10 Years Ago Today… (Thinking About Technological Progress)

by on February 1, 2009 · 13 comments

As I am getting ready to watch the Super Bowl tonight on my amazing 100-inch screen via a Sanyo high-def projector that only cost me $1,600 bucks on eBay, I started thinking back about how much things have evolved (technologically-speaking) over just the past decade. I thought to myself, what sort of technology did I have at my disposal exactly 10 years ago today, on February 1st, 1999?  Here’s the miserable snapshot I came up with:

  • 10 years ago today, I did not own a high-definition television set, as they were too expensive (I bought my first one from Sears on an installment plan a few months later. It was a boxy 42-inch, 4×3 monstrosity that rolled around on the floor on casters and it took up half the room). Moreover, only a few HDTV signals could be picked up locally and none were yet available from my cable or satellite provider.
  • 10 years ago today, the biggest television in my house was a 32-inch 4×3 ProScan analog set, which I thought was massive. (Of course, it was in terms of weight. It was over 125 lbs).
  • 10 years ago today, I was still using a dial-up, 56k narrowband Internet connection even though I lived in downtown Washington, DC just 6 blocks from our nation’s Capitol.
  • 10 years ago today, my computer was a Compaq laptop that weighed more than my dog, had barely any storage or RAM, and had a screen that was only slightly brighter than an Etch-A-Sketch.
  • 10 years ago today, I was still occasionally using an old CompuServe e-mail address that had nine digits in it. (But at least I wasn’t one of the 20 million or so people paying $20 bucks per month to graze around inside AOL’s walled garden!)
  • 10 years ago today, I was still backing up files on 3 1/2 inch floppy disks. I had boxes full of those things. (And, sadly, I still had 5 1/4 inch floppies in my possession that I was saving “just in case” I ever needed those old files. Pathetic!)

  • 10 years ago today, I did not own an i-Pod, or any other sort of portable digital MP3 player. I was still hauling a box of CDs around with me everywhere I went and playing them on a bulky portable CD player that skipped whenever I bumped it.  And I was still years away from downloading my first song or album online.
  • 10 years ago today, I was still occasionally listening to cassette tapes in my car.
  • 10 years ago today, I was still using a crummy analog cell phone that had ZERO options outside of just calling people (and I had to manually type in every single contact on the numeric keypad. But hey, that old StarTac sure looked cool at the time!)
  • 10 years ago today, I was still driving to my local video store to rent movies, and some of them were on VHS tapes.
  • 10 years ago today, I had never downloaded or watched a movie or TV show on my computer.
  • 10 years ago today, I was still playing video games on my old PlayStation (as in PlayStation ONE) and was lusting for a Sega DreamCast. And the idea of online gaming was still a distant dream.
  • 10 years ago today, I was still using a camera that required film, which I had to always drop off at the local pharmacy to be developed. And I was still over a year away from buying my first digital camera (and camcorder) that could transfer files to my computer.
  • 10 years ago today, I had not yet made my first eBay transaction.
  • 10 years ago today, I had never done any online banking, or any other monetary transactions online for that matter.
  • 10 years ago today, I had not yet conducted my first Google search. I was still using AltaVista for almost all my searches.
  • 10 years ago today, I did not have a blog, an RSS feed, a Twitter feed, any social networking accounts, Gmail, GMaps, Google News, Flickr, Firefox, Netflix, Wikipedia, satellite radio, or any of the other endless assortment of digital services I rely on today.

My God, think about how much our world has evolved in just 10 years!!  I love capitalism.

SHARE: 13 comments

Adam Thierer / Adam is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. He previously served as President of the Progress & Freedom Foundation, Director of Telecom. Studies at the Cato Institute, and Fellow in Economic Policy at the Heritage Foundation.

  • NoNamer

    Interesting article… I would agree with almost all of those, and even your conclusion at the end. I must admit online gaming was not in the distant future 10 years ago; it was alive and well. It just hadn't made it to consoles yet. I was playing Quake II and other games on the internet well over 10 years ago.

  • http://rationalitate.blogspot.com Rationalitate

    But at least I wasn’t one of the 20 million or so people paying $20 bucks per month to graze around inside AOL’s walled garden!

    How was AOL's service a walled garden?? Sure, they had that all-in-one browser, but you could access the full internet with it. And if you didn't like seeing a pulsating AOL logo as opposed to a pulsating E or N, you could always just fire up a browser.

  • http://www.techliberation.com Adam Thierer

    I have defended the old AOL business model here in the past since it was very useful for many newcomers to the Net back in the late 90s. It provided a safe, guided-tour approach to Net surfing. It was the shopping mall model applied to cyberspace.

    But that also explains why it was a walled garden. You weren't “trapped” inside–there was always a back door to get back into the Wild West of the Internet–but when you were on AOL back then, it was a very closed, guarded environment. Again, that had real benefits for some folks–especially the very young and very old. As everyone became more accustomed to how the Internet worked, however, and as they grew more comfortable with search engines as their daily launch pad, the old AOL model withered away.

    But it's still a bit astonishing to me that so many millions of Americans were once paying $20 bucks a month for it.

  • SDC

    Yeah, thank God we can watch 'Tool Academy' on bigger TVs now.

  • http://bennett.com/blog Richard Bennett

    AOL for $20/mo was a deal because the modem farm made it a local call to get on the Internet. Some of the message boards weren't too bad either.

  • http://www.openmarket.org/author/alex-harris/ AlexHarris

    Adam, I think the reason you didn't have an iPod in 1999 may be that they didn't come out until 2001:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod

    And, even five years ago, they weren't so universally liked, even among technophiles:
    http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2003/05/28/

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  • yardley285022

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