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 onto 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 lovingly 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 and an Ipod.  Now, I am seriously contemplating the purchase  of one of the latest cell  phones.  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 sent over one hundred years 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 which  fed through the receiving machines.  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.

 

So there!!! I am so old,  I can remember working with these machines!!!