It was nearly quarter of a century ago that I entered the computer age, when The Guardian presented me with a Tandy 100 laptop boasting a screen which, if I remember correctly, gave one eight lines of text and enough memory to hold one, fairly substantial article. I was able to send the article to London from Belfast - where I was based at the time - in a matter of minutes with the help of something called Telecom Gold and a contraption called an acoustic coupler.
The computer caused quite a stir at the time, the gossip column of the Irish Times running an item about my use of the machine at the annual conference of Sinn Fein. In the context of what was known about computers at the time it created the impression that I was engaging in some sort of arcane number crunching exercise, aimed at penetrating IRA secrets.
The Tandy represented a huge leap forward from a typewriter and ballpoint pen, but in the years that followed I found myself constantly hankering for improvements. They duly came. Computer screens, of course,are now able to encompass a full page and that in colour, the clumsy coupler has been hard-wired and everything moves faster.
Today my Tandy is considered a museum piece and I have a Mac laptop with an i-Pod - essentially a beautifully designed external hard disc marketed by Apple as an MP3 player. The size of a packet of 20 cigarettes, it holds 20 gigabytes of memory, enough to contain either 4,000 tracks of music or something like 200 volumes of text. .
Memory is like a vacuum; nature does not like it. The impulse to fill empty memory is similarly overwhelming. So far I have stuffed it with about 1,000 tracks of music - all of it no doubt illegally copied - and, if only I knew how, I would love to stick the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the Oxford English Dictionary in there as well.
In fact, I realise, I am a bit of a memory addict - computer-wise, I mean. My compulsion to stick things into memory is not going to be long satisfied by my i-Pod, beautiful though it might be. I am already hankering for a digital video recorder, or - as some people call it - a personal video recorder. The DVR is, as I understand it, a computer gone memory-mad, boasting not only a built-in, read-and-write CD and a built-in, read-and-write DVD, but a hard-drive which offers - at least, the last time I read up on the subject - a staggering 360 gigabytes of memory.
Designed to replace a Video Cassette Recorder, the machine offers a means of recording, watching at my leisure and archiving all the documentaries that I keep missing on the box. If that was not enough, I believe it also has the capacity to automatically skip the dreadful ads which television services (here in South Africa, at least) insist on pumping out at exaggerated volumes in an apparent attempt to deafen me. On top of that there is apparently a facility incorporated in the machine enabling one to send favoured programmes over the internet.
Needless to say none of this offers much joy to media companies. They are seemingly determined to force consumers to watch ads at whatever cost to their eardrums and to otherwise strip their wallets with the help of arcane copyright laws. One of the manufacturers of the DVR, Replay TV, was recently sold to a Japanese corporation and now seem to have had second thoughts about the magical machine. Its president, Jim Hollingworth, was quoted as saying - with what can only be described as delightful ambiguity - that "we want to respect the intent of copyright and give consumers everything that they can get."
Other corporations are hurrying to try and develop means of similarly forcing us to "respect" 18th Century laws regarding copyright. Tactics have ranged from court action to Disney's wacky plan to sell DVDs which will self-destruct 48 hours after viewing.
Copyright is an artificial concept which is self-evidently out of date. It falls foul of the right to freedom of information - the "free flow of ideas" - which is increasingly being seen as fundamental to constitutional law. Unless (as is possible) the taste for social control encouraged by September 11 spills over into the copyright arena, the defence of copyright æhas every appearance of a rearguard action in the face of a fast rising tide of consumer demand. It is a struggle in which memory will surely hold the door to the future.
