Springing forward or falling backwards

Well today the clocks went back and we are officially in winter time. As usual on this day I was unsure what time it was when I first woke, the alarm went off at the appropriate time but then again was it actually that time at all? I shouldn't of worried as it was the mobile phone alarm, this of course automatically ajusted the time so when it said 8am it was true. The fact that it was brighter than normal outside should of been a dead giveaway but then again in my defence it was 8am.

This got me thinking about how technology affects our lives in so many different ways, now with the click of a button we can record entire seasons of any TV show, we can listen to podcasts of any radio show that we might of missed and even use gps to guide us to any destination we may choose (usually!). Things that would of seemed amazing only a few decades ageo we take for granted now and yet for all that we still turn back the clocks every October.

In a strange way it is reassuring that there are always some constants that dont change just as everything else seems to speed forward.

A laptop or a calculator?

A while ageo I was doing a cleanout of the attick when I came across a Casio FP 200. It was a preasent I had been given around 1985 and ofcourse as a kid I had thought it was the best thing ever. I was in Primary school at the time and we had saved milk bottle tops for a new Apple a couple of months before( dont even ask how many all i can rember is that it seemed to go on for months) so as you can guess owning a pc was a big deal.
I can see myself spending over an hour typing in lines upon lines of basic for this bowling game and believe me it was basic but at the time it was magic, long before video games even space invaders came within reach.

So as you do when you come across something that sparks your interest I looked it up on google, low and behold there it is among the early handheld computers! It was launched at the Japan Microcomputer Show May 1983 which is grand it had to be launched sometime but to see specifics about something you took for granted for all those years is an eyeopener.

Doing a bit more digging i saw sites where it was referred to a precurser to a laptop and others where it was calles a programable calculator. This got me thinking, as a kid i thought this was a pc it was the most amazing bit of technology I had ever seen (even replacing the TV for a while) but loking back from todays point of view it could well be described as a calculator. I guess for me the kid will always win out but the best bit is that after 25 years it still works!!