In the mid 1990’s, you would be hard-pressed to avoid being inundated with Compact Discs (CDs) with software for installing America On-Line (AOL) to your Windows 95 PC. These CDs were seemingly in every magazine, gas station, grocery store and shopping mall. Due to the constraints of RJ-11 terminated wiring used for “land-line telephone” and “fax machine” connections, consumers and businesses were limited to the maximum theoretical bandwidth of 24Mbps, but only able to achieve about 0.054 Mbps (54kHz) with the available modems of the era usually peaking at 56.6k advertised limits. Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) networks are often what these these older copper wiring networks are referred to as by the Communications Industries over 30 years later, but consider for a moment what life must have in like in a time of The World where these systems were used in a brand new and cutting edge way that they were not originally designed for.
What many people born after 1990 may not realize, is there was a time where not everyone owned an electronic device capable of transmitting user-created digital information. The common households of developed countries in the 1980’s had a telephone line with service akin to the modern “cable internet” that was paid monthly to corporations like American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T), “Ma Bell“, Microwave Communications, Incorporated (MCI), General Telephone & Electronics Corporation (GTE) and other corporate fossils. These companies were in the business of connecting physical wires all over Earth for the purposes of facilitating communication between human beings. The concept of transmitting information (“data”) was conceived very early in communications technology, such as the first patent for a “Fax Machine” was filed in the 1840’s, but later improved and adapted for use over “POTS networks“. Many households in the early 1990s were still devoid of a computer, with the arguable exceptions of Video Game devices like a Sega Genesis or a Nintendo Game Boy; No consumer gaming consoles from that era had capabilities for internet connectivity.
In the beginning of “The Internet”, the “World Wide Web” or the “Super Information Highway”, each term often colloquially used interchangeably though having different origin, the limitations were that of the physics to the pre-existing infrastructure that property owners had already adopted. Imagination was never the limitation. The sky was the limit for what you might want to use the internet for. The intentions and opinions of an individual person were no longer confined to public speaking or physical media publication. One no longer had to use a megaphone and shout into it to reach more than a few hundred peoples ears and eyes. The ideas and problems of the world were now being shared liberally. Art and self-expression was influenced and inspired though “digital mediums” like GeoCities and eventually DeviantART. The prolific spread of old knowledge and ideas being shared to new regions and minds has had immense benefits, though there were also some unintended consequences along the way. Napster was used as one of the first file sharing services which was most often used to share music in the form of mp3 files, but no royalties or financial upside for music distributors. The traditional “record stores” were no longer the go-to place for unique and obscure songs or different versions of familiar tunes. Suddenly, voters could learn about downstream affects to other parts of their countries the candidates they did or did not help get elected helped generate. Libraries were no longer a required trip to make for middle-school book reports, or if they were, it was because the libraries often had publicly accessible computers with decent internet connections. These disruptive changes did not all happen over night, but when each of them did happen, they seemed to be relatively quickly and in a series. In many ways, this was the start of a trend that has yet to end over 30 years later.
These somewhat humble and questionable beginnings paved the way for modern services and utilities like Social Media, Music and Video Streaming Platforms and Personalized Messaging Applications. These “creative ideas” sparked public interest for an experience that was previous unimagined or unrealized. New innovations were inspired for commercially viable use cases, like WiFi, Bluetooth, Satellite and new variants of Radio Frequencies. As the portable energy storage in rechargeable battery technology improved, so did the performance and efficiencies of CPUs, GPUs, RAM modules and visual displays, all of which paved the way for “cell phones” that ultimately became “smart phones” of today. The intersectionality of influence for the modern technological mainstays during the early years of Commercial Internet Services is vast and profound.
So… what happened?… What stifled all of the new ideas and creativity? Aside from advancements in Blockchain Technology and Artificial Intelligence, what has been inspiring the human mind since the late 2000s? The hopes and aspirations of CoolElectricity.com are fairly simple: Provide honest and genuine observations for technological innovations, and the products and services it spawns.
Thanks for letting us ride shotgun for awhile on your journey. We hope to take another ride with you again, soon.