A lot happens in a decade, don’t you know.
Ten years ago I was fresh out of school and had just started college. I was studying Information Technology and fully expected to work in computing once I had left college, gone to uni, etc. I ended up with a History degree. Funny how life turns out.
Ten years ago I had a VCR, and now I’ve got a Blu-ray player. Poor DVD.
Ten years ago I had a Ericsson mobile phone that couldn’t send text messages. Now I’ve got an iPhone 3G which can handle augmented reality.
Ten years ago I had one PC, and it was a bulky one. It had a CRT monitor, a 333MHz Intel Celeron processor, 64MB RAM and a 4GB hard disk. I thought it was awesome. Now I have an Apple MacBook with a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2,048MB RAM and a 250GB hard disk. I also have a PC which I built a few months ago that has a 24″ LCD monitor, an AMD Athlon 64 X2 7750 2.7GHz processor, 4,096MB RAM and a 250GB hard disk. Oh and an old semi-retired PC with a 19″ LCD monitor, 2.4GHz AMD Athlon processor, 2,048MB RAM, a 120GB hard disk and a 160GB hard disk. Oh and a Sony Playstation 3 with a 250GB hard disk, oh and my iPhone has a 8GB solid state drive (did solid state drives even exist in 1999?), and countless flash drives and SD memory cards.
Ten years ago I had cable. Now I have Sky+ and cannot quite imagine life without being able to pause live TV.
Ten years ago my MP3 collection consisted of about 40 files. Now I have 3,849 files that would take me just over 15 days to listen to without a break.
Ten years ago I had 56k dialup internet. Now I have 8MB broadband which is now considered slow.
Ten years ago I didn’t have a digital camera. We had one at school, but it was huge and photos were saved to a 1.44MB disk inserted into the side of it. Now I have a Nikon D40 digital SLR camera that takes SD cards, and currently has a 2GB SD card in it.
Ten years ago I was running Windows 98 on my PC. Now I’m running Windows Vista and Ubuntu on my PC and Mac OS X Snow Leopard on my Mac. Ubuntu didn’t even exist ten years ago. Nor did OS X.
Ten years ago few people outside the US had heard of George W. Bush. Few people outside the UK had heard of Tony Blair. Few people anywhere had heard of Osama Bin Laden.
Ten years ago if a newsreader mentioned “a billion dollars” you’d have gasped at such a large figure. Now “a trillion dollars” barely raises eyebrows.
Ten years ago “credit crunch” would have sounded like a breakfast cereal. Now it’s fucked the world over.
Not everything changes, though. Ten years ago Liverpool fans were hoping and waiting to finally win the Premier League. Now they’re still hoping and waiting.
