I hate to admit it, but I am of an age when growing up without a mobile phone was normal, and even a landline in your house was rare. Unthinkable nowadays – most people wouldn’t leave the house without their mobile phone and would panic and go home if they couldn’t find it.

The first mobile phone was demonstrated by Motorola in 1973, using a handset weighing 2 kilos (4.4 lb) – that’s an enormous weight, and was the size of a house brick, with an aerial permanently sticking out from the top! In time, they shrunk to a size where your fingers could barely press one number at a time but were a good size to slip into a pocket or handbag. And they aren’t just for phone calls anymore - today’s smartphones enable people to keep almost their entire lives at hand, from banking to photo albums, just a few taps away on a device that fits into your pocket. And the apps they hold are unbelievably smart, being able to monitor your home security, or turn on your heating (if you can afford it!). I personally feel the smartphone has got so ridiculously big now that you can hardly get your hand round it, but now the thinnest available is only 6.81mm thick and weighs in at a mere 158g, and the latest ones that fold in half have gone some way to solve the problem.

Radios

Radios barely exist now, as more and more people subscribe to online music. But once upon a time the whole family would huddle round something the size of a microwave to listen to a crackly broadcast over Sunday lunch, but radios too went from this clumsy plug-in affair to giant inlaid wood radiograms which were pretty much a piece of furniture in the 50’s where you could happily while away an afternoon scrolling through the radio stations or use the turntable to play a record from your collection. Then came the portable wireless, and went from boomboxes to transistor radios and then to tiny voice-activated iPods. Physicists at the University of California, Berkeley, say they have built the smallest radio yet - a single carbon nanotube one ten-thousandth the diameter of a human hair that requires only a battery and earphones to tune in to your favourite station. The mind boggles.

Computers

Another item that went from big to small – computers. My first job had one in its own room with an airlock to enter through to keep the dust-out, then came home computers – where we marveled at games called ‘Pong’ or ‘Pac-Man’ with lurid green symbols - then came laptops and the iPad. Now our smartphones can do the work of a large computer as mentioned above - in fact it has been said that since the invention of the microchip, the small computer would hold enough data to launch a spacecraft.

The Internet baffles me - I can’t get my head around something so enormous and far-ranging, that seems free or virtually free, but guess what, it’s not free. The cost you pay for using all the fascinating, convenient and effective features of the internet is YOU. The bitter truth about these free services is that you pay for them with your own identity without being aware that you are doing so. It started out small in 1969 as an experiment, and computer scientists Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn are credited with inventing the Internet communication protocols we use today. Where would we be without it these days as the whole world has been opened up to us – and what about ‘social media’? Is this a menace, or something we simply can’t live without? I can’t keep up with the number of these, is this the only way to communicate these days?

But some things have gone the other way – TVs for instance, they are ‘smart’ too, and some are so big you’d get a stiff neck watching Wimbledon for instance, but the clarity is amazing – the pictures so sharp you can see acne scars so clear they look like craters on the moon!

Author

Marilyn writes regularly for The Portugal News, and has lived in the Algarve for some years. A dog-lover, she has lived in Ireland, UK, Bermuda and the Isle of Man. 

Marilyn Sheridan