Comments on: Chianti Classico Berardo Riserva 2000

By: Alastair Bathgate

Alastair Bathgate — Fri, 30 May 2008 16:38:59 +0000

I fear I may share your views on digital TV.
I would mutter “Times” rather than “Guardian”, but only on a Sunday since I use the internet to keep abreast of every day news, where I can read the New York Times in addition to Yahoo Finance, The Times, and of course, the excellent BBC.
I now just need to get a mobile phone with browsing capability and I can pretend to read the papers online on the rare occasions that trains do not go through tunnels…..

By: Peter May

Peter May — Fri, 30 May 2008 15:32:07 +0000

I suspect the reason such terms were not in the dictionary was that they were of no interest to the general reader, being industry specific terms at that time. And of course the thought of a personal computer would be hard to image then ….

Few people outside the industry would have seen a computer let alone used one. Rather like terms such as kerning were the sole province of typesetters until the desk-top publishing function arrived.

Of course, the arrival of computers in everyday situations has improved life for all:

Scene 1
At the station bookstall 1975
Hold up newspaper, mutter ‘Guardian, hand over the money, exit and catch waiting train

Scene 2
At the station bookstall 2008
Hold up a newspaper, mutter ‘Guardian, assistant gestures to be handed the paper which he then seaches to find a bar code, folds the paper and has a couple of goes scanning barcode, looks at till which now displays the cost and asks for the 80p which I have been holding out all the time. Puts cash in till, pulls off till roll receipt, hands it back with newspaper while I watch the train I was intending to catch leave the station.

And don’t start me on digital TV……

By: Peter May

Peter May — Fri, 30 May 2008 10:21:26 +0000

Of course computing existed in 1975 - otherwise what had I’d been working at full time for 5 years by then?

“terabyte had obviously not been imagined yet, never mind built” — Err, you don’t build a terabyte, any more than you build a kilometre or a hectare, because it is a measurement. As for not being imagined, per-leese, our tape store easily held at least a couple of terabytes worth of data in 1975.

The thing which has changed most is the amazing reduction in the cost (and size) of storage — that is what has allowed computing to enter facet of our lives