Life before laptops ... was there one?

Since living in Jersey I have discovered the internet.... I know it's ten years later than the rest of the world but I couldn't get to grips with it before! My brother works in computers and I had a natural inclination to switch off whenever he spoke about it. I remember the first time he ever told me about the internet. He explained it was called the "World Wide Web" and soon it would be taking over. It would provide an online resource of information which we could get at the click of a button. Cynically I thought he was a lunatic! He was obviously getting over excited about this and let's be honest he thought robots were going to be in every home by the year 2000 and unless I'm behind the times I haven't got a robot who cooks me dinner... although to be honest that would be nice! I always worry a robot at home would end up needy though and develop feelings and then the next thing you know you would be comforting them on the sofa, rubbing their hard metallic bodies as a row of lights flashed on and off signifying tears and they sobbed in a techno voice " I can't believe robot 46254 doesn't love me!" And so when my brother told me about the internet I just couldn't take it seriously.

10 years on when everyone else has been using the internet over the last decade I'm finally understanding it and can't understand what we did before it!

The same goes for mobile phones. My Dad and brother were always ahead of their time and we had mobile phones at home way before anyone else did. They were huge. The size of a large oversized hand bag but in the shape of a massive brick and as heavy as bricks too. Dad and my brother would walk around carrying these huge phones which had a curly telephone wire from the battery to the large heavy battery and base and act as though they were extremely mobile peices of equipment. Of course the rest of us in the family were humiliated as we watched our brother and Dad walk around shopping malls with these ridiculous phones! Of course we had two of these things! I honestly thought they would never take off but they did and would you believe it I have 3 mobiles and various sim cards to cover me when I visit Ireland or anywhere else! I remember when I got my first one and no one else really had one. My brother had insisted I got one. As my mobile rang in the middle of a lecture at college I tried to ignore it. I could see if vibrating in the pocket of my bag and worse still everyone was looking round to try and figure out where the noise came from. I looked on trying to pretend I couldn't hear it and everyone else was just deluded but as the blush crept up my face it was hard not to know that I was the guilty culprit with the mobile phone. I however never admitted it and continued to pretend I knew nothing about it. I was thoroughly embarrassed by the whole experience!

Devices like mobile phones and computers were a constant in my family. My brother had a really early apple computer in which he spent most of the time poring over a book whilst he wrote various codes and then the word "run" only for it to return the words "syntax error". It was a source of constant frustration for him and as my mum told him "never do anything with Computers when you are older there is no money in it!" he continued his obsession with all things technological. Even as kids we were always pretending tictac boxes were walkie talkies and that we were talking to each other. My brother also had one of those massive calculator watches which he would constantly add things up with. So I was not suprised at all when my brother decided it would be funny to wind up our parents and put fake "bugs" round the house. The idea was that we would make them think someone was bugging them and that all their conversations were being recorded. We set about making our bugs by taking the spongy bits off headphones from our walkmans (before the days of discmans and way before the days of mp3 players) and we would then use the speaker bits and cut the cords. We then attached them in subtle places with blu tack. We started under tables and hidden in cupboards but as our non observant parents didn't notice them we took it to the next level. For the next 2 months everywhere you looked there would be a bug attached with blu tack. It started on the bed frame of our parents to the inside of lampshades moving on further to the outside of lampshades, the edge of the bath, the inside of our dad's briefcase and finally to the steering wheel of our Dad's car. It was only at this point that Dad started to notice and started to cover his mouth and whisper to us that he thought he was being bugged. We looked at him like he was crazy and carried on until the paranoia had really set in for Dad and we were bored. So the next obvious move was to send him a fake letter stating that his breath had been smelt and they would like to bottle his halitosis for medical reasons. Again Dad was horrified....but for us it was hilarious.

As I battled to adapting to a computer literate world, I had a friend at school who was so intelligent I was in awe of her. As I sat next to her in French I tended to look over and check what I was doing against her work which would mean that if I was doing something different I was invariably wrong. This caused problems one day as I realised I had written her name on the front of my new note book. I tried to cover it up but didn't manage to in time! She looked at me disgusted when she saw what I had done and immediately said with a curled lip "Have you put my name on your notebook?" I just looked at her blankly and nodded. She ignored me and sat somewhere else after that. As I explained to my family how intelligent this girl was and how I wished I was more like her they seemed not to understand the level of intelligence. So I explained to them that I imagined all her thoughts came up in a computer language in front of her eyes and had various graphs etc coming up in her head. She would then process this information in milli-seconds and as her eyes moved there would be a computer sounding whizz go through her head. After that they soon realised this girl was really bright and seemed impressed that she may actually be a human computer...Perhaps she was a robot who knows?

So for all of us technology has been present for some time but I am only just really getting it. I never would have thought I would get into it but now this evening I have been playing around with my new touch screen mobile phone which I got on the weekend and wondering why we ever bothered with hard buttons on our phone when we can have the smoothness of a touch screen! How did it happen? And what will happen to the next generation. My nephew is already pointing his Dad's mobile at things and saying "See my shoes Auntie Clare" as he doesn't understand that not every phone has a feature that means I can see him on video. But the concern is how will technology keep going...? How will it increase our need for it... more importantly what is next? I could really do with something that would get me dressed me in the morning so I didn't have to put in the energy to do so... but with our problems with obesity in this world is technology going to make it worse? All I know is right now I'm loving technology!!! Life before laptops... was there one?