A personal history of gadgets

By Dick Swart on 10 December 2009

In 1966, when I was about 6 years old, I was a gadget myself. We had a black and white television and it had just three channels. Netherlands 1 and 2 and we could receive Belgium 1. Every time my father or an older member of the family wanted to change the channel, they asked me to change it for them. And I, thinking that they let me do that because I was so good at it, proudly walked up the television and changed the channel for them. My parents, brothers and sisters (all 10 of them) had a remote control ‘avant la lettre’.

In 1971 I got Electro, my first electronic gadget. I had fun with it until I figured out how it worked and my Electro didn’t work anymore. I used the battery and lamp for reading under the blankets. It was also funny to put the little lamp in your nostrils; it made your nose glow red.

In 1980 it was the first year that we were allowed to use a calculator during our exams and I got a ‘scientific calculator’. It was a smooth silver one with smart functions like ‘Ln’, ‘e’ and ‘sin’. I hated the damn thing. I never mastered the meaning of weird buttons like ‘MC’ ‘M+’ and ‘M-‘ and I still don’t use them. The only fun you could have with it was adding funny numbers like 707 + 707 = 1414 (type it in and turn your head).

1982 was a pivotal gadget year for me. I bought my first Walkman. It wasn’t a real Walkman just a cheap rip-off, but it did the trick. I fell directly in love with it. I remember the overwhelming sensation while walking from the store on the street for the very first time. I had a tape in it from Schubert ‘Der tod und das mädchen’ (on the other side of the tape I had Peter Gun from ELP, so I wasn’t a classic geek). The sensation that the music was just for me was incredible. I walked in my own personal movie. Everybody in the street played a role in it and all their sad looks had meaning and made sense with the music from Schubert. Alas one gets used to it and the feeling wore off and never came back.

In 1984 I bought a Sinclair. Not that fancy one with rubber buttons but the cheaper one with a membrane. I even bought an extra 16 Kilobytes because the vendor told me I might need it. It was fun programming it but I never managed to save my programs on the Walkman mentioned earlier. So every time I had to punch in the code again. The most beautiful program I made was a loop that turned a white screen into a black screen by colouring random pixels. It took hours before the last dot turned black. It was soothing to watch it.

In 1995 I got the most beautiful thing mankind invented on the Internet: Email. Finally it was possible to communicate fast en precise without being forced to answer ‘from the hip’ so to speak. Alas not everybody plays by the same rules. The possibility to retract certain mail would be nice and what strange idiot put the ‘reply to all’ button next to the ‘reply’ button anyway.

In 1997 I got a digital camera. It was very easy because you could use a 1.4 MB diskette for photo storage. Quite an invention for quick & dirty multimedia productions.

In 1999 I got my first Mobile. I hated it from the first moment onwards. My boss gave it to me and the end result was that he (and everybody else) could phone me at the most inconvenient times. I have never understood the need to be reachable 24-7 for others. 

In 2000 I got another gadget I loved from the start: the good old Palm Pilot V. For the first time a synchronized agenda and more stuff. It was also the moment that I decided never to wear more than one gadget anymore

In 2009 the iPhone entered my life…
(To be continued)

tagged with: gadgets, iphone, mobile

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