My Tech and Me (1995–2015)
Technology moves fast. Often we don’t quite realise just how fast it’s moving until we step away and look back. I’m just over 35 now, and like most people technology has been an integral part of my life. In the last twenty years I have seen phenomenal changes in an average person’s technology. There are things that I remember, which not only make me feel pretty old but also make me realise just how far we’ve advanced.
Internet
I can remember when the internet was just starting to take off, so we’re talking about the early nineties. The top internet speed was 56 kbit per second which, compared to today’s average speeds of around 50Mbits per second is around 1000 times faster. I can remember when a single music file would take several minutes to download. If you wanted to download a game or film then you’d have to be prepared to wait for hours, possibly days before it was finished. Thankfully, these days you rarely get the frustration of waiting for days for something to finish downloading only for it to corrupt, leaving you waiting for it to download all over again.
Mobile Phones
I can remember my first mobile phone, it was in 1997 and not only was it big and slightly unwieldy (though thankfully not as big and ungainly as earlier mobiles) but the only functions on it were phoning people, texting and some basic blocky games. They are so far away from the mobile phones of today, that it’s difficult to imagine anyone being happy with them, but we were. Even though texts could only include so many characters before they overflowed into a second text, and everything was pixelated monochrome, although on the plus side you did only need to charge your phone up every week. Using the internet on your mobile device was simply a thing of science fiction
Mobile Apps
Thanks to the steady and impressive development of mobile technology we now have more apps than we ever thought we could ever need. Huge great rafts of apps that help make our life a lot easier. Here are fifteen apps that are so useful you could almost wonder how we managed without them. Without Google Maps we used AA road maps, notebooks and spreadsheets were our early productivity apps, a lot of apps today simply replace the information we picked up after many hours, days or years of experience. If all apps ceased to exist today, we would still survive as a race but the journey would be just that little bit harder.
Social Media
It is all about social media these days. Careers can be made or broken by a single tweet. People can become celebrities simply by having enough followers on YouTube and many companies wouldn’t exist today without their Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn profiles. Twenty years ago, you may have had a MySpace profile which was a predecessor of Facebook, a blog which was also still kind of in it’s infancy, and there was instant messaging, but these are fairly isolated systems, there wasn’t any of the integration between them all. Basically, for most people if you wanted to socialise with your friends you met up, or you spoke on the phone.
Gaming
As a gamer, this is the category that I have seen the most changes. This advancement is not only attributed to the technical hardware of the gaming consoles and computers, which have rocketed to have full engaging storylines and graphics so realistic that they look lifelike. This is also about the availability of gaming. Gaming used to be an interest that a small section of society was interested in, and gamer’s had a, let’s say certain reputation for being hermits or basement dwelling no-lifers. Now the attitude from both within and outside the gaming community is completely different. Gaming now has a huge social element mostly by way of social media. Games are played on Facebook and on your mobile devices. You can play against people not even in the same country as you. Most people from young children through to the very old are now engaging with video games, to keep their minds and in some cases their body active, as well as making friends and engaging with other people.
These are my first impressions of how personal technology has changed over the past twenty years. There are far more here that I haven’t mentioned, but to try and include them all would make this a massively long article and probably slightly dull too.
Where can technology go now? What’s behind the next corner? More importantly, what will we have in the next twenty years that will make what we have today look outmoded and ancient? Personally, I can’t wait to find out.
