20 years of Eloine.com!

It’s that time of year for past reflection and pondering over future direction. It is a broad topic but after noticing I registered by web site 20 years ago it gave me focus to ponder.  I follow  Richard Byrne of Free Technology for Teachers and he recently talked about having his site for 12 years and reflections on what is different now in technology from then. He is only talking about 12 years and he hits a lot of truths. I started to think about my 20 years. I could start by sharing the Museum of Endangered  Sounds or after listening it should say extinct sounds but I do remember them all! It’s funny how the sound of a dial-up modem can be oddly nostalgic when at the time was extremely frustrating.

I remember thinking about the 10 year mark after high school and feeling a little future shock over how fast technology was changing and progressing. It was exciting and scary at the same time. I thought future shock was something you felt in your 50’s and not your 20’s! I wondered how I would feel 20 years later. Well now I am here and things happened I never would have thought could happen. Robots are replacing fruit pickers, automation and artificial intelligence is making ordering Amazon packages a snap.  Privacy and security is an illusion and news is now disseminated over social media media by who knows what source.

I registered eloine.com 20 years ago to showcase myself as a budding graphic designer. Having a unique name made it an easy domain to snag. Here is my list of 20 things I have observed since then.

1. The world wide web seemed like and innocent place to connect with information on almost any topic. Information on the internet was more current and accurate than anything you find in the library. Not always true now.
2. Responses on forums were generally polite and respectful. When people started writing in all caps you knew it was starting to get bad.
3. Advertising was mostly a long skinny banner at the top of a webpage or a long skinny banner on the left or the right of the web page. The phrase “banner blindness” was born.
4. Yahoo was the Google of the day.
5. AOL was always sending compact disks trying to get you to install their software. They were the social media of the day.
6. There was no undo in photoshop and there were no layers!
7. I had a GIANT gigabyte hard drive that I partitioned into 8 parts and used them for scratch disks. No really I did!
8. Every time I nudged an object on screen I got out of my chair and grabbed a of coffee, sat back down and waited for another chance to nudge the type a little further.
9. The photo copier allowed you time to think between each pass of the lights and the time the paper came out.
10. I used a flat bed scanner to get photos of ordinary objects. Now I use the iphone.
11. I zoned out on Afterdark screen savers.
12. Aldus Pagemaker was the goto page layout program and QuarkXpress was the next new thing. Eventually InDesign took over and I am surprised to see that apparently Quark still lives! Who knew?
13. Digital photography was still a mysterious thing and I still wonder if I will ever scan all these boxes of 33mm slides I have in storage.
14. I just thought it was so cool that when you type <b></b> you got bold type and <i></i> for italic. Whoever thought that <em> and <strong> would make more sense???
15. My Palm Pilot was so cool!
16. A blog was a weird word.
17. People bragged about their fax machines at office parties, weird.
18. Myspace wasn’t even a thing yet and now it’s not.
19. X-files music played in the background and I couldn’t wait for the next episode!
20. HyperCard had their final release. It was a surprisingly fun ap. The precursor to PowerPoint… Too bad I didn’t get to play with it much.

I wonder what the next 20 years will bring. I have reflected on the past and  I intend to focus on the future in subsequent posts. I hope 2020 delivers wonderful surprises. I think our world needs it now.