Try telling the kids of today. They’ll never believe you. This is the punchline of the “Four Yorkshiremen” sketch. It’s a comic sketch of four retirees, enjoying a cocktail, or two, on a sunshine holiday. They tell stories and try to outdo each other with reminiscence of hardship and their humble beginnings. Naturally, it gets silly.
Here’s my go. My childhood was tough. My brothers and I had to entertain ourselves with board games, toy cars, Lego and Meccano. Kicking a ball around, building camps out of hay bales and fighting wars with cider apples as ammunition. Building a tank out of egg crates and a milk churn trolly. Trying to make kites out of scraps of polythene sheeting. Spending hours on a riverbank waiting for a lone dace, minnow or roach to take the line.
We used to dream of having a computer (not true). Massive arrays of flashing lights, panels of buttons and dials and deafening teletype machines. None of us would have known what to do with one if we had one. Any appeal would have been for roleplaying futuristic stories. The small screen gave us so many visons of the future to feed our imaginations. My image of computers was shaped by Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Space 1999. Blake’s 7, Captain Scarlet And The Mysterons and Thunderbirds, to name a few.
It’s nice to be nostalgic, occasionally. There was life without computers. It wasn’t so bad.
Back to the question. What would my life look like in 2025 without computers? Let’s just say – I wouldn’t be writing this answer.
John Vincent 