Ahhh!! The Good Old Days!!

Do you remember the good old days of dial-up? Listeneing to the purring, dinging, beeping music of your dial-up modem, hoping it would sync up on the first go so you could get a 28,800bps connection... Ahhh.... those were the days!! I remember when we first signed up to the internet, and went out and bought ourselves one of these beauties...

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...for a cost of about 20% of the average monthly wage, just to be able to get email, and... um.... yeah, email. Oh yeah, there was IRC, and Netscape Navigator with a few websites. We could only use it for a short while every day because the phone bill would be massive otherwise, and you'd get banned!! No online gaming. No streaming (yeah, like that would work!!). Just email, and some websites happening here and there, but it was enough to warrant getting connected. It was a great adventure, and that was only about 25 years ago (28.8kbps come out in 1994). Seems like longer doesn't it?

What I didn't realise is that dial-up services are still around. Today I just read an article that Optus is shutting down there Dial-Up services on 15 July 2018. It's 2018, and Optus still has clients on dial-up!! I thought that would have all but gone at least 10 years ago, but according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, there were still 90000 households or businesses using dial-up in Australia during 2016, which was the last year dial-up stats were published.

It is quite remarkable how quickly the Internet has developed in 25 years, and has become one of the biggest catalysts to development of just about anything. The very technology that the Internet runs on probably wouldn't be as quick and efficient as it is today without the need for greater connectivity speeds and data throughput. It has been the cauldron of development in all areas of business and indeed general life, bringing people together on complex projects requiring a broad scope of knowledge, and which would not be achievable otherwise. Block-chain would not exist, and what we're all doing here would not be possible. But it's not all good. The internet has done great things for us all, but it certainly hasn't made life any safer. In many ways we are far more vulnerable than we have ever been. We have the Internet at our fingertips, and the Internet has us at theirs.

We've gone from the old clanger modems of the 90s, to these "always-on" space-age-looking UFOs sitting on our desks, with 100mbps connections. We are now talking to, collaborating, and blogging with people from all over the world, in real-time, and with no boundaries to what we can accomplish if the right mix of people are brought together.

sourceThe rate at which things are developing is staggering. The pace of life has gotten exponentially quicker, and seems to be ramping up more and more as technology develops even further.

But how quick is too quick? I do kind of miss the old days. I guess that's why I enjoy going camping.

P.S: I managed to spell bureau without spell check.... pffft!! Who needs autocorretc!! ;)

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