All things considered, then, I reckon I was born near the dawn of the Personal Computer Age.
Since then, I've also watched as the BBS concept has evolved into lists, forums, messageboards, and groups. I've watched e-mail take off from modem-downloaded text to websites embedded in full-colour, sendable with a tap on someone's phone while they're sitting in a pool sipping Chardonnay. Computers went from mainframes to personal computers to internet-connected nodes and now they're starting to become one big mainframe in some cases, content being stored online in the "cloud" and computers themselves becoming more and more just a dummy terminal for access. (I don't like that part. I like my content at home with me. Just sayin'.) What was once an excellent way secretly exchange messages over long distances has turned into Identity Theft Central. It used to be that getting a letter was routine. Now the post offices are starting to close. Remember when they tried to charge a nickel for each email to make up for their lost revenue? Yeah! I do!
Cable TV. It was once the replacement for Pay TV. The idea was that if you didn't like commercials, you paid to get rid of them. That was the deal. At some point that changed and commercials made their way back into paid entertainment. Now "cable" doesn't just mean TV. It means internet, TV, VoIP, streaming. Routers were something only the Mysterious Nerds had. Modems went from modulating and demodulating to pulling and pushing vast quantities of data from all over the world to a plethora of home computers, one or more for each family member ages birth and up.
DragonSpeak is the first voice recognition software that I remember hearing about. There may have been others. It was for transcribing notes so you didn't have to type them out. Now we have Siri and Google working for us, and surprisingly, they work well half the time.
I remember ASCII art being printed on long strings of computer paper, complete with holes along each side. I was totally floored when I first saw Paint. I was even more floored when I saw whatever Apple had for a drawing product back in the day. Remember how you could draw a few lines, then pass a rotating line over it and get Chicago 19 album cover art? Yeah!! Now we've got PhotoShop, complete with LAYERS.
It was wondrous when games came on cartridges, a great change to when they were one-game-per-machine. It was pretty cool when they began coming out on diskettes, and later, CDs. Then they were downloadable without leaving your chair. Now you go to an App Store or Google Play where there are gazillions of them for a buck.
Remember music? It used to live on the radio, records and tapes. CDs were later touted as "virtually indestructible." (Not to be a dweeb, but some of my tapes are almost 30 years old now. Admittedly, I've never lost a CD to a tape-munching deck, though, and they don't have crackles and pops in them. On the other hand, the sound quality sounds fake to me at times. But I digress.) For a time, music and software became an underground trading society and suddenly people knew of bands they didn't even know they might like... and that viruses were often packaged in strange ways. The RIAA and anti-piracy campaigns came onto the scene and broke most of that up. Then online stores came out with listening previews. THAT was pure genius. Music and bookstores are now going out of business, all for the sake of laziness, efficiency, cost, and/or instant gratification, depending on who you talk to. Albums still exist, but songs can be purchased separately. Books are searchable rather than scannable.
Viruses have evolved from extension-hiding beasties to drive-by infections from websites.
Companies have changed hands, .COMs rose and fell, and "geeks" went from being unusual freaks to desirable clubs.
And people still talk. A lot. But that's changed, too.
We still have get-togethers and parties of course. But our phones have evolved to be a single landline that swapped its connection between modem and phone call to cell phones, Skype, iChat, and Google Voice. We've also watched the rise of Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Google Hangout, and more chat clients than I can even count.
As I write this, some of the early giants have climbed out of the depths of antiquity and found themselves evolving - both out of the need to survive (heck, for me, it's KEEP UP!!) and out of the need to create, polish, and perfect.
Google used to compete with a dogpile. Now it's competing with Microsoft. It's competing with Apple, which goes into hibernation but somehow always wakes up again.
We are connected. All the time. Almost anywhere. At speeds. Far faster. Than downloading. Porn.
And that, my fellow technoweenies, is progress.
It might also assist in the collapse of the world as we know it. But until that day, boys and girls, REJOICE in all that is awesome!! I am!
~w
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