Sometimes viral videos bring back amazing memories. Recently I saw such a video from 1995 that made me take a walk down the memory lane about enormous changes the Internet has made in our lives.
It was the interview of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates with David Letterman back in the day before the DotCom bubble and certainly way before all the BitCoin mania and Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning hullaballoo of today. I have mentioned AI/ML above because Gates called the idea of an intelligent computer a very “scary thought.”
Don't worry. Gates didn't mention the Skynet.
It was just after Thanksgiving Day in 1995, when Gates was on CBS’s the “Late Show with David Letterman” on November 27 to promote his book “The Road Ahead” as well as Microsoft’s first online tool, the then-newly launched Internet Explorer.
Letterman was seemingly perplexed when he asked Gates, “What about this Internet thing? Do you know anything about that?”
“A place where people can publish information. They can have their own homepage, companies are there, the latest information. It’s wild what’s going on,” Gates replied.
In 1995, these were still early days of the Internet when only an estimated 14% of Americans browsed the web and websites mostly looked like links directory with a dull grey background.
Having witnessed generational shifts in technology fueling various innovations and disruptions, this was an interesting conversation to watch, with the benefit of hindsight, of Gates trying to explain to the then clueless America how to make sense of the Internet. Of course, two years later Alan Greenspan warned us of irrational exuberance caused by investments in early-age internet-based companies and what happened in Y2K, both financially and technologically, is now in the annals of history.
Keeping aside the aftermath of the Internet bubble, I think Millenials or Generation Y born around the 1980s have had it best. The number and scale of changes in quality of life due to the technological innovations and the resulting improvement in customer experience across industries after the invention of the Internet that Gen Y has seen in a comparatively short span of a few decades, I doubt any other past generation has experienced the same.
Born just before the fag-end of older tech, which lasted for many decades without much innovation, and entered adulthood with newer tech from “Fail Fast, Fail Often” philosophy-based startups, the Gen Y, especially in India due to concurrent overdue liberalization of socialist economy, literally grew with adoption of the Internet and got to experience both the patient times of waiting for scheduled over-the-air (OTA) broadcasts to now spoiled times of on-demand over-the-top (OTT) Connected Economy.
There was a time when even accounting for time to hail a cab was part-and-parcel of traveling but now even waiting for a few minutes before Uber or Lyft or Ola arrives feels like an eternity. Although some aspirational predictions from the 1980s such as flying cars and hoverboards by 2015 are still not a reality, but from watching Doogie Howser M.D. make his journal entries on a mysterious blue-screened personal-computer (PC) to now instantly sharing Instagram stories and TikTok videos using smartphone or from feeling amazed at the promptness of Computer voice assistant and intelligence of Soong-Type Android Data in the Star Trek series to now using own device assistant (still comparatively premature) such as Apple Siri or Google Home or Amazon Alexa or from making cash payments and using traditional manual credit card imprint machines to making biometric Aadhaar payments, we have come a long way.
With technology changing so fast, I wonder if the Gen Z (iGen or Centennials) or any other future generation would ever get to experience and, hence, appreciate long shifts, because the epoch is 2000 and using IoT connected devices is default normal for them.
I like to call the 2020s generation as the “I.G. Generation” i.e. Instant Gratification Generation for their sheer impatience for demand fulfillment. Interestingly, the generation about a century ago from 1900 to 1920 is known as the G.I. Generation.
Though it has been a great journey so far, the jury is still out on if this evolution to IG generation has been for good or bad. With great power comes great responsibility. The tech sector is going through a lot of debates ranging from privacy concerns around digital marketing to health care concerns around social media addiction.
Just think about it. How many of us make as basic an effort to remember our family and friends' phone numbers anymore? Ease of living powered by artificial intelligence should not come at the cost of our human intelligence.
Coming back to the nostalgic interview. So, what were Letterman’s parting thoughts about the Internet? “It is too bad there is no money in [computers and the Internet],” he said to his billionaire guest.
