Dinosaur: Your Time Has Long Gone

I’ve never considered myself to be old, at least, not until the doctors starting telling me I really needed to lie down on the operating table and have a few things done to keep the old pump beating. And, to a certain extent, I still do not consider myself to be old despite what others might claim: I have been referred to as Grandpa, and the Old Man by various people, although I have tried to appear as if they couldn’t have been referring to me, and simply gone on my way. When it comes to technology, though, and the advances in computers and telecommunications, well, let me tell you a story.

The local school, in the town where I used to live, was offering evening classes last year, specifically for those over fifty, the older generation, in how to handle your computer, and how to find you way around Windows 10. This is the system, as many of my younger readers will know, that is no longer supported by Microsoft, having been deemed old, out-dated, and probably less of an earner than Windows 11. My partner, roughly the same age as I am, but refuses to admit it, has the typeface on their brand new smartphone enlarged, to be able to read what is on the screen. They also prefer using what we call a Senior Mobile, one which has a larger keyboard for those of shorter sight, or fidgeting fingers. None of this, they insist, has to do with age, just with ease of use.

I recently has the pleasure of talking to a Young Person – someone of the teenage years, as it is still referred to – about the music they were listening to. I said that I appreciated it, and always had, to which they laughed and gave me that “you’re an old person” look. The artist, they told me, was of their generation, not of mine, which caused me, in turn to laugh. Their own laugh, and smugness, disappeared when I named the artist and song, although I didn’t go as far as to sing along, even though I could have. This artist, I told them, is one I know from my own youth, when I was your age. Debbie Harry, singing with the group Blondie. One of those timeless beauties who will probably never disappear, rather like Josephine Baker.

I wonder what it is that the younger generation thinks created the world they now enjoy. We dinosaurs of the past generations grew up with computer systems, of a rather less sophisticated level of course, but I was typing my first commands into a small computer console at eighteen, and working with live, real time systems at twenty-two. It was my generation which began writing the code which led to so many web sites, so many technological advances and, I am sorry to say, the Internet of Things, and refrigerators which tell you when your milk is almost empty, toasters which communicate your meal preferences to the Man in the Cloud, vacuum cleaners which send off the floor-plan of your home. Some have grown rich from these years, others have ridden on their backs and grown even richer. We were not all Woodstock and weed, although many of us might have been both, and we, as the dinosaurs of yesterday, are still your ancestors, even if there are those who refuse to believe in dinosaurs, or the not so perfectly round shape of the globe. And we have not yet had our day, despite those who try and indoctrinate us in outdated systems with bigger buttons.