Atomic Razor

The BBC are carrying this item on a 13 year old kid who swapped his iPod for a Walkman, which is apparently 30 years old this week.

There are some great quotes, one of my favourites being this one:

It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette.

But it did get me thinking about the rate of change of technology again.  There's something of a feeling that the rate of change of technology has slowed down in recent years.  However, I'm of the opinion that that's a selection effect caused by sitting in the middle of the change and of what the change is.

Some things do tend to plateau: Cars, for example.  While in 1949 there was nothing portable like the Walkman or iPod, we did have cars and a person from 1949 wouldn't have too many problems with a modern car - push button ignition might fox them, but it gets me too sometimes.  But generally speaking while performance, reliability, efficiency and comfort are all better, the basic design of the vehicle, the controls and instrumentation remain pretty much the same.

However, the technology in the Walkman, the cassette tape lasted just a few short decades before being replaced as the convienient way of storing music by the CD which, itself, is being replaced.

There's an interesting question here: is there an advance beyond the MP3?  Or is codec based music the limit?  MP3 might change as the preferred format but from now on the core technology of a player for files will remain unchanged for decades or centuries?  

Like the CD, the compact camera formats came and went in a few tens of years, muscled out by the abrupt emergence of digital cameras.  

The phone is also an interesting case in point.  Certainly the technology is backwards compatable.  A kid today would find the dial weird but have no trouble working it.  You might have to explain the buttons to a phone user from the past but the principle of pressing buttons to "dial" a number is graspable.  My 80ish year old mother has no trouble with it.

But what if that changes.  We could certainly move away from buttons to more linguistic and IM based IP interfaces.  Jason Calacanis has called Twitter the "dial tone of the 21st century" because it is already becoming a communication standard.  Now, I'm not making any wild claims about Twitter but there is certainly going to be another seismic shift in communications paradigms in the next 10 years and that might be hard for oldies like us to deal with.

Our neighbours came over for dinner on Saturday.  He was saying his teenage daughter sent 5000 text messages last month...  I thought I was doing well with 500...

Anyway, I hope I can keep up.  And, in case I can't, I've already got dibs on my grandmothers wind up gramaphone with a complete collection of 78s...