Thirty years of dramatic change (1996-2026)

February 25, 2026

The only constant is change!

An accurate statement at any point in human history. However, in the last 30 years, the world has changed more rapidly and more dramatically, than at any other time in human history.

American Futurist Ray Kurzweil speaks of an exponentially increasing rate of change.

The impact of this change has been seismic. Of critical importance are the human and corporate behavioural changes which have resulted from this turbulent technological transformation. They range from professional (online collaboration) and personal (ratio of text to face-to-face verbal communication), to physiological: the thumb is the new ‘index finger’.

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In 1996, Digital Tsunami was established to aid “Communications Evolution” for brands.
In 2016, I wrote a blog identifying some of the technological changes that had occurred in those two dramatic decades.
After a further ten years, it is time to update and reconsider the immense change we have witnessed.

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In 1996, law firm decision-makers were perplexed at how to view their own prospective websites, as they had typing pools but did not possess computers! Two decades later, law firms and courtrooms are filled with laptops.

In 1996, salespeople out in the field had to use a telephone to call the office or printed forms to place orders. In 2016, customers directly place their own orders and pay online.

As hardware increases in speed and capacity, software increases in complexity, and stored data increases geometrically. Petabytes (1015) of data are created every day, with the extraordinary CAGR of 42%. A recent Cisco report indicates that in 2016, global IP traffic will reach 1.1 zettabytes (1021), that’s equivalent to one exabyte (1018) or one billion gigabytes a month, and within three years, that will double!

• in Nov 2025, with the Internet of Things (IoT), high-res video (particularly in 4K, 8K, and VR/AR formats), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Big Data, and the widespread adoption of cloud computing, the amount of content generated and viewed each day was calculated at 173.4 zettabytes
• A Zettabyte is 1,000 exabytes, equivalent to a billion terabytes

There is an expected global storage capacity challenge. Unless denser commercial data storage technologies emerge within several years, the world’s ability to generate zettabytes of data will exceed its ability to manufacture sufficient data storage capacity. The world could be drowning in data, with nowhere to hold it!

• In 2025, global revenue from Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) was USD 171 bn

Below are some 1996 technologies and comparisons with the situation in 2016.

Computing performance is measured in FLoating-point Operations Per Second (FLOPS).
A GigaFLOP is ten to the power of 9, (109) or 1,000,000,000 = one billion calculations.
A TeraFLOP is 1012 or 1,000,000,000,000 = one trillion calculations.
A PetaFLOP is 1015 or 1,000,000,000,000,000 = one quadrillion calculations.

In late 1996, Intel’s ASCI Red supercomputer was the world’s first computer to achieve one TeraFLOP. The amortised investment per GigaFLOP was US $30,000.

As of June 10, 2013, China’s Tianhe-2 (“Milky Way 2”) was ranked the world’s fastest supercomputer, with a record of 33.86 PetaFLOPs, at a cost of just 22c per GigaFLOP.

• In Jan 2025, the cost per GigaFlop was below 10c

The Motorola StarTAC clamshell feature phone was released in 1996. At the time, Personal Digital Organisers (PDAs) had many of the features of later handheld devices. In 2016, many people over the age of 15 (in the developing world) carry a handheld computer (smartphone) in their bag or pocket.

• In 2024 global ownership of a smartphone was 71%

In 1996, the world wide web had just been enabled (with the advent of the Mosaic web browser), email was a novelty (and not yet a necessity or a burden), and some of the world’s largest corporations and most recognised brands today were in their infancy or did not even exist!

In 1996, the following brands did not exist: Baidu, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, WordPress, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp.

All have enjoyed prodigious success since their subsequent launches:
Baidu (2000) 643 million (mn) active users per month (pm);

• in 2025, Baidu had 735 mn users pm

Wikipedia (2001) 18 billion (bn) page views pm, 500 mn unique visitors pm;

• in 2025, 66 mn articles, 11 bn page views pm, 4.4 bn visits pm

LinkedIn (2003) 400+ mn professional profiles;

• in 2025, 1.1 billion members worldwide, with 134.5 million users logging in pd

WordPress (2003) 74.6 mn sites;

• in 2025, over 43% of all websites on the internet were built in WordPress

Facebook (2004) 1.1 bn users;

• in 2024, there were 3 billion monthly active users

YouTube (2005) 4 bn videos viewed per day (pd), 300 hours of content uploaded per minute;

• in 2025, there are 20 million video uploads pd, and as many as 20 mn simultaneous viewers

Twitter (2006) 300+ bn tweets sent; (acquired in 2022 by Elon Musk, and rebranded X)

• in 2025, there are 500+ bn tweets sent per day

WhatsApp (2009) 1 bn users, 30 bn messages sent pd, (acquired by Facebook in 2014 for US$19 bn)

• in 2025, there were 3.28 billion monthly active users
• In 2026, Australia’s first ‘unicorn’ (startup to billion dollar valuation) Canva (established 2013), other significant unicorns include: ByteDance (established 2012), Telegram (2013), Airwallex, Discord, OpenAI, Revolut (2015), Neuralink (2016), Binance, Substack, The Boring Company (2017), Anthropic (2021), Perplexity AI (2022)

The world’s human population was 5.8bn in 1996. In 2016, it was 7.4bn.
In 1996, there were 250,000 websites and 77 million Internet users (1.3% of the total population). In 2014, there were a billion websites and almost 3 billion Internet users (40%).

