Evolution of IT From the Perspective of a (Relatively) Normal Person
Speaking about the evolution of IT cannot be subject to itself. It is necessarily related to the people and degrading of the society.
I am 47 years old. I had the luck to catch the last train of the pre-PC era and grow surrounded by evolving technology. My first computer was 8-bit. I got it from my parents on the 31st of May, 1987.
I had a great time with it. My town had a small computer club named "Čak-hak." We were using Yugoslavian-made computers "Orao" (The Eagle) based on a proprietary "operating system" with a built-in Basic interpreter. I am not sure if it was based on Motorola or Zilog processor. I still have a small notebook from that time, as we had meetings every Friday at 6 PM. I was the youngest there as I started visiting the club in 1983.
IT was about having fun, writing code, doing something with sprites, and exchanging knowledge and experience.
As time passed by, we grew up, and IT evolved more. Not much, but it was clear it was becoming. We moved to 16-bit computers, again having fun, but that was the first time I noticed antagonism between people, almost like we had soccer/football supporters; Atari, Commodore, Apple, and IBM.
I remember I had an Apple Macintosh, Atari TT, and Schneider 1512. It was fun before almost a fight every Friday we had to watch the arguing. Not too much fun. First, BBS' (Bulletin Board Systems) appeared. I remember my old 2400-bits (or 2400 bauds then) Zyxel with many flashing LE diodes.
Still, it was fun.
I exactly remember the day when Microsoft Windows 95 appeared. We also had networks then (does someone remembers Novell?) and some Internet. The next day I bought Macintosh II FX. I cannot say I did not like W95. I did, but everything was wrong with them.
It was not fun anymore. I grew up and became a mathematician. I am trying to remember why and how I decided to pursue an IT career, but I was certified MCSE in 199in 9.
Internet became almost normal (slow by today's standards, good enough for then). Windows NT 4 evolved into Windows 2000. MacOS was in version 8 or 9; I only remember a little.
It is 2023. I built my first document and content management system in 1999. Data was stored on 5.25 magnetoptical disks in autoloaders. We are still talking about digitalization these days, don’t we?
When things went wrong? How something that was supposed to be “information superhighway” became “false information, duckface collection, a shitload of unuseful whatever superhighway”?
The problem is in people. I cannot use the term “users.” Everyone can access the Internet and social networks and create content in primary, non-complex forms like photos or short videos. You don’t have to use your brain to use the Internet. You click and share. It is that simple.
Evolving of technology was not followed by the development of people.
Sometime in the late 2000s, I was filled up with technology. I knew computers should be applied to something else. If we take away time spent in different corporate software, almost 99 percent of user time was on various social networks. Waste of time. Wreckage of the brain. Waste of intellectual power.
During that time, I left my IT career, albeit certified for anything you cinimagine, from Cisco, HP, SAP, IBM, OpenText, etc. I installed SharePoint on the enterprise level before it had the name SharePoint. It was called Tahoe. It was the first enterprise-level SharePoint installation. Globally. I remember I was leaving my office on 9/11 and thought that security was watching an action movie. :(
I made the right choice. I still like computers. I like the software. I own a small company dealing with mathematical models for predictive analytics (no, we don’t use any GPT yet; we are more intelligent than that). Daily I am using expensive software solely as a tool. I became agnostic about the technology. I don’t know what processors I have on my laptops (I use four). I am unsure how big my solid-state drives are; everything is in the cloud. I got terabytes of storage with a vast Internet connection. I don’t care about operating systems.
What do I care about? Security first. Two-factor authentication. I have a dislocated backup.
Do I have fun? Yes, I love my job.
What do I dislike? Excel pushers, people filling forms with data no one will ever use or read. Their work is to pretend to they are working.
My daughter is eight. She asked me the other day if she could take one of my Micro Bit boards. Of course, dear, do you need help?
No, she answered.
Thirty minutes later, she came back from her room. Hey, Dad, I want to show you something. What, dear?
She made a super simple calculator using Micro Bit. I was not aware she was even able to do that.
I should mention one thing. I am having fun with IT again.
In the last three or four years, I bought almost any kind of Micro Bit, Arduinos, Raspberry, and an entire large box of different development boards, sensors, servo motors, switches, and whatever you can find for these small platforms.
My little one is having fun with computers. She cannot use social networks, and the content she can access online is strictly limited.
She is having fun with IT in a different way than ordinary people. She is having fun, just like I did.
