Have you ever thought about the fact that when a child presses the save button that they have no idea that that odd little square in the corner of their screen is something called a floppy disk? They have absolutely no idea that people used to save their documents to those little squares of plastic rather than on a USB stick or in the Cloud. There have been so many changes in technology that children today would be shocked at how life was only ten or twenty years ago. Here are our five biggest changes to technology.
Letters and Phone Calls
Can you remember the last time you wrote a letter that wasn’t for an official reason? Was it typed? It was not that long ago that the main forms of communication were either by mail or phone call but now there are a wealth of different options to choose from. Emails, instant messaging, text messaging and now social media allow for constant streams of communication wherever we are. With wearables like the Apple Watch nothing seems to be getting in the way of our communication anymore.
Payment
The ways that we pay for things has changed dramatically over the past couple of years. Cheques, while still around, seem to have become a thing of the past. While credit cards are still the major form of payment, services like Apple Pay are becoming more and more prevalent. Furthermore, the majority of our purchasing is done online instead of on the high street. Sites like Amazon and eBay have become our everyday haunts when we’re looking for something to buy.
Storage
Our documents used to be always available to us in some form of physical format. To begin with they were always on a piece of paper and then when computers came along they were always on a hard drive or backed up to tape or discs. Now we are seeing more and more of our data being accessible to us from anywhere through the Cloud. We no longer feel the need to keep our documents safe through a physical product that we have to carry around with us and feel comfortable enough to invest in a service that we can access however we please and from wherever we are.
Entertainment
The television used to be the centre of home entertainment providing us with films and programmes to pass the time away. In recent years the PC seems to have replaced the television through services such as Netflix, BBC iPlayer and Spotify. Even if the device we are using is not recognisable as a Windows PC underneath its casing will be a computer with a processor and RAM. The Internet has broadened how we entertain ourselves providing us with many different options and even if we choose to watch a television programme there are now multiple ways to do so.
Mobility
With Cloud computing and mobile technology we are no longer tied to our desks. In fact the term ‘out of office’ seems to have gone out of the window. We can access everything and anything from anywhere and everywhere. Only a few years ago we would be lugging laptops around searching for an Internet connection.
