I agree with you about the young generations running rings around us on tablets and smart-phones. But I think that is a matter of familiarity with the new toys rather than a technological edge over the older generation. Touch screens with tiny images doesn't help the elderly either. I have quite large hands and fingers, and eyes that have seen better days. But I still have a reasonable idea of what goes on behind those flashy touch screens that I prefer to stay away from.

I cut my teeth on those enormous valve powered analogue and digital computers that required their own power station, and a very large forced-draft air-conditioned room to keep them cool. I remember a 1 KB HDD was about 1 foot square and 6 inches deep.

In the late 50s and early 60s transistors soon reduced the size of the computers. Then in late 60's and early 70's integrated RTL (Resistor Transistor Logic) ; then DTL (Diode Transistor Logic), quickly followed by TTL (Transistor transistor Logic) integrated circuits, dramatically reduced the digital systems, and increased their number crunching power. With the advent of CMOS (Complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor) technology the speed of progress just took off – virtually mini-systems became available on single 'chips'.

In those early days we were integrating crude modems and very unreliable fax machines into computer systems so as to link computers together. The modems were very crude; basically two telephone receivers dropped into an acoustic coupler box, earpiece to mouthpiece with switched tones acting as the medium for a series of '1s' and '0s'. Faxing a single sheet of A4 could easily take about 15 minutes in those days – it didn't help that the then rather crude telephone system wasn't up to handling digital data.

Later relatively crude microprocessors and RAM (Random Accessible Memory) appeared on the scene in the early 70s. Wow, then computers and programmable devices could really get going. Since then the progress has been unstoppable. But under the bonnet the same physics and engineering principles still applies today as in those early days.

To program a microprocessor-based system in those early days required a good understanding of the Instruction Set of the particular 'micro', what we called 'machine code'. Today, high level programming languages and compliers have taken most of the drudgery out of it.

Before the advent of the internet as we know it today, we used a BBS (bulletin board system) for accessing and communicating data.

The younger generation has all the benefits of technological teaching aids that enables them to rapidly access information and knowledge that previously would have taken a very long to acquire. The whole panoply of digital and electronic engineering has now effectively been reduced to what we now know as “Information Technology” (I.T); the key is in those two words; a world of information is now on tap for anybody who wishes to access it and take advantage of it.

In the case of Mr Umuuna MP and his friends; being able to word process and send an email doesn't set him above the generation that helped prepared the way for him.

I retired at the age 62 and 10 months; and not too early; the work place had become increasingly unpleasant from the top down. I do feel sorry for the younger generation with the working conditions they now have to accept as normal. Employees have been reduced to economic cyphers in an arena where dog is required to eat dog; and back-stabbing has largely become the norm, where "love thy neighbour" has become 'trample thy neighbour'; and the prospects of an affordable retirement from the rat-race are extremely unlikely for the majority of people.

Your experience is far before my time. I missed out on punch cards and came in with COBOL 77 then fairly quickly COBOL 85. I still use VB6 on a daily basis and I have dabbled with VB.Net 2010.

My earliest email was the HP Comet system (Computer Message Transmission). Cutting edge in it's day

In October I'm going to get a new PC and load it up with Win7 and Office 2010 before my company paid for MSDN licence expires

I will not be touching Win8 or Office 2013 as they are pants (technical term)

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Lets be careful out there !

I use Win 8 on this PC have no issues with it. Win8.1 now I think since the updates.

But I have several other boxes and a couple of laptops with various flavours of linux distro's on them. I recently turned an old slow netbook (had win7 mini or something like it on it) (I found in the back of a cupboard) into a reasonable fast machine by putting lubuntu on it.

Windows and the office applications will be moving to free operating systems with annual licenses for working software in the next few years. Many people are learning there are good linux alternatives out there.

As for Chukka bless him.... Seems his inbox is full to overflowing............

http://order-order.com/2014/06/24/ukip- ... kas-inbox/

I stopped at VB5. Before VB5, I spent about a couple of years using IBM Basic, and about 8 years with HP Basic - can't remember the version numbers now. We created quite complex systems using HP Basic, systems that controlled automatic test stations for large-scale production testing of weapons systems and their modular units. In my last two years before retiring we were using VB5 for controlling production test stations - we were still using HP Basic though. We used a lot of HP instrumentation equipment on these test stations, linked together across an IEEE-488 control bus (GPIB), and HP Basic fitted the situation like a hand-in-glove.

I'm running Windows 7 64 bit Professional in the Retail version because that gives me the freedom under MS's licence system to re-install the O.S on any PC of my choice, providing it is only on one PC at any one time. Like you, I will not touch Win 8, and I haven't used MS Office since retiring. I now use the Open Office freeby, and from my experience it is every bit as good as MS Office, and it has the added ability to create PDFs.

I also use a version of Linux O.S on my main PC, and on a old Acer laptop. On the main PC I have a bank of HDD caddies so that I can switch data storage HDDs, and switch O.Ss between Windows and Linux without having a multi-boot system; Windows doesn't really like multi-boot systems, and can be a tad touchy and destructive if it finds another O.S present. My primary reason for having Windows 7 is to run two applications that just will not run properly within Linux, one of them being Photoshop; in any case, switching an O.S HDD in a caddie carrier only takes a few seconds.

[quote="Kremmen"I will not be touching Win8 or Office 2013 as they are pants (technical term)[/quote] Yes, I'm familiar with that technical term, and others, such as Murphy's Law, which basically means, if it can go wrong at the most incoveneinet time, it will do.

I remember we had some HP Business Basic apps that were ported to VB6. There were some very clever people with HP BB. Problem was it was all GoTo's which were frowned upon years later where the GoSub or Perform statement was far more flexible.

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Lets be careful out there !

I agree with you about GOTO and GOSUB routines. I remember once having to reverse engineer a huge piece of software that had been written in IBM Basic, where the very first line was “GOSUB 600”. “GOSUB 600” was the front end menu that offered a number of sub-menu GOSUB routines. I agree with you, at one time GOSUBs and GOTOs were vehemently criticised by purists as tending to produce spaghetti programming. And they were often the simplest way to achieving the desired result. I didn't see anything wrong with GOSUB and GOTO instructions, they fitted naturally with IF, THEN statements.

Hewlett Packard (HP for short) was originally a supplier of measuring instrumentation, and later diversified into computers and PC related equipment under the name of HP. During that phase HP also supplied non-PC type computers that were designed to run on a version of Pascal and HP Basic. I think HP somewhat lost their way for while during that period, and later divided itself into HP Business, and Agilent Technologies for the instrumentation business. I can't speak for HP Business, but I do know that the part of HP that became Agilent Technologies had some very clever people on board, and I understand they still do have.

Lots of people are blowing Chuka out of the water on this one for his quite obvious idiocy. Fact is that UKIP has a greater online presence than any other party, in fact it's the only area in politics where they outclass the others - if anybody doubts a simple Google search can verify, or a comparison of how many people watch UKIP speeches on youtube versus any of the other muppets. UKIP is doing well because of the internet, not in spite of it. In the past, the media would have shut them down, only the internet has given them a chance.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/dougl ... re-online/

Bigot-gate was a case in point.
That woman wasn't a bigot. She's seen the real world changing around her and doesn't like it. It's quite scary that apparently a narrative is being constructed where if you're not in favour of totally unrestricted migration then you're no better than an SS stormtrooper.

This reader's comment in the DT really hits the mark: