Is there room for nostalgia in our high-tech world today?

A simple website content discussion took an Interesting, fun and nostalgic diversion recently.

I was working with my Millennial client, communicating content changes and I requested a turn-over in a sub-head. “What’s that mean?”, and I wrote “a carriage return”, which was responded to with a sarcastic GIF of some historic horse carriage, returning from wherever.

Funny… but that’s not what I meant of course!

For those Gen-X and older, you remember the days when pressing enter, was a manual slide of the carriage return on the mechanical typewriter. Then I shared an image of my version of the horse carriage, that was influential in my childhood (above). I’m not that old, but it was met with astonishment.

I was referring to the Moonya Farm Dairy horse and cart that delivered two bottles of fresh lukewarm milk complete with foil caps, straight off the cart behind the draft horse as it trotted down the street every other day. This was in Keilor Park only 15km from Melbourne CBD, until the early eighties. Home delivery 70’s and 80’s version looked different back then!

The electronic age was in full swing by now, with colour TV’s, handheld and console gaming, cassette decks and VCR’s dominating shopping lists. Technology began to influence business in a big way too. Computers were being introduced, and the tech industry was evolving into mainstream. If you wanted to talk about that over the phone with anyone though, you would still be doing that from the landline in the family kitchen until analogue mobile phones the size of a house brick were introduced.

Then the electronic evolution turned digital and the Internet arrived. Plenty of us were there for that, and there were real careers out there in information technology, and plenty of them. The tools and coding were basic, but the evolution over the decades to follow has been game changing. My grown-up Gen-Z babies know no other world.

I feel privileged to have ridden that curve from humble analogue beginnings, and to be running Peach Consulting today as a tech innovator solving organisational technology problems. And just like a decade ago, this article was authored by a human, without needing artificial intelligence for structure and content.

What happens to it once published though is all algorithms!