This automatically-generated transcript is taken from the IT Pro Podcast episode ‘100 years of tech innovation’. To listen to the full episode, click here. We apologise for any errors.
Jane McCallion
Hi, I'm Jane McCallion.
Adam Shepherd
And I'm Adam Shepherd.
Jane
Welcome to the 100th episode of the IT Pro Podcast.
Adam
Yes, it really has been 100 episodes since we launched on the first of November 2019. Not including our many bonus episodes and special additions that we've brought you over the years, of course.
Jane
Yes, I've got to say Adam that there's been a lot of change over the course of the past couple of years since we started doing the podcast, not least the fact that you and I don't sit in the studio with each other anymore, and indeed haven't for most of the podcast.
Adam
Hmm, I think we only did less than 10 episodes in the, in the studio before we had to move like everyone else to remote working. And I feel like over the last 100 episodes, we've probably spent more of them talking about remote working and all of the various knock on effects of the pandemic, more than any other topic.
Jane
Yeah, apologies to anybody who, you know, has kind of had enough of that. But yeah, I mean, it's true, and it gave a big steer to, I can't imagine that the content that we would have put out, you know, the episodes and topics that we would have put out over the course of the past two years would have been anywhere near the same had the pandemic not happened, like remote working might have come up a couple of times. But otherwise, there would have been a lot of security, a lot of IR35. Remember that? That was a thing that happened.
Adam
Hmm. All seems like such small potatoes now.
Jane
It does. But anyway, in recognition of this special anniversary, we thought we'd do something a little different. And no, it's not a clip show, you'll be glad to hear. We're taking a look at the past 100 years of tech innovation.
Adam
I'm sure that for many of you, and certainly for us, when you think of the world 100 years ago, you think of the Victorian era. After all, that's what we were all taught about in school. But the somewhat worrying reality is that 100 years ago was in actual fact, the roaring 20s - pretty much the opposite of the Victorians.
Jane
So let's talk about what there was going on during the 20s; not known for its technical innovation. High on fashion innovation. But when it comes to tech, and IT particularly, very early first steps were being made. The probably the most notable thing is the Loewe 3NF which I discovered during my research for this particular episode, it was an integrated electronic device and kind of an ancestor to the modern silicon chip. So like I say, important first steps were being made during the 20s. But it wasn't a super exciting era, if you're interested in in IT.
Adam
So moving on from the 20s, the 30s and 40s saw a great amount of turbulence, I think it's fair to say.
Jane
Yeah, there's some innovation in rocketry during that time.
Adam
There was and indeed, the technological developments made as part of the second world war would go on to fuel a lot of innovation in the private sector in the post war years. So skipping forward to 1951. The Stanford Industrial Park, which is now the Stanford Research Park, was founded in California as part of Stanford University. So this was fueled in large part by some of the advancements in microwave technology and radio technology that was being developed to help support the war effort.
Jane
So Stanford industrial park, as we say now Stanford Research Park, still exists. It was largely the brainchild of the dean of engineering, Frederick Terman. And this kind of 1950s era is very much the kind of the cradle of Silicon Valley, we see names that you will still recognise now HP and Xerox, start themselves up there. And I mean, we've discussed in our Silicon Valley episode how important sort of the relationship with Stanford and the fact that you've got these graduates coming out who you know are very technologically advanced, they've got real interest in this era. And even actually, people who drop out because they decide actually, you know, I'm going to move straight into industry because I've decided I know enough it's one of those things like kind of quite often when I think about - I guess cause it's in the name - tech and stuff I think about MIT, but Stanford really is probably a more influential institution nowadays.
Adam
Certainly in terms of the modern tech industry. Yeah. Stanford Research Park, in particular, was instrumental in building Silicon Valley into the powerhouse that it is, you didn't just have Stanford providing a steady stream of graduates, what you had with Stanford Research Park was an atmosphere of collaboration and sharing of knowledge and ideas amongst these early technical pioneers. So HP and Xerox, of course, you know, very quickly became hugely successful, which pulled more tech companies towards California and towards that whole kind of like, Palo Alto, Mountain View kind of region. And if we, if we didn't have the Stanford Research Park, I don't think we would have Silicon Valley in the same way that we do today.
