The last 10 years have brought us plastic Identity Cards, MP3 players, flat-screen televisions and various other commonly used items. In this presentation, I will describe a few of them.
In 2000, in almost every Polish home there was a regular traditional colour television - and today, for a comparatively low price, one can obtain a huge, flat screen receiver with HD resolution.
Although mobile telephones were already relatively common, they were only used to talk and send text messages. They've evolved over the past 10 years in a few important ways. First, they gained colour screens, followed by primitive photo cameras, access to e-mail...
Today's mobiles can take photos and record videos with amazing quality, and can be used to communicate with videoconferencing (just like in science fiction films years ago!) and surf the Internet with ease.
Most of you will have certainly been the happy owners of CD players and Walkmans 10 years ago. Along with the introduction of the iPod and small-sized but high-capacity MP3 players, we can take our whole favourite music collections with us in our pockets.
Laptops were a real luxury, reserved for businessmen and professional programmers. They are now popular gifts for children's First Holy Communion. I remember when I started studying at the university, few people I knew owned portable computers - and now it's difficult to find someone who doesn't use one.
Square-shaped plastic diskettes that could hold 1.44 megabytes have become completely obsolete. Even recordable CDs that hold 700 megabytes are starting to disappear. These days are ruled by small but packed USB pen-drives, DVD discs and portable hard-drives.
I admit that I'm not the biggest expert regarding computer equipment, so I won't compare the specifications of computers 10 years ago and those today; although, even a layman can see how much their abilities have changed. In my case, this progress has been particularly evident in graphics software.
Today we can predict, that the next few years will bring even faster Internet, 3D televisions in common use, and more vehicles using cleaner alternative energy sources on the roads. I wonder if anything surprising will join them.
Questions:
1. What product do you associate with the passing decade most?
2. What contemporary item of every-day use would have fascinated you the most 10 years ago?
I thing a mobile phone and internet are associate with last decade. I known that they were discovered in 90's but the real boom was in las decade.
ReplyDeleteI can't really thing of only one item. Maybe laptops, save equipment in the cars or LCD monitors.
I think that new kind of electronic devices I can associate with last passing decade. New mobile phones, TV's, computers. It seems to me that those devices are the largest items of suprise.
ReplyDeletePresent mobile phones like Iphone would be the most suprise for me 10 years ago.
Everyone writes about laptops and cell phones. I would like to mention Playstation and Discmans. Everyone was crazy about Playstation, it was much better than Pegasus, and games for it were way more interesting and advanced. Discman, on the other hand, was a nasty device. It was probably the worst portable music device (it did not work well at all). When it comes to the contemporary items, 10 years ago I would have been fascinated by the iPad DJ device. I am a DJ myself, I play vinyl records. The iPad DJ enables you to play virtual records and mix them like with a use of a normal mixer. It is fancy, yet interesting.
ReplyDeleteI think that the most associate passing decade are computers. We can see in the internet a lot of photos of first computers. The were huge! We can see them in a museum in the palace of culture in Warsaw. There are many interesting "monuments", not only computers. I think that the dishwasher or flat tv are good example of contemporary item of every-day use wchich I have fascinated 10 years ago. Dishwashers were rare then. 10 years ago sew people know that there is something like a dishwasher. But nowadays everyone of us have it in home. We treat it as something normal. I think that nobody of us think 10 years ago that tv will be like paper-thin. In those days tv take a lot of place, had to stand on the table. Nowadays everyone have flat tv, we hang it on the wall.
ReplyDeleteI can agree with previous posts. In the last decade we were flooded by shrinked devices like mp3 players, mobile phones, thinner lcds and netbooks - everything had to be smaller and more shiny :) In present decade technology probably will continue that march.
ReplyDelete1) The internet, with no doubt. Poland is connected to the internet since 1992 (to be exact from 20.12.1991), but in the last decade the real boom happend.
ReplyDelete2) I think mobile internet and GPS navigation.
1. Definitely computer technologies. Now each device (mp3s, cell phones, cars, game consoles) has it more and better.
ReplyDelete2. I think smart phones as Iphone or HTC. Today we use it as small personal computers. We can receive mails, connect with our computer at home, shopping and many others.
My answer for these two questions is Iphone. For me it's some kind of revolution. Now I have computer that fits my pocket, have wireless connection to Internet and endless possibilities of usage. There was no device in past years that affected me more.
ReplyDelete1. What product do you associate with the passing decade most?
ReplyDeleteI identify most with spartphones. They combine all the utilities we have ever invented the technology. Perhaps the most important achievement of this decade is that we can move your equipment anywhere-they are mobile.
2. What contemporary item of every-day use would have fascinated you the most 10 years ago?
Like I said - for me the best discovery of the past decade is smartphone because it is small computer which can be used everywhere in the world and is easy to use.