blog.species5618.net

Today my son turned 13
When I was 13 a handfull of my friends did not have a home phone, nights/days out had to be arranged by the time you left school or did not happen, homework was handwritten, home computers where rare, and ran at 4MHz with between 1 and 16kB of memory, hard disk where unheard of outside corporate circles and a 10 MB disk drive was the size of a washing machine. My TV was a 12 inch black and white portable which recieved THREE channels

Today, 98% of teenage kids have ther own personal mobile phone, a night out can be arranged by text, twitter, facebook, msn from the moble phone while on route to the destination. For his last history project, jake created a well edited 8 minute video and for his next it is a web site, the phone in his pocket runs at 500Mhz and has 8GB of memory, his (yes his own personal) laptop has 2GB memory 2x 2G Hz processors and a huge 250 GB hard disk drive. Jakes TV is a 42inch plamsa with all the toys and over 300 channels to chose from

Oh to be a teenager today

On the flip side when I was a teenager coping a grope with the teenage girl next door was considered a laugh, making a factual reference to someones ethnic background was the norm, and clipping a kid round the ear for scrumping apples was a daily summer time event…… today any of those would get you arrested