We're All Victims of Upgrade-Itis ; Our Science Editor Deplores the Curse of Modern Life: The High-Tech Gadgets That Are Almost Out of Date As Soon As You've Left the Shop

Summary

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ON MY garage floor, sad and gathering dust, is a true marvel of technology. It consists of a plain, beige metal box which hides innards of fantastical complexity. Inside, there is a glittering mass of silicon, rare alloys and precious metals that would have baffled a 1950s boffin, let alone someone from the pre-modern era.

This marvel is a computer, and its abilities are quite staggering. It has a memory capable of storing several hundred thousand copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica. At its heart is a tiny processor muscular enough to perform several million calculations a second.

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We're All Victims of Upgrade-Itis ; Our Science Editor Deplores the Curse of Modern Life: The High-Tech Gadgets That Are Almost Out of Date As Soon As You've Left the Shop

It can play videos and movies, edit photographs and wing its way around the World Wide Web with consummate ease. Indeed, this box, which weighs about 20lb, probably contains more computing power than was available to the whole of NASA during the Apollo Moon programme. And what is more, it works perfectly.

Naturally, it had to go. Naturally, because despite this impressive list of talents, my computer is a venerable beast, now more than five years old.

In computing terms, this puts it somewhere between the Iron and Bronze Ages.

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