THE Internet has just celebrated its 40th birthday, while an extremely close friend has just turned 65.

I link the two because he, like me, is of a generation to whom the Internet, SMS 'texting', Bluetooth and Yahoo Messenger and the like are still mysteries. We are the generation who watched the moon landing in black-and-white on televisions which you had to leave your seat to change the channel and you had to fiddle constantly with the aerial, to get a recognisable picture.

But yesterday, even though I had forgotten to post his card in time (it's on its way, I swear!), my friend still got my birthday greetings, delivered in a split-second by email.

Had I been trying to reach him in another country when the Internet was born in 1969 (though it was some years before the public got their hands on it), I would probably have had to book a phone call through the international operator. Now, if between us we were more Internet savvy, we could chat cam-to-cam, but neither of us has figured that bit out yet.

I was 14 when a US technocrat first got two computers to talk to each other and paved the way for the worldwide web and there were no such things as a laptops, PCs, mobile phones or even (I think) TV remotes, at least not in the hands of anyone I knew.

In those days, the now outdated but not yet redundant fax machine was a rarity and even the first newspaper I worked on did not have one when I started work four years later, at 18.

It did have a telex machine, which was regarded as very hi-tech and was kept under lock and key in a special office, with only one member of staff authorised to operate it.

My first experience of computers was in my early 20s, when a girlfriend acquired a piece of kit that you plugged into the TV (colour by this time) and, if you keyed in the right program, it produced an image of a ticking clock.

That was the limit of its capabilities and, I suspect through flawed programming on her part, the clock always stopped at a quarter to 12 ! Now computers almost run the world and we use them for almost everything, from doing business to sending birthday cards. lhorton@gdn.com.bh