Member-only story
Why Doesn’t New Technology Feel Comfortable Anymore?
An ode to the senses
What, if anything, do you remember about 1999?
Endless discussions about the Millennium bug and our computers not being able to work. Or the dot-com bubble?
When I think of 1999, I think of music.
Napster — the peer-to-peer file-sharing network — changed everything. Suddenly it wasn’t necessary to buy a whole album for that one great song I heard on the radio. Now, I could use Napster to download any song I wanted.
Of course, the system wasn’t flawless. It took a long time — sometimes very long — to download a song. A phone call would disconnect me from the service and I had to start all over again. And I ran the risk of downloading a virus as well. But the service was free and provided access to an unimaginable library of music.
It was the start of a new era. And when Steve Jobs announced the iPod, it didn’t take long for me to digitize and store all my music on a virtual jukebox. Now I had access to thousands of high-quality songs wherever I went. I wasn’t forced to go out to Sam Goody or Tower Records and buy the albums of my favorite bands and manually copy the best tracks to a cassette tape or CD.
