Nothing ages you more than a dig through your tech past

I learned this past week that nobody ages as quickly as a lover of technology.

Not because we live life in a continuous state of stress-inducing exasperation, in between the lost charger cords (“no, that’s the one for my previous iPhone, before they changed the connector bit yet again”), the software update that deletes all your data or eliminates a favourite feature, the unexpectedly crap app, the broken screens, the loose keyboard letter – always something critical like the “e” or “a” – that pops off its little spring like a grasshopper and vanishes into the sofa.

But agonising as these things are, they are not the catalysts that make us old before our time.

What truly withers the spirit is to do as I have done: clear out one’s house and its slow accumulation of technologies.

Emerging from the back of dusty shelves or the depths of a closet or a drawer come things that once made a geek heart beat faster, and now seem comically old and useless.

Tempus fugit when it comes to tech. Swiftly outmoded, eventually laughingly quaint, these examples of former leading edge electronics now make teenagers marvel – what could they possibly have been for?

It’s as if someone unearthed a Rosetta Stone of technologies and, alone among the marvelling crowds, you found you could understand all of its formats.

Some forms of tech clutter age a person more than others. In the middle ground falls garden-variety old tech, such as the 80s-era Walkmans that baffle schoolkids unfamiliar with cassettes. Yes, I have one of those, and it seems ponderously huge, even though I distinctly remember glorying in it as a “pocket-sized” device I could carry everywhere, back in the day. Maybe pockets were larger.

That sort of stuff is more amusing than anything else. What really brings out my inner Methuselah are verifiably nerdish items that I once flourished proudly, like my Handspring Visor.

“Your what?” I hear some say.

Now, see? That's just what I mean. My little blue Handspring PDA.

You know. PDA. Personal Digital Assistant, a personal electronics category pioneered by Palm. Please don't say "Who?" This is breaking my heart, and causing my hair to grey. Though, yes, I see you at the back, insisting that PDAs were actually begat by the Apple Newton.

Bitter battle

My friend, I know what side you were on during the operating system religious wars, and you are exactly why I am arguing that geeks age so quickly. A whole generation has grown up now, unaware that once, nothing stirred the blood quite so deeply as the bitter battle between the divided aficionados of the Windows PC and the Apple Mac.

Those of us who recall those days are tech’s equivalent of Chelsea pensioners, proud of the scars we bear from painful skirmishes with the enemy in discussion forums like UseNet.

UseNet! Old, old, old. Mention a PDA, draw forth a floppy disk, recall the “Easter egg” surprises that could be produced by pressing certain combinations of Mac key, say the word “baud” with knowing relish, and you, too, are probably of the era that – as I did – now rushes to post images of our tech paraphernalia on Twitter.

I found that I’ve got a lot of material to reminisce about, because like most of us who love technology, I never seem to have been able to throw anything away.

I still have my very first own-branded Esat Digifone mobile phone, a clumsy oblong with a little antennae-nubbin sticking up out of the top. Why have I saved this relic? Or – discovered in another drawer – my free, government-issued punt-to-euro calculator, sent to every home during the currency transition. It still works, if you want to know any price conversions.

I found the floppy disks for setting up my Indigo email account (floppy disks!). A peripheral device for scanning paper documents into my computer (I never used it). A DSL modem that looks like a stingray. Fax machines. Enough phones to fill a small telecommunications museum.

As I do my archeological dig through my tech past, I am deliberately saving the best for last, though. Up in the attic sits my Mac SE, a quarter of a century old now. The entire operating system fitted on – yes – a floppy disk.

Soon, I will bring it down and see if it starts, giving its little chiming chord. I expect it will. But it isn’t fooling me any more. Up there in the dark rafters, I know my Mac has been gleefully doing a reverse Dorian Gray, remaining timeless and primed to go, while I silver away in the real world outside.