A Look Back at 1996 Technology

If you walked into a typical office in 1996, you’d be met with a symphony of sounds: the rhythmic clack-clack of mechanical keyboards, the whirring of cooling fans, and the legendary screech of a 28.8k modem struggling to connect to the World Wide Web.

Let’s step into the time machine and see what the tech stack looked like thirty years ago.

The Desktop

In 1996, the Pentium Pro was the king of the office. Computers weren't sleek, brushed-aluminum accessories; they were heavy, beige towers paired with massive CRT monitors that took up half your desk and doubled as space heaters. Let’s look at a couple of more elements of the 1996 computer:

• Operating system - Windows 95 was the gold standard, having launched just a year prior. It introduced us to the Start button and the concept of plug and play.
• Storage - We lived and died by the 3.5-inch floppy disk. If you had a Zip Drive with 100MB of storage, you were basically living in the future.

Connectivity

Internet access in 1996 was a luxury, not a utility. Most businesses were still using dial-up connections. If someone picked up the phone in the breakroom while you were downloading a 1MB file, the connection would drop, and you’d have to start all over again.

Netscape Navigator was the browser of choice, and Googling wasn't a thing yet; you were likely using AltaVista or Yahoo! to find information.

Communication

In 1996, your mobile office was a pager clipped to your belt. If a client needed you, they’d page you with their number, and you’d have to find a payphone to call them back.

While email was starting to gain traction in the enterprise, the fax machine was still the backbone of legal and financial transactions. If it wasn't on thermal paper, it wasn't official.

Data Security

Cybersecurity in the mid-90s was... straightforward. Most hacks were actually just boot-sector viruses spread through physical floppy disks. Firewalls were in their infancy, and the primary way to back up data was to copy files onto a tape drive and literally carry the tape to a different building.

How Far We’ve Come

Comparing 1996 to today is like comparing a paper airplane to a SpaceX rocket. Today, we handle:

• Instant connectivity - Fiber optics and 5G vs. the 28.8kbps crawl.
• The cloud - Unlimited, scalable storage vs. a stack of 1.44MB disks.
• Security - AI-driven threat detection vs. Don't put that disk in that computer.

At RiverTrail Technology, we’ve traded the beige boxes for high-performance infrastructure, but our goal remains the same: keeping your business running smoothly, no matter what century we're in.

For more great technology content return to our blog soon.