The 3.5 inch disks in use in 2000 could hold just 1.4MB of information. A single photo for a modern smart phone is too large to be stored on one. (Photo by Art Smith)

We reached a milestone a few days ago. We are now in the second quarter of the 2000s.

There was a time, not that long ago (1999) that we were worried that all the computers in the world would quit when the calendar moved from 99 to 00.

Well, they didn’t, and many people are now more concerned with how much of their daily life is consumed with computers.

We forget about the sheer number of changes that have happened. They include.

* The explosion of smartphones. They were not here in 2000, they are now everywhere. The iphone was introduced in 2007. There are now an estimated 1.46 million iPhones in use worldwide. That’s 18% of humans. They are used for taking photos, navigating, ordering food, listening to music and of course, calling people.

* Memory. The floppy drives of the 1990s have been replaced by massive storage devices that can hold the same amount of data as 694,444 floppy drives in the palm of your hand.

* Google became a public company in 2004. Today there are 5 trillion Google searches per year.

* Maps. Remember paper maps and then later the stand-alone navigation devices that you purchased. Today you get rerouted based on the current conditions of the road ahead of you with software like Google Maps, Waze and Apple maps.

* YouTube. The first video was uploaded in 2005. There are more than 5 billion today.

* Facebook. First introduced in 2004, it now has 2.41 billion active users, which is a third of the people on earth.

* Access to the internet. In 2000 just 7% of the world’s population was online. Now it is more than half.

* AI. Artificial intelligence, which are massive computers using the incredible computer power now available to learn and change, often producing work in seconds would have taken a human much longer to produce; it is poised to automate mundane tasks. Many fear the power and the disruption that it will likely bring. AI was first considered in the early days of computers with 2017 marking the start of software that showed the potential of what was possible.

* Shopping. The internet has greatly changed how we shop for nearly everything. In the first quarter of 2000 there was $5.5 billion in sales on the web. The first quarter of 2025 had $225 billion in sales.

* Reading. There was zero chance you read The Marietta Times or the Parkersburg News and Sentinel on a computer or anywhere else but a piece of paper in January of 2000. Not true today because you can get either paper delivered to your smart phone, tablet or computer early in the morning. Technology has greatly changed how we deliver the news and how you receive it.

Everything is quickly becoming interconnected to everything else. It is getting more difficult to travel, shop, bank or work without the constant presence of technology. Many likely do not see all this as an improvement and yearn for the good old days of the 1990s. There is no going back, of course. You can’t put the Genie back in the bottle; the best you can do is hang on and enjoy the ride.

Art Smith is online manager of The Marietta Times and The Parkersburg News and Sentinel. He can be reached at asmith@mariettatimes.com.