Twenty Years Ago….

The internet sucked.

1997

Twenty years ago would be 1997. Many of us still suffered through dial up. Each internet company had to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars just to get servers. Then hundreds of thousands more to get a server room in their building and cool it and keep it running. The UI for most of us was some portal like AOL upon startup. Browsers finally existed so that’s cool and it fueled the dot com boom. A few years later, the dot com bubble burst.

5 years later ~2002

Web 2.0! Now everything is cloud based and we can build cool stuff rapidly. Terms like scalability, MVC, and DRY were being thrown around everywhere. DHH invented Ruby on Rails at some point in this time period, awesome! The internet had officially made the transition to browser and web based. So, it sucked way less.

5 more years later ~2007

The freaking iPhone! Holy SHIT! Just as we’re getting used to web 2.0 and SAAS we’re hit with this doozie. Now everything will be mobile. Mobile first, mobile everything. I threw my Blackberry Pearl in the garbage. Now the internet and technology is cooking with gas! Totally not sucking!

Present Day ~2017

Wow, remember the days when you entered in values into a web application and all it did was do some logic and return values back to you? How freaking basic! Now our software knows more stuff about you, usually pulling in data from other sources like sensors or other services. The present day is about contextual relevance. This can go unnoticed but it is a big improvement towards our next step, which is…..

The Next Step~2022

Don’t just give us good context and info, tell us what to do! And why! Actually, don’t wait until we ask, predict what we want to do and then help us do it. This sounds half baked, but when you think of all the IOT stuff (censors, data, cameras) colliding with Artificial Intelligence which will get smarter over time, then it’s not really crazy. I can envision an “internet” where there is no more screen or browser, shit just happens. Work is over? Uber shows up. Maybe it’s Alexa or another voice interface. Or it’s a little screen in your contact. Maybe not, but we will be on our way.

Cheers to the internet not sucking now, this is getting exciting!