Happy Birthday to the Computer
Today is the 60th anniversary of the birth of the first computer.
Lovingly christened ‘The Baby’, it was developed at the University of Manchester, weighed in at well over a ton and took up a whole lab.
Obviously you don’t have to look too hard to find what the computer’s done for budget travel. These days the computer – and its offshoot the internet – isn’t just important to budget travel, it is budget travel.
Ok, so the Competitive Traveler (see ‘Annoying Hostel Types’ post) will swear blind that the internet was the death of the genuinely footloose globetrotter.
But the truth is that travel has been opened up in a way that would have been beyond the wildest dreams of the grand tourists, the hippy trailers and even their much more recent descendents. And not just to some, but to many.
From booking a hostel in Ulaanbaatar or a rail pass in Europe, to finding out the local exchange rate or reading detailed up-to-the-minute blogs, what the internet allowed you to do for the first time was really plan your trip and prepare an accurate budget.
Which in turn, of course, brought it increasingly into the realms of possibility.
So there might be just a little less spontaneity to traveling as a side effect of all that planning, but the modern traveler is a whole lot better informed about where they’re going, what to see and do and how to behave…
And for that, we have the birth of the computer to thank.
Happy birthday.
