My fascination for technology began in the late seventies when programmers were punching cards that went into computers that took up entire office floors. My mother worked for the government at the time and brought home stacks of used punch cards which we used to make Christmas wreaths. We were in awe when the first home computers were released and we could use programs like Lotus and WordPro and play games like Pacman.
The 90’s laid the foundation for the beginning of the information age, which saw the entire world growing closer together with the adoption of the internet. We now had “Global Communications” on this massive and infinite information highway called the World Wide Web. The internet brought us AOL, Yahoo, Google and VoIP to name a few of the inovations. You could shop nude ! Cell phones and Blackberries made our lives so much easier. With the rise of .coms, eCommerce took off and co-location facilities popped up everywhere, offering hosting and managed services. Some people made a lot of money with IPO’s until the bubble burst at the turn of the century. It was madness ! We all held our breath waiting to see if the world would collapse with Y2K. It was, in fact the biggest anti-climax that I can remember in the history of technology. Billions of dollars were poured into ensuring that nothing would go wrong, and I guess we must have done a really good job. Or maybe it a money making scheme for the Y2K remediation companies that we hired to scare us to death LOL !
As technology development escalated in the early 2000’s we saw the beginnings of Social Media Platforms. Personally I had no interest at the time in MySpace and had no idea that by 2010 Facebook would have taken over the lives of many. It’s a love hate relationship for me. Social media should be called “the antisocial media”. We also had a huge surge in the gaming world with Nintendo Wii, released in 2006. And now we have people getting hit by cars chasing Pokemon, another great Nintendo/Google/Niantic invention !
This era also brought us text messaging, iPhones, the USB drive, Windows XP, more Social Media, TiVo, iPod, WiFi and YouTube and online dating. No longer do we have huge costs to further our education as we can all attend YouTube Universtity for free. We can all be our own WebMD’s and self-diagnose our medical issues and those of our friends and pets. Businesses migrated from regular voice circuits to data circuits with VoIP and MPLS and of course video conferencing. This enabled us to grow collaboration technologies and we stopped jumping on planes every day for meetings, impacting the Deltas of this world. Social media advertising mushroomed and became the new improved marketing platform. And then came “The Cloud”. As if by this time we didn’t have enough security concerns and breeches on a daily basis. So security firms became the new hot ticket, as companies, governments, and organization were being sued and embarrassed and criticized due to data breeches.
Big Brother – realized. In 2013, Edward Snowden revealed to us the extent of the NSI surveillance programs. My Google and Yahoo accounts were no longer private ! Paranoia ensued and data privacy became a huge concern and then things got really exciting. With endless amounts of data available to both companies and individuals through our smart phones and the endlessly scalable cloud computing advantages, we had no choice but to keep inventing new technologies to deal with that which we have created! Which leads us to Artificial Intelligence, Intelligent Automation and the IoT (Internet of Things) and of course the impact of this on businesses, the workforce (us) and our personal lives. I call this “the technology disruption”.
Stay tuned for my next chapters, exploring the reinvention of companies and individuals and how technology will save our planet. I need to fully disclose, this article was ghost written by my newly released, highly artificially intelligent robot slave…(you may remember her from the Jetson’s) Rosy v3.0.