Here at High Profile Staffing, we’re still marking 25 years of helping thousands of talented office professionals find rewarding work with Dallas-Fort Worth’s finest companies. We thought it might be fun to look back on how much technology has changed since 1987, when we first started providing staffing solutions to help local businesses grow.
Remember when businesses communicated by something called a “fax machine“? Scanned material was transmitted, usually by telephone, and received at the other end in the form of a printed paper copy. With the onset of the Internet, this technology has largely fallen by the wayside, though many companies still maintain fax servers and other computer systems that can receive and store faxes electronically. But the days of tying up phone lines to receive incoming messages are long gone.
The personal computer has changed dramatically since the late 1980s. In the early days, PC owners had to write their own software programs! And many of us can remember the ungainly size of personal desktop computers and their stand-alone hard-drives. Today, of course, the term “personal computer” includes laptops, tablets and notebooks. Some tech experts are already looking ahead to a “post-PC era” dominated by smartphones and other hand-held devices – a time when even laptops are becoming more extinct.
Email is another form of communication barely imaginable in the 1980s. Back in the day, early email systems required both parties to be online at the same time in order to communicate at all.
What about the early mobile phones? A glance back at movies in the late ’80s and early ’90s shows “cellular phones” of a mind-boggling size and weight. (The first hand-held mobile phone weighed in at more than two pounds!) Over the course of little more than a decade (1990-2011), global mobile phone subscriptions have grown from 12.4 million users to more than 5.6 billion. As of 2011, worldwide use of mobile phones was estimated at roughly 70 percent.
The first search engine appeared in 1990, created by computer science students at McGill University in Canada. Three years later, Wanderer was built to measure the size of the World Wide Web. Since then, numerous other search engines have come and gone. How many of these names do you recognize: JumpStation, WebCrawler, Magellan, Infoseek, Northern Light and Alta Vista? Since 2000, Google has come to dominate the search engine field, while Microsoft has sought to compete, first with MSN Search and, since 2009, with Bing.
Among the most dramatic technological breakthroughs of the past quarter-century is the eruption of social media as a means for people and businesses to communicate. Today, we stay in touch across many different social media platforms, including blogs, microblogs, wikis, podcasts, forums, social networking sites and virtual social worlds. Back in 1987, who would have ever imagined something like Twitter and having to get your message across in 140 characters?
Times have certainly changed, but the quality of service and talent High Profile Staffing provides has remained constant–for 25 years and counting.