Lately I had the opportunity to travel for business to Palo Alto California close to the Stanford University campus and have a walk there. Last time I was there was… 23 years ago! And as usual when we suddenly come back to past places I realized how much things had changed over those 23 years:
I did not have email in those days even within the university and research community. We could only do ftp to connect to other computers, sometimes- To communicate overseas with my family I sent a weekly handwritten fax over, and invested in a MCI long distance calling card for one weekly call
- Amazon did not exist of course so the reason for me to go to Stanford was to visit the well-stored Stanford University bookstore to look for specialized books in my field which I struggled to find otherwise
- The spirit in Palo Alto is all about startups which was not yet so much the case in the early 90s. Now you can’t go anywhere without people mentioning about startups and new IT stuff
Some things also don’t change much like the main buildings of the university. But it is sometimes amazing to think how that can remain steady when there is so much change around in particular with Stanford being at the epicenter of the Fourth Revolution!
