The industry thrives on its futuristic image, worships boy-CEOs and renders the past obsolete at a frightening pace. Even in the eight years I've sat on the Guardian's technology desk, the field I cover is frequently unrecognisable from what it was when I started – a world where self-driving cars were just around the corner, where virtual reality was an impressive technology that had failed to catch on with normal people, and where the world was starting to tire of the like-clockwork appearance of a new iPhone every 12 months. Well, fine, but some things really have changed in that time. Just before I started at the paper, the Guardian broke the news that the NSA had been spying on Americans – and the rest of the world – through the tech sector, with more revelations to come thanks to the whistleblowing efforts of Edward Snowden. It was the first sign that the lustre had started to come off the sector, an inkling of what was to follow a few years later as the "techlash" saw first Facebook, then the rest of the industry, fall from grace.

The new BBC micro:bit'mini-computer' given to school children has been upgraded with AI and machine learning support, a new speaker and a microphone. It was launched in 2016 as part of the BBC'Make it Digital' campaign and four years later over five million have been used by schools and children around the world. The project is no longer run by the BBC, it was taken over by the Micro Bit Educational Foundation, a non-profit group setup to make coding more accessible. As well as a new microphone and speaker, that could be used for anything from listening out for doorbell sounds to playing back voice recordings, the device will include a touch sensor that could count how often a fly lands on a pad. The new BBC micro:bit'mini-computer' given to school children has been upgraded with AI and machine learning support, a new speaker and a microphone The palm-sized micro:bit was launched in 2016 as part of the BBC'Make it Digital' campaign and four years later over five million have been used by schools and children around the world Other new sensors on the device including light, magnetism and temperature, to create a wider range of applications.

Manufactured by Swansea-based Dragon Data (an offshoot of traditional toy company, Mettoy), this 32k machine featured an advanced Motorola MC6809E central processor, decent keyboard and excellent analogue joypads. However, its eccentric graphics hardware gave every game a garish green tinge, and its most iconic gaming character was a bespectacled schoolboy named Cuthbert. Admittedly, I put the Dragon on the list instead of another great Swansea-made machine, the Sam Coupe, because I designed two hit games for the system: Impossiball and Utopia. Despite this, Dragon Data went bust in 1984. The first home computer to feature a colour graphical user interface and powered by a 16-bit Motorola 68000 CPU, with 512KB of RAM, the Atari ST seemed like the future … until the Commodore Amiga arrived two months later.

Apple's mighty iPhone had a chunk bitten out of its reputation, after losing in a computer power test to a £12.99 ($18) IT education aid. In a David versus Goliath battle, the BBC's Micro:bit beat the Siri-enabled smartphone in a race between eight computers from the last 75 years. Each device was given 15 seconds to generate as many numbers as possible from the Fibonacci sequence, where each number is the sum of the previous two. The low-spec teaching tool, given to schoolchildren for free, came out on top while the iPhone languished second to last. Apple's mighty iPhone had a chunk bitten out of its reputation, after losing in a computer power test to a £12.99 ($18) IT education aid.

In 1972, at the age of ten, I spent a week somewhere near Windsor – it's hazy now – learning how to program a computer. This involved writing out instructions by hand and sending the pages to unseen technicians who converted them into stacks of cards punched with holes. The cards were fed overnight into a device that we were only once taken to see. It filled a room; magnetic tape spooled behind glass panels in big, grey, wardrobe-sized boxes. The next morning, we'd receive a printout of the results and the day would be spent finding the programming faults that had derailed our calculations of pi to the nth decimal place. There was awed talk of computer experts who worked at an even rawer level of abstraction, compiling programs (no one called it coding then) in the opaque, hieroglyphic notation of "machine code". Those were the days when you had to work close to the guts of the machine: you thought in terms of central processing units, circuit diagrams, binary logic.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been much in the news with the defeat of Go champion Lee Sedol. In the past, some including Stephen Hawking and numerous Hollywood films have warned about the inexorable march of a potentially hostile Artificial Intelligence. Others fear the disruption to traditional jobs of these new technologies. And if you don't work in the tech industry, it's easy to get the impression that AI systems are just ticking things off the list one by one until we humans are all redundant. But human vs. machine competitions that capture our imaginations represent only a small slice of the amazing AI research that's occurring worldwide.