Jane
Yeah, it is an interesting kind of counterfactual to consider. Would we have Silicon Valley? Like you said, probably not, although there's always the opportunity for these things to spring up elsewhere if there is a need.
Adam
Oh, absolutely. But I think it's much more likely that, as you mentioned, organisations like MIT up in Boston, may have, you know, assumed that position.
Jane
Yeah. I mean, it is also worth realising or saying that not all tech giants are linked to Stanford, and, you know, to, to Silicon Valley, big names that are not; Microsoft is based out of Seattle, Dell is in Austin. And so yeah, it's kind of, it's not Silicon Valley or bust by any stretch of the imagination, but like you say, that kind of cauldron of ideas. And you know, just people meeting each other and doing on for businesses, or whatever they did. I think that really, that's what Stanford Research Park brought about. And it's still still super important.
Adam
Absolutely, there's still a number of high profile companies that are tenants at Stanford Research Park, and who have kind of moved through there over the years.
So speaking of Microsoft, the 1980s, saw the birth of personal computing, as a as a category, as an idea. The MS DOS operating system was created and released in 1981, alongside the IBM Personal Computer, which was unbelievably significant.
Jane
Yes, like you said, this is the birth of personal computing, the IBM Personal Computer, or PC, if you will, led to the home computing revolution, arguably, without the IBM Personal Computer without MS DOS, we wouldn't have PCs as we know them. Now you and I wouldn't be sat here in our own little houses, talking to each other over the internet, which we'll get to later point on our own personal devices. And once again, it's one of those things that eventually somebody might have had this idea, and it might have happened anyway, with another company, even if it wasn't identical. There's sort of, there's an evolutionary niche there, if you like. But whether it would have happened in 81, or like 91, that somebody would have had this idea about, wouldn't it be grand to gift your computers to individuals in their houses, maybe like nobody would have ever thought of it. Just thought it's a ridiculous idea that anybody might want a computer of their own.
Adam
And without the PC, we wouldn't have had the coding boom of the 80s and 90s, we wouldn't have had the explosion of the World Wide Web in the 90s, which again, we will come on to shortly. And we wouldn't have had the kind of acceleration of global business, which has got us to where we are today. If people were still having to, you know, use big mainframe devices to do all of their business computing, then the world would be a very different place.
Jane
Yeah. Do you think there's any significance in the fact that it was Microsoft that created the operating system for the IBM Personal Computer? Was there anybody else kind of about who could have, who could have done it or you know kind of what what would we be like probably, like now, surely Windows wouldn't be, and all the rest of Microsoft's stuff, wouldn't be as kind of ubiquitous as it is now, had they not been involved in the IBM Personal Computer?
Adam
Absolutely not. And Microsoft has done a huge amount for bringing computing to more people. If IBM had developed the operating system in house, then, you know, it wouldn't have been made available to other manufacturers in the same way that MS DOS was, you wouldn't have had this, this whole kind of sub genre of IBM PC clones springing up and making PCs more affordable. Cause it's worth bearing in mind that the IBM PC, while it is commonly thought of as kickstarting the home computing revolution, most people didn't actually have IBM PCs. What really fueled home computing was the legions of more affordable slash cheap knockoffs of the IBM PC that smaller manufacturers made and you know, used MS DOS to power.
Jane
Yeah, yeah, when I think back to when I was in primary school, we had sort of BBC Micros, and that kind of thing, which when you look at them kind of aesthetically, very similar to the IBM Personal Computer. So you know, kind of it is interested in how that filtered down. Now, at the same time as this was going on, the Xerox Star operating system was introduced, which is the birth of the the graphical user interface, the GUI, if you like, and also the desktop metaphor. Lots of other things that we associate with modern kind of computing: bitmap displays, actually networking email capabilities, which is not bad in the 1980s considering there was no internet yet. This is Ethernet, more than anything else.
