Stories in Digital Media (SIDM) was a blog run by a few students and the professor Frieder Nake, part of the former Digital Media programme in the state of Bremen, Germany. By the end of the first decade of the millennium, the web and digital technology were advancing at an unprecedented pace in the social and artistic sphere. Developments were exciting, and we kept a log of some events and took time to reflect.

What you see here is a rendition of the content as it was back then, in a different, static archival representation. Enjoy this glimpse into a hopeful and exciting past.

Stuff that may be relevant for the Digital Media programme in Bremen.

The 00s: Revolutions, Evolutions, things we lost in the fire

· Andre Hoffmann · in Rant
I take this opportunity to write down what the 00s were technologically all about. Most points here I wrote down by heart, with some I did some extra research. Enjoy the soon-to-be-retro-feelings!
  • the internet sow it's wild oats in the dot com bubble, then its coming-of-agewith the web 2.0, 2005 the world faces one billion internet users. After all, the internet is serious business. The factor bandwidth and its technical manifestation, broadband, becomes an issue for the location of economies and even private households, though the vanished analog modem dial-in sound is still engraved in the hearings of millions of people.
  • mobile phone reception almost completely covers the civilized world, for good reasons.
  • WiFi, WiMax, AccessPoints, free WLAN, UMTS, HSDPA. The Internet starts to get wireless. Meanwhile, mobile phone and landline providers tremble by the thought of Voice over IP applications.
  • Cloud computing and virtualization, massive parallelization, distributed computing. Skynet starts to gain consciousness.
  • In June 2000, the ASCI Red super computer heads the TOP500, the list of supercomputers, with 1.34 GFlops of computing power. In November 2009, the top machine's name is Jaguar, manufactured by the honorable Cray Inc. corporation, with 1.64 PetaFlops. Moore's Law is still going strong.
  • Faster, storage-wise bigger and overall more efficient computer technologies raise a couple of questions, amongst others in the area of data privacy, in a sidenote the human genome finally gets unpuzzled with the help of some mere electrical calculators times a trillion.
  • In 2001 the first iPod was introduced. Stockholders were unimpressed. In 2007, the iPhone causes a great stir. This time everyone knew it would change a lot of things. No one uses PDAs anymore, smartphones simply provide better connectivity. The ruler of the 90s, PalmOS, slowly declines until put to sleep. In contrast, Blackberry jams cause annoyances in the collapsing traffics of New York, London and the like.
  • Free and Open Source Software starts to conquer the servers and private households. OpenOffice will be downloaded far over a hundred million times. Linux evolves with it's advanced desktop environments. The Mozilla project organizes a rich media advertisement in newspapers world wide for their adolescent browser spinoff "Firefox".
  • Notebooks, laptops, mobile pcs start to show up everywhere. While prices fall, the laptop in the auditorium becomes a normal sight. Later, netbooks attract millions of customers, although more or less accidentally invented, inspired by the One-Laptop-Per-Child (OLPC, now XO) project.
  • Napster reaches it's climax in the beginning of the decade afterwards sued to death by the music industry, it's shallow remains sold to Bertelsmann, later re-vamped for a working business model. Peer-to-peer and copyright becomes a growing issue as the music industry faces it's oblivion. Kazzaa, eMule, Gnutella and BitTorrent follow the basic idea of peer-to-peer sharing. ThePirateBay shuts down it's torrent-tracker after advised to pay 2.74 Mio Euros to various music and film companies. Legal digital business models seem to work, the iTunes (Music) store flourishes.
  • No one buys CDs anymore except me. In an antagonistic development, vinyl record sales go up again. The DVD format establishes, MP3 Players replace some of the last portable cassette players and while they're at it they kick portable CD players and the MiniDisc format in the behinds. DV comes up and starts to wave goodbye before the decade is over. Then SSDs announce to replace their magnetic disk grandparents. Soon it's farewell, magnetic formats!
  • Floppy Disks are still being sold out of spite.
  • Growing bandwidth allows a variety of services unthinkable in the beginning of the world wide web - first and foremost the real time consumption of high quality video. In 2007, YouTube, the most successful video portal to date, is responsible for ca. 20% of the traffic generated in the world wide web, i.e. 10% of all internet traffic. Most videos are made by little kids mashin up copyrighted material for 7h3 lulz.
  • Apple's OS X gets introduced and the old system architecture was brought to it's grave. Windows XP causes lot of criticism in the beginning and ends up as a robust long-runner. Vista sux, Windows 7 should have been XP's successor in the first place.
  • Y2K-what? Bug? My VCR already stopped timing in 1998.
  • Talking about VHS. BluRay wins the fight against HD DVD. The children of the Betamax party once again judged that the inferior system won again and provide sell-out HD DVD players a place in their basement.
  • Ultima Online was a joke compared to the Hype World of Warcraft causes. 11.5 Mio players logged in to see what the fuzz is all about, some of them never came back. Chinese gold farmers sell virtual goods on eBay while some of their Indian neighbors do something more equitable and play the support desk from next door for customers a few thousand miles away.
  • Nintendo comes up with some great ideas, then some people come up with some great ideas with touchscreens and Wiimotes – despite the fact that a lot of Wii's cary the dust beside the 360s and PS3s. Segas Dreamcast journey finds an early finish, only because the PlayStation 2 provides DVD support. Almost no one will remember the Gamecube, while the first XBox still runs as a linux server in some places. Nintendo just doesn't want the DS to decline and produces spin-off after spin-off. The PSP... well, it's a portable PS2. Movie UMDs will one day sell for high prices!
  • Green IT. A google search causes up to 5g CO². Spam causes a substantial part of the overall co² emissions of IT and the decline of billions of nervous cells. LEDs ever-y-where.
  • and digital camera sensors!
  • Fives stars seem to replace every other judgmental system.
  • And what future generations will be puzzled about the most are the memes which came up in the 00s. knowyourmeme.com knows about ca. 1500 internet memes, most of them emerged in the decade, most of them require zeitgeist-sensibility and background knowledge.
I provided no direct links here, but you know, there's been a new word around for searching the internet: google it. What important issue have I not mentioned here? What's your anecdote? Tell it in the comments!

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