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Time Traveller TV
The Speed of Light Makes Time Travel
About
From Y2K to Y2K+9 - Over the course of a decade, dot-coms came and went, the TV world became flat and we posted life's details for all to see - The year 2000 came and went with nary a bug, but later in the decade, we swarmed to Facebook like locusts. By Omar L. Gallaga AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF On Oct. 15, 1999, the American-Statesman launched a personal technology section called Technopolis. It was a response not only to the freewheeling dot-com culture that was overtaking Austin, but the many ways that technology was starting to permeate our lives, at work, at home and at play. Ten years on, as I dig through the old paper sections that had been residing in a big plastic bin in my garage, I remember anticipation most of all. It was more than fin de siècle anxiety: The tidal wave of our Internet connectivity, the first clunky gadgets that would evolve into smart phones and the creativity in blogs and in industrial design that was taking off here made the air buzzy. We could all feel the shift happening. Something big was coming, and we were all a part of it. If we could just survive that Y2K bug. The headline on a commemorative Jan. 1, 2000, issue of the American-Statesman bore the headline, 'Howdy, 2000! Y2K bug fizzles, downtown sizzles as Austin rocks.' Spending $250 billion worldwide helped make the Y2K problem a nonissue. Sure, we've had stumbles and disappointments. Living digital in late 2009 is even more overwhelming than it was then, even with the clarity of HDTV and the help of your Facebook friends. Your cell phone still drops calls. There's still no George Jetson flying car to get you to work (we were skeptical it would ever arrive even in 1999). But we're more connected and armed for easy communication with those we care most about. And not everything we love has gone away (yet). This story is still being printed on paper. There's still new music, even if the music industry has lost half its value. And we got rid of annoying pagers. That's progress, right? Here's a look back at some of what we lost and gained in Austin tech. The dot-coms The first issue of Technopolis was 26 chunky pages of gadgetry, Web sites and gigantic ads for dot-com companies that no longer exist. The Internet was still something you experienced in front of a desktop computer and a CRT monitor, but even in 1999, we were already beginning to do our shopping online. We imagined, wrongly, that we'd soon be buying all our groceries and pet supplies on this World Wide Web. In Austin, dot-coms like living.com, garden.com, drkoop.com and RX.com seemed poised for the same kind of success that Amazon would eventually find. That didn't happen. It seems crazy today, but two Austin companies, Agillion Inc. and Netpliance Inc., spent a combined $9 million on Super Bowl ads in 2000. The high-tech happy hour movement rode on those kinds of dollars with open bars, free food and nouveau riche cubicle dwellers out for the night, modeling the latest in white T-shirt design and flip-flops. The Austin Upstarts met every Friday at Speakeasy, and Harry Pape's infamous High Tech Happy Hour was the place to network, once a month, with hundreds of fellow techies. People left steady jobs to take a chance on start-ups with goofy names. Registering a domain name and seeking venture capital to grow an ultra-niche Web company felt like buying a lottery ticket. It took the bankruptcies of many a dot-com company and Sept. 11, 2001, to snap the tech world back to reality. And it took a new generation of more modest content-driven Web sites, software service companies and social networking digital creatives in the late '00s to bring the schmoozing of the high-tech networking event back into fashion. We got connected On Sept. 11, 1999, we quoted Steve Jones, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and founder the Association of Internet Researchers, about the way the Web was going. 'There's something unnatural about being in touch with everybody all the time,' he said. 