Millenium.
It was a word to conjure with. 1999, the edge of the Great Odometer Rollover, the dawn of the 21st Century (if you’re going to be pedantic about 2001, feck off) – the arrival of The Future.
And it really felt that way. We had the Internet, the World Wide Web, all sorts of knowledge right at the fingertips. We had phones small enough to fit in your pocket that worked all over the country and could call any number, no long distance, no roaming. Music was only a couple of clicks away – okay, more than a couple, but if you could get Napster working, a little time and patience would get you all manner of free songs. And if it didn’t, well, there was always a whole wide world of FTP sites and search engines that, let’s be honest, were more safely navigated on your Mac.
And that was going well, too – I was rocking a Powerbook G3 Series 233 Mhz, 14″ screen, with 96 MB of RAM and a whopping 2 GB drive – the same processor and RAM as the desktop machines, and just about as fast a machine as you could buy for $2000. Apple was definitely NOT dying – hell, in two years, the stock had gone from $15 to $125. But then, the tech sector was running away – Amazon, Netscape, all manner of companies that couldn’t have existed five years earlier were now pushing the stock market to dizzying levels.
I distinctly remember sitting in my cube at work, using my time and effort during the day to seek out and find new MP3s to download – and when those ponderously long downloads started, I would run out and troubleshoot Palm III handhelds for people who couldn’t grasp that when you brought your laptop back, you had to plug the cradle in before your Palm would sync.
And the free stuff! Free dialup ISPs. Free DSL in some places. I think a couple of donks got free cars. Advertising was going to drive everything. Peapod. Kozmo. You would get stuff delivered. No more grocery shopping, hell, no more runs to the 7-Eleven! God, what I would give to have that back up and running.
I think Web 1.0 was largely a transitional phase – even things that were classed as a “pure Internet play” were largely just taking meat-world goods and services and selling them on via the Internet with no actual brick-and-mortar presence. In a world where the hottest machines were barely a third of a gigahertz and the hottest connection was ISDN, *real* pure Internet plays, things that only exist as Internet phenomena – things like social networking and digital music – weren’t really on the cards. Similarly, the next big wave of ingenuity depends on enough smartphones out there for critical mass. Don’t forget that things like Bluetooth and DSL and satellite TV and digital cable and hybrid cards all *existed* in 1999 – they just hadn’t reached anything like critical mass. Or, as a wiser man than me put it, “the future is here already, it’s just not evenly distributed.”
Which is why 1999 was when I first started thinking about moving to the thin end of the distribution. Or, put differently, the bleeding edge.