SON: Dad, what’s a download?
FATHER: Where do I begin? Well… you know your PS5 and your iPhone 6G? There was a time where they both had something called a hard drive embedded inside them. These drives were a kind of localized storage that computers and all sorts of consumer electronics devices needed to access songs, movies, games, and files of all kinds. When you wanted a new song, movie, or game you had to “download” it or save it to your local drive. And often you had to buy each one of those items you wanted to download.
You see, years ago, not all of these devices had access to the internet. For those that did, it was often slow and unreliable– certainly not like the 1Gbps your iPhone gets today. For those reasons and an outmoded desire for “ownership” of such media products, people built up vast collections of files on these hard drives. But with faster, more reliable bandwidth, an increasing number of internet-enabled devices, increased demand for anytime/anywhere access, and the new economics ushered in by the Second Great Depression, people came to realize that limited ownership was not quite as valuable as unlimited access. Slowly, those media products transformed into media services and all of a sudden every song, movie, TV show, and game was available on-demand, streaming to you anytime, anywhere. Believe it or not, there was a time when you couldn’t just subscribe to iTunes or Sony Online like you do today. In fact, they used to charge 99 cents for every song you downloaded!
There were a few early visionaries in the 1990s like Scott McNealy who said “the network is the computer” but most people didn’t fully appreciate the meaning. In 1999, telecommunication companies like Qwest tried to better articulate the coming future– broadband and on-demand services so ubiquitous that even in a cheap motel in the middle of nowhere, you could still get “every movie, ever made, in every language, anytime.”
These services even started to reshape computers themselves. If you had unlimited, on-demand access, you not only no longer needed to download, you no longer needed a hard drive. It wasn’t until 2010, when the first computers running Google’s Chrome OS appeared, that we first started to truly appreciate the impact. The future was in the cloud, and the days of downloads, desktops, and even hard drives were numbered. Computers and connected devices of all kinds became cheaper, thinner, lighter, and more flexible. And slowly but surely, all these files you had to “download” to your computer, store and sync were now always available all the time from anywhere.
SON: Dad, what’s a computer?
