Communicating

My father died in 1976 at the tragically young age of 45.  I often wonder what he would think of the technical revolution that has occurred since then.  I am a Secretary/PA of the old school.  When I started it was with a manual typewriter. I remember at Secretarial College in London, learning to type to the rhythm of Cliff Richards' Walking Talking Doll!! Years later,  the Tech Rev gave us the Olivetti Golf Ball typewriter. Whooo!!  I remember back in the 80's being very reluctant to change my state of the art IBM typewriter to a computer!


Photocopiers didn't exist, we used Gestetner machines which were filled with purple ink - you typed the document onto 4 layers of paper, each letter puncturing the paper which then filled with the lurid ink.  This was then put into the machine on a roller and - voila! The copies were manually rolled out!!  


My cousins lived in California and at Christmas we had to book a call with BT (or whatever it was then) who would then make the connections for us. There weren't dialling codes 9 digits long - our phone number in London was Park 9051. (Originally 051 but the 9 was added in the 60's).


Now, I wander around fields in the middle of nowhere talking on a mobile phone to someone in Australia!  I put a photograph of Crumble into a machine that is plugged into a wall in my cottage and magically it appears simultaneously on another machine plugged into a wall in South Africa. My printer photocopies.


If you needed a general knowledge question answered you rang the Daily Telegraph Library in Fleet Street and some nice woman would disappear for a moment, research your question and return with an answer - free! Now I type in a phrase and whoosh the info is in front of me.


Now I have access to everything on the computer, I Twitter, Facebook, order food, have 24 hour news and sport and can even watch television on it.


But the thing that would most surprise my Father is that I haven't communicated with my sister for 2 years.


Sad.