wireless router (Photo credit: Sean MacEntee)

I’ve been having communication difficulties.  As I connected and disconnected phone extensions I found an old cable-reel extension lead and remembered how, ten years ago, this was my connection to the internet.

Back then, as now, the computer was ten metres from the phone socket so in the dim, distant dial-up days dis this was extended along the length of the apartment and plugged into my clear red plastic modem and the noisy connection process could begin.  Once finished it would be wound up again and slotted back down the side of the sofa.  In those days the dangers of the internet as espoused by the tabloids missed out my own addition – a trip hazard.

Now, of course we connect laptops, PCs, phones and tablets even speakers wirelessly and speedily, it’s wonderful to be able to play music from the tablet in my hand to the speaker in front of the TV, to control my car stereo from the touchscreen phone by the steering wheel, share pictures between cameras and phones with a touch and to be able to read books, articles and whole encyclopedia’s on a portable handheld slab of plastic and glass.  We truly are at the beginning of a fantastic age, no matter what the naysayers, er say.  Ok, the technology isn’t yet in the hands of everyone but it is becoming cheaper and easier to use so that more people can have the greatest collection of humankind’s knowledge literally at their fingertips, along with cat videos of course.

As Arthur C Clarke said “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” and although we don’t really think of our free and open mine of information as mystical it is a wonder, especially in the current climate of big media wanting us to subscribe to everything.  Thirty years ago I watched The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and wondered whether we could have such an electronic book as that.  Right now, we have so much more.  So next time your wireless connection stutters be thankful that you don’t have to unravel that extension lead.