Last week we looked at “Church in 1880: What was it like?” The blog provides an interesting timeline that covers the gasoline engine, railways, telegraphs and telephones, the lightbulb, typesetting and printing, radios, and photographic film. Today we look at computers, the sinternet, website, and what has changed in the last 20 plus years.

Personal Computers: IBM Got It Wrong & Then Got It Right
1949 to 1955 – Electrical Apparatus Company (GE in USA, the British GE, Siemens in Germany, Philips in Holland) went into computers.
In 1965 – Researchers hooked up a computer at MIT with US Air Force computers in California. For the first time two computers communicated.
In 1971 – Ray Tomlinson wrote the first program that sent the first ARPAnet e-mail between two computers.
In 1976 – Microchips were invented. IBM market research was wrong. IBM thought that this would not happen. Everything they were certain of was disrupted. They had to reorganize themselves.
In 1980 – IBM produced its own personal computer.
In 1983 – IBM became the leading personal computer producer.

Internet:
In 1973 -US computer scientist Vint Cerf invented the TCP/IP protocol that rules them all.
In 1974 – The term “internet” was first used by a US computer scientist Vint Cerf.
In 1982 – David Nicholas, Mike Kazar, Ivor Durham, and John Zarnay, students at Carnegie Mellon University constructed the first internet application for the building’s Coke vending machine.

Website:
In 1989 – Sir Timothy Tim Berners-Lee, a British developer is credited as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He came up with the idea of “Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)” to access and retrieve information across the internet.
August 6, 1991 – The first web page on the internet was built at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research).
August 1991 – 18,957 websites online.
August 1996 – 342,081 websites online.

What changed in the last 20 plus years?

2000:
TripAdvisor, an American online travel company was formed.
Just half of Americans had broadband in their home. Today, more than 90 per cent have it.
Manufacturers began to adapt Bluetooth for use in computer and mobile phones.
Flash Drives first sold by IBM in 2000 that allowed large storage capacity for files, photos, or videos.

2001:
Wikipedia started publishing articles online.
Apple sold its first iPod.

2002:
LinkedIn became an online networking platform.
Xbox live allowed gamers to play each other online.

2003:
iTunes launched online access to music.
Skype launched in August 2003 transforming the way people communicated across borders.

2004:
Social media did not exist.
Facebook was first developed.

2005:
Google Maps in February 2005.
YouTube was launched in May 2005.

2006:
Twitter came on the scene.

2007:
Apple released the iPhone, the first touchscreen smartphone with mass-market appeal, in June 2007.
Netflix enabled viewers to watch movies and television programs on demand via a monthly paid subscription.
Amazon Kindle was released in November 2007.

2008:
Airbnb became a cost-effective option for travellers and encouraged homeowners to rent out properties to boost tourism.
Dropbox allowed people to store digital files and documents in online folders.

2009:
Uber enabled drivers to use their own vehicles as a cost-effective alternative to taxis.
WhatsApp allowed people to communicate via text messages or phone calls for free, without the need of a cell phone plan.
Google self-driving project started.

2010:
iPads were introduced as a cheaper, smaller, more mobile option to access online technology.
Instagram allowed people to share and comment photos posted online.

2011:
Siri became the new search tool on iPhones.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) became real as IBM’s Watson and Salesforce’s Einstein were developed as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools.

2012:
Google released Google Now for their Android System.
August 2012 – Google announced that its automated vehicles had completed over 300,000 miles of driving, accident free.
The biggest player in Virtual Reality (VR) space, Oculus (a division of Facebook) introduced its first product – a VR.

2013:
The first VR headset called the Oculus Rift was introduced. The company has since launched a number of headsets with gaming as one of its biggest applications.

2013 & 2014:
Microsoft and Amazon followed suit with virtual reality products, and then came Cortana.
Voice recognition technology moved far beyond the smartphone.

2014:
Voice-enabled Alexa AI was available in stores.
Peloton, a stationary bike with a built-in screen allowed people to access live and on-demand workout classes.

2015:
Klaus Schwab introduced the concept of the Fourth Industrial revolution.
Starbucks launched mobile ordering at all US locations.
By November 2015, Uber was valued at $70 billion USD and had spread to over 250 cities worldwide.
In November and December 2015, two private companies, Blue Origin and SpaceX, successfully landed reusable rockets. This drastically reduced the cost of space exploration and brought commercial space travel one step closer to reality.

2016:
Klaus’s book, “The Fourth Industrial Revolution” was released.
McDonalds rolled out its mobile ordering app and kiosks.
Apple introduced Air Pods, the first in-ear wireless headphones that can be paired with Apple devices via bluetooth technology.

2017:
Atom Bank became the most preferred bank in UK. It was a mobile only app without any brick-and-mortal location or tellers.

2018:
Facebook had more than 2.26 billion users.

2019:
Lumi by Pampers (wearable tech for babies) became an all-in-one size baby monitoring system that works via a sensor on a baby diaper.

2020:
4.2 billion people are already connected online. 3.4 billion people publicly shared their personal information with the world.

2022:
Facebook changed its name to Metaverse.
During Google’s I/O Developer Summit, Google CEO Sundar Pichai showed a video demo of a pair of glasses that showed live translations in real time to the person wearing them.

Digital and physical has merged. For the first time, small and medium size churches will be spending more on digital solutions than traditional ones.

Discussions have moved from ROI (Return on Investment) to ROR (Return on Relationship).

No one can really predict what the church will be like in 2030. However, take a picture of all the devices you use. They will all be slower and look uglier in just the next eight years. A tsunami of change is waiting for us. The next five years of artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR) is about to rock our world.

Reflection: What is the impact of this technology on the future of online ministry and evangelism in a Phygital (merging of physical and digital) church?