Delving the Past

Here’s a list of things we had in 1999:

• Web 2.0(tm) News Aggregation Sites – Slashdot, anyone?
• E-Commerce. Now I’m going to go punch myself in the face for using that term.
• Acceptably decent resolutions – anyone who was anyone used 1024×768 at *minimum*
• Triple digit amounts of RAM, measured by the megabyte
• MMOGs – EverQuest FTW. Hate! Hate for Innoruuk!
• Ungodly large mp3 collections
• TV-resolution sized video
• Large scale portable storage – cd-rw’s were beyond cost effective at this point

Here’s a list of things we didn’t have in 1999:

• 640×480 screens
• A lack of hard drive space
• Floppy drives – it was a task to find a floppy drive in a lab on my campus
• YouTube
• Google Maps
• Spam – no, getting a marketing e-mail once a month was not spam
• Cheap Viagra from India

This post inspired by a story on Digg. I’m rather amused at how little has changed in over a decade. Where’s the innovation, folks? Oh, there’s minor innovation – this site is running Wordpress and I don’t have to dick around with paragraph tags/etc. But ‘blogs’ were around before that nasty little word that conjures an image of someone taking a dump was ever dreamed up.

Really, things like Google Maps and YouTube (I’ll shove the rise of video under YouTube, kthx) have been the only major quality-of-internet-life enhancers.

Naturally, world-changing innovation doesn’t happen nearly as much as we might think. More often than not, progress tends to be slow and steady, building on things that came before. Still, nothing like a good swift progress-kick-in-the-arse; we could use one right about now.

My money’s on mobile being the drive behind the next great leaps in technology. It has already begun – FFS, I can’t drive around aimlessly without my Android-based smartphone. Google Maps while driving? Hell yes.

(FFS, I can VPN on the damned thing. I CAN STOP YOUR SERVER FROM TAKING A DUMP WHILE I TAKE A DUMP.)