This article first published as Reflecting on Technology in South Africa Over the Last 15 years on Technorati, where Paul Ogier is a writer.
South Africa, in terms of technology, has been trailing behind for a couple of years. This is a look back at my experiences with technology in South Africa over the last 15 years. The reason for this is that there are a couple of really exciting things that are happening in South Africa in the next couple of months that make me look at where we have come from, so that we can admire where we are going.
1994
Had a Toshiba T1100 laptop. This ran DOS. There were Internet and service providers in South Africa but not many and the connection was very expensive. I went to the local Internet cafe and experienced my first online experience. I can’t remember what I looked at, but I do remember thinking that the whole experience was very boring, slow and expensive.
1995
Upgraded from our DOS Toshiba laptop to a desktop computer. A 486 dx400. The HDD was as far I can remember was a 800mb HDD. I really looked at this space and thought, what the hell am I going to do with all this space? Then it started, the need to fill up hard drives. It was running DOS 6.22 and it had a turbo button. I really want to have all my current computers with a turbo button, you know something is taking too long, well push the turbo button.
Later this year we upgraded the software on our 486 from DOS to Windows 95. As far as I can remember, it need to be loaded from 27 3.5-inch floppy diskettes. The first time we tried to load the disks, disk 19 didn’t work and we had to take all the disks back to get another set.
1999
Started working at a school as a teacher. The school was still using dial-up internet. If you wanted to get on the Internet, you had to phone the computer teacher and ask them to please connect the Internet, this was proceeded with the normal questions about what was going to be done on the Internet. Once the computer teacher was satisfied that you were going to do research, the Internet was then connected.
2000
I finally convinced the school and Telkom (the South African telecoms operator) that we needed to move from dial-up and get faster internet. Telkom had to upgrade the local exchange for us and we then got a 64k ISDN line.
2001
We were then able to get a 128k diginet line. It was very fast and very stable. The problem was that it was very expensive. This was however offset by the absolutely amazing “speed”.
2003
ADSL was sold as the best internet connection available. The up-speed was 256 and the down-speed was an incredible 512. After much begging and pleading and six months we were able to get our exchange upgraded again and this time it was upgraded so that ADSL was an option. The cap amount was very expensive and the school started with a 2gb cap. We would never need any more than that, right?
2004
ADSL was now available in 1mb flavours. Telkom fought with us and said that we didn’t need that kind of speed. But eventually they upgraded the exchange again and we had a 1mb ADSL line. Our cap went from 2gb to 8gb per month and that was good.
2008
The school had moved from a 1mb to a 2mb in 2006 to a 4mb line in 2008 and the cap had increased to 50gb per month.
2009
In the beginning of 2009, we were approached by a company called Vox DataPro for ADSL line bonding. They said that we could get two ADSL lines bonded and the speed would be double what we were currently getting. That meant that in early 2009 we had 8mb internet. But the real nice thing is that we had a 200gb cap.
2011 and beyond.
The very slow pace of development in the first 10 years and then the very fast development in the last five years makes me realise that as a country, South Africa is moving forward fairly fast now. We are getting faster internet and there are many fibre cables coming down the African coast that will be connecting us with the rest of the world. This bodes well for us.
We have an ever increasing amount of people using the Internet for the first time, sometimes on their mobile phones rather than on their computers. The speeds of the wireless Internet are getting faster and faster, with the cellphone companies trying to out do the other one.
South Africa is a beautiful country, with beautiful people. I am glad that now we are getting to the point where we are not left at the bottom of Africa and everyone regards us as the red-headed step child of technology.
