Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, I lived in a fairly analogue and small data world. All of our household appliances were electro-mechanical. My homework was paper-based and marked by hand. If I wanted to discover information, I went to the library and searched through hard copy books. Our car was purely mechanical, with no digital components or network links. I listened to music via the radio or by playing vinyl records or tape cassettes, and television consisted of three then four channels. Communication was by written letter and a landline phone. Undoubtedly, I appeared in a few key government databases, but most of my education, health and welfare records were stored in paper files.

There were some hints of the digital world to come. In the late 1970s, my parents bought a clone games machine that enabled the video game Pongto be played on the television, and in 1981 I received a ZX81 personal computer as a Christmas present. It had 1K of memory (16K with a booster block). To play games I first had to type in the programs then save them onto a tape cassette. A couple of years later, my parents bought a Spectrum computer for the family, which had slightly more local memory (16K, expandable to 128K), colour graphics, and you could buy pre-made games on cassette. In the mid-1980s, my father had a satellite phone installed in his company car so he could be contacted when he was driving around the country to visit work sites. I left home for university in 1988. The library catalogue was still mostly card based, but it was possible to do some electronic search for items. My essays were handwritten or typed, and communication with staff and departments was via letters and noticeboards. In 1989, I first accessed the internet, still in the pre-web era, and had my first email account in the same year, though I barely used it as few other people I knew had an address.

In the 1990s, everything seemed to change. When I started my Master’s degree in GIS in 1991, my parents bought me my first personal computer. For £900 I got a 286 IBM clone with 1Mb of internal memory and 16Mb hard drive.