Everyday. Everywhere. Everyone.: Technology Nostalgia

Guess this stuff has been around for long enough for a viable nostalgia industry to have emerged.

These two are examples of this. The first is a company producing these 'retro' Apple decals for your latest Apple device, and the second is a reboot (sorry) of a once defunct brand - the much loved C64 - where the original casing is considered cool enough to be desirable.

So the fan-boy within me just thinks this a cool thing, the thing I really respond to is the inference of 'classic' in both these examples. In the Apple case people are reaching back and selecting elements of the brand's history that they (not Apple) feel are relevant today, lending credibility to the companies' past and badging themselves as 'original' Apple advocates.

And, in the C64 case the company is bringing back an object that is closely tied to the beginning of the home PC boom of the last 20 to 30 years. It's re-launch draws a line under a period of personal computing defined by paradigms of work (the QWERTY keyboard) and driven by the bedroom programmers who have most recently delivered services like Facebook.

So just back to Apple briefly, Steve Wozniak recently said that Tablet computers are "for the normal people in the world". So if the retro Apple stickers and the relaunched C64 tell the story up to today, the new burst of Tablets and Smartphones suggest the next chapter will tell a more connected, aware, professional (and of course monetised) story.

That makes me feel nostalgic again ...