Great Tech Is Older Than You Think

I remember being an awe-struck kid when I first saw the web. It was incredible to realise that I could play Age of Empires II with other people and have my own email address and that I could find lots of "alone-time" material, so long as I was willing to stomach the speed of dial-up connections (why did images have to load from the top, when the good stuff was invariably around the bottom third?)

In the decades since, I've been captivated by mobile phones, the colour version of Snake, the iPod, the iPhone, encrypted messaging, and I'll never forget the magic of walking into a data centre some twenty years ago. It was a truly mind-altering experience - I suddenly understood the physical nature of it all, the metal boxes and cables that make the illusion of "cyber space" work.

But no technology has made me stop and stare like the obstetric ultrasound. If you've never experienced one, consider how amazing it is to see your unborn child inside your partner's belly - or your own belly, if you have the requisite parts - and see a tiny heart beating and tiny hands covering tiny eyes, months before those eyes will see daylight. Now realise, in your modern, tech-savvy arrogance, that the first obstetric ultrasound happened in 1956. That’s 38 years before the public roll-out of the web, and a longer period than has elapsed since. It’s so long ago that my grandparents may have experienced the techno-wonder of it.

And they experienced many other techno-wonders, too. In my sleepless nights, after that ultrasound became a birth, I did an informal generational tech advancement tally. It's sober reading for my generation. Whenever I think of the really big things - the inflection points that forced the world into a new shape - it's almost always a previous generation who made them happen.

Motorcars and aeroplanes? My great-grandparents did those. Supersonic flight and satellites? Those were my grandparents. Widespread mobile telecoms and the early web? My parents. What's more, they knew that they were living through inflection points - they knew that the world was spinning differently due to the changes they were experiencing.

We younger folk (and my middle-aged self still counts) seem rather more circumspect. We didn't really know that web-2.0 would prove to be such a cultural shift, just like we didn't really know that smartphone apps would create platforms for so many voices that were silenced under legacy media. We appear to lack the confident techno-mindsets of our forebears, and I think I have a theory as to why - we're so far along an unbroken line of progress that we've learned to spot the build-ups.

To my grandparents, supersonic flight wasn't just an evolution from the Wright brothers. And, to my parents, mobile communication wasn't just a step up from satellites. Such things were perceived to be entirely new, even though they weren't, even though they obviously weren't, if anyone cared to think about them. But very few people did - most people let themselves appreciate the magic instead of breaking it down into metal boxes and cables as I did in that data centre.

And breaking things down is dangerous because almost anything you break down becomes a bit lacklustre. Take the Moon landing, for instance. It's probably the greatest single achievement in human history, but it was also built around the basic technological principle of fire shooting out the back end of a metal tube - and your great, great (to the power of a gazillion) Uncle Grog had fire, metal and tubes back in the Bronze Age.

He also had a plethora of old gods whose actions explained natural phenomena like lightning, the seasons, the regularity of rains, fate, death, love, war, storms and halcyon days. Which might seem a little silly to modern sensibilities, to people who know how things like lightning happen, just like Grog's idea of "hole-in-the-ground" sanitation is a bit behind modern sewerage. But Grog had a sense of wonder - we should try to keep some of it.

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