In the mid-2000s I spent enough time in Tanzania to stop noticing the thing a visitor notices first: almost everyone had a cell phone. Not a landline at home. Not a shared village phone. A handset, usually a Nokia, often something from the European market the US had not seen yet. There was a real secondary market, and the phones moving through it were in most ways more interesting, more diverse, and more advanced than what people in the US were carrying. A US Razr was good currency in that market, and I traded mine more than once for something better. The network was spotty, the electricity was spottier, and the towers kept working anyway because the business of getting an SMS from one person to another had already won the argument there. There was no copper to retrofit. There was no dial-up, no DSL, no ISDN, no cable. The sequence the US and Europe had lived through was not a sequence there. It was a thing that had never happened.
In 1999 I was running a web hosting business out of real server racks, selling dedicated machines to customers who mostly reached them from Windows desktops sitting on furniture. The endpoints were known. They lived in offices and bedrooms. They plugged into the wall. If you wanted to manage your server, you sat down at a desk and did it.
PlotThing is a comprehensive story management and writing application I'm building. It provides writers with tools to organize their creative work and export directly to publishing formats.