At my school there was only one computer, locked away in the Physics Department. We got to visit it when accompanied by a teacher. We would look on in wonderment as a green blob bounced up and down on the screen.
I was called a Yuppie because I had a mobile phone in the 80s. I upgraded from the Brick to the Motorola Flip and the only game you could play was to display SHELLOIL upside down. I had obviously developed this game on one of my many Casio Calculators and it went down well at parties.
I didn't get my first PC until the 90's. It was an Ambra 386 with 4MB RAM and Windows 3.0 from Scotbyte in Livingston. I remember being fascinated with MS Paintbrush! Laptops weren't invented so I had to hump it round the country when staying away on contract, along with my Thorn Microwave and my Pioneer Ghetto Blaster. Sadly, the Microwave passed away only 10 years ago but I still listen to the radio on the Pioneer in the garage. Along with the old denim jacket, my wife doesn't want it in the house. The tape deck doesn't work but I can now plug in my mobile phone and blast out my whole Elvis collection. As for the Ambra, it lasted only slightly longer than my first HP Ipaq with no WiFi. What was I thinking?
My first email address was a number from Compuserve and you could only send attachments in sections. I recall sending my CV to Computacenter from contract digs in Aberdeen on a borrowed black and white Compaq laptop. Actually, that is incorrect, my friend rented it to me for £40 a month! My digs rent was only a ton!
I have seen many changes in technology over the last 30 years but in the last 5 years, it seems to have cranked up a notch. As a software developer colleague of mine with decades of experience said to me yesterday when I quizzed him about the cost of building an app for a client, "If you had asked 5 years ago the application may have been a challenge. Now nearly all the pieces of the jigsaw are available easily and mass marketed."
The challenge, today, is to bring together the digital elements and create that seamless cross over between technical and creative. The combination of marketing consultancy and technical consultancy has never been in more demand. Even traditional methods of project management are being challenged as a new breed of specialist evolves in the digital arena. The route to market for any software development now has to embrace the existing channels laid open to it that were never there previously. Only a few years ago, as much consideration would have been given to the development of the infrastructure and hardware to facilitate the solution. Now the high speed communication link and hardware is in the palm of your hand.
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