I just finished watching the LTT Video Intel Predicted the future and had to laugh at some of the things in it. But it also brought me back in time, thinking of things we have now that we didn’t have back then…
- 1995 I got my first PC. It ran Windows 3.1, had a 486 33Mhz proc, 8MB of RAM and 200MB HDD.
- around 1996 I got an upgrade to a 133Mhz Pentium. it has 16Mb of RAM, I can’t remember the HDD space, but it had a 56K Modem! That’s the year I got online first!
- around the early 2000s, we got Cable Modem into the house… BROADBAND! 150Kb/s down! After a couple of iterations, we got 300Kbs, 500Kbs, etc… I’m now on 1Gb/s! on that same Cable provider (changed names a few times!). Being online all the time made a big difference. No more dial-up!
- Around the Windows XP days, we got Digital TV installed with half a billion (ish) channels. I got my hands on a couple of TV tuners, built some sort of a machine and turned it into a Windows XP Media Center. We could watch and pause live TV, record multiple channels, etc. All these are things a standard Sky or Virgin TV box can do now, but back then, Woah! I remember family and friends getting very confused that we could rewind live TV. “How the hell did you do that?!”
- I got my first “Smart Phone” around early 2001-2002ish. I remember a couple of years later, I was an intern at Microsoft, and walking around the shop. The phone beeped, and I checked it. An Email, from none other than Bill Gates! It wasn’t direct to me, it was company-wide, but still… Walking around a shop, probably around 2003 or 2004, reading email on a phone. Now, that’s normal… Back then? Not so much.
- That same phone had a “massive” 64MB SD Card. I would fill it will (legal…) MP3s and listen to it on the bus to work. 2001-2002, give or take. Just after the iPod came out. But this was different. This was ON A PHONE!
well, that made me feel old… I mean, back in 2011, I wrote a post “5+ screens and a cloud”. That was nearly 11 years ago… and Did I get anything wrong?! Maybe the Xbox Kinect… got replaced with Alexa or Google Assistant… I miss Cortana…
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My name is Tiernan OToole, and I run my own ASN, AS204994. More details about that over there. I also use Vultr for transit services and HostUs for LIR Services. Check them out. You can also check some of the gear I use on a daily basis over on kit.co/tiernano. If you find this stuff useful, you could also Buy me a coffee! Thanks!