We relocated to new offices last month after 16 years in the same building. As you can imagine, we had amassed a considerable amount of archive material, old equipment and junk, all carefully stored in our basement. Languishing, forgotten in one of the dark recesses, we came upon our original file server - a Macintosh SE/30, circa 1988. It was configured with a massive 8 MB of RAM and an 80 MB hard drive, which ran at a blistering 16 MHz clock speed! As I wiped off the dust I just wondered to myself. Would it still work after so many years of neglect and damp, not to mention a flood? We powered the old Apple Macintosh up and retired to a safe distance, cowering behind a solid desk just in case. Well, out rang the familiar start-up chime like a long lost friend. Then up came the screen, all nine inches of it, in glorious black and white. What a little marvel, welcome back!

The SE/30 was the forerunner to the current iMac range, a compact elegant computer in an all-in-one unit. It was quite a radical design at the time, although I remember Sun’s SPARCstation Voyager had a similar design philosophy but not a similar price. In 1994, the Voyager was aggressively priced at $13,995! Surprisingly, it didn’t sell, but became hot property when production stopped. Ironic.

Our Macintosh SE/30 now has pride of place in the Beechwood museum alongside a Sun-3 workstation. Not an extensive collection then, I hear you cry. No, but I wonder what will be in the museum in another 16 years? An antique iPhone? A quaint olde-worlde wireless mouse? Or maybe a strange object that used to be called a keyboard?

The land of Route 66 and the gas station diner, the good old US of A is well known for its love of the automobile. So the following may come as something of a surprise. Especially when you consider that this all happened, way back when, in a twenty-year period between 1897 and 1916.

1897 - The first electric taxis hit the streets of New York City early in the year.

1910 - The Pope Manufacturing Company of Connecticut becomes the first large-scale American electric automobile manufacturer. The electric automobile is in its heyday. Of the 4,192 cars produced in the United States, 28 percent are powered by electricity, with others powered by steam. Electric autos represent about one-third of all cars found on the roads of New York City, Boston and Chicago.

1916 - A man by the name of Woods invents the first hybrid car, combining an electric motor and an internal combustion engine. This predates the Toyota Prius by an amazing 81 years.

The complexities of understanding what truly are ‘green technologies‘ were illustrated beautifully by the award to Toyota’s Prius, or as I prefer, Pious, as Greenest Technology of the Year award at the inaugural British Technology Awards. By what conceivable metric could the Pious be called green? Toyota refuses to disclose the amount of embedded energy (CO2) in the sourcing, building and recycling of the vehicle. This is a car with two electric motors and one internal combustion engine and a resource-intense nickel-metal hydride battery. Toyota admits that building (not disposing of) the Prius expends more energy, but then says that’s compensated by its better fuel consumption. Come on Toyota, publish the figures and let’s decide the car’s green credentials.

Technology will provide some of the solutions but in the meantime let’s consume less and preserve more.