30 Years in Tech: What an Amazing Progress!
I just finished a nice ride on my racing bike, and without much thought automatically opened Polar Flow on my cell phone and started to sync the ride data stored on my bike computer. After a little while the ‘ping’ from Strava notified me that my ride was now available to analyze and share. And only then did I realize what just happened is nothing short of miraculous.
We usually take for granted what an extraordinary progress the tech (and sports) world has made in the last 30 years. Let’s go back to 1991 when telephones were fixed, wall mounted devices with cables. In my student house we had to write down the number of ‘ticks’ after each call in order to properly split the bill at the end of the month. Internet? Only for the brave pioneers willing to suffer painfully slow modem speeds and text based interfaces. Heart rate monitors? In a hospital maybe, but surely not on your wrist or chest, connected via bluetooth. We couldn’t even imagine then that only a few decades later our GPS enabled smart watches would flawlessly record and map our activities, or that all information recorded during our runs and rides could be wirelessly transmitted and shared through various apps using REST api’s. Back then I could certainly not imagine being able to sit outside and type this on a tablet device with a magnetically connected keyboard. If it wasn’t already aptly named I wouldn’t hesitate in calling it ‘magic’ myself.
In my day job I frequently tell people that while technology has changed considerably, the problems we’re trying to solve are more or less the same as they were 30 years ago. Though that might hold some truth, it’s undeniable that the progress technology has made is truly remarkable. At the same time we keep complaining about things that don’t work as we’d like them to, or don’t work fast enough. Nevertheless, I think we should all sometimes pause and appreciate the work of the brilliant engineers who made our lives so much richer, easier, and more comfortable.
