Yeah, it's pretty bizarre, just thinking back to what things were like back then and how they were different in various ways from now. For whatever reason, I can clearly picture "the '70s" and "the '80s" and "the '90s" -- and even sub-sets of them (I think of the "early '70s" as very distinct from "late '70s/early '80s" and that as distinct from "late '80s") -- but everything else I tend to cluster together as "post-2000." I can form an easy mental image of cliches from the '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s, but what are the '00s?
I think it "helped" that I had certain "time landmark" points in 1980 (as it was my first "new decade," and I remember a big deal being made about it in the various shows and publications I followed as a kid, so I was very conscious that it was a "new decade"), and then again in 1990 (I started college in the 1989/1990 semester, so the new decade marked a new sort of life for me), and then of course with 2000 (thanks to the Y2K scare and all the hype about a new millennium). Compared to all that, the break between '09 and '10 didn't seem so distinct.
Going back circa 2000 or so: I was working at the Evil Corporation (That Shall Not Be Named Due to Scary Legal Papers I Had to Sign When They Let Me Go Promising Not To Talk Ill of Them in Public) around the turn of the decade/century/millennium, precisely because I was hired on in relation to the big Y2K scare. (I.e., their banking software stored years in FOUR digits, whereas so many banking programs only stored TWO, so they got a lot of business in banking software conversions in the ensuing panic with 2000 looming.) Then, not that long after 9/11, they let me go, and around 2002 or 2003 is when I started working part-time at ITG.
And back then? Well, around that time, there was THE INTERNET more-or-less as we'd know it now, but I don't think there was casual browsing of streaming online video content. I seem to remember that around 1999-2000 or so, Flash videos were still a thing, where you'd have to sit and wait for some Flash cartoon to load for several minutes, and then watch a simple cartoon that would only last for seconds. Badger-badger-badger-badger (mushroom, mushroom), et al., came out in 2003. (I just checked, and yeah, it was right around that time.)
Netflix existed back then ... as a DVD distribution system; it didn't start streaming until 2008.
At ITG, when we showed concepts to focus groups, we had artists drawing things on pen and paper, and I had to photocopy them, cut them out, and TAPE them onto printed documents, copy, then distribute for groups. It wasn't until around 2004 (when we moved to our new office, and I got a networked scanner and printer combo) that my preferred practice of SCANNING the artwork, then just inserting it as an inline image in a Microsoft Word document (with all the text) and PRINTING it (no tape or white-out required!) became standard practice.
Our initial AV system in the new location circa 2004 included a DVD player in the kitchen for playing music (primarily before the session would start, while people were milling around), and occasionally video snippets (as part of "creative excursions," where we'd show a clip of some movie that was remotely related to the topic at hand and encourage the participants to use that as "creative stimulus" to brainstorm on ideas related to the topic).
iTunes was a new and shiny thing. I think it was in 2004 that we got some company iPods. Fragile little things, though. They didn't last long.
Oh yeah. D&D edition 3.5 came out in 2003. That was a new and shiny thing as well! Valve's "Steam" online platform launched in 2003, but at the time it was only used for Valve's own programs, such as Counter-Strike; third-party games wouldn't be available on Steam until "Rag Doll Kung Fu" in 2005. World of Warcraft came out in 2004. (Okay, so my particular viewpoint of what constitutes the development of the internet is a little bit FOCUSED on particular game touch-points. ;) )
I honestly can't remember when I first got a cell phone, but I think it was sometime in the '00s. The prevalence of cell phones would have to be one of the major touch-points for impacting when a story is set in the '00s, I think. iPhone came out in 2007. My boss at ITG was using a Blackberry circa 2004-2006 or so.
I'm hazy on the details, but I THINK that 2008 was around the time that I was wrapping up my involvement in the Warcraft fandom, finally experimenting with making artwork entirely digitally (Wacom tablet, Photoshop, and Illustrator), and then having my hey-day with assorted Savage Worlds projects. Before that point, I had experimented with doing digital artwork for coloring, but it required a pretty high-end computer to be able to handle the huge memory requirements of large-resolution layered images. Oh, and the FILE SIZES!
Hmm. What happened in 2010 in my little gamer-focused life? Well, there was Fallout: New Vegas, aha! My first introduction to the Fallout universe. ;) (I'd heard of it before, as Prester_Scott was quite a fan of the original Fallout games, but it had been presented as something grim and gritty that he thought I would have no particular interest in, so I never tried them.) According to one snippet I found, even though YouTube had been around since 2005, it wasn't until around 2010 that it became quite the big phenomenon that it is now, partly thanks to improved infrastructure/internet speeds overall.
Flash drives (AKA thumb drives, key drives, USB drives, flash sticks, memory sticks, and so on and so forth) I think might have been available in the '00s, but I think circa 2010 or so, memory capacity was still measured in MB -- certainly not GB or TB.
That kind of makes me wish I could backtrack and see the progression of commonly-available hard drive sizes over the '00s. I vaguely remember being awfully impressed when I went to Best Buy and saw a hard drive for *1 TB* being available. Now I understand that there are FLASH DRIVES that can store 1 TB?! Maybe I should get one of THOSE to do my backups before I go on a trip. And somewhere along the way, laptops started and then stopped having integral CD/DVD drives and burners, but I'm not sure of the particular range of time when that would have been a "thing."
Hard drive sizes definitely have a huge impact on how we treat digital content (casually storing them, or deleting them immediately after watching, being able to store songs, or entire movies, or just snippets), and would be relevant to how people would treat "fragments" as per the video snippets from that story.
