This is changing very quickly at the moment. Everyday on the bus I see people reading their emails on their phones on the way to work. When I’m out with the guys they often end up having to get their iPhones out to look up Wikipedia to resolve something we are arguing about. With the low end iPhone now just US $99 I expect to see phone internet access absolutely everywhere within 1-2 years.

I have three other surprises for my 1999 self:

1) Digital cameras. Back in 1999 digital cameras were low-quality devices for a few geeks with too much money. I would have been surprised to find that digital photography has basically completely replaced film, to the point that even professional photographers choose a digital camera over a film camera.

2) Text messaging. Back in 1999 text messaging was a fledgling new trend. To quote my favourite source (Wikipedia of course!): “Short message services are developing very rapidly throughout the world. In 2000, just 17 billion SMS messages were sent; in 2001, the number was up to 250 billion, and 500 billion SMS messages in 2004.” So back in 1999 text messaging was in its infancy. My 1999 self would have been very surprised to find that most of population, including my parents, would be busy sending text messages in a new txt-language in 2009!

3) The lack of technical progress on many fronts. As you mentioned in your post, the dot-com boom was going crazy in 1999 and there was a plethora of promising technologies coming out every week. This included WAP cell-phone standards, micro-payments for small Internet transactions, and various passport technologies for single-point authentication on the Internet. But basically, 10 years later, the landscape is not that changed. The majority of cell-phones do not web-browsers and there are very few services accessible for the cell-phone, we still pay for every transaction using our credit-card, and site authentication is not that different. I think that my 1999 self would have expected greater technical advancement.

I had one in 1999 with a basic LCD screen, and at the time the technology was moving pretty quickly. Just a few years early almost nobody had one. If you’d told me in 1999 that over the next 10 years they would get colour screens and essentially become small computers that could run various software, and had built in digital cameras (remember that digital cameras already existed in 1999, I got one in 2000 with 64 MB of ram and a colour screen on the back) I doubt I would have been all that surprised on hearing this.

Well, maybe it’s faster than I would have expected. Something like the new iPhone in 2015 rather than 2009.

In retrospect it looks like it was inevitable, but in 1999 I would have been pretty blown away to know I could do all the essentials. (Of course, the black president is pretty mindblowing too, but I’m limiting the scope to technology. Otherwise 9/11 would probably win).