Do you remember the old style modems which, in order to get online, required placing a weird looking telephone, with a wire connected from one end to the wall, over two pieces of foam? The wire would be just short enough to make it difficult to reach the desk where the computer sat, whilst just long enough for it to be possible for you to sprain an ankle trying. They didn’t make it easy…
My first experience of “going online” was in 1988. My dad got a PC as part of his university course and I was amazed at the power it had… It had something like 1MB of RAM and a badass 8Mhz processor. I was about ten or eleven at the time and, had The Captains of Industry discovered the internet at roughly the same time as us, we would have sent emails, bought books and traded shares. There was certainly a market for all this. Only 16% of American households owned a PC.
Now I think of it, nothing much existed in cyberspace at the time, which is probably why my first online experience lasted less than 5 minutes. I wasn’t to hear the screeching of computers shaking hands until the Internet Revolution, nine years later.
Microsoft launched Explorer, Amazon was born and WH Smiths buried their head in the sand in 1995. Streaming audio became possible the same year thanks to Real Networks. Television stations were predicted to go bust within days. We were given so many new toys to play with (Java, Windows 95 etc) that the sales assistants at PC World had something to do with their day, other than hide from customers. Great innovators seemed to join forces at exactly the same time to deliver killer application after killer application… Which, in turn, delivered an entirely new audience to the World Wide Web. The computer was no longer a slave-tool of the office, we could now buy our groceries without leaving the house, sell our unwanted junk on eBay or buy someone else’s, play chess with friends we will never meet.
Fast forward to 2003 and I’m writing this entry from my bedroom on a mobile phone… in 1988 mobile phones were the size of bricks and the battery was carried in a suitcase.
Sometimes I miss the good old days, but then I look at the cornucopia of gadgets I’ve amassed over the years and think, nah!
I’ll be putting this phone to use tomorrow as I have an idea which may be pretty cool…