Adam
This is local networks, predominantly.
Jane
Yes, yes. So it was a flop.
Soz to Xerox Star.
Adam
Well, they can't all be, you know, category defining winners.
Jane
This is true. This is true. RIP MiniDisc, for example. But that said, commercial failure but without it, we wouldn't have macOS in particular. The Lisa OS which came with the Apple Lisa in 1983 was, let's just say it was very directly inspired by Star. But yeah, Windows also wouldn't exist potentially without Star. or certainly not until much, much later. Yeah, me reminiscing about BBC Micros and stuff. But I'm sure that many of our listeners remember MS DOS, in fact I'd be surprised if all of you don't, which was you had to write what you wanted the computer to do. And like as I say you had to just tell it with your words, what you wanted it to do, rather than just clicking on something; the desktop metaphor is so powerful. And so kind of like how you do things in real life. I don't turn around and say, book, open. Page 63. You know, you go get it, you go to what you want to do. And yeah, like I say, complete commercial failure. Absolutely revolutionary and computing as we know it now. No way it would be what it is now. Maybe they can maybe in the alternate reality where Xerox Star wasn't created, they have something better. But it's equally as important as the the IBM PC.
Adam
And so now we come to arguably the most significant technical innovation in history, the internet. Now most people know about ARPANET, the early precursor to the modern internet as we know it, which was developed by the US Department of Defence. But the development of commercial internet, as we're familiar with it currently is often overlooked. So it took over 20 years to go from the initial kind of ARPANET projects to the emergence of the first kind of commercial internet service providers, which appeared simultaneously not just in the United States, but also in Australia in 1989.
Jane
Can I just say for the record that while I think the internet is is very important, I think that probably the wheel, technically, is the most important technological innovation ever.
Adam
I don't know; I use the internet much more than I use wheels.
Jane
Currently anyway, yes. What with the whole not going anywhere thing.
Adam
Listen, the internet is better than the wheel. And I will stand by that. It is the official stance of this podcast that the internet is more significant than the wheel.
Jane
What is your feeling on modern agriculture?
Adam
It's alright, I can take or leave it.
Jane
As long as you have the internet, you don't mind going back to sort of nomadic hunter gathering type stuff then?
Adam
Yeah, absolutely. As long as I can still get Twitter, that's fine.
Jane
So yes, ISPs, commercial ISPs, appeared in the US and Australia in 1989, with ARPANET being decommissioned the following year. Now, it was also in 1990, when Tim Berners Lee both wrote his initial proposal for the World Wide Web, which at the time was all one word, rather than three words, you could be annoyed either way, I guess about the construction of that particular word. And then the first web page was also published in 1990. So the internet, the commercial internet, would obviously be impossible, as we know it now without ISPs. Like, just you can't do without them. But without the web, it could have existed, it did exist. But would it really have taken off the way it has, do you think, without the web?
Adam
Absolutely, not. Fundamentally, the internet would have very limited utility, if it weren't for the World Wide Web, unless you have, you know, websites to visit and you know, things to do with the internet, then there's not much point having it, you know, the, the pre web internet was predominantly for kind of connecting different networks. So you know, letting you share files, and, you know, send messages and whatnot, between different institutions. So universities, for example, were heavy users of the pre web internet. But for your average Joe, or average Jane, indeed, there's not really a huge amount of usefulness to that, you know, it's not something that would make you sit up and take notice and say, Oh, I need to get involved with this. It was only when you started being able to do things like looking up film trivia, or checking the weather forecast, or indeed, you know, leveraging services like email, which previously just you know, weren't accessible for, for normal people, because they were just reserved for universities and government institutions.
