The article below is referenced so that I didn’t use an unlicensed picture. You don’t need to read it all, but do look at the picture near the end of the article.
Social Media history – histograph included.
I was 11 years old in 1969 when computer communication, basically, started. That means I was alive and old enough to understand all of what has happened in the last 44 years to now. Just think! In less than 50 years, we have gone from specific communication between a few college and military computers to what we have now. Also, in 1969 it was all text, no pictures. I remember that when you wanted to see a picture, you had to download the binary code (all 1s and 0s), pages of it, then run a program to turn those numbers into a picture. It also could take 15 minutes or longer for one picture! The worst part, in my opinion, was that, often, you would lose the connection for a second and had to start all over (no recovery). Also, a picture back then was around 200k as opposed to 2-3MB now. So, the pictures you can get now in just a few seconds are about 10 times more pixels than the ones that took 15 minutes or longer then.
Then look! The World Wide Web (the basic Internet for the longest time) was public in 1991. That’s only 22 years ago!
The Internet had 2.6 million users in 1990 and 70 million users in only 9 more years! We have exploded in the world of computer technology and communication. As of last year, there were 2 Billion users on computers and 6 Billion mobile subscriptions. Let’s not even get into how the phone has changed: party lines when I was a kid to cell phones everywhere with cameras and GPS.
Anyone who doesn’t believe in miracles, isn’t looking very hard. We have gone from pre-school to post Doctorate in computer communication. It is a lot of fun and games now. It was fairly serious back then. Games were all text-based and were written by college people and professors and such. The idea that kids would be programming mods on video games was unheard of; in fact, the idea of an actual video game was kind of weird then, too.
So, when someone over 45 asks how you “youngsters” keep up the pace – stop responding with “what pace?” To us, there is a definite pace.
How do you feel about the speed of evolution in technology and communication?
Other posts to reference:
Namaste,
Scott