Once again, the train journey from Coventry to Wolverhampton...

Once again, the train showed up late. So late, in fact, that I've taken an earlier train. An earlier train that was supposed to be later than the one I originally intended on taking. Except the original train has still yet to arrive. Funny that.

I've noticed that there are many more laptop users on the trains than there were two years ago or more. Not that I've been a big time train user at any stage before now. It would appear that a large number of these laptop users have DVD drives in their laptops and they're using them as DVD players. Excellent! They even have headphones to listen to the stereo sound. Maybe I should consider the journey as time where I can watch some movies, eh?

Interestingly (define interestingly, eh?), I remember my initial fascination with computers as allowing me to control what is displayed on a TV screen. I'm not kidding. It struck me as I was growing up that I was part of the generation of American kids which was given free reign of the TV when we got home from school. All baby boomers can claim this. I wasn't necessarily fascinated by computing, but I think I did feel restless in my teenage years - restless because the TV was dominated by adverts of horrible crap I didn't want and re-runs of TV shows that I had seen several times before.

I wasn't conscious that my desire was to control the TV. However, in the early 90's I read a book book by Robert X. Cringely, called "Accidental Empires" (and it had the best subtitle ever: "How the boys of Silicon Valley battle foreign competition, make their millions, and still can't get a date"). In it, there were many memorable passages and reflections by the movers and shapers of the high tech industries in Silicon Valley, and the sociological subtext in which they lived. You don't have to be a techie to read this book. Conversely, I suspect that many 20-something-product-brainwashed computer geeks might not find it interesting.

One of the people Cringely wrote about was Nolan Bushnel, who was the founder of Atari, and the guy that invented Pong. When I heard that he wanted to not sit passively and watch his TV any longer, and wanted to have some control over his TV, I realised that was what had fascinated me back in 1981. That, and my discussions with Adam Beguelin, one of my classmates in physics at Centralia High School.

Beguelin, Bushnel and Cringely - you have a lot to answer for!

It's only been this year that I've started to consider the DVD revolution, and that perhaps it's time that I stop trying to control the screen, and re-visit the enjoyment of watching TV again. Having got up to visit the loo, I was able to see that the guy sitting across from me is watching "Lost in Space", the original black and white series that I grew up with, but surprisingly never watched.