I retired on Oct 2,
2006. My final day of work was Sept 29, 2006. I had been a
computer programmer, a systems analyst and finally in my last
dozen years a technical manager and director. No one at
my retirement dinner was checking their pocket devices
because at that time there were no smartphones. (Of
course today that's all you see in restaurants) Yes,
there had been attempts prior to 2006, PDAs, some mobile
devices that integrated telephony & data, but not until the
iPhone in the summer of 2007 did the explosion of
smartphones occur. Android phones soon appeared after the iPhone.
And the clam shell phone died (only to be resurrected by a
small group of rebellious hipsters.) And Windows phones way
after that. And then cometh the tablet. There were text messages you could send with the clam shell phone and Blackberry had the ability to message with QWERTY keyboard but texting wasn't well used then as it is now.
In 2006 Gmail
had almost arrived for everyone but was still invitation only. Twitter could only be accessed by PC/Mac type technology and was hardly used. Up
until late 2006, Twitter was mainly a communication
application within the Twitter start up. Facebook launched
for everyone the week I retired. Till then it was only for
university students. So up until that time the best way to communicate with your aunt Tillie or some individual you
fancied was by land line, cell phones that were only phones and
email or IM on your desktop or notebooks or for that matter by
card or letter which would take days or you could pass a note under the door or leave a mash one for someone you liked in the cubicle down the hall.
In 2006 you still
shared music with your fellows mainly by cassette tapes or
burning CDs if you could afford a CD burner. Yes there
were the peer to peer networks Napster and others but were soon
deemed illegal and Bit Torrrent was not widely used yet and
was considered controversial. The music
industry was still
selling CDs and even cassette tapes were still being sold.
Tower records did go out of business in late 2006. Sam Goody
stores died around the same time. Best Buy was still selling CDs. Newspapers were already in decline at the time but
there were plenty of viable companies and the NY Times cost
$1.00. The e-Reader was yet to arrive. So there were books and
bookstores still and newspapers and magazines. Used to be when you got on the subway most people were hidden behind newspapers.
There were some
social networking precedents like Friendster and MySpace and some others though
these had more specific maybe more niche like approaches.
Myspace was largely a site that was dominated by music
groups and fans and Friendster was a rising popular network but ultimately had limited appeal and ultimately declined. Maybe if
there had been smartphones at their height of popularity they
might have dominated since they had been up and running since
2002. But the world of social networking had not really begun
to take over our internet existence. Perhaps you might
even say, social networking created our internet existence. Also realize there were no selfies or photobombing or gifs or instagram or vine or snapchats or dick pics or internet bullying and so on.
There were no net
books, no tablets, etc. Microsoft sold a pocket computer but
it was fairly useless. There was email. There were corporate
intranets and of course the internet and the discussion was
about Internet 2.0., the new safer, smarter internet.
Still the really big thing that year in 2006 was the Blu Ray
DVD player. And to fully enjoy the Blu Ray player you had
to have an HD TV. Am I ignoring HD TVs? No, they started
cropping up in the early 2000s but boy were they expensive and a
little difficult to set up. There was no streaming Netflix
service, no Amazon Prime, none of the hundreds of
streaming services that exist today. You tube was in its toddlerhood
having launched the year or so before, but you needed a computer to
watch it not your phone.
In the fall of 2006
I set up my first router and connected with my Gateway XP
windows notebook and hard wired my Dell desktop also running
XP. The main internet browser was IE. I first started using
Firefox then. I think they had a 5% market share. Then
along in 2008 came the Chrome browser and together Mozilla and
Google made the IE largely a joke. DVR technology was
limited and there were court challenges. I did have an iPod that
held 5 gigs of data, mainly music. (iPod had been around
since 2001.)
So that was 8 years
ago. What will the next 8 years bring? Some new
revolutionary way to communicate and share information? Or just
bigger smartphones, more tablets, clunkier buggier
software. And more hype & bullshit so that the corporations
like Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon,
Facebook and Verizon
etc. continue to dominate the field and are now lacking any
kind of startling innovation and continue to make and hog all
the money to prevent real technical innovation? We shall
see. Meanwhile we've lost bookstores, newspapers, TV
broadcast viewing and most of all our privacy.
