All tech, all the time

It was 1998, and something enormous was coming.

Nobody knew exactly what, but you could feel it. Every company was in a low-grade panic, trying to wire itself together before whatever was next arrived.

The internet was no longer optional. It was becoming a business imperative, and most organizations were nowhere near ready for it. Hanging over all of it was Y2K, which, from today's perspective, seems like an overreaction until you realize entire IT departments spent years trying to keep modern civilization from accidentally shutting itself off at midnight.

Before any of that could happen, something more fundamental had to be built first: connection itself.

At the time, the expectation that information could move instantly wasn't normal yet. That a question asked in New York could be answered in Bermuda in seconds. That employees could access systems remotely. That businesses could operate across offices in real time. We take all of that for granted now, but in the late 90s, those capabilities still felt futuristic.

They had to be physically constructed, server by server, network by network, by people building infrastructure most of the world didn't yet understand.

And because the future was arriving faster than companies could fully understand it, a lot of the people building those systems were figuring it out as they went.

Including me.

I had just walked away from advertising after years spent straddling the increasingly blurry line between creative and technical work. My world had been Macs, Photoshop, Quark, multimedia presentations, production studios, and the strange merging of technology and creativity that defined the 90s.

One month you were laying out brochures. The next month you were building interactive CD-ROMs and multimedia presentations that clients barely understood but knew they needed.

Technology kept expanding outward, swallowing adjacent disciplines as it went.

Then I landed at OMNES, a joint venture between Cable & Wireless and Schlumberger, at the Park Avenue headquarters of a Fortune 100 company.

Overnight, my life became all tech, all the time.

The office sat high above Manhattan on the 42nd and 44th floors of 477 Park Avenue. Executives carried laptops. Server rooms hummed constantly behind locked doors. Entire floors of people were beginning to depend on systems that had only recently become central to how business operated.

And underneath all of it was networking.

LAN and WAN, we called it then. Local area networks. Wide area networks.

Simple language for what was actually a massive transformation: businesses becoming connected systems instead of isolated offices and standalone machines.

Suddenly I was leading a team responsible for executive desktop support, NT migrations, help desk operations, backups, and network connectivity between New York and Bermuda.

On my first day they handed me a ThinkPad and a pager.

I had never even used Windows before.

That sounds ridiculous now, but at the time the divide between creative technology and enterprise technology was enormous. Creative departments lived on Macs. Corporate America was rapidly standardizing around Windows NT, enterprise systems, servers, and centralized infrastructure.

Companies everywhere were trying to build modern connected businesses before most people fully understood what connected business was going to mean.

And once systems became connected, the expectations changed immediately. Everything had to be faster. Everything had to be accessible. Everything had to stay running.

Backup tapes were carried by hand every Friday to a bank vault across the street because entire businesses lived physically on servers. The cloud didn't exist yet. Connectivity itself still felt fragile.

But the expectation of immediacy was already taking hold.

That may have been the real beginning of modern work.

Not the internet itself.

The expectation that everything should happen instantly.

I still think about how strange that era was. Thousands of people were probably more technically qualified for my job than I was. I was 29 years old, coming from creative production and advertising, suddenly managing infrastructure operations during one of the biggest technology transitions modern business had ever experienced.

But honestly, that was the era.

Technology was evolving so quickly that entire careers were being reinvented in real time. The people surviving those transitions weren't always the most qualified. They were often the people willing to keep moving while everything around them changed.

So I did.

I learned fast. I adapted. Eventually I led the team well. And somewhere along the way, I realized technology wasn't becoming part of business anymore.

It had become the business.

I spent a year and a half inside that world while everything around me seemed to be rebuilding itself at once.

When I left, I wasn't moving with some grand strategic vision.

I was simply leaving one version of my life behind.

What came next was the internet.