In praise of low tech aka Glory be to the anti-iPod

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A few years ago I received a freebie Fisher Space pen as a corporate gift. For anyone who doesn’t know the story, the Fisher Space pen was designed as part of the Apollo Moonshot program at a cost of $12m. The pen contains a pressurised ink reservoir, which means it can write …

• At any angle
• In a vacuum
• Under water
• In zero gravity

The story continues that, faced with the same problem, the Russians simply used pencils, at a total development cost of zero roubles.
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Sadly, this particular story is cacca. Fisher designed the pen independently at a cost of $2m and subsequently offered it to NASA. NASA liked it and since then both the Americans AND the Russians have used space pens. Pencils are a no no in space as they give off dust that can interfere with electronics and represent a fire risk in 100% oxygen atmospheres.
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It's a good story though and, even though it's a shaggy dog story, it does contain a grain of truth.
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During a road trip through the Southern States last year, Tracy and myself spent some quality time in Huntsville, Alabama. Hunstville was a relatively small town until about 1950 when the US Government turned it over to Wernher von Braun and his zany crew of unprosecuted war criminals to build missiles, sorry peaceful spacecraft, in. SS Sturmbannführer Wernher von Braun was one of the 'Good' Nazis who went over to the Allies in 1945. After developing the V2 rockets that flattened a good part of London in 1944, built by a slave labour force that died by the thousand, Wernher admitted that he was actually one great big softie who was only ever interested in peaceful uses for frigging enormous missiles.
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Learning the Wernher von Braun story, later in life, solved a personal childhood mystery as to why that really scary man with that weird accent used to appear on Disney produced 'The Challenge of Space' documentaries when I was five.
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Post 1950 Huntsville became a rather large town, complete with the Wernher von Braun Civic Centre at its heart, just jam packed full of interesting peaceful research and production facilities. In fact, Huntsville was such a peaceful place that the Russians marked the city down as the fourth most important target after Washington, New York and NORAD.
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Anyway, to the point. Huntsville is home to a really spiffy NASA museum. Inside the museum we sat through an interesting documentary about the Space Race and the International Space Station. The funniest part of the movie came when we saw a clip of preparation for a Russian launch. Unlike the altogether more stage-managed NASA launches, the Russian count down procedures seemed to consist of various cosmonauts, technicians, their portly wives and kids standing around the base of the rocket, leaning on the enormous exhaust nozzles, smoking hand rolled cigarettes, sipping vodka and chatting.
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Outside of the movie we were equally amused by a display of typical cosmonaut food, which included tinned pilchards and cartons of tomato juice, and travel accessories including tatty suitcases, folding toothbrushes and disposable razors all highly reminiscent of a cheap package holiday c.1975.
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Almost getting to the point now …
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The point is the Russian rockets were, and probably still are, better than the German, sorry, American ones. They were sturdy, reliable and capable of lifting enormous loads. The Russians didn’t muck around with developing freeze-dried food or elaborate launch procedures because they didn't need to. Everything was overbuilt, just to be on the safe side, and robust enough for use in a 3rd World country. The only thing they really had to worry about was the impact of a zero G environment on a cosmonaut living off a diet of tinned fish and tomato juice.
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I could bang on about this point for ages. I've seen crappy little Ladas beat Range Rovers, Land Rovers and Land Cruisers up rough terrain. Right now the Iraqis are disabling multimillion dollar Abrams AFVs and Blackhawk helicopters with $30 RPGs operated by sixteen year olds. Low tech is good. Rivets are good.
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Where am I going with this?
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Digital Cameras and iPods.
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I bought my brother a digital camera two years ago so that he could record some snaps of his new born daughter. Last year, when they went on holiday to Italy, he left the digicam at home and took one of my old film SLRs instead. He just couldn’t face the hassle of using the digicam. With the film camera he didn’t have to worry about recharging batteries, filling up or having to back up his memory card, or printing the pictures when he got back home. Nope, three rolls of film in the camera, down to the chemists and a 100 pictures came back out with no hassle at all. Some of them were even OK.
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iPods
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I am the proud owner of a digital jukebox I bought more than three years ago; back in the days when most people didn’t know what an MP3 was and those that did thought downloading or ripping them was a very sad pastime indeed. My MP3 player is shaped like and weighs the same as anti-tank mine. At its heart, it is nothing more than a computer hard disk, a circuit board and four AA batteries loosely held together with Duck tape. In many ways it's very Russian, even though it's really French. It is the anti iPod.
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Unlike an iPod …

• it has survived over three years of heavy use
• it contains no U2 tracks recorded after 1989
• when the batteries start to lose their charge after a few months I can put new ones in
• I am not hooked into proprietary download services, music formats or copy protection
• the headphones aren’t rubbish. OK they're not white but they're also not rubbish
• most importantly, it doesn’t pretend to be a consumer product

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy digicams and MP3 players immensely. That is because I'm a geek. Nearing middle-aged but a geek nevertheless. These toys need the love and attention that only a geek can offer. For the vast majority of people buying this stuff they are onto a loser. All praises be to the power of marketing; particular kudos to Apple and Sony.
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What proportion of people who picked up iPods or digicams over the last year or so have backed up their music or pictures? What happens to all that data when they change their computers or their hard disk dies? In five or ten years time how many of these people are going to have more than a handful of photographs or records from this year? Maybe it doesn’t matter that they're going to lose most of their pictures and music collection next time their computer conks out, but shouldn’t it? Sadly, we have moved into an age where our photographs and our music last no longer than our reduced attention spans or the mayfly-level working life of our new toys.
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That's really cr*p.
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