At my birthday this year, I put an email around to the office to say the traditional cakes were at the coffee area. I made some comment in it about being that age that was "the answer to life, the universe and everything". A number of the young people in the office didn't get the reference at all. Some of the others knew that it was a reference to something or other, but didn't instantly know it was the "Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy".
I guess each generation has it's reference points, and Hitchhikers certainly informed mine. I vaguely remember the TV series, but the books were the main source for me. In my teens, they were required reading, along with "The Lord of The Rings", and I've re-read them often enough in the times since then to be broadly able to quote them at will. They've come to mind recently for a number of reasons, one due to the fact that one of clients replaced a decent coffee maker with a modern version "Klix" machine, which does a good job of producing a hot liquid almost completely unlike coffee when you want a coffee. Add the fact that with some of the work we are doing at the moment, it does feel that the designs have more than a touch of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation about them, in that the fundamental design flaws are being hidden by the superficial design flaws.
And also that the archive of "Desert Island Discs" has now gone back as far as when Douglas Adams was on. (see here). It was a little strange hearing him talking about the future of computers, where they would all be linked together in a global network, but the bit that resonated with me was that his book was the "Omnibus of Golfing Stories by P G Wodehouse", which only one other person had chosen (a personal favourite of mine, and along with the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and the Diaries of the Right Honorable James Hacker MP, one of the three contendors as my book if I was ever on the programme).
The generation before mine seemed to always go on about Monty Python, and "you were lucky....!". We quote Douglas Adams. What's come in behind that? Terry Pratchett? Or more scarily "The Office"? What do you think?
