Do you remember life before the internet?

Technology, technology, technology…What do we do with this huge inundation of “techie” stuff?

Dating back to the 1970s, the “Space Race” and the Vietnam War kicked off a boom in new technology for consumers and commercial businesses. Consumers got cordless phones in their homes, and businesses got this new gadget called a “Fax Machine.”

I can recall when businesses got their first fax machine. That’s right…businesses got one fax machine; why would a company need more than one?!?! In the company I worked for, THE fax machine was located right next to the CEO’s executive assistant. A sign boldly declared that only the executive assistant had completed the required fax machine training course. All others were warned not to touch the fax machine.

This was the essence of high technology. It all seems pretty absurd by 2026 standards. The absurdity continued when grown adults went to the executive assistant to request a fax be sent. The real dilemma was what do you do if the executive assistant wasn’t at her desk. If we had an urgent fax to send, two of us went to the fax machine – one guy to send the fax and the other one to be the lookout for the executive assistant!

It only took one incident of someone faxing by themselves, and getting caught using the fax machine, before it became a two-man job. From about 60 feet away, the assistant said in a really loud voice, “Hey, hey, hey!!! You’re not trained to use the fax machine! Get away from it RIGHT NOW!”

I don’t know how we made the leap from a high tech fax machine to a higher tech desktop PC, to surfing the internet. Then we started living dangerously by [gasp], using a cell phone while simultaneously surfing the Net. Multitasking personified!

It’s amazing how dozens and dozens of companies went all-in as fledgling Dot Coms. In the 1990’s we thought it was pretty slick to checkout all of the area’s movie theaters playbills on Fandango. No one in the Dot Com era could fathom how the internet could be used for other services. We thought that when Fandango rolled out online ticket purchasing, it was the pinnacle of internet high technology.

Then Black Friday came along (no, not the shopping day after Thanksgiving!), which was always a bad thing. America awakened to heavily internet-leveraged companies failing left and right. This was society’s internet epiphany that Dot Coms weren’t so special in their ability to leverage the internet for profit. Plenty of other companies could do it too after some time and money was spent to onboard internet technology. This ushered in the Dot Gone era, where Dot Coms didn’t have the catbird seat anymore, and found themselves hemorrhaging money.

Eventually, internet capabilities were used across-the-board, and it didn’t take long to catch on. A common benchmark for all businesses to become part of the fabric of society and industry is when a product or service tops 50 million users. It took over 40 years to reach 50 million users for the telephone. Owning 50 million computers in the home took 10 years. It took only four years to reach 50 million homes with internet access.

In a nutshell, unless you’re someone who lived through the internet’s meteoric rise like I did, you would be hard pressed to know the how, what, where and who of the internet’s early days. The internet is so pervasive now in all aspects of life, that it’s hard to recall a time when you didn’t have the internet, and your options for accomplishing anything were limited.