Written by Dennis Harvell
The Same Storm, a Different World
The blizzard outside looks exactly like 1996 — but the way we live through it has been rewritten. We’ve traded screeching 14.4k modems, fragile dongles, and brick‑sized batteries for the invisible speed of the Cloud and Wi‑Fi 7. A reflection on how far technology has come… and how we’re still just hunters chasing “juice” and a connection through the white‑out.
Reflections on the 1996 and 2026 Blizzards
I’m looking out my window right now, and the view is a haunting carbon copy of a morning in 1996. The wind is making the glass shudder in its frame, and the world has been erased by a thick, relentless white‑out. Two feet of snow have already claimed the driveway, and for all I can see, I could be the only person left on earth.
But then I look down at my desk, and the parallel snaps.
The Era of the Brick
In 1996, I was a senior staffer — one of the “chosen few” provisioned with a brand‑new IBM ThinkPad. I was proud of that machine. It was a heavy, matte‑black brick that felt like a piece of the future, even if it was as bulky as the “brick” cell phones of the era.
Working from home back then wasn’t seamless. It was a negotiation:
- The PCMCIA Card: That distinctive, precarious click as it slid into the side of the ThinkPad.
- The Notorious Dongle: A spindly, proprietary cable as delicate as a twig. Shift an inch, lose the connection.
- The Handshake: The screeching digital lullaby of a 14.4k modem waiting for AOL or Lotus Notes to breathe into life.
I’d type a URL into WebCrawler and go get a cup of coffee. By the time I came back, the page might be halfway “painted” onto the screen — line by agonizing, pixelated line.
Wrestling with the Beast
Under the hood, I was wrestling with Windows 3.11 — a universe of “Program Groups” and pixelated icons that felt more like a filing cabinet than a computer. To this day, I still call it File Manager. My younger colleagues are quick to correct me — “It’s File Explorer now” — but they never had to hunt through directory trees in a 16‑bit window, praying the hourglass cursor would stop spinning.
2026: The Friction Is Gone
Now, as the 2026 blizzard shakes my house, my work no longer lives inside a physical brick; it lives in the Cloud.
- Connectivity: I’m pulling gigabit speeds through Wi‑Fi 7 in a storm that would’ve rendered me invisible thirty years ago.
- Hardware: I can pull my entire office down from the air onto any device I own. No dongles. No screeching. Just silence.
The contrast is almost absurd.
Ghosts in the Shoebox
History moves in circles. I see ads today for “revolutionary” foldable flip phones, and I have to laugh. I remember my old Motorola Sprint flip — the ritual of flicking it open and pulling up that thin plastic antenna.
I still have one in a shoebox. When I pulled it out recently, the soft‑touch plastic had turned sticky, as if the 90s were literally melting away. I plugged it in, and the Sprint logo scrolled across that tiny, low‑res screen.
Sprint doesn’t even exist anymore, yet there it was — a digital footprint of 1996 still glowing in the dark.
Staying Connected
We’ve traded bulky batteries for magnets, fragile dongles for Wi‑Fi, and screeching modems for the silence of the Cloud. But as I sit here next to the window, watching the white‑out swallow the world, I realize something:
We’re still doing exactly what we did back then —
trying to stay connected while the world outside goes white.