A Different View with Dave O’Connell

While watching an old crime drama on the telly recently, the sight of two detectives storing their evidence on a floppy disk brought back memories of a time when we thought our first or second-generation computers were at the cutting edge – little knowing that, within years, the floppy would be as obsolete at the typewriter.

The irony of course is that they weren’t floppy at all because they were housed in a hard plastic case, but without doubt they were gamechangers; a small square not much bigger than a playing card and yet it could store the contents of a large office cabinet on it, with room to spare.

And even if technology has since advanced so far that we’d store all of that and more on the pinhead of a needle, that’s just evolution. The floppy disk was the trigger for a revolution.

We’d never lose another story we’d written; we could store contact numbers (in a time when Data Protection wasn’t even a twinkle in some Ombudsman’s eye), transfer information from one computer to another – and just marvel at how far the world had come in our lifetime.

The computers themselves were also wonders to behold; an electronic screen with a little green cursor pulsating like a beating heart, allowing you to go backwards as well as forwards and clear up your spelling mistakes without the aid of Tippex.

Newsrooms used to be cacophonies of clacking typewriters and ringing phones – reporters slamming the carriage return like they had a vendetta against it and those traditional devices of communication ringing away, possibly because the intended recipient was away in a pub.

Within a generation, the newsroom became almost as quiet as a library as reporters gently tapped computer keys, and they no longer had to rely on desk phones because their lives were liberated by the arrival of the mobile.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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