This millennium started about 15 years ago. Here’s what life
was like back then: no MP3 players. No iPod. No iPad. No tablets altogether. Still no color-screen cell-phones, actually. No iPhone, XPERIA, or smartphones altogether. Yahoo!
was still the web portal to go to. No Bing. No Reddit. No Facebook, Instagram
& no Pinterest. No YouTube. The cutting edge form of mobile data was WAP. Actually
dial-up 56k was the dominant speed of internet available. Remember busy phone
while using internet? Remember ICQ? Remember Xing Video Player & Jet Audio?
Do you remember Netscape? You probably do, because there was no Firefox, and
definitely no Google Chrome. Flash memory thumb drives were a tool of the
elite, not widely present. DVD was still limited. PC’s needed the hardware MPEG
decoding add-on cards (DXR-2 & DXR-3) to play the cutting edge quality DVD Video. Nvidia hadn’t bought 3DFX yet.
Commercially, HD still doesn’t exist. The same goes for WiFi. No media
servers, DLNA or UPNP media streaming. Most families had only 1 PC, shared by
everybody.
Actually, here are the specs of my PC back then:
- Pentium II 400 MHz MMX
- Acorp Motherboard, ZX Intel Chipset
- 64MB SD RAM (DIMM)
- 6.4 GB Seagate PATA HDD
- Creative Vibra 128-bit Sound Blaster sound card
- Motorola 56k V.90 Fax Modem
- 4 MB S3 Trio VGA AGP (Later Upgraded to Creative Riva TNT2 32MB)
- 14” CRT Hansol Monitor (Max Resolution 1024 x 768)
- 52X Creative CD-ROM
- Windows 98
Look how far we’ve come! Voice & video chat, web, decent
digital camera, camcorder, music player and some office suit functionality fit
in your smartphone.
Indeed we did move forward pretty darn good. Definitely
better than how other areas of life have gone.
However, looking at what’s cooking
in labs today, the next 25 years are not going to be any less impressive. Not
just for gadgets and personal computers. I will try to discuss some of the signs of what it might look like in a mini-series of posts.
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