Forty Years of Losing the Human Internet

It’s 1986. I am in the military overseas and work the swing shift. It’s quiet at 2 a.m. A handful of staff and enlisted personnel are keeping the mission on track. On a table is an IBM XT computer. Amber monitor, two 5.25" floppy drives, no hard drive. 64K of RAM. This is where my life in technology was born. It’s 2026. I am sitting at work looking at two laptops, both connected to a 32" widescreen, curved HD monitor via a KVM (keyboard, video, mouse). One laptop is connected to the work internet, and my personal laptop is tethered to my iPhone, using it as a data source. Thirty years in the IT field. The amount of technological change in those 30 years is hard to fathom, especially if you’ve only lived in a world that has ever known the internet. Someone born in 1800 might have seen their world transformed by steam power, railroads, and factories within a single lifetime. Still, most people experienced maybe one or two truly disruptive technologies per generation. Where earlier eras…