Eight years and counting: My retirement as told through the window of our evolving technology and the demise of great cultural institutions.

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.