By I.J. Hudson
Only 11 years ago, the fight to transmit 100 channels of music/talk from geosynchronous satellites to your car or home began. Let’s have launch. The New York based Sirius put the first of its 3 satellites up. XM was a little late putting up its two birds, but on the ground was building a gorgeous set of studios in a converted printing plant in Northeast Washington, DC. As the saying goes in The Highlander, “there can be only one.” And now, after a lot of struggles, there is – only one. XM Satellite Radio dissolved early in 2011 and was merged into Sirius XM.
Speaking of music, the progression of Internet Radio is certain worth a mention. I remember visiting an Internet radio station operating out of a very, very small studio in Alexandria. If I remember correctly, it was a room off a store. Early Internet radio was a bit on the sketchy side – audio quality not so good at first because of noisy phone lines, etc. Obviously, things sped up and quality improved. While a little thing like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act muddied up the waters, Internet radio survived the tumultuous changes in the music industry. Then Apple’s iTunes came along in 2003…and more sea changes followed. Now, if you mention Internet radio, names like Pandora come up. Cool. The quality is good, wide selection. I’m listening as I write this.
Digital cameras were starting to take hold. Digital quality didn’t match film yet, but you still had the advantage of deleting a bad picture and taking another bad picture. Storage was on floppies or super disks. Owners bought stock in battery companies.
External hard drives to store all of these pictures and the coming video revolution were coming of age. Maxtor offered a full 80 GB of storage for only $360.
Privacy was being debated at every level. Website that would protect your identity popped up – anonymize.com and zero knowledge were a couple of them.
I close out the year 2000 with CueCat. Some of you who remember this little device will smile. The short story is CueCat (attached to your computer) was a scanner that read a bar-coded hyperlink in a magazine or cat-alog. And when you saw the perfect BMW in the auto magazine and ran CueCat across the bar-code, your browser would be taken to the “landing page” for the Beamer you were looking out. It was also used to take Olympic fans to pages specific to events they were reading about. Radio Shack, Forbes and Wired magazines were major partners. This cat did not have nine lives…….
I apologize for the number of posts today. Once I got started reviewing my scripts from 2000, I realized that I had to keep going. It was a big and busy year for tech. It brought back a lot of memories about the seeds of change along the Information Superhighway (remember when we used it call it that!!!) Some of the seeds grew; others didn’t – but, it’s a very wide and very fertile field. And we just keep planting more seeds to see what survives.
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