Technology is not a natural approach to longing. The industry enriches the image of the future, worships boy-executives and delivers the past at an alarming rate.
Even in the eight years I’ve been at the Guardian Technology desk, the field I’ve been covering is often unknown since I started: the virtual reality was just around the corner with self-driving cars with amazing technology. That made it impossible to connect with ordinary people, and where the world began to get bored of the new iPhone every 12 months.
Well, well, but then things changed. Shortly before I started the paper, watchdog Edward Snowden called for more revelations as a result of his extensive efforts. He also broke the news on the spying with her.
“Texas” was the first sign that Facebook, and then the rest of the industry, had to move out of the sector a few years later.
It was all a long way off when Victor Keegan started with the guard. Over the years, he has traveled around the office, working as a reporter, financial reporter, economics editor, business editor, and lead writer. But In 1981, the guard saw the potential to be on the cutting edge of the new event.
“I remember one piece on FT, buried on the inside page, and ‘won the contract for that’ BBC Micro ‘.’
“No one has ever heard of them, but I thought, ‘That sounds good.’ It took me years to follow them, in a very small room in Cambridge, but they were there, Chris Curry and Herman Hower. They gave me the show, and they showed me what I believed. ”
Launched in December of that year, the BBC Micro was designed by Carrie and Howor Computer to focus on the education market.
It was an amazing success – starting at just 5 235 – even less than 1,000 in 2021. In an accompanying BBC TV show to teach children how to use it, one eventually got into the hands of five out of five British schools, and I in hundreds of thousands of British homes.
“When this happens,” I thought, “we really need to write more about computers.” He returned to the office, and along with Tim Radford, then the science editor, offered a new supplement to use the tide of interest – the micro-watchdog.
The class finally began in October 1983. “They had delays, and for the first time they didn’t get it right,” Kegen said. Some things seem to have changed over the years.
Jack Shoffield, then author of Practical Computer Magazine, was hired to write a column, and Kigan interviewed Kenneth Baker for the first issue.
“He was the then Minister of Information Technology, but he had no idea how to run a BBC computer. He had a government employee there and he was screaming down to get things done.
About ten years later, Keegan did it again. In the 1990s, the hottest thing was not computers at all, but a new development born in the Swiss research laboratory – the World Wide Web.
When the web made the Internet easier and more understandable, it was up to him to bring the tutor online, which he did in a confusing way, “online”. When he went online shortly after, he could say that he was the first newspaper editor in Britain to launch a website.
One of the highlights of our conversation is how local Kegen’s work is in Kiganda. Akor and Sinkler were moving England from Cambridge to the information age.
In the years to come, Kegan will host meetings of London-based codecs, launch Guardian’s first website, and follow the mobile phone industry as it moves from a “car” provider to a smartphone revolution – all without much expense. He often worries about what will happen in Silicon Valley.
“Dotcoms, they were very close. There were all these things in Britain, you can go there and drink, it was all very open.
American companies definitely wanted to report on them – Microsoft and all other companies make regular trips to journalists, but I never consider them as a news source. You need Windows for some things, and Apple will have the apps and things like that.
Of course, there is still a large English technology sector. But comparing Kagan’s two decades of technology to my past experience, and how far the industry’s gravity center has gone to the west, can be devastating.
That is a reflection of the scale of technology in general — from Silicon Valley companies to international power players in their own right, no technology reporter can ignore the fact that they focus on many domestic stories.
But it is also a sign of the centrality of the technology industry. The combination of operating systems, the cost of chip production, billions of big four are being thrown at R&D – all of which means that for a medium-sized country like Britain, there is little room for such a micro-climate to grow.