In Retrospect We compare past and present items

...We look at how technology has taken a quantum leap over the last several decades. It was around the turn of the century in 1899 when science and technology started to develop and innovate, where electricity, petrol engines and machines started to appear, but we don't need to go that far back.

We will compare just ten common household items to see how they have improved, you would think that I was going back a hundred years when in comparison to the items of today.

A span of thirty to forty years is only a generation, when you consider for example that from the 1st century to the eighteenth century, which is an 1900 hundred year period, nothing really ever improved, changed or altered as nothing new was discovered in science or engineering. Innovation was at an all time low !

So lets have a look at how technology took a quantum leap over the past few decades, that most of us should remember, either first hand or told to us by our parents.

1. CALCULATORS

First lets look at the humble pocket calculator, on the left we have a portable Sharp QT 8-B Micro Compet from around 1969, it was amongst the first portable calculators with about 7 functions.

It had a basic 8 digits, green vacuum fluorescent Itron tubes display and came complete with a carrying handle! it cost about $475 when it came out, it was a big and hefty item to carry around. Whilst on the right we have a Texas Instruments TI-34-II scientific calculator from 2008, 130+ functions, LCD screen, battery + solar powered slim-line case and costs about $30

2. MOBILE TELEPHONES

On the left we have a mobile phone from about 1990 which is only 18 years ago at time of writing, it was a house-brick with very limited functions. It was a mobile phone and nothing else.

Whilst on the right we have a Blackberry Storm™ Mobile phone from 2008, it has a touch-screen, radio, GPS Sat-Nav, Mp3 player, Internet and email provider, video game player, calculator, diary, calendar, photo album, video camera, stills camera, voice recorder, alarm clock, timepiece, address book...oh...and its a telephone too !

3. VIDEO GAMES CONSOLES
Video games have been with us since about 1975 but didn't really take off until the home console came out around 1980 and one of the most memorable was the Atari 2600 as featured on the left. It was fun, and I must have spent thousands of hours playing it when I was a youngster. The graphics quality of it is shown underneath the console image, it was the all time favorite... Space Invaders ! On the right is the all popular, Xbox 360...need I say more !

4. Hi-Fi MUSIC SYSTEM

The Hi-Fi (High-Fidelity) music system has been around since about 1970, which was developed from the humble record player. Most houses had a record player to listen to those 45's or LP's and even those old 78's that were retrieved from Grannies house. Today though, we just slot our i-Pod into an amplifier and hey presto, one Hi-Fi.

Hey ! cool Hi-Fi on the left, it even has a tape deck ! maybe I should have gone back a bit further in time with that one ! For those too young to remember them ( as this is a family website, for young and old alike ), the speakers were plugged in separately and there was no remote control with it, you had to get up out of your chair to alter the volume, change records etc.

5. PORTABLE TELEVISIONS

Portable TV's have been around properly since about 1960, but were more popular and affordable in the late 1970s. They were suppose to be portable, but in effect they were big bulky and heavy things to tote around. They inevitably only received the transmission signal in black & white, as color TV didn't really become common in the USA until the late 60's and the late 70's in the UK.

If you was to see your digital TV in black & white today, you'd probably think that it was broken !

6. MUSIC RECORDERS
If we wanted to listen to music and to record sound whilst on the move 30 years ago then the trusty old cassette deck was the order of the day and I mean just a bit further back than when the Sony Walkman™ came out. I also present an image of the recording media under the item on each side. We now of course have Mp3 and Mp4, compact, light and delivering super quality music and many many more times the play time. The old cassettes gave us C-60, C-90 and C-120 minutes play time and of course the C-120 was a thinner tape and after a while, the quality distorted as the tape became emulsified and stretched, those were the days !

7. WRIST WATCHES

I'm going back exactly 80 years for this comparison. A 1930 IWC 7-day automatic, it was a very expensive mechanical timepiece, waterproof, anti-magnetic, luminous hands with accuracy @ +/- a 15 seconds a week with day and date feature. There were no LCD or LED displays of course.

And on the right we have a solar powered, radio controlled time adjusted watch with Regular timekeeping Hour, minutes, seconds, pm, year, month, date, day Water Resistant 200 Meters Backlight Electro-luminescent backlight, Afterglow Alarms 5 Daily Alarms Snooze Feature for 1 alarm Time Signal Hourly time signals Stopwatch 1/100 Sec Stopwatch Countdown Timer Measuring unit: 1/10 second Dual Time 29 time zones (48 cities), city code display, daylight saving on/off Time calibration signal reception Auto receive Manual receive Last time received display Time Calibration Signals Frequency: 77.5 Khz Other: Transmitter selection Input range: 1 minute to 60 minutes (1 minute increments) Frequency: 60.0 Khz Solar Power Power Saving Turns off the display when the watch is left in the dark...did I mention that it also tells the time !

8. GPS SYSTEM
In 1970 if we wanted to find our way around Illinois, we would have used the state of the art in Global Positioning Systems, ie; a Road map and a pair of dividers. 38 years later and a GPS Sat-Nav will do it all for you, and it will even speak if you take a wrong turn, along with details about the road, black-spots, traffic congestion, 3D road maps, distance markers and tons of other useful info.

9. PERSONAL COMPUTER

A mere 25 years ago in 1983 you could have bought the first commercial Personal Computer, with its own monitor, GUI -Graphical User Interface- and mouse. The PC was the Apple Lisa, it had a 5mhz Motorola 68000 Processor and a whopping 1Mb of RAM.

The software was loaded from a 5¼ inch double-sided floppy disk drive that was 871 Kb on each side. All this magnificence for $9,995 or that's $21,500 by today's prices and 'Apple' sold over 100,000 of them. Today of course, this PC is just a museum piece.

And today for a fraction of the cost at $970 you can buy the Zoostorm 62-4303 Quad Core Q9300 2.5Ghz Intel Processor 1333Mhz Bus speed, 6Mb cache, 4Gb of PC6400 800Mhz RAM, 500Gb SATAII 300 Hard Drive, 8 Mb Cache, 20 x DVD RW RAM SATA DL Drive, 512 Mb nVidia 9600GT Graphics Card (DirectX 10) 5.1 Audio, 7 USB 2.0 Ports, 52 in 1 R/W Flash Memory Card 10/100 LAN, 19" LCD Monitor with 1440x900 resolution 5ms response & DVI, 5.1 Surround Sound Speakers, Keyboard, Mouse with Microsoft Vista Home Premium Operating System...this is the PC on the right hand side by the way !

10. THE INTERNET

I think it safe to say that the best innovation ever devised for the acquisition of information, education and entertainment, indeed this very page, has to be none other than the Internet.

The Internet had actually been developed in the 1960's as a basic and additional means of communication for the US military. It wasn't seriously until around 1995 that it started to take off to expand into the giant that it is today.

Your PC monitor screen is an eye to the world, a window to be opened and the landscape to be explored.