Technology years are like dog years: they seem to move much faster than chronological years.
It’s not hard to see why: while software innovation may eventually require physical infrastructure to change (specialised broadband cables replacing telephone cables, or the construction of purpose-built data centres), it is much easier to update software than it is to alter a physical production line.
At Unboxed, we have been creating digital services since early 2005. That’s two decades of design and development. While some of the personnel have been replaced by new faces over the years, our basic principles, which include learning by doing and delivering value, have not changed.
The name 'Unboxed' reflects the company's mission to break away from the traditional software model of the late 1990s and early 2000s, when software was primarily sold in physical boxes. Instead of offering 'out-of-the-box' products, Unboxed championed bespoke solutions, making custom software development more accessible and successful. The founders envisioned 'unboxing' the process, fostering innovative thinking and rejecting the constraints of conventional methods. This forward-thinking approach aligned with the emerging shift towards flexible solutions like Software as a Service (SaaS).
However, what has changed dramatically are the tools we use to create our services. Unboxed Senior Software Engineer Ben Eskola and I weren’t working at Unboxed in 2005. But that hasn’t stopped us taking a trip down memory lane to remind ourselves exactly what the technology landscape looked like when Unboxed was formed:
In 2024, most of the applications we build are hosted on cloud services, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Digital Ocean or Heroku. While there are still sometimes valid reasons to self-host, the cost reductions and convenience of the cloud has meant that this is now the default expectation when we build.
In 2005, though, everything was different. On-premises server rooms were still the norm - usually secured by keycard and off-limits to all but a select few.
Ben remembers:
“Virtual machines (VMs) were really the thing that changed everything. Until then, you were dependent on the physical computers that you had. When I started university in 2004, I joined the computer society. We had a few desktop PCs in a cupboard but VMs were totally out of reach, just not a thing you could do. Virtualisation becoming available for small-scale projects where you don’t want to spend too much money is a real game changer. Back then, it simply wasn’t possible to run an application for a few pounds a month like it is today.
“In 2004, to run an application, you needed a server room with power and an internet connection, and it was pretty much the same in 2008 when I did my placement year. For hobbyists who wanted to host at home, it was similarly difficult, depending on your internet service provider. The only real alternative was shared web hosting with PHP support, but it only allowed you to do certain things. PHP became popular as a language because you could update websites and applications by dropping files into these shared hosting providers, rather than needing to run your own server which you would have needed to restart, like Rails.”
It was the following year, in 2006, when a new digital age would emerge with the launch of AWS, followed by Heroku in 2007.
Also different in the 2000s was the way we managed our code and got it from our local machine to the computers in the server room.
Today’s streamlined code pipelines and their associated tooling were very much in the future in 2005: many of us used FTP clients such as Filezilla to push their code to the server. The potential for pushing the wrong code was also high as version control was a lot less widespread in those days.
While developers working on large-scale projects may have used a version control system for individual files, many people working on web applications only started to do so in the mid-2000s. Today’s market-leading solution, Git, was launched in the same month as Unboxed, so if people were using version control back then, it was more likely to be SVN (Subversion, first launched in 2001).
“SVN was when version control started becoming more widespread and within reach of more organisations. Some big open source projects would have had CVS but the big difference was it meant running a server. So either you needed to run your own server or have access to one with a friendly admin. This constrained the model of what you could do with branching, sharing, cloning etc.
“At the time Git appeared, there was an outcrop of alternatives, such as Mercurial, but most of these fell by the wayside [Note that the existence of the GitHub website and the high profile of Git’s creator Linus Torvalds may have hastened this]. By 2008, I was using version control myself: first SVN and then Git.
It would be impossible to work without it today. Developer workloads are so centred around version control, especially in conjunction with GitHub, but even without. I genuinely can’t imagine what it would be like to work on a project of any size without version control” - Ben
On the other hand, maybe version control was less important 20 years ago because the number of files you needed to build a web application was much smaller.
Additionally, it can be argued that the skill level of developers in the early 2000s were higher than today, due to the plethora of frameworks that now make development much more accessible and user-friendly.
