm Tungsten and used it alongside my Nokia 6310. I also bought a folding keyboard for it, which you could dock the Tungsten into. It was the most amazing thing, ever! The tungsten had a colour screen, a touch screen with pen and using the phone you could connect it to the internet to receive emails and "surf the web". I could sit in the pub with a pint and write spec docs on it. It blew me away - and this was over ten years ago!
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| Palm Tungsten |
It took SD cards and I could put music and yes, even videos on it. I could listen to albums, watch the Simpsons, write office documents using it. Now, I used this set up, upgrading to a newer Tungsten, and upgrading my phone until I got a Sony phone with a camera with built-in xenon flash. It was a fantastic phone - in many respects, it still is. And then, one day before Christmas 2007, a plumber came round the flat where I live with my partner to do some work. He had just got back from the US and was keen to show off a new toy he had picked up over there - it was an Apple iPhone!
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| The great Nokia 6310i |
I was blown away by it - it was like no other phone I had ever seen! It was the first model, and it wasn't even officially available in the UK at that time. All I knew was I wanted one! I wanted one so much!
By the time I could afford one, it was an iPhone 3G. I loved it. I also had a MacBook by that time, so the iPhone 3G made a lot of sense for me. I even liked iTunes! Because I listened to a lot of podcasts, iTunes syncing was great. After the iPhone 3G, I got a 3GS, and then an iPhone 4. By this time, some of my friends had moved across to Android, but I wasn't really interested as the iPhone did everything I wanted it to. But there was a problem. The screen size. After handling a friends new Samsung Galaxy S2, I saw how small the iPhones screen was. I did (and still do) a LOT of reading on my phone, and now I had seen the Galaxy's screen I wondered whether I could live with an Android phone. My iPhone had a 3.5" screen and the Galaxy had a 4.3" screen. I finally made the leap, and initially got a Galaxy Note. But, after that died shortly after buying it, I got a Galaxy S3 instead.
After moving across form Apple to Android, I went through a period of what I can only describe as 're-adjustment' as I tried to get my head around using an Android phone. I swung on a daily basis form loving the phone to hating it. I came within a cat's whisker of returning it for another iPhone on a weekly (and sometimes daily) basis. I whined and bitched about how it "wasn't an iPhone" on forums, daily. But, eventually, I got round to Androids way of thinking and finally loved it. It took about 3 months though!
Today
So that brings me up to today. Now, in July 2013, I have an HTC One (M7) which I selected after careful consideration over the S4. Basically, the S4 is a lovely phone but it was too much like the S3 for me. And, after carefully reading al the reviews, the HTC One seemed like the right phone for me.
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| The stunning HTC One. The image boxes you see are part of its 'Blinkfeed' feature |
So what can I say about the HTC One? It is, simply, the best phone I have ever had. It is a quite astonishing piece of technology. You can now hold, in your hand, this exquisite metal and glass device which can answer any question which has ever been posed to mankind throughout it's history. It has access to the sum of all human knowledge; it can not only tell you exactly where you are, but will direct you to anywhere else either by car, on foot or public transport. It can play back TV and films in full HD on it's screen. The front stereo speakers are amazing. WHen I slide it into my dock in the car it automatically begins charging it and puts up a special car menu for me. I can verbally ask the phone to remind me to buy cat kibbles the next time I am in Tesco, and it will sort it out for me. I can tell it to text my friends, to post up tweets on twitter, to call my mates, to take a picture. The camera has built in optical image stabilisation, can shoot an incredible 8 frames per second. It also has a mode called 'Zoe' along with an auto-preview mode which means when I am out and about on a walk in the countryside for instance, at the end of the day it puts together a show-reel and when I browse my pictures they are all nicely animated.
It also has a screen called 'Blinkfeed' which is built in to the home screen. What this does, is initially asks you to run through a set of interests and magazine/newspaper selections (more get added all the time) and then puts together a series of news stories, Facebook posts, tweets, photos etc for you to flip through on your home-screen. This is unique to the HTC One, and I really love it. Unlike Flipboard and Feedly, which you have to go into to look at, Blinkfeed is already right there in front of you. That advantage in accessibility makes all the difference. It's not perfect yet - they need to add RSS syndication to it (and have said they will at some point).
Of course, it's not perfect - these things never are. The battery is still pretty woeful. But it is the best phone out there right now.
Going back to an iPhone recently made me feel like I had gone back five years in time! I await iOS7 with interest, but for now, I can honestly say the HTC One is just amazing. It is the single most amazing piece of technology I have ever owned.
I will hopefully be putting up a few posts about features of the HTC One, and living with one and a MacBook.
You can take a look at some of my Showreels and Zoe's on Google+ here.
