I have lived through an era of evolving communication . As a kid in those wonderful days when our innocence to things scientific had not been roused we used to play out in the acre of ground that was our home. My two sisters and I had dug out holes in the ground about a foot deep by six feet by three. We placed poles at each end and Dad had strung hessian scrim between them to form a roof that gave us shade.
Not sure all these decades later where the idea came from but we set up a communication system from two clean tins ...and a length of string. The idea in all probability came from a comic, those little pages of stories, adventures and quizzes that we used to buy for 2d and 3d. (translated tuppence and thruppence).
It was about this time that we had a real telephone connected to the house, but that is another story. It was a party line, it was a manual exchange and with it a whole book could be written about the 'service'. Oddly enough though this was 75 years ago our phone number has remained with me. 485k , the k being the call to answer LONG-SHORT-LONG. Even radio in those days was a novelty and I can still recall Dad telling us how in the future we would be able to speak to people on the other-side of the world and see their faces . Fanciful stuff but way in the future .
The years have gone by and all that our Dad had talked about has come and been surpassed. The passage of time has given us radio, broadcast, shortwave and FM (Frequency modulated). Then the magic of the process of television, from its staggered path to relative perfection through 'black and white', to colour, all the time improving as each new model came along. Today we accept it all with little appreciation of how it evolved .
Then there was the advent of a computer, the size of a small house with many valves, that generated much heat.
Here is what is considered to be the first computer, the Z1.
By Photograph by Mike Peel (www.mikepeel.net)., CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=58211423
This back in the 1930's, gave birth to a whole new communication system that saw what was to become the Internet, that in itself created mega giants like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple.
There is no doubt that the Internet can be a medium for good and bad and a lot in between. Its biggest advantage is its world wide communication networks, but it requires human beings to operate it and therein lies its biggest challenge.
