But would you like to live to 100? Really?

This is not ever going to challenge me. I’m one of those folk who spent the past two decades trying to get rid of all the vices I picked up in my first two decades, and although there’s been a lifetime of boundary nudging and fun – and I wouldn’t change one minute of it – there’s a cost.

Even if it was an option, I’m not sure I’d relish the idea.

One of the consequences of reaching what Phillip Adams once called his “anecdotage” is that it becomes very clear that the world is rattling past at warp speed, and all the brain cells required to keep up are already occupied with memories of silly times with your mates, things that went spectacularly wrong, laughter, family, food, wine, work, books, films, travel, toys that there are none left to take in new stuff. 

It’s only when I sit down to chat with people aged 20 to 30 that it becomes obvious that my generation, born in the 50s, has experienced probably the biggest changes and developments in human history.

Yes, that’s possibly true of any generation of the past 150 years, but this one, the Boomers, has seen astonishing and impossible things happen almost daily.

Take newspaper presses as a simple example. When I started as a 16-year-old cadet at Sunraysia Daily in Mildura, even William Caxton would have been able to follow in principle how the printing process worked. Articles were written on slips of paper, then hand-typed into machines which spat out short lines of raised print on hot metal. These were all assembled into flat pages, or forms.

The press rolled ink onto the now cooled bits of metal and paper was rolled over the top and pressed onto the inky surface. The basic machinery hadn’t changed since printing was invented.

Now, a lifetime later, even the bits that are still printed operate via computers, digitally controlled presses in any imaginable colour and at speed.  Mostly, there is no press anymore.

This thought came to mind on Monday when it was reported that the very last video tape ever to be made was produced in Japan.

We Boomers still regard the VCR as relatively recent. About the time our kids were being born, which can seem like last Tuesday.

Videocassette recorders only became readily available in the mid 70s, and I can remember buying my first Phillips machine on my way through Hong Kong airport in 1981. It was the size of a suitcase. 

It had a remote: a switch box physically connected to the VCR by 10-metres of convenient cord.

So, when it comes to electronics and entertainment, my life has included:

Cat’s whiskers crystal radio kit, a valve radio, a transistor radio, a party-line phone, newspapers, Phantom comics, Women’s Weekly, black and white TV, individual landline phone, colour TV, stereogram, FM radio, cassette deck, VCR, CDs, the first “brick”, the Internet, iTunes, faxes, emails, digital everything – news, sport, weather, mobile phones more powerful than early super computers, wearable communicators/computers better than anything Captain Kirk ever had in Star Trek, Google, eBay, nano-computing, 200+ entertainment channels (and still nothing worth watching!).

WAYNE GREGSON