'It's a natural thing to move in and out of social relations.' We didn't know that in 10 years, 350 million people would be bonded by status messages and photos to family and friends on Facebook or that phones with constant access would tether many of us to the Internet 24 hours a day. In April 1999, I wrote about Austin bloggers who were sharing their lives with the world in online journals. A directory called Diarist.net listed about 1,100 of those journals worldwide at the time. This was before online journals became blogs and before blogging created new celebrities in politics, entertainment and even the world of mommies. Online video seemed like the future of entertainment, but we hadn't yet been through the YouTube looking glass and seen what could happen when the best and the worst of ourselves coexist on the same Web page. That year, only 39 percent of households were online. We worried about a digital divide that would keep Internet access away from the disenfranchised. It still exists, but cheap netbooks, high-speed Internet access that's now cheaper than having a home phone line and other devices - from portable game consoles to pre-paid phones - have helped narrow the gap. At South by Southwest Interactive in 2000 - before technologies like Blogger and Twitter would later capture the imagination of early adopters at the conference - a scant 45 panels were held. Hugh Forrest, who still heads the conference today, wrote in Technopolis, 'When people ask me if there's a theme to the 2000 South by Southwest Interactive Festival, my answer is short and simple: Convergence.' Gadget revolution On Feb. 27, 1999, I raved about the Palm V, a sleeker version of the homely Palm Pilot that looked less like a calculator and more like something you'd stun Klingons with on 'Star Trek.' As the audience for cell phones, laptops and flat-screen TVs widened in the '00s, forward-thinking industrial design came from firms like Frog Design, Design Edge and, of course, Apple's team of wizards. The bulbous Motorola StarTac begat the best-selling RAZR phone, and the Palm Pilot and iPod got funky together and had a baby called the iPhone. At the turn of the century, Time Warner Cable was just beginning to roll out HDTV programming in Austin. Over the next 10 years, our local stations made the big digital switch while our TVs went from big-box Trinitron to flat-screens everywhere. Beige desktop PCs and charcoal-colored laptops got thinner, got color and got wireless. Dell was a little late to the computers-as-fashion-statement party, but in recent years has gone full bore into design-centric PC manufacturing. We said goodbye to fax machines, VHS, cassette tapes, 35 mm cameras and dial-up modems as we became an upgrade culture. We went public Gary Chapman of the LBJ School of Public Affairs predicted in our Jan. 1, 2000, American-Statesman edition that our lack of privacy would get worse over the next 10 years: 'It won't be a giant catastrophe, but a steady erosion of privacy, which people are already concerned about, especially instances in which people might be denied health insurance or denied a job based either on accurate or inaccurate information.' It would have been hard to predict that Chapman was right - but that the culprit would mostly be ourselves. Tawdry Tweets, ill-chosen Facebook updates, bad blog entries and photos that perhaps should have been kept private have become part of the Google gristmill, easily searchable and never, ever erased. We've traded privacy for the immediate juiciness of TMZ.com's scoops and nosy-neighbor access to the most mundane details our friends and co-workers are willing to share. The avalanche of millions of digital photos (cheap, fast, no cost to develop) and strings of text coupled with cheap online data storage and new methods of delivering it all - mobile devices, RSS feeds, better Web browsers- has accelerated our intake of information. In October 1999, I wrote in Technopolis about 'this accelerated, caffeine-propelled time.' Quaint. I was unaware we were still downing decaf at the time. Where we're going In 10 years, I've found we still haven't gotten any better at stepping back and looking at the effect all these changes are having on us. We're too busy making those changes happen- better touch screens, faster communication. We're still in the process of abandoning physical media (first CDs, next DVDs, probably books next), and virtual worlds like 'Second Life' and 'World of Warcraft' still aren't taken very seriously beyond the world of gamers. But we've broken down a lot of walls in 10 years. For musicians and filmmakers, for people with disabilities, for families messaging each other across continents, for anyone who wants to reach out to the rest of the world and say, 'Here I am.' Things will most certainly be faster in 10 years, more complex and more digital. But many of the technologies in this story have also helped bring people closer together and created a new kind of digital culture (or, maybe, millions of new subcultures). The best part of the anticipation I felt in late 1999 is that it never really went away. In this town, something new and shiny is always right around the corner, ready to give you goosebumps and blow your mind with possibilities. I can't wait to see what comes next. ogallaga@statesman.com; 445-3672
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