Suddenly, 30 years later…

MARK LYNDERSAY

IT'S BECOME difficult, over time, to mark time passing in this space.

It once seemed easier, particularly when every year of publication seemed to be seized out of the aether, a generous gift by editors willing to let the words run on.

Last year I noted the first decade of TechNewsTT, the dedicated website that hosts BitDepth (technewstt.com/report-to-readers-10-years) and in 2026 I hope to mark 50 years worth of writing and photographing in TT.

BitDepth at 30 feels like a different kind of benchmark, the longest run of writing on a single topic in my career.

The column began while I was consulting at the Trinidad Express and I went from desk shopping a sample column.

Stephen Doobal, keen for text for the paper's new ETV Guide, accepted it as a weekly freebie.

Over the next 16 columns, I had a chance to think about what might be interesting to the technology savvy and the generalist reader.

I also determined that the column should remain in bits, though sketchy e-mail in September 1995 meant that I'd sometimes bring the column to Doobal on a floppy disk.

The late Keith Smith, a journalism mentor and formally an editor-at-large at the paper, read an issue of the ETV and declared, rather loudly, "What is this column doing in the TV guide?"

What followed was the journalism equivalent of a promotion from office boy to the C-Suite. The next week, BitDepth was installed on the op-ed pages of the Express.

The journey from there to here has tracked my own path in journalism.

When I left the Express in 1998 to work with Lenny Grant at the Guardian, BitDepth jumped to another op-ed space.

From there, the column accompanied me to the Guardian, then, after a short hiatus while I built the infrastructure for The Wire, it appeared in that short-lived paper where it became a feature section lead. The column returned to the Guardian in 2003, where it continued as a feature lead until 2017.

At that point, mortal disagreements with editorial management at the Guardian led me to Newsday, where the column was returned to the op-ed page with occasional expansions into Business Day.

Those are steps, threads that stitched this work into every daily newspaper published in TT, but they don't tell the story of the column's evolution.

In its earliest incarnations, most notably in the first ten years of publication, it flitted carelessly about, reflecting the arbitrariness of earlier columns like It's My Write, my weekly column for The Catholic News published in the 1980s.

The late Peter Quentrall-Thomas, who ran a computer outlet, messaged me threatening to quit the column if I didn't stick more rigorously to tech.

Because I harden, that probably happened, but he wouldn't live to see his wish come true.

By the 2000s technology was everywhere.

The deepening immersion of tech in civil society meant that there were more facets to explore in its shaping of this country.

On another front, junkets for technology journalists reached the Caribbean via Latin America in 2005.

BitDepth took me to Jamaica, New York, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Mexico, Panama, Berlin and London, but it wasn't the blessing you might expect for someone self-employed.

Per diems were scarce and time spent on a junket meant diminished earning power.

Eventually, in 2019, I dropped out of a China trip because I simply couldn't afford the lost income it would represent.

By then, that era was coming to a close and covid ended tech junkets almost entirely.

But that brought its own advantages for reporting. Webinars consumed exactly the time they were live. Recordings enabled time-shifted reporting with more leeway to consider presentations in depth.

The internet has matured far beyond being 1995's medium for e-mailing this column.

Reporting on companies that are digitally connected and rich in media resources is a very different landscape from the one I set out to explore.

The last two decades of this column have drilled down into personal technology and the impact of technology trends on the average user.

Whimsy in topic choices has been replaced by informed snark deriding of the pervasive absurdities of the sector.

BitDepth in 2025 is very much the same idea I had in 1995, driven by the same excitement and curiosity about the transformative potential of technology but diving a bit deeper (I've learned a few things) while working to explain ever more complex concepts for a general audience.

Mark Lyndersay is the editor of technewstt.com. An expanded version of this column can be found there