Jane
Yeah. And it's also worth noting that the web came first, and then HTTP and HTML came afterwards, shortly afterwards, HTTP in 1991, and HTML in 1993. So then you kind of get this this third layer of questions. Without these two things, without HTTP and HTML, once again, would the internet have taken off in the way that it did? It raises questions about how we use sites, how they are created. HTML is, is what we think of as the internet, which is actually the web or would something, once again, have come along and filled that gap that is not HTML, but did effectively the same job.
Adam
The big thing with the web was that it democratised information and access to information in a huge way. And without HTTP and HTML in particular, making it you know, comparatively easy to set up your own website with kind of really very minimal resources. Without that, the web as we know it would not exist because it would only be it would only be for, you know, big companies and big organisations with the resources and the skills to create websites. And having having this accessible open toolkit enabled anyone to start a website. And yeah, without that huge explosion in content, the web would not have been this kind of all consuming thing that everyone had to be on.
Jane
A blessing and a curse then, really, in many ways, especially considering, you know, democratising information and information distribution has also democratised stupidity; we can all be a lot dumber. But it is incredible to think back to sort of 20 years ago, I was looking at some of the sort of 9/11 memorial stuff and it's incredible to think that you know, I remember where I was on that day, and I didn't find out what had happened for hours and hours later, because I was busy bunking off school; stay in school, kids. I had some free periods. And rather than use them as study, I went to see my boyfriend and the TV was off and you know, I didn't know what happened until hours later. Nowadays, I would have found out instantly 20 minutes 20 minutes after I left school, which is kind of when it all kicked off. Yeah. It's incredible to think that something so big was something that people found out about like I said, hours and hours after it happened because we didn't have the internet everywhere. And importantly, we didn't have internet enabled mobile phones.
Adam
Yes. So this is the other really significant development over the last kind of 20 years, the explosion of mobile technology, and in particular, the explosion of mobile internet access.
Jane
Yes. So this was facilitated really, with 3G. So we we had mobile phones before that even right back into the 80s, we had mobile phones, before that I had my first mobile phone before the invention of 3G or before it became available here anyway. But this third generation of mobile connectivity, it really powered, like you say the, the way that we use the internet now. So it first became available on a commercial network in 2002, in South Korea, which, like it's super recent, is crazily recent, although still 19 years ago, but you know, let's not make everyone feel old. There had been some pre commercial networks set up before that, but yeah, commercially available in 2002, in South Korea, and actually one of the test networks was in the Isle of Man - one of our favourite places on the IT Pro Podcast - in 2001, and shortly afterwards, we got it in the UK, in 2003, the first sort of commercial 3G networks became available. This was the originator of the term mobile broadband. I'm sure that many, many of our listeners remember this as a big turning point in how we use mobile devices. Without it, we don't have smartphones, we don't have watch. We don't have social media. We don't have potentially, you know what we're doing here now, speaking to each other, virtually, yeah, because you don't have FaceTime, all these kinds of things. You can kind of do whatever with it. And this 24 hour connectivity really is impossible without 3G, or would have been impossible without 3G.
Adam
Well, still is impossible without 3G, because 3G, and to a greater extent, 4G and 5G, you don't realise how much of our lives they underpin until you're in an area with, you know, not particularly great data signal. And when you don't have access to it, you suddenly realise that, you know, not just things like email and social media and you know, streaming Netflix on the bus or whatever. But even, you know, a lot of the communication tools that we use, things like WhatsApp, things like Facebook Messenger, completely fall apart without without mobile internet access. When was the last time you sent a text to someone?
Jane
I send texts - like, an SMS text? I send them on the regular.
Adam
Oh really?
Jane
I definitely receive them regularly. Do I send them regularly? Not so much. Actually. I use iMessage occasionally to message my husband, but more often than not now it is, it's WhatsApp.
Adam
Yeah, absolutely. And I would argue that's probably the case for the majority of people listening to this, if not the majority of people in the country. And going back to kind of traditional SMS or even phone calls would be a very kind of... it would be a big shock to the system for a lot of people, I think. And of course, there's a huge range of businesses and business models that just would not be possible if it wasn't for mobile internet.
