In June 2004, BusinessWest ran an article of mine in its 20th anniversary issue. It was titled "Progress in Large Bytes" and covered two decades of advances in technology. I was executive director of the National Center for Telecommunications Technologies then. I reread it recently. Most of it held up.
The article started with the 1981 IBM PC: a 4.77 MHz Intel 8088 processor, 16 KB of memory, one or two 160 KB floppy drives, and a price a little over $1,500. It moved through Novell NetWare, Tim Berners-Lee writing the first browser code at CERN in 1990, and the April 1995 decision by the NSF to privatize NSFNet. ISPs appeared in every part of the country, and dial-up modems quickly felt slow.
One correction. The article credits VisiCalc to Harvard MBA student Dan Baker. His name is Dan Bricklin. Twenty-two years later, the record is fixed.
The article made two predictions. First, Microsoft's next operating system, code-named Longhorn, would need a broadband connection for its full feature set. Longhorn shipped as Windows Vista in 2007 and worked offline, so that one missed. Second, always-on wireless connectivity would dominate business and consumer technology, across PDAs, VoIP phones, tablets, cell phones with Web interfaces, and Game Boys. That one landed. The phone in your pocket now does all of those jobs.
The numbers moved as well. A phone with 8 GB of memory holds 524,288 times the 16 KB in the original IBM PC. Scott McNealy's line, "the network is the computer," now covers AI models that run in data centers and quantum processors that you reach through a cloud login. Neither sits on your desk.
The last sentence of my 2004 article reads, "We have only started to scratch the surface." It aged better than the Longhorn paragraph. Check back in 2048.
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