In Competition No. 3080 you were invited to supply an elegy on a piece of obsolete technology. Thanks to Paul A. Freeman for suggesting this challenge — there’s nothing like a blast of nostalgia to usher in the new year. Sinclair C5s, faxes, floppy discs, typewriters; all were eloquently hymned. I admired Hamish Wilson’s elegy on a radiogram and John O’Byrne’s Whitman-esque homage to the Walkman:
O Walkman! O Walkman! our cassette days are done,
My ears have enjoyed every tune, the tapes I played are worn,
The phone has come, the apps are here, the playlists all inspiring,
But Apple killed this mobile thing for designs sleek and aspiring.
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No mourning when the Olivetti
Clacked its final doubtful e,
Its drawbacks were, however petty,
As irksome as such irks can be.
Corrections now just took a jiff,
With Tippex obsolete long since,
Though ‘word processing’ had a whiff
Of manufacturing verbal mince.
Still, in the electronic kit,
So self-contained and blandly brisk,
There was one small outlying bit —
The unpretentious floppy disk.
But such detachment would not do:
For quirky oddness doomed to die,
The concept all too briefly flew,
A siliconic butterfly.
W.J. Webster
The pock, the pock, the smooth drift to and fro,
The rhythm of its soporific song,
The greatest video game we’d ever know,
Was that early masterpiece, Atari’s Pong.
The stately back and forth sometimes got fast
Enough that we would play our paddles wrong,
Losing our bids to outsmart or outlast
Each other for supremacy in Pong.
Today’s games are all 3-D CGI,
Finesse and drawn-out volleys don’t belong.
Players play fast and hard, craving a high
With bells and whistles alien to Pong.
Museum piece now, Pong still looks futuristic,
One yester-view that gave tomorrow strong
Pop-art cred, more cartoon than fine-artistic.
We mourn, we celebrate, we ping, we pong.
Chris O’Carroll
A thing of beauty it was not,
though it was all the rage:
Macintosh Classic, shoebox squat,
and resolutely beige.
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