Jane
Yeah, yeah. I mean, Twitter is a is a really good example actually. Because obviously you've got desktop, Twitter. But if you want to go speak your brains to the world, you need your phone to do it.
Adam
Contactless payments as well just wouldn't be possible without mobile internet.
Jane
When was the last time though that you were somewhere where there was no mobile internet or like no mobile signal whatever at all? Probably fairly recently for you because you're in London, so the tube last Tuesday.
Adam
Well, you say that; even even the tube now. You've got Wi-Fi at the stations, and they're talking about rolling out mobile internet across the length over the tube line. So even in you know, in the tunnels. And it's, yeah, as you say, it's incredibly rare that you're without mobile internet for any significant period of time.
Jane
I was gonna say, there's a place where I sometimes go on holidays that in 2015, 2016, I remember had no connectivity at all, nothing.
Adam
Really? Not even Minitel?
Jane
I told you, we keep the Minitel device in my mother in law's loft. No, there's there's nothing, tiny little hamlet, really. And it was so liberating. I've got to say. And then we went there again, couple years ago, and it had like 4G that was faster than my house, which is in like a city, one side of my house doesn't have 4G at all, the other side does. Who knows how it works? Radio engineers, your letters, bring them to us. How does, why does my house have half 4G, half 3G? It's a mystery. It's everywhere now, it really is everywhere. And once again, you know, much like the internet for for better or worse, because I like, on the one hand, it's actually quite liberating to not be able to pick up your phone and just like waste your time on insert whatever social media normally of choice here. And on the other hand, modern life is such that you kind of do need that connectivity, I feel.
Adam
Yeah, absolutely. We've spoken before on the podcast, and indeed on the site, about how essential it is to be able to have that connectivity for basically every job now.
Jane
Yeah, yeah. And it's worth also, it's not just, when it comes to mobility, it's not just a question of network connectivity. It's also question of apps; it's very hard to shitpost on Twitter if you don't have the Twitter app on your phone. And, and when you and I were first sort of speaking about our 100th episode, and you said oh, we must do the App Store. I was like, Oh, the App Store's been around since forever, hasn't it? You know, same sort of like... nope, nope, nope, nope. 2008, the arrival of the App Store, which obviously made smartphones more appealing, which leads to take off off mobile internet, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Adam
So yeah, this is the Apple App Store, specifically, yes. You know, downloadable software existed before that. But it was only again, you know, it's the democratisation of technology. It was only once Apple launched the App Store, and crucially opened it up to third party developers, where anyone could build an app, submit it, people made their fortunes, entire businesses were built off the back of a single app, Twitter being an excellent example. But there's countless applications that people have, you know, cobbled together in bedrooms and garages that have now become multi million dollar commercial organisations.
Jane
Yeah, and it really is kind of, I think, quite crucial to the life and death of businesses, of websites, whatever. I mean, I, as you know, it used to be a goon - which if you know, you know, listeners - I've ended up transitioning to Reddit primarily because it has an app. SomethingAwful does not and you're kind of - it, it really it's so important. How would we do some of like the business stuff that we do nowadays, how would you during your commute, check your email or you know, kind of log on to Slack or Teams or whatever were it not for the App Store, and the fact that you can just like, very quickly be like, yep, okay, I'll have that. Off we go.
Adam
Yeah, if we had to do everything through mobile browsers and mobile web pages, there's just a lot of stuff that we would not be able to do at all, it would not be a pleasant experience, and, therefore, would not be anything like as popular as it currently is.
Jane
So I feel like we can't talk about 100 years of technology without talking about the cloud. I don't think you can really talk about technology nowadays at all, without talking about the cloud.
