The big bang

How much can happen in years? A lot. Graeme Philipson looks at how technology has changed our lives. Ten years ago there were 6655 bank branches in Australia. Today there are just 4888. Over the same time the number of bank tellers has declined by half, according to the Reserve Bank. There are no figures on visits to banks, but most likely they have fallen by an even greater margin. Today every PC is a bank branch, and we are all tellers. Advertisement: Story continues below Online banking is just one way technology, and in particular the internet, is changing our lives. Consider what the world was like in 1995, just a decade ago. In that year, Microsoft released Windows 95, the first version that worked as advertised. Labor was in power in Canberra, and out of power in Britain. O.J. Simpson's trial in the US redefined the meaning of justice. Best picture Oscar was won by Mel Gibson's Braveheart. Carlton won the AFL premiership (maybe it really was a long time ago), and the Bulldogs stormed into the rugby league premiership from sixth spot. In 1995 Amazon was a small firm struggling to survive and email was a novelty. Digital cameras and iPods didn't exist. Analog mobile phones were clunky, expensive and unreliable. PDA still stood for "public display of affection". The Java programming language was announced that year, as was the first Sony PlayStation. Since then a whole range of new technologies and services have come into being that have totally changed our behaviour and habits, at work and at play. We are surrounded by electronic digital devices. We buy our cars, do our banking and read our news online. Newspaper circulations and cinema attendances are declining. Most dating services, job ads, and encyclopedias are now online. We can send and receive SMS messages from fixed phones, watch Rosetta Stone Greek TV on our computers, and surf the net and take pictures with our mobile phones. Wireless communication is widespread, for voice and for data, and the day of seamless integration of wired and wireless networks is almost upon us. The internet, only a baby years ago, has matured. We rely on it and we trust it. The key has been the movement of information from analog to digital. Analog signals represent information as waves. All analog signals are different, and storage or retransmission means an inevitable loss of quality. With digital, all information is expressed as zeros and ones, which means we use the same technology for storing and transmitting all media and all computer-based information. TV, CDs (and now MP3 players), DVDs and telephony all employ a string of binary digits, called bits. Digital signals can be stored, copied and retransmitted an infinite number of times with no loss of quality and at virtually zero marginal cost. The internet has been around since 1969, when the United States Defence Department started connecting its research computers to each other. But initial growth was slow and in the early '90s still largely restricted to government and academic users. It was hard to use, text based, had poor search capabilities and required arcane commands to navigate it. But in the late '80s Englishman Tim Berners-Lee worked out a way to make the internet easy to use, by introducing a new naming convention and the concept of hypertext. He called it the World Wide Web. Suddenly, it became possible to search the internet, and people began to build web pages for other people to look at. Then in 1993 the US Congress changed the law to allow the internet to be used for commercial purposes. That year also saw the introduction of Mosaic, the first easy-to-use web browser. At about the same time, PCs became commonplace in business and the home, and data communications improved to the point where dial-up internet connections were good enough to handle simple graphics - as found on web pages - as well as text.

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