Internet technology

One of the things that I've really come to appreciate lately is the advance of internet technology. As high-speed internet connections have become more common, it's much easier to implement various high-bandwidth services. Many of these are things I most likely would have scoffed at 11 or 12 years ago.

10 years ago I remember laughing at the idea of downloadable video, let alone streaming video. Sure, I downloaded a video or two every now and then, but it usually meant waiting at least an hour to watch a low-quality slideshow with nearly inaudible sound. Today, we have sites like youtube.

Communicating with other people from across the world was something I did a lot back then thanks to something called IRC, which was sort of the internet's first chat room program. Every now and then, I would actually have a voice chat with some of these people using a program called Powwow. The quality was usually pretty poor thanks to being on dialup, and there were other problems with it as well. In other words, it was not the most reliable program. Today, I have a high-speed connection and can use a program like Skype to have a voice chat with someone, complete with video if we both have webcams.

As a lifelong gamer, I thought the idea of massively multiplayer games you play over the internet sounded cool, but I didn't think my internet connection could handle such a thing very well. Sure, there were games like this around back then (Ultime Online, for example), but I didn't think such a thing could be handled very well on my dial-up connection, and I hated the idea of paying a monthly fee to play the game, on top of paying for the dial-up internet. 4 years ago, a game called World of Warcraft arrived on the scene and hooked me and millions of other people. It plays extremely well and it pretty much requires high-speed internet. (For what it's worth, I'm done with WoW for now, but I am certain to resubscribe again in a few months...)

It has also become very common for video game consoles like the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 to make use of the internet with online gaming. Going right along with this is the widespread availability of wireless routers which allow for game consoles to connect to the internet without having to string a wire across a room. Many of these online games also make use of voice and video chat.

Of course, there are plenty of internet-related improvements that I haven't talked about in this blog post. I'm pretty sure we'll even cover some of them in this 23 Things exercise.