• In Feb 2026, the world’s human population was 8.3bn

In 1996, DSVD (Digital Simultaneous Voice and Data) modems were ratified as V.70 by the ICU in 1996 and the fastest modems offered a maximum upload speed of 33.6 kbit/s (1000 bits per second).

In 2016, a DisplayPort 1.3 (4-lane High Bit Rate 3) has a capacity of 32.4 Gbit/s (32 billion bits per second).

• In 2026, researchers achieved internet speeds of up to 430 Terabits per second, (equivalent to 430 trillion bits ps)

In 1996, The first version of the Java programming language was released.

In 1996, the Macintosh was the all-in-one desktop computer offered by Apple. The MS-DOS-based, Windows 95 operating system was installed on all Microsoft computers.

In 1996, desktop monitor resolution was commonly 640 x 480 pixels. In 2016, the resolution of the current iMac desktop monitor is 5120 x 2880 px.

Web developers wanting consistency between O/S and monitors used 216 ‘web safe’ colours. In 2016, computer monitors can display 16,777,216 colors.

In 1996, Netscape was the most popular web browser. Internet Explorer rapidly gained users as it was bundled with Windows in PCs.

In 1996, the commonly used search engines included WebCrawler, Lycos, AltaVista, Excite and Dogpile. The Google web search engine had just been initiated as a Stanford research project.

• In 2025, Google Chrome holds ~66% of global market share

In 1996, the first HDTV-compatible front projection television was introduced in the USA. Broadcasters, TV & PC manufacturers set industry standards for digital HDTV. Now, the film production and television monitor standard is 4K.

• In 2026, consumer monitors are available in 8K (7,680 x 4,320 px)

In 1996, Macromedia Flash (animation software) was still at version 1.0. Twenty years on, it is no longer supported, and has been superseded by HTML 5 markup language and now Google Polymer software library (used to define and style Web Components).

• In 2026, composable architecture software (focused on modular, reusable, and interoperable components) include the headless content management systems (CMS) Contentful, Builder.io, Umbraco

In 1996, Dolly the sheep, was the first mammal to be successfully cloned from an adult cell. In 2003, the Human Genome Project completed sequencing 99% of the euchromatic human genome with more than 99.99% accuracy.

In 1996, IBM computer Deep Blue defeated grand-master Garry Kasparov at chess.

• In 2019, South Korean Go champion Lee Se-dol retired after being beaten by DeepMind’s AlphaGo software. A human did not win against a computer until (an AI aided software exploit) in 2023.

In 1996, Pokémon Red and Green was released in Japan. Pokémon now has hundreds of millions of adherents, worldwide and has generated US$37.76 billion in revenue.

In 1996, David Bowie’s song “Telling Lies” became the first single offered as a digital track by a major record label. In 2015, upon the launch of the iPhone 6, rock band U2 controversially distributed their album “Songs of Innocence” for free, to every iTunes account.

• In 2015, the song “Hello” by Adele reached one billion views on YouTube in just 87.4 days.
• In 2025, Taylor Swift’s “The Eras Tour” sold out in just a few minutes, and “The Exo Planet Tour 4” sold 67,000 tickets in 0.2 seconds!

In 1996, Hong Kong was still a colony of Britain, but within a year would revert to Chinese sovereignty. The 13 storey height limit and flashing neon sign prohibitions imposed on Tsim Sha Tsui buildings (due to the central Victoria Harbour location of Kai Tak International Airport) were lifted in 1997 (when the new Chek Lap Kok International Airport opened), enabling 100 storey buildings to be constructed and the city to be illuminated in a “Symphony of Light”.

The global technological, corporate and behavioural landscape has changed even more than the dramatically vertical cityscape of Hong Kong. While the changes of the twentieth century (in transportation, communications and a resulting globalisation) were revolutionary, the changes wrought in the Digital Age of the last two decades, have been unprecedented.

Despite the overuse of the word ‘future-proof’, what happens in the next 30 years is hard to foretell.

• In 2026, with the advent of AI, we can safely predict that the only constant will be change .. and (unless some extinction level event occurs) the geometric rate of change will continue unabated.

Digital Tsunami was founded in Hong Kong in 1996. The company name and brandline ‘Communications Evolution’ were selected to convey (for some, quite confrontingly) the immense and comprehensive impact which digital technology was expected to deliver. 

For thirty years, Digital Tsunami consulted to global brands, MNCs and SMEs on digital strategy and content solutions. The company closed in 2025, when the founder retired.

Image credit: Frances Gunn

Sources:
apple.com/mac/
businessofapps.com/whatsapp-statistics/
chrome.google.com/world-data-atlas/
cisco.com/c/en/us/VNI
computerworld.com/scientists-calculate-data-295–exabytes.html
emc.com
expandedramblings.com/index.php/baidu-stats/
expandedramblings.com/twitter-stats/
expandedramblings.com/youtube-statistics/
highscalability.com/how-big-is-a-zettabyte
internetlivestats.com/total-number-of-websites/
managewp.com/statistics-about-wordpress
recode.net/data-storage/
statista.com/statistics/linkedin/
w3techs.com/technologies/cm-wordpress/
stats.wikimedia.org

Sources 2026:
easeus.com/whitepapers/2025-data-storage-statistics-facts-and-trends.html
prsense.global/2026-data-tech-and-storage-trends/
medium.com/@cli_87015/the-evolution-of-gpu-pricing-a-deep-dive-into-cost-per-fp32-flop-for-hyperscalers-cbf072b85bb5
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PptfuuTa3y0