Retrospective: looking back on almost thirty years of technology reporting

Here we are, just shy of thirty years writing this column, started on a whim, as a sidebar to a career teaching secondary school physics and computer science, and with only a few column inches initially, a venture I expected to last maybe six months.

In that intervening nearly three decades, we’ve covered everything from breaking news (for some of you, the very first mention of search engine Google, for instance, or digital cameras for another marker), to seemingly endless internet-based scams, to our more recent series on hearing aid technologies. Let’s also not forget numerous columns on artificial intelligence, starting with the emergence of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November 2022.

Back in September of 1996, my visionary principal, Mike Cooke, decided to embark on a bold program of technology expansion at Notre Dame Regional Secondary. We were fortunate to join forces with an equally visionary technology supplier, who quite simply said: “The cloud will be everything.”

By “cloud,” he of course meant the Internet. And by “everything” he meant that this Internet would touch all aspects of school instruction, and, by extension, life in general. I should add that by this time, 1996, my own classroom had been using some form of internet communication since 1986, when I received a grant to download NASA material using the then-new bulletin board service (BBS) technology and low-speed dial-up modems.

When this new school-wide cloud technology infrastructure was installed and operational, my principal and I decided that we now had the means of serving not only our school but also the broader Catholic community, the Archdiocese, if you will.

We purchased the domain name rcav.org for the then-going rate of US$70. We set aside a small portion of our new heavy-iron server, named Millennium, for the looming year 2000, for web hosting based on that rcav.org root domain name (RCAV being the acronym for Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Vancouver).

Initially, we set aside space for just that root structure and for this very newspaper, using the subdomain name bcc.rcav.org. The BC Catholic subdomain was used to publicly post regular columns, including this one. It was quite magical in those early years. My own column would be posted to the subdomain by noon on Friday. By about 1 p.m., I’d be getting questions from people around the world, so good was Google’s search engine that it had already indexed the column by then.

And so it went for about a decade. Various parishes and diocesan organizations began requesting space on the Millennium server. Instrumental in all this was then a volunteer and later a diocesan employee and webmaster, Makani Marquis. A parish or group would want to set up a web presence. I would set aside the space, using either a subdomain or a dedicated domain, set up the appropriate domain name service (DNS) pointers, and Mr. Marquis would take care of the rest. 

Fast-forward from those days, and we’ve reached another developmental milestone as this very paper moves to a monthly schedule, format as yet not announced, stop-gapped by emailed news on a weekly basis. Many of our columns over the past decade or so have covered the rapidly changing, and some would say disappearing, media landscape, be it print, radio, or television.

My initial thought in writing about this new “internet thing”, that I might run out of material after six months or so, has, of course, proven wildly incorrect. Even now, I still have drafts and outlines for at least a dozen more columns, with topics such as teen social media use, the controversies over data centres driven by demand from artificial intelligence solutions providers, and an update on improvements in the hearing aid space. It is worth noting that as this column goes to press, B.C. has become the first province in Canada to authorize access to over-the-counter hearing assistance devices. It is doubly interesting that this would occur just as the diocese is looking at expanding coverage for hearing aids through extended health benefits for its employees.

Meanwhile, the internet itself is speeding towards a future some have dubbed “Google Zero.” No, it’s not some form of low-calorie drink but a descriptor for a situation, already here, in which Google searches result in no additional web traffic to actual websites, because AI Overviews have become so good at answering questions that users don’t bother, or feel they don’t need to click on a link.

All this said, here are my links! Continue reading my columns at https://techwise.petervogel.ca. 

Follow me on X (@PeterVogel) or on Bluesky (petervogel.bsky.social).

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