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Daniel, aged 18 months, learned about switches four months ago.

He started with the hi-fi, which he can reach by climbing up on a table; graduated quickly to the hoover and now he's moved on to my PC. I'm sitting at my desk, writing this column, or rather was writing an earlier version now lost forever, and he walks into the room. He wanders about for a minute or two quite innocently, then whacks the on-off switch just when I'm not looking. Then presses it again to hear that satisfying whirr as the hard disk kicks back into action.

Two days later I get back from work exhausted at 9pm, looking forward to slumping in front of the telly. It is not to be. Daniel has figured out a new way of re-programming the television. Unfortunately, it's quite beyond his parents to work out what he's done to it, so we're reduced to listening to the radio.

And I haven't even mentioned the phone yet. Like most toddlers, Daniel is telephone-obsessed, with an alarming ability to place actual calls.

One morning at 6am we got a call from the police. 'Has your child been playing with the telephone,' they asked. We had to admit he had, though how, then aged 13 months, he had managed to dial 999, I'll never know.

Of course it was all different when I was a kid. TVs weren't colour with remote controls. They were black and white with big, chunky, fool-proof push-buttons. Telephones had rotating diallers in the middle that were almost impossible to dial accidentally. And that was about it.

By the time Daniel is two, I'm reliably informed, he'll be wielding a mouse like an expert. He'll probably type all his homework on a PC. By the time he's 10 he'll have a mobile phone - all kids will by then.

But he'll never take the lid off a PC. When I first started reading and writing about PCs, about the second thing you did with your PC was take the lid off and tinker about with cards and cables and upgrades. Now hardly anyone does. The interesting and expensive part about a PC now is the software and what it does, not what's inside the box. By the time Daniel's 10 he'll know the URLs of a hundred Web sites and he'll knock out charts and diagrams with his hands tied behind his back. But he'll never experience that little fillip of late '80s excitement you got when the graphics card you'd just installed worked.

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