A trip down connectivity memory lane

Awhile back Lenn and I were talking about how far we’ve came from a mobility perspective and I guess a bit about how far we have to go. This got me thinking about the variety of tools I’ve used to keep connected over the years, how they’ve evolved, improved and the drastic improvements.

15 Years Ago
I was the MIS Guy for a large Canadian Manufacturing Company. We moved beyond a sneaker based network and enabled file sharing via a Novell file server and allowed folks to share printers amongst their workgroups. The accounting gals prayed for the network to go down and although the network was pretty darn reliable, I still remember hearing how networking equalled not working. Kind of entertaining how we now a days take reliable networking for granted.

12 Years Ago
That same Canadian company continued to bet heavily on IT. A big deal was the new 56K wide area network line that connected our manufacturing plants and corporate headquarters together. We ran Accountmate on FoxPro and I can still remember the great day we had doing closing out a month end in accounting across all divisions at the same time. Prior to the 24/7 lease line we did our data transfers at night via a scheduled dialup connection and IT manually stitched the data back together.

The leased line also brought us “instant e-mail”, prior to this our Microsoft Mail based system dialed out to the the facilities via a dial up connections delivering and picking up mail on a predetermined schedule to keep phone bills at a reasonable level. I still remember getting phone calls from folks asking me if the mail had gone out yet as they wanted to stop a message from being sent to corporate as they didn’t mean to click send.

Our sales folks were configured to dial in to the MSMail server to pick up email while travelling on business. The experience in MSMail was very confusing for these folks on how to connect and although I configured every laptop to do it, I don’t think anyone ever used it.

The world was getting closer together, but boy did we have lots of work to do to make it so everyone could use it.

10 Years Ago
ICQ was born and I moved down to the United States to join Microsoft. My parents purchased their first computer the weekend before I left, I got them a dial up account at a local service provider. In one afternoon I taught my mom and Dad how to send email, view a webpage where we’d host photos and use ICQ. They were looking for the easiest way to stay connect with their only son. It was still pretty darn expensive back then to dial long distance so ICQ was a big breakthrough. As we made the long trek to Washington state I wondered inside if they’d use the computer, but they did. I remember powering up my PC upon arriving at our apartment in Redmond, signing into the look ISP, connecting to ICQ and chatting with my mom. Instant was a total break through in staying connected with family.

5 Years Ago
About this time I got both a high speed line in my home and wireless Internet. I quit using a desktop PC and used a laptop for my computing. Something magical happens with the personal computer when you take it out of the office. You’ll start using search engines for recipes, finding phone numbers or getting more information about television program you are watching. Wireless changed forever how I use PCs and gives me so many more places to connect with family.

2 Years Ago
Outlook RPC over HTTP made it very easy for me to stay connected at work. Horrible name, but incredibly useful feature. This allowed me to use the Outlook client without having to be connected into the corporate network via remote access. (RAS) Sure, Outlook Web Access is great, but nothing can touch Outlook Web Access.

1 Year Ago
While Lenn and I were working on our secret plans for Channel 9 we added a new tool to our arsenal, Groove Virtual Office. I love this product and am still using it today. In fact one of my happiest days this year was the morning I woke up and read the announcement that Microsoft had announced the acquisition of Groove. With Groove Lenn and I could share document libraries without having to RAS into the corporate network. Simple things happened like my Internet Explorer favorites were syncronized across my machines. Sharepoint a pillar of collaboration at Microsoft was now available while offline in a file explorer like view. Important folders on my laptop are automatically backed up to a PC back at our corporate office in case heaven forbid I was to lose my laptop or have a hard drive folder. I love Groove, thanks Ray!

Today
Weblogs have decentralized publishing in many ways and have brought a human voice to corporations and a independent eye to politics and breaking news. It feels like everything is really starting to come together. A product like Live Meeting allows my team to travel less, present more spending less time on the road and more time with their families. A big break through product for me is the Office Communicator which I am using at work in beta. I love this application, it does all the instant messaging/collaboration stuff allowing me to turn rapid fire email sessions into rapid fire messaging, but the big break through for connectivity is its telephony capabilities. Last Friday morning I was working from home watching Josie while my wife Lauri had a doctors appointment. I was doing email and a got a popup that I had an incoming call to my office phone, selected the notification dialog and it gave me the option to forward the call to my home number. A brief second later my home phone rang and I was connected to the call being made to my work number while at home. Amazing! I was able to take the call, work with a customer all from the comfort of the island in my kitchen at home.

You know those of us in the technology world get very frustrated about lack of progress, we continuously talk about all the work that needs to be done. While I agree that there is a lot more work ahead of us and I get very excited by the possibilities its pretty darn amazing to think about how far we have came in a relatively short period of time. I can only imagine where we’ll be 15 years from now.