Safety Issue
These devices, (OK communication ones like phones) these tools, may be one of your greatest safety features that you will have. This can be incredibly important, can save lives, rescue from injury.
These gadgets
Computers, phones, the internet, these electronic gadgets are really just tools. OK, they may be toys for some as well. They are now relatively robust so you probably won‘t break them by experimenting with use.
I’ve just been going through learning some of complications of this with our telephone and the change from the “old” wired system to “new”, Voice Over Internet Protocol, VOIP.
Telephone systems
Telephone systems: We have just been going through the landline change to VOIP and temporarily lost our old long standing phone number for a few weeks. Even some temporary numbers didn’t always work. A bit devastating for a small business. It was impossible to contact us by phone. Were we still alive, still open, we hadn’t skipped town with the £12.50 cash float from the till? OK, we did put some information about a temporary phone number here on our website, sometimes that number worked, just not always.
We were without our phone number at the shop for a few weeks. This was all due to this changeover from telephone landline to Voice Over Internet (VOIP) and a very frustrating time.
Phones or cameras are also useful for recording details of items to make or how something is put together when dismantling for repair.
The safety issues: Someone can be contacted, if you are say trapped on the floor, up a ladder, etc if its with you you can make that contact.
Computer systems
With computers I started back in the dark ages of DOS before PCs, moved to buying a complete PC then realized the IBM PC were effectively assembled from standard components so started putting my own together to build what I wanted. It’s not difficult, but its not what you do to save money (at the start, yes, it saved money now costs can be about the same) its to put together the bits you want. Ready built ones can be a compromise on quality, on specifications, and, OK, not as much fun.
Using computers mainly comes down to the software. This has changed drastically over the years. Now with fancy graphics using much of the processing power making it more visually appealing whether its playing games or working on text, databases, photos or spreadsheets. They have become much more robust so some slight user error generally isn’t catastrophic.
Of course one can get into the arguments over Apple verses Windows, verses unix like operating systems, Linux, and which iteration. I’m not going there. After DOS I was using IBM OS2 which was great but lost the wars .. now using Windows
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