Adam
No. And you know, especially having just spoken about the importance of mobile apps, the cloud has played a huge role in popularising and kind of enabling mobile apps. And indeed, vice versa, the cloud has become completely ubiquitous, we would not have been able to cope with the last 18 months, if it wasn't for the cloud.
Jane
No, on several levels, both from a business level and also got to do those quiz nights on Zoom. It is quite a new invention, it's, you know, much newer than anything else that we've spoken about here. And you know, we've kind of jumped around a bit in time. It has its roots in things like webmail, really, there were some inventions in the 60s 50s. But it really, it wasn't until the creation of AWS in 2002, that it started to become what we know it as today.
Adam
And again, it comes back to democratisation, with the creation of AWS and other kind of public cloud providers. Suddenly, you didn't need to have 100 grand kicking around to invest in server infrastructure, networking, all of that kind of stuff in order to run an app or an online service. All you needed was a credit card, you could spin up a couple of virtual machines in the cloud. And you're off to the races. You can launch an app, you can launch a website, you can launch an online service instantly.
Jane
Yeah, and I think that actually kind of you make a good point. Because when I first started writing about the cloud, which was sort of the early 2010s, there were some people who were very snippy, just being like, well, it's just colocation really, isn't it? And, I mean, it's definitely a cousin of colocation. Absolutely. But you can't just kind of sit and go, do you know what? I'm gonna start doing some colocation just now, and off you go. No, you know, there's a lot of negotiation, a lot of contracts, a lot of money involved. Whereas the cloud as we know it through AWS, laterally through Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform. It's that instantaneousness - that is, that is a word - that really sets the cloud apart. Yeah. And this is kind of it started off really, as IaaS, infrastructure as a service. So yes, spinning up instances on other people's servers, basically, to do what you want. But then along comes Platform as a Service, along comes super importantly, and probably what makes the cloud the cloud as we know it now, Software as a Service. So yeah, that is Salesforce, Workday. Yeah. All those kinds of software where you... Slack, indeed, Slack. Indeed, most of the things really, Office 365. Most productivity suites, most file sharing things, I mean...
Adam
Most software at this point.
Jane
Yeah, really; like you say it's most software, whether that is business software, commercial software, whatever, is in the cloud, it's cloud based. Is there any way that you can get... to say it's pervasive now is an understatement; can it get any more pervasive?
Adam
I think it probably could. I don't know if it's going to because over the last couple of years, we've actually seen quite a few organisations pulling back from public cloud towards, to a certain extent, moving more towards kind of multi cloud deployments, where, you know, some stuff is running in public cloud, but some stuff is running on prem, some stuff is running in a kind of hybrid type set up. So I don't think we're going to ever get to the stage where cloud is powering all IT.
Jane
Yeah, that's especially on the IaaS side of things, you know, kind of that, you're not going to probably pull all your stuff out of a SaaS platform in order to run it on on prem because that would be silly, frankly.
Adam
Yes, yes it would. As many organisations have discovered.
Jane
Yeah, but IaaS, definitely. I mean, of course, it's possible that we're sitting here going, no, there is no way that this can become more pervasive. Just because we're living in the moment now, and we can't foresee what it might be. Same as the Jane McCallion and Adam Shepherd of 2002, wouldn't have foreseen how things are now, really.
Adam
So what comes next, then? What's the next frontier of technological innovation?
Jane
I'd say the DARQ technologies, which I call the DARQ technologies cause it sounds metal as hell. So that's distributed ledger technology,
Adam
Commonly known as blockchain.
Jane
Gotta be so colloquial. Artificial intelligence, extended reality. And the Q the end is a Q, and not a K, which is for quantum. So I think of those the most interesting and transformative - and I'm not sure you're gonna agree with me here, actually - I would say is AI, and quantum.
Adam
Yeah, I'd absolutely agree with that.
Jane
Wow. Well, this is a short discussion. I thought the mixed reality, extended reality type stuff might have tickled your fancy a bit.
