IT Essentials: Climbing frames to mainframes

50 years and going strong

A trip down memory lane over the Easter weekend turned into reflections on technological progress.

I went back to my childhood home in Oxfordshire over Easter, and spent Saturday walking around my old haunts with my wife.

Obviously plenty has changed, but I was surprised to see how many of those changes were surface level. There might be new climbing frames, but the play park is still in the same place; the shops are different, but the local high street is as busy as ever; the menus are a bit more millennial, but the pubs are still there.

Being a dutiful editor, I started thinking how I could draw parallels to the IT market. As luck would have it, we're celebrating our 50th anniversary this year - a perfect chance to look at the past, present and future of technology.

Computing was first published to cover the then-nascent computer industry. It was a time of experimentation, change and, yes, mistakes. As long-time reader Ian Snowdon, who got in touch this week, put it: "One other thing I remember from the 70s was the saying, 'To err is human. For a real cockup, use a computer.'"

Over the years, we've written about the rise of personal computing; the internet revolution; the dot-com boom and bust; the rise of mobile devices and social media; and the ongoing digital transformation of virtually every sector of the economy.

In the early days, we wrote about mainframes, data processing and programming languages: all developed to raise productivity and ease the burden on employees. Today our coverage is more about cloud computing, cybersecurity and AI - all of which, funnily enough, were built for the same reason as mainframes were 50 years ago.

Workplace technology has changed significantly over five decades, but its aims have stayed the same. It's all about efficiency.

And there you go. From climbing frames to mainframes in 300 words!

Weekend reading

As you head off for a well-deserved break, read Penny Horwood's fascinating interview with Paul Staples of Liverpool John Lennon Airport, about the commercial use of computer vision technology; and John Leonard's analysis of the House of Lords' upcoming scrutiny of the Online Safety Bill.