Marie Low: How technology rapidly reimagined our lives

I have reached the age of 51. I'm not expecting congratulations - I got here by being lucky enough to wake up every day. But, having been born just this side of 1970, I can give you the complete potted history of the rise and rise of the computer.

It's a historic tale that will one day be the domain of whatever the 2080 equivalent of the Encyclopedia Brittanica is, probably some sort of chip on your index finger you can think your questions into. That is not likely to be the next big thing, but what do I know? Even the arrival of CDs were a surprise to me.

That's kind of the point. I have survived the computer era as someone who has been continually awestruck by one development after another.

When I went to school back in the dark ages (my husband, who is somewhat older than myself, has told me he learnt to write on a slate. I am not from the Fred Flinstone era), you had to learn to type on a humongous grey monster. If you were a little sly in looking at the keys, the teacher came around and held a heavy book over your hands to test your QWERTY touch-typing skills.

You sat on a high stool and your back had to be perfectly straight.

Then came a couple of electronic typewriters. They were marvels, but short-lived marvels, because very quickly after this phenomenon, there was a computer lab. That's right, it was a lab filled with computers, because these were apparently scientific days.

My father, an engineer, was taken with the whole computer thing and bought us a home computer. When you turned it on, it produced a large picture of Dick Smith's face made out of keyboard characters which changed colours. That was the most marvellous thing it did.

I spent the whole of Saturdays and Sundays typing in pages of computer code to get it to play brickbats. If you got one character wrong out of the 60,000 or so, it didn't work. That was the computer.

One birthday, I received a small yellow typewriter. This was the love of my life and I took it to school with me where I amazed teachers by handing in assignments blotted with Liquid Paper and smudges.

At university, we had to check something called a Telex machine for our media releases. Faxes had not yet been invented. Later, we had to type in strings of code to edit newspaper stories. I do not have a maths brain and this resulted in words that could not be replicated by any of the codes.

We had to share one email address among the whole newsroom. This was another marvel - people could communicate directly with us without having to shout at us over the phone.

Then, as a media advisor, we were given mobile phones, the worst invention for media advisors ever. You could pretend not to hear a pager, but mobile phones were very insistent.

Now, I spend my days alongside those who are app-happy. We have all become so accessible that we are not allowed to be off-duty.

Here's to the conveniences of modern technology.