I went to see my mum yesterday. As usual she gave me lots of food and then we watched some gameshows.
We usually watch contemporary gameshows like the Cube or Deal or No Deal but yesterday we had a go at that Challenge TV, where the shows are from about 20 years ago. The main attraction was back to back episodes of Brucie's Price is Right. I never even realised that Brucie had done 'The Price is Right'. I've only ever seen the ones with Leslie Crowther.
It shows how far technology has advanced in the last 20 years that almost all the amazing prizes on the Price is Right, gadgets like Home Computers, Camcorders, Stereos etc, all priced at £1000 or more, you can now pick up from a charity shop for about a fiver. Stuff that obsolete you can't even take to Cash Converters, they'll just laugh in your face. A PC with 16 megabytes of RAM, a camcorder the size of a suitcase, a stereo with a tapedeck, a VHS video recorder? You'd have trouble these days trying to give that crap to the rag and bone man. And the 4 separate devices that between them cost about 5 grand on the Price is Right and which would fill a whole room, could now all be replaced by an I-Phone.
Technology has come on so far since I was growing up in the 70s and 80s I can hardly believe it.
To think that when I came home from playing rugby against Benton Park when I was 15 I was astounded by our new VHS video recorder that we'd just got. I was so amazed I watched Top of the Pops over and over again. I didn't even like Stool Pigeon by Kid Creole and the Coconuts, but I thought it was incredible that I was in control of when it was on. We even had a remote control on a wire that trailed along the floor. It was state of the art.
I think that VHS recorder cost about £700. It was as big as a house, and if you pressed the eject button it set off so much vibration all my mum's ornaments fell over.
In the Second World War they had to crack the Enigma Code with a computer the size of a stately home that had about a million valves each about as big as a small child. Then in the sixties they managed to land on the moon with the aid of a room full of computers that had less processing power than a modern Pay as you Go sim card. Now we're all watching Youtube in our breaks at work on phones the size of postage stamps. If technology gets any smaller we'll need electron microscopes to even find the stuff.
When I was a child I was a human remote control. If my mum wanted the channel changing I had to get up and bash one of the big 3 buttons on the big wooden telly to switch between the 3 available channels of crap. It was the News on two sides and Harold Lloyd on the other (no, young people, you've never heard of him, look him up he was ace) The cathode ray tube on that telly probably weighed the same as an anvil, and it was encased in a giant wooden case. It was never likely to get stolen, and even it somebody did steal it, it would probably have been worth more as firewood than as a telly. But nobody ever would steal it, because you'd have needed a team of navvies just to lift the thing. These days you could get your i-Phone 5 stolen off you by a motivated fly. Recently Ruth lost her i-Pod in the car for about a month because it had fallen down a crack about a millimetre wide into where the spare tyre is kept.
Say what you want about old and obsolete technology. It may have been total crap and it may have had to be delivered to your house by forklift truck after having the front window taken out, but at least you could find the stuff. Stuff that bulky you could see from space.
All this modern stuff, it might do all kinds of stuff that we could only dream of in the 70s, but at least in the 70s we didn't need tweezers to retrieve our technology from between the cracks in the floorboards if we accidentally dropped it. We didn't have to go through the bins in case we'd chucked our phones away then. No, that bloody massive beige phone we had in the 70s, it was quicker to run down the street and call for your mates than it was to try and dial a number on it. And the first proper record player we had was actually built into a sideboard!
I could go on, but if you're old you'll remember it, and if you're young, you'll never believe it, so I think I'll stop there.
We usually watch contemporary gameshows like the Cube or Deal or No Deal but yesterday we had a go at that Challenge TV, where the shows are from about 20 years ago. The main attraction was back to back episodes of Brucie's Price is Right. I never even realised that Brucie had done 'The Price is Right'. I've only ever seen the ones with Leslie Crowther.
It shows how far technology has advanced in the last 20 years that almost all the amazing prizes on the Price is Right, gadgets like Home Computers, Camcorders, Stereos etc, all priced at £1000 or more, you can now pick up from a charity shop for about a fiver. Stuff that obsolete you can't even take to Cash Converters, they'll just laugh in your face. A PC with 16 megabytes of RAM, a camcorder the size of a suitcase, a stereo with a tapedeck, a VHS video recorder? You'd have trouble these days trying to give that crap to the rag and bone man. And the 4 separate devices that between them cost about 5 grand on the Price is Right and which would fill a whole room, could now all be replaced by an I-Phone.
Technology has come on so far since I was growing up in the 70s and 80s I can hardly believe it.
To think that when I came home from playing rugby against Benton Park when I was 15 I was astounded by our new VHS video recorder that we'd just got. I was so amazed I watched Top of the Pops over and over again. I didn't even like Stool Pigeon by Kid Creole and the Coconuts, but I thought it was incredible that I was in control of when it was on. We even had a remote control on a wire that trailed along the floor. It was state of the art.
I think that VHS recorder cost about £700. It was as big as a house, and if you pressed the eject button it set off so much vibration all my mum's ornaments fell over.
In the Second World War they had to crack the Enigma Code with a computer the size of a stately home that had about a million valves each about as big as a small child. Then in the sixties they managed to land on the moon with the aid of a room full of computers that had less processing power than a modern Pay as you Go sim card. Now we're all watching Youtube in our breaks at work on phones the size of postage stamps. If technology gets any smaller we'll need electron microscopes to even find the stuff.
When I was a child I was a human remote control. If my mum wanted the channel changing I had to get up and bash one of the big 3 buttons on the big wooden telly to switch between the 3 available channels of crap. It was the News on two sides and Harold Lloyd on the other (no, young people, you've never heard of him, look him up he was ace) The cathode ray tube on that telly probably weighed the same as an anvil, and it was encased in a giant wooden case. It was never likely to get stolen, and even it somebody did steal it, it would probably have been worth more as firewood than as a telly. But nobody ever would steal it, because you'd have needed a team of navvies just to lift the thing. These days you could get your i-Phone 5 stolen off you by a motivated fly. Recently Ruth lost her i-Pod in the car for about a month because it had fallen down a crack about a millimetre wide into where the spare tyre is kept.
Say what you want about old and obsolete technology. It may have been total crap and it may have had to be delivered to your house by forklift truck after having the front window taken out, but at least you could find the stuff. Stuff that bulky you could see from space.
All this modern stuff, it might do all kinds of stuff that we could only dream of in the 70s, but at least in the 70s we didn't need tweezers to retrieve our technology from between the cracks in the floorboards if we accidentally dropped it. We didn't have to go through the bins in case we'd chucked our phones away then. No, that bloody massive beige phone we had in the 70s, it was quicker to run down the street and call for your mates than it was to try and dial a number on it. And the first proper record player we had was actually built into a sideboard!
I could go on, but if you're old you'll remember it, and if you're young, you'll never believe it, so I think I'll stop there.
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