What was technology like 20 years ago

In if you wanted to "surf" the internet at home, you had to chain yourself to a network cable like it was an extension cord.

In , Wi-Fi was invented and released for consumer use. With a router and a dongle for our laptop, we could unplug from the network cable and roam the house or office and remain online.

Over the years, Wi-Fi's gotten progressively faster and found its way into computers, mobile devices and even cars. Wi-Fi is so essential to our personal and professional lives today that it's almost unheard of to be in a home or public place that doesn't have it. The internet of things allows consumer devices to connect and share information without human interaction. Wi-Fi hasn't just allowed us to check email or escape boredom at the in-laws, it also made possible a ton of consumer devices that connect and share information without human interaction, creating a system called the internet of things.

The term was coined in , but the idea didn't start to take off with consumers until the past decade. Today, there are tens of billions of internet-connected devices around the globe that allow us to perform smart home tasks such as turning on our lights, checking who's at our front door and getting an alert when we're out of milk.

It also has industrial applications, such as in health care and management of municipal services. For many consumers, the heart of the smart home is a voice assistant such as Amazon's Alexa , Google's Assistant and Apple's Siri. In addition to being a prerequisite for controlling devices in your home, their connected speakers will tell you the weather, read you the news and play music from various streaming services, among thousands of other "skills.

There were more than 3. But they also present a privacy headache, since the devices are essentially internet-connected microphones that transmit your conversations to servers at Amazon, Google or Apple. All three companies have admitted to using human contractors to listen to select conversations from the voice assistants in an effort to improve their software's accuracy. Another wireless communication technology that has proven indispensable is Bluetooth, a radio link that connects devices over short distances.

Introduced to consumers in , Bluetooth was built for connecting a mobile phone to a hands-free headset, allowing you to carry on conversations while keeping your hands available for other uses, such as driving a car.

Bluetooth has since expanded to link devices like earbuds, earphones, portable wireless speakers and hearing aids to audio sources like phones, PCs, stereo receivers and even cars.

Fitness trackers use Bluetooth to stream data to mobile phones, and PCs can connect wirelessly to keyboards and mice. Between and , the number of Bluetooth-enabled devices in the world nearly tripped to 10 billion.

Today, Bluetooth is being employed in the smart home for uses such as unlocking door locks and beaming audio to lightbulbs with built-in speakers. The virtual private network, essentially an encrypted tunnel for transferring data on the internet, has proven invaluable for both businesses and individuals. Developed in , the technology initially was used almost exclusively by businesses so their remote employees could securely access the company's intranet.

VPN use has grown in popularity since then, with about a quarter of internet users using a VPN in Today, other popular uses for VPNs include hiding online activity, bypassing internet censorship in countries without a free internet and avoiding geography-based restrictions on streaming services.

Bitcoin is the digital cryptocurrency that racked up headlines with its meteoric rise in value a few years back and then its equally breathtaking decline, and it's another technology made popular by anonymity. The decentralized currency incorporates technology, currency, math, economics and social dynamics.

And it's anonymous; instead of using names, tax IDs or Social Security numbers, bitcoin connects buyers and sellers through encryption keys.

Computers running special software -- the "miners" -- inscribe transactions in a vast digital ledger. These blocks are known, collectively, as the "blockchain. Perhaps bigger than bitcoin is blockchain, the encryption technology behind the cryptocurrency.

Because blockchains work as a secure digital ledger, a bumper crop of startups hope to bring it to voting , lotteries , ID cards and identity verification , graphics rendering , welfare payments , job hunting and insurance payments.

It's potentially a very big deal. Entertainment has become a whole lot more portable in the past quarter century, in large part due to the introduction of the MP3 and MP4 compression technologies. Research into high-quality, low-bit-rate coding began in the s. The idea was to compress audio into a digital file with little or no loss of audio quality.

By , consumers had the Pentium microprocessor, which made IBM computers faster and able to multi-task much more. Computer games were getting more popular. Storage space was limited, though. According to Computer History , '94 saw the release of the Iomga Zip Disk -- a device that stored up to MB on a cartridge about the size of a 3.

Believe it or not, mobile phones have existed since before World War II -- though they were more accurately a pound walkie talkie that used AM radio signals. WonderHowTo points out versions of the "brickphone" that Zack Morris used on "Saved by the Bell" were available as far back as the '70s, and Motorola introduced a "flip phone" that could fit in your pocket in In '94, the closest thing to a smartphone was the IBM Simon -- the cell phone, featured in "The Net," also worked as a PDA personal data assistant with a calendar, address book, calculator, email and a keyboard.

Car phones, such as Motorola's Bag Phone , were still popular but the wireless market was expanding quickly as 2G networks grew. Note to readers: if you purchase something through one of our affiliate links we may earn a commission. All rights reserved About Us. The first blogging sites became popular in the late 90s starting a social media sensation that continues on to this day.

Early blogging sites included Blogger and LiveJournal. MySpace was launched in to become one of the first ever worldwide social media sites, and was popular among budding musicians as a place to upload and share their tracks. Facebook was launched in , and by the end of the year, it had 1,, monthly active users. Today, we have multiple social media platforms that all fit different social networking niches, such as Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, LinkedIn and many more.

The first widely used instant messaging platform was MSN Messenger, which was popular with noughties teenagers as a way to connect with school friends after classes were over for the day. It started as a text messenger, but later added photo sharing, video calls and games. In it had as many as million users but was closed down in when Microsoft replaced it with recently purchased Skype.

This meant that you could only use either the phone line or the internet at one time, sharply increasing the number of arguments in households with teenagers! Dial-up would take up to a minute to connect and was characterised by a series of musical beeps, screeches and boings as the modem connected. To put this into context — a 6MB image would take 15 minutes to download on dial-up, but only 2 seconds today.

Today, we are able to access the internet completely wirelessly, from wherever we are. On our mobile phone networks we also have internet access via 4G, and are slowly being introduced to 5G, which will only make our access to the internet even faster. The number of people who have access to an internet connection has also hugely increased in 20 years.

There is a stark contrast between the data storage of 20 years ago, the storage available now. At the beginning of the millennium, USB s had just been invented, which held around 8MB — enough for two ebooks or a 90 second low-resolution video.

Nowadays, we have USB-C drives , that can carry significantly more information compared to USB drives and offer double the transfer speed, all whilst gradually getting smaller in size.

SD Secure Digital cards are also commonplace today, they come in a variety of different sizes to suit your different devices, from cards around the size of a stamp to ones the size of your fingernail!

Amazon, Yahoo! And Mosaic Communications later known as Netscape were in the beginning stages. Netscape Navigator was the first commercial web browser launched then.

Two years after came Microsoft Internet Explorer. Then ten years after came the Mozilla Firefox. Internet was mostly used by scientists and clients then. But computers used floppy disks then.

And it required telephones to literally dial a connection. Sites had to give internet users instructions since no one knew what they were doing.