I've got a few dead Iomega external hard drives sitting around -- as I used them to try to back up my laptop and PC contents, and then the things would FAIL on me, and I had various work files and artwork and such on those drives that I think I might not have anywhere else. If only I could recover it all ... but now I don't even remember what might be on there. Now I'm wondering if the concept of an "external hard drive for backups" might be obsolete, even discounting the idea of storing things "on the cloud."
no subject
I think it "helped" that I had certain "time landmark" points in 1980 (as it was my first "new decade," and I remember a big deal being made about it in the various shows and publications I followed as a kid, so I was very conscious that it was a "new decade"), and then again in 1990 (I started college in the 1989/1990 semester, so the new decade marked a new sort of life for me), and then of course with 2000 (thanks to the Y2K scare and all the hype about a new millennium). Compared to all that, the break between '09 and '10 didn't seem so distinct.
Going back circa 2000 or so: I was working at the Evil Corporation (That Shall Not Be Named Due to Scary Legal Papers I Had to Sign When They Let Me Go Promising Not To Talk Ill of Them in Public) around the turn of the decade/century/millennium, precisely because I was hired on in relation to the big Y2K scare. (I.e., their banking software stored years in FOUR digits, whereas so many banking programs only stored TWO, so they got a lot of business in banking software conversions in the ensuing panic with 2000 looming.) Then, not that long after 9/11, they let me go, and around 2002 or 2003 is when I started working part-time at ITG.
And back then? Well, around that time, there was THE INTERNET more-or-less as we'd know it now, but I don't think there was casual browsing of streaming online video content. I seem to remember that around 1999-2000 or so, Flash videos were still a thing, where you'd have to sit and wait for some Flash cartoon to load for several minutes, and then watch a simple cartoon that would only last for seconds. Badger-badger-badger-badger (mushroom, mushroom), et al., came out in 2003. (I just checked, and yeah, it was right around that time.)
Netflix existed back then ... as a DVD distribution system; it didn't start streaming until 2008.
At ITG, when we showed concepts to focus groups, we had artists drawing things on pen and paper, and I had to photocopy them, cut them out, and TAPE them onto printed documents, copy, then distribute for groups. It wasn't until around 2004 (when we moved to our new office, and I got a networked scanner and printer combo) that my preferred practice of SCANNING the artwork, then just inserting it as an inline image in a Microsoft Word document (with all the text) and PRINTING it (no tape or white-out required!) became standard practice.
Our initial AV system in the new location circa 2004 included a DVD player in the kitchen for playing music (primarily before the session would start, while people were milling around), and occasionally video snippets (as part of "creative excursions," where we'd show a clip of some movie that was remotely related to the topic at hand and encourage the participants to use that as "creative stimulus" to brainstorm on ideas related to the topic).
iTunes was a new and shiny thing. I think it was in 2004 that we got some company iPods. Fragile little things, though. They didn't last long.
Oh yeah. D&D edition 3.5 came out in 2003. That was a new and shiny thing as well! Valve's "Steam" online platform launched in 2003, but at the time it was only used for Valve's own programs, such as Counter-Strike; third-party games wouldn't be available on Steam until "Rag Doll Kung Fu" in 2005. World of Warcraft came out in 2004. (Okay, so my particular viewpoint of what constitutes the development of the internet is a little bit FOCUSED on particular game touch-points. ;) )
I honestly can't remember when I first got a cell phone, but I think it was sometime in the '00s. The prevalence of cell phones would have to be one of the major touch-points for impacting when a story is set in the '00s, I think. iPhone came out in 2007. My boss at ITG was using a Blackberry circa 2004-2006 or so.
I'm hazy on the details, but I THINK that 2008 was around the time that I was wrapping up my involvement in the Warcraft fandom, finally experimenting with making artwork entirely digitally (Wacom tablet, Photoshop, and Illustrator), and then having my hey-day with assorted Savage Worlds projects. Before that point, I had experimented with doing digital artwork for coloring, but it required a pretty high-end computer to be able to handle the huge memory requirements of large-resolution layered images. Oh, and the FILE SIZES!
Hmm. What happened in 2010 in my little gamer-focused life? Well, there was Fallout: New Vegas, aha! My first introduction to the Fallout universe. ;) (I'd heard of it before, as Prester_Scott was quite a fan of the original Fallout games, but it had been presented as something grim and gritty that he thought I would have no particular interest in, so I never tried them.) According to one snippet I found, even though YouTube had been around since 2005, it wasn't until around 2010 that it became quite the big phenomenon that it is now, partly thanks to improved infrastructure/internet speeds overall.
Flash drives (AKA thumb drives, key drives, USB drives, flash sticks, memory sticks, and so on and so forth) I think might have been available in the '00s, but I think circa 2010 or so, memory capacity was still measured in MB -- certainly not GB or TB.
That kind of makes me wish I could backtrack and see the progression of commonly-available hard drive sizes over the '00s. I vaguely remember being awfully impressed when I went to Best Buy and saw a hard drive for *1 TB* being available. Now I understand that there are FLASH DRIVES that can store 1 TB?! Maybe I should get one of THOSE to do my backups before I go on a trip. And somewhere along the way, laptops started and then stopped having integral CD/DVD drives and burners, but I'm not sure of the particular range of time when that would have been a "thing."
Hard drive sizes definitely have a huge impact on how we treat digital content (casually storing them, or deleting them immediately after watching, being able to store songs, or entire movies, or just snippets), and would be relevant to how people would treat "fragments" as per the video snippets from that story.
I've got a few dead Iomega external hard drives sitting around -- as I used them to try to back up my laptop and PC contents, and then the things would FAIL on me, and I had various work files and artwork and such on those drives that I think I might not have anywhere else. If only I could recover it all ... but now I don't even remember what might be on there. Now I'm wondering if the concept of an "external hard drive for backups" might be obsolete, even discounting the idea of storing things "on the cloud."