This year marks the 20-year anniversary of 1999.
The small quirks of ’90s technology included Windows 98 and dial-up – things some people have not heard of. The somewhat ancient wired connections to the internet in the ’90s would leave people our age bored out of their minds.
Look at how we improved over the years. Instead of old, boxed computers, we have laptops that are more portable and faster. Desktop computers became smaller with the screens bigger. Companies made tablets to become minicomputers.
This also happened with phones. You would also have or seen people using old cell phones or flip phone with keypads. If you think about them back around 20 years ago, you would remember the old-styled Nokia.
Since the iPhone came out in 2007, how we used the cell phone changed drastically. It featured a touchscreen and apps that older phones did not offer. The iPhone came out with a huge success with 270,000 of them sold during the first weekend that it came out.
Now, iPhone and the Samsung Galaxy have taken over the cell phone industry. Old school dialing someone’s number is a thing of the past – now we can text message, FaceTime, use social media, listen to music, play games and surf the internet all in one device. The inventions of earlier phones have surely impacted future phones to become useful in almost everything in life.
The internet has also changed for the better since people did not have much access to different sites in 1999 than we do now. Accessing it was slow and took about a few minutes while today, it takes a few seconds for a web site to pop up. That was because there was not much of anything that offers like social media since MySpace, Facebook and other platforms didn’t come out until the early 2000s.
Google used to be only a search engine made by two Stanford University students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and Google was originally named BackRub according to Business Insider. Over the years, Google has become more than just a search engine. We now have Gmail, Google maps and Google Drive.
In 2019, almost everything online is connected to the internet and without it, we would not get much new information or connect with anyone through social media. Jobs are requiring workers’ social media for professional use. CareerBuilder Survey reported that 70 percent of employers use social media to hire workers.
People now see the internet as a utility because they connect with it every day that there is hardly any escape from it. The scary part of it advancing is that more people are already connecting faster and some profile pages are viewed publicly online. Users can use social media to cyberbully others which can cause serious mental health issues and feel bad about their body image.
It is still impressive that for around 2o years, we made the technology even better than we couldn’t believe that it has gone fast. As human beings, we are always meant to improve for a better future and make life easier and information and connection more accessible even with the benefits and consequences.
