Technology in 2000

One thing that’s frequently overlooked when considering what happened – and how – in the case of Asha Degree is the state of technology in the year 2000. In order to put this in the proper context, we’re going to begin with a bit of nostalgia (or for some, a history lesson).

The year was 1999. In the lead up to New Year’s Eve of the new millennium, there was something of a panic. There were predictions that there would be an apocalypse — technological, societal, possibly both. It varied bases on who you asked. The ‘millennium bug’ or ‘Y2K bug’ was believed to be a design flaw that would make computers incapable of distinguishing between the year 2000 and the year 1900 because they only looked at the last 2 digits of the year. This was believed to be more than these devices would handle and thus, in the worst case technology scenario, come midnight and the 1st of January, the global banking system would collapse, medical devices would cease to function, airplanes would drop out of the sky, nuclear reactors would… well… you probably see where this is going. There was a fairly widespread belief that Y2K would be catastrophic for clocks & utterly destroy human society as we knew it.

Yeah.

While we hope you enjoyed the trip down memory lane, it’s an important reminder of just how technologically illiterate most people were in February 2000.

Here are some other points to keep in mind:

• Mobile phones were not common place.
• Most children did not own mobile phones at all. Some wealthy teenagers had them, usually around the time they were learning to drive, but it still was not the norm.
• Texting was not widespread and those who did use it had to use the regular numbered keys. It took a long time. Most texts (both incoming and outgoing) also cost at least 5 or 10 cents each.
• Most people did not have the internet on their phone. The few who did were not working with anything remotely comparable to an iPhone. You may have been able to get limited news, information on the stock market & limited information about sports. You didn’t have the entire internet in your pocket.
• CCTV was still in its infancy — it existed, but the quality was blurry & it was recorded to VHS tape or CD. Because those didn’t have much space, they were used again, recording over everything that had been captured every few days unless there was a major incident.
• The PlayStation 2 did not connect to the internet (not until August 2002 in North America.)
• Many families did not own a home computer and not all families who did have a computer had internet service. Companies like AOL provided free trials (by the hour) of internet service via CDs sent in the mail. Schools taught kids how to use a “word processor” in the school computer lab.
• The iPod did not yet exist.

And finally, just to drive the point home for all the millennials:

• The Thong Song wasn’t released until February 15, 2000. Shaggy’s It Wasn’t Me wasn’t released until November 7, 2000.

It is easy to think about Asha’s case in terms of the way many American children live in 2024, but the technology is an equally important piece of this case and understanding it. Had Asha’s case occurred in February 2024, we would be practically guaranteed footage from several video surveillance systems, video doorbells, mobile phone signals and more. The truth is that because of the time period, Asha just missed the technology boom that would almost certainly have been able to offer more evidence and insights in to what led up to her disappearance & more importantly, what happened during and after.