I got my first desktop computer while attending secondary school, somewhere in the early-mid 90s. I must have been 11 or 12 years old.
Growing up in the south of Italy, a land not exactly akin to the modern Silicon Valley, I would still need a few years to have my first encounter with “the Internet”. That happened probably in 1997-1998, can’t remember the exact year now.
What I can distinctly remember, though, is the sound of the 56k dial-up modem connecting to the network: a melody I quickly learnt to associate with freedom and adventure (I’m not kidding).
I remember how slow the whole experience was of connecting to the World Wide Web and surfing internet pages.
And I remember my parents not liking my online venturing because our home phone line would stay busy for several hours in a row.
At the time, Google was not a thing, e-commerce stores were just experiments, “social networking” was limited to early drafts of ICQ chat-rooms and mySpace profiles, building a (poor) website required a significant time investment and (some) skills.
I used Altavista as my go-to search engine, Napster to download music I liked (it would take 30 minutes to download one song, and it was maybe illegal) and Frontpage (once upon a time a Microsoft HTML editor) to stand up my first website: “Cuninho”.
Looking back at the 1990s, we now think: “That was the perfect moment to start a venture on the internet”.
Fast-forward some 25 years later and the internet became an integral part of everybody’s time and space.
We read on the internet. We write on the internet. We sell stuff on the internet. We buy stuff on the internet. We sell stuff on the internet that we bought on the internet. We connect with friends and family on the internet. We fall in love on the internet. We watch movies and listen to music on the internet.
To summarise: we live on the internet.
If you’ve been through the last two or three decades, you might feel as if all the “internet inventable” – everything that could be invented online – has been invented already. The internet is now so pervasive, covering each and every aspect of our world, that you might be led to believe there’s no more space for innovation and advancement.
I bet though that if you take your mind back to those 1997-1998 years, chances are you didn’t see Facebook coming, you didn’t think Amazon would start by selling books and end up powering the tech infrastructure of large corporations, you could not even “imagine” that we would have 570 million blogs like the one you’re reading, built on a number of different webservices – one more user-friendly than the other.
The best time to start getting involved with the internet was 30 years ago. The second best time is now.
None of us know how the world, the physical as well as the online one, is going to look like in 2050.
It’s extremely probable that the technology that will dominate our lives 30 years from now hasn’t been invented yet.
Will it be the Web3?
Will it be the metaverse?
Will it be a combination of the two, perhaps with a sprinkle of AI on top?
Or will it be something else all together?
While we don’t know all the things that will change in the future, we have a fairly good idea of the things that, in all likelihood, will stay the same.
The human desire for connection will probably not change. The valuing of convenience will stay the same. Beauty in all shapes and forms will still be admired, valued and sought.
The future is up for grabs.
The decision to get involved, get your hands dirty, tinkering with the possibilities, lies with each one of us.
In 2050 we will look back at the 2020s and we will think: “That was the perfect moment to start a venture on the internet”.
PS: if you are curious to know how bad I was at building websites when in my teens, feel free to laugh at this antique internet relic.