Today is my 43rd birthday. That is 25 years into my adult life, and approximately 25 years away from my inevitable death. Other than that, it’s not much of a milestone, just 43. Still pretty young. Still kids to raise. Still ground to gain in my career.
I am devoting a little less energy to my article this week because, well because it’s “my” day, and I have some birthday type stuff to do. That doesn’t mean I’m blowing it off though, so you get me for an hour or so on this, my special day. The fact of the matter is that I take my commitment to Connected Internet quite seriously, and if there’s even just one of you who reads my article every week, I owe you something more than filler. However, I feel no compunction whatsoever about hitting you with a sentimental, retrospective list, so here it is:
25 years is both a long time and a short time. 25 years is a drop in the pan in the big scheme of things, yet so much can change in 25 years. These are the five technologies from the last 25 years that I think are most noteworthy, or world changing if you will.
- The compact disc We’re still using them. Despite what vinyl fad-ists may have to say about the fidelity of vinyl vs. compact disc, the average person will resolve better detail and have better sound quality with compact disc. Yes, vinyl is great, if you have a vinyl hi-fi system that costs as much as my house. Most of us never will. On top of that, CD led the way to digital replacing analog, and paved the way for the DVD. Say what you want, the CD was the first significant change in music reproduction since Edison.
- Cable TV made the world smaller My family got cable around 1980 or 1981, when it first came to the area I lived in. The early days of cable were sparse, with ESPN broadcasting crap like Aussie rules football (no offense to Aussie readers) and lots of women’s collegiate volleyball (no offense to lesbian readers), and most of the channels resembled public access.Then came 1989. Tianenmen Square. I honestly don’t recall watching CNN before Tianenmen. We all watched it during and after. Later that same year we all watched CNN again, when the Berlin Wall came down. I can’t tell you younger readers what that meant back then. Most of us had never known a world without a cold war. The wall was permanent, immutable. A symbol of the division of our world, and a reminder of the danger all of us were in if someone important on either side had a bad day. Of course we all watched both Gulf Wars on CNN as well, and who can forget where they were on 9/11?
- The internet Think on this: 12 years ago most homes still didn’t have internet access. How much has the internet infiltrated your life? News, communication, commerce, entertainment. We have internet on our cell phones. We have internet addiction. I did most of my Christmas shopping online, not to mention it’s usefulness as a source of information.
As significant as the steam engine. - Bandwidth This may seem like a subset of a point I already made, but don’t discount the importance of bandwidth. Internet, television, wi-fi, home entertainment. All dependent on the bandwidth available to deliver them. As all this content evolves and becomes bigger and better over time, more bandwidth is needed. Anyone who ever downloaded something big over a 56k phone modem appreciates how bandwidth makes your life easier.
- The computer The computer came into it’s own in the last 25 years. From archaic, monochrome flickers of command line interfaces, to early stumbles in the direction of GUI, to what we have today. Think about how fast your Pentium 200 with 64 megs of ram felt. Remember what a stud you thought you were, having a computer that did GLQuake at 29 frames per second at 640×480? How about now?Hell, you know I’m not a Windows guy at all, but I can concede that Windows is actually usable anymore. Linux has evolved to the point where it has about as friendly an install as you could wish for, and a spit and polish to the desktop that may only be a few more years away from rivaling the Mac.
Ah, the Mac. This ain’t your daddy’s Mac anymore. Thank God for Cupertino, who managed to finally do what Apple always wanted, with what NeXT envisioned, and did it all on the back of a 30+ year old replacement for the mainframe operating systems of the time. I could write this article 25 years from now, and it’s still gonna be a unix world, baby.
We have more speed, more memory, more storage, more cores. How fast does your Pentium 200 feel compared to the 3.0 GHz quad core with 8 gigs of ram on your desktop? The point is, that as hardware has improved over time, it’s improved the experience of the end user to a point where it’s not just us geeks who “get it”. Twenty years ago I didn’t own a computer. Today it’s an appendage.
Yep kids, we still wrote paper letters when I was your age. Mail order was the thing. Porn? I remember walking uphill nine miles in a blizzard to get to the adult bookstore…
So, Happy Birthday to me. I’ll be back next week, and I promise, no lists, no retrospective, no rush. I am going to go eat something I’m not supposed to and spend some time with some people that actually think I’m pretty great, for whatever reason. All in all, I guess it wasn’t such a bad 25 years, and I’m a pretty lucky dog after all.
