Three Decades In Tech (Part 1)

About 30 years ago, I started my career in technology. My first gig was with a notebook computer manufacturer. For a kid with an electrical engineering degree who loved technology but had little interest in being an engineer, it turned out to be a great place to start. I was able to use my education at a company in an exciting emerging market that was bootstrapped, innovative, small, and agile. Throughout my time there I wore a lot of hats (some that fit and others not so much), but every experience taught me something. I thought it would be interesting to look back at what the tech landscape was like then, how technology has changed, and what the future may hold. After all, we can learn a lot from history--it really does repeat itself.

I’ll start with the general computing landscape 30-some years ago.

Way Back When

In the summer of 1991 I had just started at a 3 year old hardware company. It?recently went public through a reverse merger. Here’s a good example of how history repeats itself even if slightly disguised. A reverse merger is when you merge a public shell company into a new firm to capitalize it. Sounds like a SPAC doesn’t it? Spoiler alert--worked about as well for them as it’s working out now for firms--even after 30 years I remember what “going concern” warnings are.

The firm, with annual revenues (and at least we had some revenues) of roughly $1 million, was unbelievably? awarded a $40,000,000 contract to supply the Treasury Department with new notebook computers. In 1991, a typical notebook computer weighed 7-8 pounds and featured an Intel 386 CPU, a 1 MB of memory (yes, that’s an M) and had a 10 MB hard drive. Windows 3.0 was released a year prior to great fanfare as Microsoft finally released a serviceable GUI operating system. There was often no connectivity to speak of--local area networks were nowhere near ubiquitous, modems were a luxury, and wireless was just a green shoot. Al Gore had not yet invented the Internet.

When you needed to print something and you didn’t have your own printer, you would walk to a communal printer and either connect a cable to your notebook’s serial (slow) or parallel (fast) port, or copy the file to a floppy disk and give it to someone else to print who was hooked up to a printer.

Screens were monochrome (that means one color for those of you under 40 who have probably never seen one).? Battery life was a couple hours on a good day.

Desktop computers were actually far more common than notebook or laptop computers. While there were bag phones, it would be years before smaller cell phones and eventually smartphones came out. Interestingly enough, the Apple Newton, an early handheld computer and ancestor of the smartphone, would soon make an appearance.

Today’s World

Today, personal computers come in all shapes, sizes, operating systems, etc. and can even run virtually. While virtual desktops have been around for a long time, the pandemic greatly accelerated the adoption of them. Some organizations simply expanded an existing on prem VDI environment while others embraced cloud based VDI. The need to quickly expand or deploy a remote work solution combined with the elasticity of cloud based virtual desktops proved to be an ideal fit for businesses without VDI or hampered by the unavailability of hardware.

The Road Ahead

As far as the future, it is not hard to imagine another case of everything old becoming new again as desktops move to centralized clouds for processing, and workers merely send their keystrokes and screen refreshes from almost anywhere from almost any type of device. Just like the old days!

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