IS IT just me? All I could think of while watching news coverage if the launch of Apple's new iPad computer tablet was that Little Britain sketch about Dennis Waterman.

It's the one where the miniature Dennis Waterman goes to visit his agent and offers to write and sing the theme tune.

If you have never seen the sketch, that will mean nothing at all to you.

But the point of the set-up is that little Dennis is tiny, and everything else in the room is outsized.

And that's what the iPad looks like, an outsize iPhone. It was unveiled last week amid massive quantities of hoo-hah, and every newspaper and news programme in the world covered it.

Nice marketing, Apple.

Across the world, millions of people will have gone along with the hokum, and millions will already have their orders in for a gadget without which they suddenly simply cannot live.

Honestly, will people never stop falling for the hype?

Well, we may have been guilty ourselves back in the day...

Before Sir Clive Sinclair started making tiny cars that wouldn't get you up hills, he made tiny electronic things that you could send away for.

You could send away for a kit to make a digital watch, which Clive Sinclair hilariously called The Black Watch, and a calculator.

Dad did both of these things, clipping a coupon out of the newspaper, and the excitement in our household was intense as we waited for the parcels to arrive.

You have to remember that these were the days when the available television channels numbered precisely three, and everything on all three channels finished at about bedtime with the national anthem.

Being flag-waving republican revolutionaries, of course, we refused to stand and salute the TV. But while we may have been revolutionaries, we were determined to keep pace with the white heat of capitalist technology.

A digital watch and calculator were the very height of sophistication, and we toiled long and hard over the kits.

If I remember rightly, in both cases there was a circuit board on to which various tiny things had to be connected.

My input would have been mainly in opening the boxes and keeping out of the way, because dad was good at this kind of stuff and I had only recently managed to make an Airfix Folland Gnat look like a recently-crashed Morris Marina.

I do remember that when concentration was at its height, and the acrid tang of solder filled the silent room from the tiny curl of smoke drifting up from the hot end of the iron, we held our breath in unison.

Finally, the job was done.

The watch was huge, it was glossy black, and I wish I had kept it, because a quick glance on the internet shows that while the watch in kit form cost about £20, examples are now going for £300 to gullible collectors of 70s retro kitsch.

In fact it spent most of its time with no display at all, because in order to save its tiny battery, you had to push the case at a strategic point to make the numbers glow red.

It was a triumph, thanks to dad's dexterity, and it was all mine.

The calculator was a bit more expensive at about £25 a go but for the extra money you did get the word Cambridge etched on to the case, and even for revolutionaries, that turned our heads a bit.

It could do things that even in science lessons you never, ever had to do. Various keys did not have numbers next to them at all. They had symbols from the Greek alphabet.

But this was ground-breaking stuff. I had learned to use a slide rule with some difficulty, but this was going to make that particular piece of equipment obsolete. Bring it on.

Again I opened boxes and held my breath while dad soldered and clipped things together. I remember our old tortoiseshell cat making a quick hand-assisted departure from the polished table top after getting a bit too close to the box of tiny bits.

But then it was done, and it lit up, and you could you could key in 5317704 and turn it upside-down so it read HOLLIES. 5339.338 gave you BEE GEES upside-down, and 710.0553 gave you ESSO OIL. They were simple times, Guideliners. We made our entertainment where we could.

Now even my battered pay-as-you-go phone does it all and much more. But it isn't half so much fun as a silent night with the soldering iron.