I was loving my Powerbook G3, a speedy 233 MHz with 16 MB of RAM! (And a special $45 dongle to be able to attach to projectors)
iPods did not exist yet.
My consulting & training business was in year 8.
I was rocking my super-cool Nokia 6150 cell phone - it could almost fit in my pocket. Okay, a very large shirt pocket.
In early 1999 I was attempting to open my own training center and was running into a problem with insurance companies: no one wanted to insure me because of worries over the year 2000. Remember that whole Y2K thing? I had a hard time convincing insurance companies that teaching off-the-shelf programs such as Photoshop had nothing to do with Y2K.
NAPP was in its second year of existence - I had joined in 1998
My kids were playing Super Mario on their Nintendo 64.
According to wikipedia, in 1999 over 83 million adults - 40% of the U.S. - were using the internet. I was an old pro by that point, having launched by first web site in October of 1997.
Photoshop 5.5 was introduced in 1999, featuring Save for Web, the Extract filter and a bundled application called ImageReady.
What are your memories of 1999?
9 comments:
Totally non-photography or technology related I'm afraid, but my abiding memory of 1999 will always be May 26th, in the Camp Nou stadium in Barcelona, Spain. Watching my team - Manchester United - score two goals in injury time to win the European Champions League for the first time in over 30 years!
I've got my first Mac, an iMac with 266 MHz and a 6GB hard drive...
Sorry to be a bit of a downer. 1999 was pretty fuzzy with my dad fighting cancer. He passed in September and my mom followed in November.
I remember fighting with Win98 trying to keep it from crashing when I was working on large Photoshop files. Switched to Mac the next year and that problem went away.
I was building custom trucks and working on a Nascar pit crew.........now I take pictures of cars for a living.....not that much has changed lol
Actually, Dave, not to be too anal about it, the decade doesn't end until the end of 2010, 'cause it didn't begin until the first day of 2001.
I was still shooting film back then, and continued to do so for a few more years. I just discovered a trove of Kodachrome 64 buried in the recesses of my freezer. I have until the end of 2010 to get them processed so I'm going to have to dust off my Leica M6 and get shooting ..... what a drag!
I will still using a PC although 1999 was when my dad and I first started to explore digital photography first with a trail version of Photoshop 5 and then for Christmas we got a Canoscan 35mm negative and slide scanner. Over the holiday period I made my first HTML website (we didn't have the internet in our house until six months later) but I knew I wanted to make my personal homepage, just wasn't sure what to put on it at that stage of my life, I was only 13 years old after all!
My most distinctive memory of 1999 has absolutely nothing to do with photography or technology: It was the year where the Broncos won the Super Bowl and I was in the stands to see them hoist the trophy, and cry out "This One's For John!" - followed by his retirement into the Colorado sunset. Football just hasn't been the same for me since...
I spent about 4 months in 1999 in Germany acros multiple visits. The big technology issue was the ability to instant message via AOL to my wife in virginia and my folks in Detroit at the same time over the office internet and my IBM laptop (still on Win95 if I remember correctly). My dad never did figure out how I could "talk" (i.e., type) so that we all saw the same chat on the screen, even though we were in 3 different places. I think I bought my first home laptop in 1999 along with my first Wacom tablet, a Graphire. That tablet is on my desk right now, connected to my work PC, so I still use it, now with PS CS2 (my client hasn't upgraded me yet ). I did all of my holiday shopping in Dusseldorf and Cologne in 1999 and was the defacto tour guide to Dusseldorf and the Weihnacten festivals for American-based employees visiting the Dusseldorf office.
I had the same G3 computer and used it way beyond what the normal person would do(something like 2006). At the end, all I used it for was surfing the web, checking email and working on my web site. Watching online video, forget it. In the end, the screen went black, so into permanent retirement it went and new MacBook Pro was purchased to replace it.
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