50 years ago yesterday there were two significant developments in the history of the UK, starting off with the first section of what is now our motorway network being opened. An eight mile stretch of dual carriageway had been built to bypass the town of Preston, with a hedge running down the middle and no hard shoulders at the sides – they used soft shale which turned out to be a bad idea.
In an interesting counterpoint a new 5.8 mile section of what has since become the M6 was opened yesterday joining the English network to the Scottish one – I look forward to using it on my next trip home to the Highlands rather than the tractor infested section of dual carriageway that had been there for many years.
Meanwhile on the same day in Bristol our constitutional monarch became the first person in the country to use Subscriber Trunk Dialling to make a long distance telephone call without having to go through an operator.
Difficult to judge which of these events has had the greater impact, we now have around 2,200 miles of motorways criss crossing the land but at peak hours (or following an accident) they can come to a total standstill. On the other hand the phone network(s) have leapt forward at a dizzying pace over the last 25 years following the introduction of the first digital telephone exchanges.
Call waiting, caller id, ISDN lines were just the start; I am writing this using a 6Mbps ADSL connection which is costing me around £10 per month – my first internet connection cost around £7 per month and I was lucky to get 33 Kbps from it.
We've come a long long way together – an excuse to stick in a link to the Fatboy Slim track Praise Me.
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2 comments:
Progress sure seems nice at first, but life-complicating the more it grows and expands, eh?
rt, That sure is true for most of it, though I can assure you that using computers is way easier now than it was 30 years ago.
Having said that they will still break down that the most inconvenient times.
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