Boy, was Letterman wrong!
Would love to know your thoughts. What do you think? Are we better off now than before? Let me know in the comments section below…
This is a republished copy of my popular LinkedIn Pulse article “Internet Inside: Our evolution to the Instant Gratification (I.G.) Generation” and Medium story “Internet Inside: Our evolution to the Instant Gratification (I.G.) Generation”.
It was the interview of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates with David Letterman back in the day before the DotCom bubble and certainly way before all the BitCoin mania and Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning hullaballoo of today. I have mentioned AI/ML above because Gates called the idea of an intelligent computer a very “scary thought.”
Don't worry. Gates didn't mention the Skynet.
Letterman was seemingly perplexed when he asked Gates, “What about this Internet thing? Do you know anything about that?”
“A place where people can publish information. They can have their own homepage, companies are there, the latest information. It’s wild what’s going on,” Gates replied.
In 1995, these were still early days of the Internet when only an estimated 14% of Americans browsed the web and websites mostly looked like links directory with a dull grey background.
Having witnessed generational shifts in technology fueling various innovations and disruptions, this was an interesting conversation to watch, with the benefit of hindsight, of Gates trying to explain to the then clueless America how to make sense of the Internet. Of course, two years later Alan Greenspan warned us of irrational exuberance caused by investments in early-age internet-based companies and what happened in Y2K, both financially and technologically, is now in the annals of history.
Born just before the fag-end of older tech, which lasted for many decades without much innovation, and entered adulthood with newer tech from “Fail Fast, Fail Often” philosophy-based startups, the Gen Y, especially in India due to concurrent overdue liberalization of socialist economy, literally grew with adoption of the Internet and got to experience both the patient times of waiting for scheduled over-the-air (OTA) broadcasts to now spoiled times of on-demand over-the-top (OTT) Connected Economy.
There was a time when even accounting for time to hail a cab was part-and-parcel of traveling but now even waiting for a few minutes before Uber or Lyft or Ola arrives feels like an eternity. Although some aspirational predictions from the 1980s such as flying cars and hoverboards by 2015 are still not a reality, but from watching Doogie Howser M.D. make his journal entries on a mysterious blue-screened personal-computer (PC) to now instantly sharing Instagram stories and TikTok videos using smartphone or from feeling amazed at the promptness of Computer voice assistant and intelligence of Soong-Type Android Data in the Star Trek series to now using own device assistant (still comparatively premature) such as Apple Siri or Google Home or Amazon Alexa or from making cash payments and using traditional manual credit card imprint machines to making biometric Aadhaar payments, we have come a long way.
With technology changing so fast, I wonder if the Gen Z (iGen or Centennials) or any other future generation would ever get to experience and, hence, appreciate long shifts, because the epoch is 2000 and using IoT connected devices is default normal for them.
I like to call the 2020s generation as the “I.G. Generation” i.e. Instant Gratification Generation for their sheer impatience for demand fulfillment. Interestingly, the generation about a century ago from 1900 to 1920 is known as the G.I. Generation.
Though it has been a great journey so far, the jury is still out on if this evolution to IG generation has been for good or bad. With great power comes great responsibility. The tech sector is going through a lot of debates ranging from privacy concerns around digital marketing to health care concerns around social media addiction.
Just think about it. How many of us make as basic an effort to remember our family and friends' phone numbers anymore? Ease of living powered by artificial intelligence should not come at the cost of our human intelligence.
Coming back to the nostalgic interview. So, what were Letterman’s parting thoughts about the Internet? “It is too bad there is no money in [computers and the Internet],” he said to his billionaire guest.
Boy, was Letterman wrong!
Would love to know your thoughts. What do you think? Are we better off now than before? Let me know in the comments section below…
This is a republished copy of my popular LinkedIn Pulse article “Internet Inside: Our evolution to the Instant Gratification (I.G.) Generation” and Medium story “Internet Inside: Our evolution to the Instant Gratification (I.G.) Generation”.
