I’ve just seen a news item which reports that bus drivers in London no longer accept cash for bus journeys… Passengers now use a prepaid or concessionary ticket, Oyster card or a contactless payment card to travel.
Life has changed so much in so many ways, but when I read this I just thought how amazed my parents would be, let alone my grandparents. My mum died when she was quite young, only in her fifties, but she died before there were mobile phones, home computers, bank cards and pin numbers. My grandparents would have been astounded by all we have now; televisions were very new and in only a few homes when my grandparents died in the fifties and early sixties; many homes were without a telephone at all and people would rely on public call boxes to ring friends. Postal services were three times a day, so you could post an invitation to supper in the morning for a friend to come round that very night. I think they would have been amazed at modern banking; to take a bit of plastic, stick it into a hole in a wall and get £50 out?! Astounding! My grandparents who had a pub would be stunned to walk into our local… first of all the length of opening hours, secondly the number of women there, and then the vast array of drinks of all sorts available… oh and money… yes, I can hand over my piece of plastic and get drinks and money back in return!
Lois Elsden 
The transistor changed everything. Strange that it was invented in 1947 by Bell Labs the same year that the UFO crashed in New Mexico. I think some reverse engineering was involved. In my job as an Electronic Technician when memory was expensive our logic statements had to be very discrete. With memory now cheap and limitless the design engineers can add all kinds of c..p that doesn’t improve the process but just makes the job of a guy like me all that more difficult. Glad to be retired.
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Things everywhere seem to be getting further and further away from the actual thing they are supposed to be improving… whether it is technology or engineering or medicine… and as for all the business management that messes everything up and costs so much money… well, don’t even get me started!!!
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