Mostly, people used to build applications by hand-coding HTML, JavaScript and CSS files, along with PHP (and SQL if their app needed a database). It is hard to underestimate the impact of Ruby on Rails, which we primarily use here at Unboxed, which was released in 2004. The idea of MVC (model view controller) frameworks was not absolutely new. Spring was developed in 2003, but it was Rails that really provided an elegant and easy solution, offering a user-friendly gateway for a whole new generation of web developers.
Ben points out that one of the factors that allowed Rails to evolve was virtualisation:
“We touched on it when we talked about shared hosting, because something like Ruby or any application framework where you have a process running would have been a lot more difficult to implement. It’s only because of virtualisation and providers like Heroku that Rails was able to take off.
“Ruby was a breath of fresh air for developers at that time. Lots of developers came from Java and were so happy to discover a language that made coding fun again. Java has improved a lot in the interim but back then, the difference in flexibility and mindset was hugely appealing to early adopters. Ruby itself wasn’t new. It had been around for more than 10 years, but Rails was a big part of its success.”
It wasn’t just the software that would appear strange to today’s developers. Offices were dominated by clunky workstations - or, if it was an office with a lot of creative types, you might have seen arrays of fancy Apple G4 computers.
Laptops were beginning to make inroads, but were far from ubiquitous - and the most popular model, still around today in much improved form, was the IBM ThinkPad.
“Laptops have become the default and are so cost-effective that we give everyone one these days. Certainly in 2008 or 2010, everyone had a desktop and you couldn’t hot-desk because your setup and your files were on your specific desk.” - Ben
Operating systems, too, were dominated by one name. Microsoft Windows feels like it has been with us forever, but in fact it celebrated its twentieth birthday in 2005, just after Unboxed was founded.
Linux was an option, but developers had to use Red Hat or one of the other early distributions. It wasn’t until Ubuntu was launched in 2004 that Linux became the overwhelming developer favourite it still is today.
“Before 2004, Linux distributions were mainly things like Debian or Fedora. This meant that to be using Linux in 2003, you had to be a real enthusiast. It was Ubuntu that with its first release made Linux accessible to more people. In my placement year in 2008, I used Fedora but by the time I had my first job in 2010, most people used Ubuntu, which was viable for most people who were even slightly technical rather than specialist computer people.”
“Perhaps it was not exactly a competitor to MacOS, but Ubuntu began to be a reasonable choice for people who were not hardcore Linux enthusiasts.” - Ben
Offices looked different in 2005 - and we behaved differently, too. On-site working was the norm, meaning that most communication took place face-to-face, and digital communication generally happened by email because no one really expected synchronous conversations unless they picked up the phone and called each other.
Today, it is hard to imagine working without real-time chat applications such as Slack (launched in 2014):
Rhian says: “In 2005, working for a large corporation, everything was done by email, which feels impossible now. We also had lots of weird proprietary applications built for us by private suppliers, which had to be maintained - and also a company intranet, which were very popular at the time.”
“There were instant messenger applications by 2004, but we didn’t really use them for office communication. In 2008 we would have used email or phones: not phones for everyone, but a phone in every office. I don’t know if having Slack is necessarily the greatest advance ever. Real-time communication is good but sometimes it can feel a bit non-stop. Email is a bit easier to ignore for a couple of hours to do focused work whereas Slack feels like you have to respond straight away, which is not always a good thing.
“There were other things that also weren’t possible in 2004. For example, video calls existed in theory, but hardly anyone used them because what that meant at the time was a grainy 200x340 pixel image, and a bubble webcam perched on top of your monitor. Changes in bandwidth as well as hardware enable the sort of video calls we are used to today” - Ben
Perhaps the best way to think about the sea change that has happened in technology in the last 20 years is to think about how Unboxed and other digital businesses were able to continue working through the pandemic.
In a world where all staff members have laptops, applications live in the cloud and we can communicate via Slack and video calls, it is easy to forget how recent these advances have been. It will be interesting to look back in 2045 and see how the world of technology has changed in another 20 years - and how Unboxed has kept up with this evolution.
