On 22 September 2026, Computer Weekly turns 60. To mark the milestone, we asked some of our friends – experts, parliamentarians, IT leaders and suppliers – for their perspectives on how tech has changed their lives over six decades. What’s changed the most for you since then?
These days people considering an electric vehicle may debate whether or not to buy a Tesla. A similar polarising debate took place after Apple shook up the mobile phone market in 2007 with the launch of the iPhone. There were the Apple fan boys and girls and then those who weren’t.
When I look back on the decisions I’ve taken to buy my own tech – and for my sins, I do buy plenty of techie stuff – it seems I’ve often been drawn towards the less popular and somewhat alternative options.
When the iPhone began gaining momentum in the UK, my preferred device was a Blackberry. I don’t remember which model exactly, but the fact that it had a Qwerty keyboard and mobile data, meant I could write articles using my thumbs to type, and quickly email them back to the Computer Weekly team. In the days of print, this was the difference between having a story in the next edition and reading it in a rival publication.
A tech editor’s essential travel kit
The Blackberry replaced various bits of kit I used to carry around in the mid-to-late 1990s when travelling to press briefings and overseas conferences. These included various Psion devices and the 9600 baud modem that plugged into the hotel room’s telephone line.
When the keyboard on my last Blackberry – the Q10, I think – eventually stopped responding, I began looking at alternatives. People I knew were buying the Apple MacBook and, later, the MacBook Air. Around this time I would have probably got into the Apple ecosystem had the bloke in PC World successfully demoed DVD playback on an iMac.
“Perhaps the most phenomenal device I have come across as a tech journalist has been the Raspberry Pi, which has become a fundamental component of my alt-tech inventory”
Cliff Saran
But I stuck with Windows and when it came to buying a laptop for writing articles, I was drawn to the sleek and elegant Google PixelBook, which ran ChromeOS. This device served me well until quite recently. When I first showed it to people, they were blown away by the PixelBook until I told them the price.
“You could have got a MacBook Air for that,” they’d say. True, I’d say, but I wanted an alternative and I sincerely hope whoever is now using my old PixelBook enjoys it as much as I did.
Perhaps the most phenomenal device I have come across as a tech journalist has been the Raspberry Pi, which has become a fundamental component of my alt-tech inventory. Many years ago, I was fortunate enough to go to the Raspberry Pi Foundationduring a visit to Cambridge startups. Since then, I’ve lost many weekends hacking Pis.
The Raspberry Pi began as an incredibly cheap computing device for education to get kids into programming. In some ways, it reminded me of the BBC Model B that started my programming journey which introduced me to 6505 assembler, leading on to university where I studied computer science and digital electronics.
A blank canvas for experimentation
The Pi is a blank canvas, which has inspired people to build fantastic applications, and it has been an ideal fit in my alt-tech lifestyle.
Take music streaming, for example – Sonos has developed amazing speakers for streaming music and the setup is literally plug and play. It’s why people choose Sonos. But one Saturday – probably in 2010 or 2011, while idly looking at the discount bin of devices at Dixons (it’s not something I often spend my Saturdays doing, but I just happened to be there that day) – I noticed a Logitech SqueezeBox Receiver.
This was basically a client device for the Logitech Media Server (LMS) and came with a remote control called the Duet, which offered an Apple iPod style wheel for scrolling through music libraries. I figured out how to get LMS onto an old PC running a headless Ubuntu LTS Linux distribution and with the Logitech Receiver/Duet combo I had a streaming music alternative to Sonos.
Logitech stopped making these things years ago. But thanks to open source software, LMS lives on and the Raspberry Pi makes a perfect music server. In my home, I use a Pi to stream music to other Pis, each of which has an updated sound card and is connected to a proper, old school, Hi-Fi amps with speakers.
The Pi is also integrated into another of my pet projects – this time as an alternative to Lego Mindstorm. I became interested in this now-discontinued line of product after interviewing Thorkil Sonne, founder of Danish social enterprise, Specialisterne, which used Lego Mindstorm to help autistic and neurodivergent people find meaningful employment.
Being an alt-tech geek, I didn’t want to buy the Mindstorm computer. Instead, I came across US-based Dexter Industries, which has an add-on product called BrickPi and software which enables a Raspberry Pi to control the Lego Mindstorm motors. BrickPi supports sensors, making it possible to create a Raspberry Pi -based Lego robot.
Unfortunately, my attempt to build a Pi-based self-driving Lego car was held back by a lack of Python skills. However, I hope that I’ll get some time to revisit this project with help from an AI coding agent.
Being an alt-tech geek
I began this essay with Tesla and Apple and I want to be clear that I’m certainly not anti Tesla or Apple. It’s just at certain points in my working life, I could not justify the premium these products commanded. And when I’ve had the luxury to splash out, I tend to buy alternative tech.
It’s the same with Sonos and Lego. The alternatives I sought were cheaper and – in the case of the Pi-based LMS server – hopefully has a secure future now that LMS is being maintained as open source.
Returning to Blackberry, my new Samsung Z Fold 8 is very much the successor to Blackberry’s Passport smartphone, which I secured for a couple of weeks as a device to review when it was launched. The Z Fold 8 is perhaps far too mainstream for an alt-tech geek, but it does remind me very much of what I consider was Blackberry’s best device.
I’ve spent the last 28 years writing for Computer Weekly, with a brief break in 2000 and I’ve been in a fortunate position to see some incredible technology. But I tend to be drawn to alternative tech and on Computer Weekly, it’s the alternative approaches to enterprise IT that seem to pique my interest the most.
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