Adam
While that is an interesting area. And there's a lot of a lot of room to explore there, and a lot of interesting things that can be done with it, machine learning, AI and quantum computing have exponentially greater potential impacts on, you know, society at large. I mean, some of the things that are being done with AI already in fields like medical research, for example, or even just, you know, productivity and just helping us get things done faster; things like machine vision for automatically translating text is a hugely impressive feat that would have been unthinkable just five or 10 years ago.
Jane
I'm not impressed by machine vision doing translations.
Adam
Well, no, but that's because you are our resident translator.
Jane
Nothing impresses me when it comes to second language. Yeah, and I would actually say, out of those two, out of AI and quantum, if you and I sit down in two years time to do our 200th episode, then I reckon that AI and its kind of subdivisions is the one that will have done more, will have been more impactful, not least, because quantum is kind of...
Adam
Quantum's still early.
Jane
Super early. It's very much still a research project. And don't let anybody else tell you any differently. Once we have quantum servers that are available, like to companies to have on their, in their own data centres, and are useful and can work nicely, with traditional kind of silicon one, zero based computing, then you can come back to me about quantum. It has some interesting applications. The ideas that I've seen previously around quantum entanglement, and superposition and security is theoretically really interesting. But lots of things are theoretically, really interesting.
Adam
They don't always translate well to the real world.
Jane
Yeah, this whole conversation though has really, it's made me think of a meme that I think I saw this morning actually. What, what? I'm sorry, I'm very online, I can't help it. But no, it was about how there was only sort of 66 years from the flight of the Wright brothers to landing on the moon. And prior to that, I think, they said that the chariot was kind of invented about 2000BC and was the dominant, it was the fastest you could go as a human being until trains came along in the 1800s. And then planes come along in the early 1900s. And then suddenly, suddenly, couple weeks ago I'm live streaming footage from Mars for the benefit of my son who's just like, I want to see the Mars rover, I want to see Mars. I'm like okay, yeah, sure. Couple of clicks. That's Mars. Because that's mad to think about. That's mad to think about and completely, just unthinkable from when I was his age. From a personal point of view, then in your lifetime, what do you think has been, I guess, the biggest leap forward in your own mind or the most impactful thing to have happened?
Adam
The most significant thing to happen in my lifetime, is unquestionably mobile internet and smartphones. It's the thing that had the biggest transformational impact. And the, you know, the impact is still being felt to this day, you know, mobile internet is continuing to transform how we live our lives, how we shop, how we work, how we play, it's a genuinely revolutionary development. And the world would be vastly different if it hadn't happened.
Jane
So I'm going to slightly cheat for me. And I will kind of combine that with the internet. Because I, when I was kid, the internet didn't exist. So that was obviously transformative. The idea that I just go and look up stuff on the internet. Like, oh, you know, what was the name of the third man on the moon? Wikipedia is flippin revolutionary, for students all over - don't get caught out. But yeah, and then mobile internet took that a step beyond, even. So I agree, just the internet and mobile internet, that my life as I as I know it, and live it now would just, it couldn't exist without those two things.
Adam
Well, I mean, aside from anything else, if it wasn't for the internet, neither of us would have jobs.
Jane
This is true. This is true. And we certainly wouldn't be speaking to each other right now.
Adam
No, we would not.
Jane
Well, on that note, unfortunately, this is all we have time for on this special 100th episode of the IT Pro Podcast.
Adam
We'd like to thank all of you for tuning in over the last two years, and here's to another 100 episodes.
Jane
You can find links to all of the topics we've spoken about today in the show notes and even more on our website, itpro.co.uk.
Adam
You can also follow us on Twitter at @ITPro, as well as Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube.
Jane
Don't forget to subscribe to the IT Pro Podcast wherever you find podcasts to never miss an episode. And if you're enjoying the show, which I hope you are after, after nearly two years, please leave us a rating and a review because it does help other people to find us as well.
Adam
We'll be back next week with more analysis from the world of IT but until then, goodbye.
Jane
Bye.
