subject: 4 Pieces Of Technology That You Will Now Struggle To Live Without [print this page] Even if you're only 15 or 16 years old, there are several pieces of technology that you use and take for granted in everyday life that weren't around when you were younger.
These 4 pieces of technology may seem commonplace and standard now, but it wasn't that long ago when they weren't even easily available.
1. Broadband internet - when the internet first started to be used by people other than educational and technological organisations, the primary way to access it was by way of a 56kbps modem.
Staying as the standard method until the new millennium, it was at this time when broadband internet - a faster and more reliable way to access the World Wide Web - was introduced to the public on a large scale.
Now the primary way to surf online, if you used to access the internet via a 56kbps modem, see if you can try one out for a day - it will be one of the funniest yet daunting and most frustrating thing you'll have done recently.
2. Hard drive recordable television - although VCRs have been around since the 1970s (they actually date back to 1956, but were not cost effective to make on a large scale for home use until the 1970s), by the early 2000s, people were starting to look for different ways to record television programs.
First there were recordable CDs and DVDs, but they could be expensive, in respect of both the discs and the machine and then came along recordable hard drives - and their brilliance has blown people away.
So simple that you can record an entire television series with the touch of a button, you don't have to set it to record at a certain time as you did on a VCR and you don't have to have masses of videos laying around, either. Everything is built into the device and allows you, in the standard models, to record up to 24 hours of television.
3. Mobile phone - arguably one of the best inventions of the last century, mobile phones date back to the 1950s, but it wasn't until the late 1980s when their popularity began to rise.
Starting off as large devices that could only stay charged for a few minutes at a time and had no other ability but to allow you to make phone calls when on the go, as their popularity began to increase, manufacturers started to develop smaller, practical and more affordable handsets.
According to World Mapper, in 1990 12.4 million people had a mobile phone. Less than 2 decades later in 2009, the IEEE Computer Society reported that the number of mobile phone subscriptions was a staggering 4.6 billion - that's approximately two thirds of the entire world's population.
4. Digital cameras - up until 1990, the only way to take a photograph was with a camera that used film. When 1990 came, however, the Logitech Fotoman was introduced and was soon followed by Kodak's DCS-100 in 1991, a 1.3 megapixel camera that cost 13,000 US dollars.
Today, with digital cameras able to be bought for less than fifty pounds, most younger generations would find it difficult to not have the ability to upload their images straight to their computer, never mind be able to load a film into a camera.
