The computer had already been invented when I was born, as had the atomic bomb, colour television, radar, radio aircraft navigation and landing systems, the ballistic missile, the cruise missile and the jet aircraft. Most of the plastics we have today were known in the 1960s and so were many of the drugs in common use now.

Car seat belts were used as early as 1910. The computer mouse was invented in the 1960s. So was the car air bag.

What has changed is the fact that most of the things I have mentioned have got a lot cheaper and a lot more common.

Examples – 1. When I was a little kid, you never saw a plastic bucket. They were always metal. Now you hardly ever see a metal bucket, they are almost always plastic. 2. If your radio broke down, you took it to a repair shop and got it fixed. Now you chuck it (if it ever breaks down) and buy another. I have one set here that is 42 years old and still going strong.

Microgroove records replaced 78rpm records in the 1950s though they had been technically possible from the 1940s on. In the later 1960s people started buying music on tapes, then in about 1980 the compact disk appeared. I saw movies on disc in the 1970s but the disks were 300mm across and didn’t take off, the market did not want them then.

Cars are a lot faster, safer, more durable and economical and have been for a good while. If you got 10 years out of a car in the 1930s or even the 1950s you were doing really well, today it is not unusual to see 15 or 20 years old cars still in good usable condition.

In the 1950s the transistor began to replace the vacuum tube, it had done so by about 1970 except for some specialised purposes. (Microwave generation in your kitchen oven is still by vacuum tube.) In the 1960s the integrated circuit began to replace the transistor.

Probably the biggest recent innovation is the internet. We have no idea where the WWW will lead, we are only guessing at the moment.

The other is the rapid sequencing of DNA developed by Sanger and recently automated that gave us the human genome project. Add this to the development of gene splicing in the 1970s and the polymerase chain reaction of the late 1980s. The consequences for biology and medicine are staggering – we could be looking at extending healthy life by decades as a result, first only for the rich, then for the not – so – rich eventually.

Personally, I think the biggest effect is not so much the technology but the fact that it is cheap and common, that goes from “free” mobile phones through to inexpensive and rapid international travel.

Optical Fibre and its associated technology has swept away coax completely from the long distance communications routes, and is now being developed to provide links direct to homes and offices, again superceding copper technologies.

I began my career maintaining electro mechanical switching equipment, cleaning lubricating and adjusting switches that handled 1 call at a time. I now work with optical line systems that can handle 1920 calls simultaneously!

How has it changed the way I live? I am using it now. You are reading it now. The communication is instantaneous, and worldwide.

Computers are now all-present. All of industry and science are now controlled and directed by computers. Government, business, schools, military, medicine development of future breakthroughs, manufacturing, CAD (computer-assisted design) —all directed and assisted by computers.

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