An hour ago I finished watching all ten seasons of the television series Friends. Every night I’d fire up Netflix to see the latest shenanigans and relive that time in my life. The characters on the show were around my age at the same time so the show has some personal nostalgia.
It wasn’t until the third season that I realized none of the characters carried cell phones or had personal computers. There was no talk of internet or texting and everyone just hung out, which I guess was the premise of the show. From 1994 to 2004 was an interesting ten years because technology use grew exponentially.
Getting in touch with someone in the early 90’s meant calling them on their land line. Cell phones existed but they were literally the size of a brick and extremely expensive. Sometimes you’d luck out and someone would have a pager but that could also have been a sign the person was a drug dealer.
If you’re older than 30 you may remember photo developing services. In my house we used to mail the rolls of film to the developer. When they came in my family would sit around the table sorting them and tearing up the ones that didn’t come out good.
In my circle of friends I was one of two who owned a computer. Computers weren’t cheap and took a fair amount of patience to use. Computers were one of those things that had few applications outside of business and word processing.
Connecting to the web meant making sure everyone was off the phone and call waiting was disengaged. Then there was the horrible audible preamble of the modem as it negotiated the connection. Downloading a picture meant almost a minute of watching lines populate the computer screen.
Ten years brought us from limited technology to everyone owning a cell phone and a computer. We went through a tech boom between the late 90′ and early 00’s. Technology changed so rapidly it felt like we barely learned how to use a technology before it was replaced.
Cell phones rapidly started replacing land lines in the late 90’s and it was nothing to see someone walking down the street talking on a phone. Technology allowed smaller devices and with the advent of cell phone towers everywhere losing a connection became less of an issue.
Film use started slowing down rapidly once cell phones came equipped with cameras. Though not as good as a traditional camera, cell phone cameras were more convenient. At the start of the millennium just about every phone had a camera.
Computers started to become much more popular in the late 90’s and it was no longer uncommon to see a computer in someone’s house. Processor speeds made drastic advances in the early 00’s and kept rising rapidly until multi core processors were developed.
Dialup internet was replaced by high speed, always-on technology in the late 90’s. My neighbor was the first person I knew to have cable internet wired to their house. I remember being extremely jealous of their high speed connection.
The premise of the show Friends was a group of people hanging out and doing stuff. Even in their early 30’s they were six people who kept in touch. We don’t have that today because there’s no need. We can share our pictures and memories from our phones and don’t need to tolerate other people being in the same room as us.
(Jeromy Patriquin is the President of Laptop & Computer Repair, Inc. located at 509 Main St. in Gardner. You can call him at (978) 919-8059 or visit www.LocalComputerWiz.com.)