How technology made it from Novelty to Mainstream

I remember (what I consider) the early days of the Internet. It was the mid-90s and I was an undergraduate at the local university. It was amazing that you could connect from one terminal to its neighbour, or across the lab, or even crazier to a room down the hallway. In one of my projects, I could dial in via modem from home and send commands to my workstation – and the lab technician wasn’t aware of this. It was literally hard work to get connected and required a level of technical knowledge and UNIX command-line/scripting wizardry.

Several years later and telcos were selling dial-up plans and ADSL connections which promised on-demand Internet access. Limited by time, they also they tied up your line in case you needed to make a call. Remember talking on the phone and having a modem pick up the other line and start issuing DTMF dial codes? “Hey! I’m on the phone!” which got a response “I need to download my email, and you’ve been talking for the last 3 hours! Hang up now!”

Fast forward to 2022 and the Internet is literally all around us. The days of pulling network cables all over meeting room tables and swapping with your colleagues just to send an email is not something the current generation can imagine. “What is a network cable? Isn’t the Internet always in the air?”

In just over two decades, specialised networking technology has gone from research labs to kids’ playtime! Something published in academic papers is now placed on food court tables to distract babies (and adults) as they eat. With IoT, everything from cars, lightbulbs and microsensors talk to each other using TCP/IP without even telling us. They might be collaborating to overtake humanity, starting with those babies.

The only question is, what comes next?