THE TECH TRANSFORMATION

MY FIRST COLUMN AS A TECH EDITOR OF MW RAN IN THE AUGUST ISSUE OF 2000. THINK ABOUT WHERE THE INTERNET WAS THEN. THE CONSUMERS HAD JUST STARTED BUYING PCS FOR HOME; THE INTERNET STILL CAME FROM DIAL-UP MODEMS.

- MADHULIKA MATHUR

There were no smartphones. Instead, there were ICQ and chat rooms, and a single photo took five minutes to load. Mark Zuckerberg was still in high school and Nokia sold more mobile phones (or, as we called them, "brick phones") than anyone else.

But when I look back on the last 20 years, I see it as an era of remarkable transformation. What we consider everyday staple now, like Uber, Spotify, and WhatsApp, didn’t exist a decade ago. The confluence of technological breakthroughs in hardware, software, and connectivity, created completely new ways of connecting, consuming, and doing things.

Here are some of the most dramatic technological transformations that I have had the privilege of watching up-close, and writing about over the last 20 years.

WIRELESS INTERNET

Can you believe that the Internet is just a few decades old? But if there is one technology that revolutionised how we work, live and play, it is wireless Internet. Every major breakthrough in the last two decades — whether it’s social media, instant photo sharing, or gig economy — relied on the power of mobile data connections. And as data transmission speeds grow globally, it is likely to be similarly transformative.

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