Monday, January 21, 2019

10 Year Challenge - It Changes So Slowly

Weapons of great renown have to have a name. - Barbara Thorson (I Kill Giants)
It's surprising how little technology has changed over the past 10 years, right? A decade ago I had an iPhone 2G which I named Kauro and it was amazing because it replaced carrying my Blackberry + iPod Mini which replaced my carrying my Ericsson + Palm + Archos Jukebox. These days my carry is iPhone XS Max, which is just a bigger more powerful version of what I've had for a decade. Go back two decades and I had a USR Palm Pilot Pro with Omnisky and no way to play music.
A decade ago I had a MacBook Air (1st Gen) and that has been replaced with a iPad Pro Max. I'm not sure it's gotten lighter or I've gained portability, but the screen is so much more gorgeous today than it was then. I also definitely couldn't watch video and multi-task on that old MacBook Air, it would spin the fan to full and throttle the CPU (there were many nights I had my portable fan blowing across it full blast just hoping it would stay cool enough to run Flash Player and watch a streaming show). Go back two decades and I had wonderful tower I built with a Cyrix 6x86 that would triple boot OS/2 Warp, Win NT, and Redhat - it was named Asuka.
But even if my day-to-day electronics looks about the same, the technology I use for work must be totally different? Not so much. One decade ago (in fact, TWO decades ago) I was building server-side web applications in Java and I'm still doing the same thing. Sure raw servlets changed to Struts+JSP and changed to front-end HTML5/JS webapps with RESTful Java JSON services built on Spring. The basics are really still the same old webapps just more interactive.
What's going to be different in another 10 years? Maybe I will only have my phone and that it will "expand" into my computer with an external keyboard and monitor when context allows. For my work technology? Who knows, maybe progressive apps will be a real thing? I'm expecting the real AR advancement to be in audio and subvocalization which could be pretty cool.