Wednesday, August 4, 2010

How Many Years Is An Internet Year?

After 9 years and 11 months of neglect I found myself today pulling up the main page of my old Infocom website to make a few edits.  It's hard to believe that 15 years have gone by.  When the site was first developed it was the Wild West of the Web times.  HTML 2.0 pages were edited in text editors (I'm a vi).  This was an age when the word "hyperlink" sounded space-age rather than retro.  I got to thinking about all the events and advancements that occurred between the time the site was first created and now.  I know I'm missing more than I'm including but here's what came to my mind.

In random order:
  • the birth of Nathan and Avery (Gabrielle was already 3 months old when the Infocom site first came up)
  • the dot-com boom and eventual bust
  • ftp and especially gopher fade into the shadow left by http
  • Netscape (pronounced "Mozilla") supersedes Mosaic
  • Netscape wins the browser war
  • AOL buys Netscape and the latter becomes irrelevant
  • IE wins the browser war
  • Firefox wins the browser war
  • WebKit wins the browser war
  • Opera... is glad to be a part of it
  • Napster came and went and was reborn (sort of)
  • Apple is reborn
  • Java is invented!
  • Web 2.0 is invented along with its hefty toolbag: XHTML, CSS, Javascript, AJAX, XML, DOM, Rails, etc.
  • Computer gaming industry realizes that millions of people are willing to pay a monthly subscription to play a game 
  • More than a decade of "this is the year of Interactive Television"
  • GPS devices and location services allow us to locate ourselves and others anywhere in the world
  • Bandwidth availability increases and storage price decreases allow for previously unthinkable services like YouTube, Hulu, Internet Radio, Flickr, SkyDrive, Google Docs, and other cloud services
  • Google becomes a 900 lb gorilla
  • Windows 98, ME, CE, 2000, Mobile, XP, Vista and 7
  • Be kind rewind?
  • Macintosh changes CPU architectures... twice!
  • Wikipedia begins cataloging the world's knowledge
  • Social media sites as us to like, follow, connect, stalk, check-in, tweet
  • Cyber-bully and cyber-stalker become words
  • Apple invents and/or dominates new markets: all-in-one computers (ok, it did that way before 1995), MP3 players, touchscreen smartphones, trackpads, tablet computers
  • Old-school IRC iconography like :-) and abbreviations like l8r get co-opted as cool text-speak
  • We can all have a Second Life 
  • In addition to earth's natural spheres we also have the blogosphere and twittersphere.
  • Texting becomes more popular than talking
  • We can have more computing power in our pockets (you know what I mean) than we used to have on our desks or in our server rooms
  • 2" is considered a thick depth for a TV
And the height of cool goes from to

1 comment:

Kimota94 aka Matt aka AgileMan said...

Hey, I never knew you used to be a lady! (not that there's anything wrong with that)

:-)