I've been online personally since 1979, and through school terminals since about 1973 (anyone out there remember playing lunar landing games on the university timesharing systems?).
My first Apple computer used a *cassette tape recorder* to store data, because Steve Wozniak hadn't yet designed the controller software for Apple's first floppy disk drive.
My first external connections were through a Hayes Micromodem, which ran at the blistering speed of up to 300 bits per second (way faster than the previous standard of 110 bps.)
While few of you young 'uns will remember the name Hayes, for us old timers it (and the iconic casing for its product which remained the same during three orders of magnitude of exponential technological development) was almost as ubiquitous as Apple is today (although Apple itself was just one of many competitors back then).
There have been so many people for whom this answer has been a nostalgic trip down memory lane that I can't resist adding in a little Easter Egg. The following clip is what we used to hear when our Hayes modem would pick up the telephone and dial into our Internet Service Provider. The 28 seconds (which happened every time, my young grasshopper) were the sounds of the modem negotiating the speed of the connection with the other end. This sound eventually got to be so familiar, that anyone alive during that period can probably hum or whistle this from memory:
The reason for this trip down memory lane is to point out that in my particular case this exponential development of technology has been somewhat like taking a bath that starts out at exactly room temperature and slowly is brought to a boil.
I've always been pretty close to the "forefront" of technology, so for me the past 35 years have felt like a seamless continuum ...whereas for those being freshly exposed to new technology it comes across as a step function.
Back in the mid 90s, I was negotiating a deal with Lycos (one of the original big search engine portals, probably equivalent then to what Yahoo is today). I can remember with perfect clarity the rather pompous BusDev executive haughtily informing me that they had one of the world's largest data centers (think 'Apple's cloud data center in North Carolina') that stored almost EIGHT TERABYTES of data!
Today you can get an 8TB drive for $600 and carry it in your laptop bag.
The bottom line is that for me, the differences between then and now have had, perhaps counterintuitively, much less impact than they have had for an outsider ... just as I suppose the 8 terabit per second Internet2 connection that I'll have on my iPhone in a few years will seem simply a logical extension of the 100mbs broadband service I have today in my apartment.
David S. Rose, entrepreneur, angel investor, and CEO of Gust, has been described by Red Herring magazine as "patriarch of New York's Silicon Alley."
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