Justin Buist

Every now and again technology amazes me when I reflect on the past.

The other night I fired up my Xbox 360 to play some Halo 3 and got hit with a message that I needed to upgrade my software. I figured it was just another patch to prevent cheating.

With the patch installed I noticed that the interface was different and poked around. There was a new “NetFlix” channel on there. I downloaded that, fired it up, and viola — I can now stream any film NetFlix has in their “instant viewing” category right to my TV via the Xbox. Awesome. Now I can watch The A-Team on demand.

What got me is I couldn’t help but reflect upon the progression of technology that got us to this point. Back in the early ’80’s a VHS based VCR must have still been about $200 bucks and people bought them. Maybe it was $300. I don’t know. What I do know is that it was affordable but not a common expenditure. My father loves movies, and we had one in the early 80’s, but they were uncommon enough he had to drive a good 30 minutes to just rent a video at the time. We actually had a Betamax and a VHS system, though I don’t recall ever watching anything on the Betamax one.

Anyway, that’s not the point.

Roll forward to 1993 when I finally get online with a 2400 baud modem. At the time the only “pictures” you’d see were text in nature. ANSI art was as good as it got unless you wanted to wait 8 minutes for a proper JPEG image to download. Around 1996 I remember a guy pontificating, with absolute certainty, that you’d see JPEG and GIF images coming down the pipe just like we were seeing ANSI art. The bandwidth would be there.

Thought the dude was a loon. Turns out he was right.

Now, you have to remember that around 1994 to 1996 people were dialing up with modems in the 2400-14,400 baud range. At the low end we were kicking around 250 bytes per second, and at the high end 1400 bytes per second. The ISPs that we dial in to to get internet access only had 56k connections to their uplink. They were spreading that 56k connection around to the 3-4 guys that were actually on “the internet” at the time, and we were happy with it.

And then we all rolled around to 28.8k modems, and finally 56k modems, and then the masses picked up on it. In 2000 DSL lines capable of 512k or 768k started hitting. Cable services were offering up 388k and 768k services.

This shit was off the fucking hook for us old timers! I’ve come to terms with it, but I’m still blown away at times when I get a really good connection on my 6meg home connection. Hell, I worked on systems where 6meg wasn’t possible between two machines sitting 8 feet from one another.

Today I can fire up my Xbox, a $300 device which when weighed against inflation is probably cheaper than a VHS system back in the early ’80’s, use my $60/month internet connection that I use for work, and combine that with a $4.99/month NetFlix fee to watch everything in their “instant view” library.

And now we can watch movies our our TV cheaper than ever before and it only takes 30 seconds to make it happen.

So, what’s next?