It’s funny how you get used to things, isn’t it?
When I was growing up, books and comics were on paper, we had one TV in the house (with four channels) and video games were courtesy of the Commodore 16 Plus 4 that had to be plugged in to said TV (and was only allowed out on a Saturday afternoon).
But last night, after dinner, the boys were settling down for a bit of quiet time before bed. Alastair was watching a YouTube video on his iPad, Ed was reading an ebook comic on a different tablet and I was flicking through Disney+ on the TV to decide what I was going to watch later. Just a normal evening.
All three of us were using the internet for different things, at the same time, sitting wherever we liked, without a wire in sight. How times change.
Apparently wireless internet, or “WiFi”, has been around in people’s homes for about 25 years now. Not in mine. But still, we got our first WiFi broadband about 15 years ago – so of course, the boys have grown up with WiFi in the house. It’s still pretty amazing when you stop and think about it, though. All that information just whizzing through the air! It really is a brilliant system, and would have felt like sci-fi back when I was a kid.
One of the things that WiFi made possible was handheld tablet computers like the iPad. Without wireless internet, they’d be a bit pointless (or at least, very different!). They can be very small and thin because they don’t need lots of sockets round the edge for connecting things – everything’s done over WiFi (or other wireless connections like Bluetooth).
You don’t need to just use WiFi for connecting to the internet, either. You can use it to connect to other devices round the house as well – like printers, programmable lights or security cameras. And it means I almost never sit down at a computer to do things now, unless I’m working.
Hurray for WiFi!