Above: The first BitDepth column appeared on September 22, 1995 in the Express TV Guide.

BitDepth 1531 for October 06, 2025

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 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 to 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 email 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.

On my last day at the Express, where I’d been involved in modernising the operations of the photographic department into a hybrid film-scan digital system, I paid a courtesy call on the late CEO, Craig Reynald, with whom I’d worked agreeably realising those projects.

“But what about the column?” Reynald asked.
Surprised, I responded, “I think they would like to have it along with me; unfortunately.”

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 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 BusinessDay.

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 1980’s.

The late Peter Quentrall-Thomas, who ran a computer accessories 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 2000’s 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 and greater challenges understanding not just the tech, but the importance of supporting policy and guaging the response of the public it is meant to serve.

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.

Visiting countries is fun, but I find actual travel time-consuming and annoying.

The internet has matured far beyond being 1995’s medium for emailing this column. Countless technologies have matured and disappeared or fallen force ripe on the bloody floor of time and tech.

It’s really difficult to get excited over shiny and new when you’ve seen how quickly that gloss gets tarnished and eventually rots.

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 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.