Thought For The Week: 

The world is changing - at an exponential rate. The picture below is a good example.

A 5-megabyte hard drive in 1956 vs. one terabyte today. A terabyte hard drive in 1956 would be the size of a 40-story building.

I remember being offered four blank, writeable DVDs 25 years ago. They were almost impossible to come by and were offered at the genuinely bargain price of $100.

Over the holiday break, I visited MOTAT and checked out the technology section. They had a host of ancient telephones on display but not one as old as the first one I used at age 6 when we got our first phone.

The one at left is actually flasher than ours was. It had a hand ringer on the right side. We were on a 'party line', meaning we shared a phone connection with about six other families living within a few miles of us. Our number was 50W - the ring pattern was short, long, long - the phonetic code for the letter W.

If you were on a call, others on the party line could quietly lift their earpiece and listen in. If you wanted to ring someone, not on your 'party line', you dialled one long ring and got an operator who plugged you into the number you wanted.

Anyway, back to MOTAT and technology.

It was interesting to see that we in New Zealand designed and developed our own desktop, education-focused computer called Polyanna.

This New Zealand-designed computer was aimed at the education market. Its tough, protective shell and handles for ease of carrying were features that suited it to young students. The 1980-81 summer holidays were a busy time for 65 teachers around the country who worked right through, writing course materials for the Poly in a computer-ready format. In 1982, the government reneged on its agreement to buy 5,000 Polys over five years.

Cabinet minister Warren Cooper stated that he "could see no reason why the government should spend money so that teachers could do even less work". The Poly had some international success, but the bottom really fell out of its education market when Apple offered every school a free computer, plus additional units at a huge discount.