Revisiting The Exponential Age

My First Memories of the World Wide Web and Email

The spread of the PC laid the foundations for the rapid spread of the internet. In 1984, there were 1,024 computers connected to the internet. By 1994, the number had risen more than three thousand-fold. One estimate put the number of internet users in 1995 at sixteen million; by the end of 2020, more than five billion of us were connected to the web (a three-hundred-fold increase).

Excerpt from: "The Exponential Age: How Accelerating Technology is Transforming Business, Politics and Society" by Azeem Azhar. 

While reading this excerpt recently, I was immediately transported back to my days in Chicago in the early 90’s.  The Chicagoland suburb of Downers Grove is where I rented a shared office from a gruff ole Vermont native named Dave. If my memory serves me correctly, he couldn’t seem to shut up about the syrup the state is known for.

But I digress.

2460 Wisconsin Avenue was where I had an office during my years on the speaking circuit. It contained a wall jack and internet cable for the modem of my computer. Those of you from back in the day can remember the obnoxious screeching sound that the modem made when manually powering it on. And the connection time was sooooo slow, which made it seem like a lifetime just to connect. 

My earliest realization of the internet’s future importance came one afternoon in 1996 when another business owner who had an office down the hallway from me yelled out “hey everyone, come look at this.” A number of us hurriedly walked to his dimly lit corner office to see what all the fuss was. When I cleared the door, I could see a bunch of guys huddled around his computer screen. Once we were all settled in around his fuzzy screen mesmerized by the cryptic images in view, he turned around and announced “folks, this is the World Wide Web that everyone’s been talking about.” 

Despite the promise it held in revolutionizing the world, I didn’t immediately embrace the Internet. That is until a speaking client of mine called one day asking whether I had received the contract they had sent me to sign. I responded, “no, I haven’t received anything in the mail.” She responded, “it was sent by email so please check there.”

So, I fired up the modem connection to the computer. Loe and behold a message popped up in my email inbox with the details of my contract – a $3,000 speaking engagement along with a five night stay in Bermuda. At this point the realization hit me of my need to get up to speed with the fast moving technological advancement quickly. 

Back in the day, I used an email service called CompuServe which happened to be headquartered in my hometown of Columbus, Ohio. It came with this cryptic alpha numeric email address which you were unable to customize. After a few years I upgraded to Hotmail, paying $9.99 a month for email with more advanced features. 

Fast forward to 2004 when a friend of mine Devorah Sperling, who was at Harvard introduced me to an invitation-only email that seemed revolutionary at the time. That service was called Gmail. And while it was free, its early years were fraught with outages which would send users into a panic.

I have more territory to cover in “The Exponential Age” book and will alert you if I stumble into any other significant discoveries from it. In the meantime, what were your first memories of the World Wide Web and email? Please share your comments below.