Technology didn’t boom once. It has boomed in waves, each one faster and more transformative than the last. But the boom most people mean when they ask this question, the explosive growth of digital technology that reshaped everyday life, started in the late 1940s with a tiny device made of germanium and gold contacts. Everything since then has been an acceleration of that single breakthrough.
The First Booms: Engines and Electricity
Long before computers, the world experienced technology booms that felt just as revolutionary to the people living through them. The first Industrial Revolution, roughly 1750 to 1900, introduced steam power, mechanized factories, and railroads. For the first time in human history, machines could do work that had always required muscle.
The Second Industrial Revolution, from about 1870 to 1914, layered on electricity, the internal combustion engine, and the telephone. These weren’t isolated gadgets. They were interconnected systems. Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse recognized that electricity was a network: power generation, transmission lines, and devices all had to work together. By 1890, the main technical problems had been solved and electricity was being tamed for commercial use. Meanwhile, Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz built the first gasoline-powered automobiles in 1885, and by 1914, Henry Ford was selling nearly a quarter of a million Model T cars per year. The pace of change was already accelerating. The car went from prototype to mass production in under 30 years.
The Transistor Changed Everything
The digital technology boom traces directly to December 16, 1947, when John Bardeen and Walter Brattain at Bell Labs created the first working transistor. They pressed two thin gold contacts into a small slab of germanium and found that the voltage on one contact could control the current flowing through the other, amplifying the input signal up to 100 times. It was a tiny, fragile device, but it could do the job of a vacuum tube, the bulky glass component that powered early electronics, at a fraction of the size and energy cost.
Bell Labs announced the transistor at a press conference on June 30, 1948. A spokesperson said it “may have far-reaching significance in electronics and electrical communication.” That turned out to be one of history’s great understatements. The transistor replaced unreliable vacuum tubes and electromechanical switches, making it possible to build smaller, cheaper, and more reliable electronic devices. Without it, there are no computers, no smartphones, no internet.
Moore’s Law and Exponential Growth
The transistor didn’t just start the boom. It created a self-reinforcing cycle of improvement that no previous technology had achieved. In 1965, Gordon Moore, who would co-found Intel, noticed that the number of components engineers could fit onto a single chip was doubling roughly every 12 months. He projected this trend would continue, predicting chips would hold 65,000 components by 1975.
He was right. By 1975, he updated the prediction slightly, noting the doubling rate had slowed to about every two years when factoring in more complex microprocessor designs alongside memory chips. This pattern, known as Moore’s Law, held remarkably steady for decades. It meant that every couple of years, computers got roughly twice as powerful for the same cost. That compounding effect is what separates the digital technology boom from every boom before it. Steam engines improved, but they didn’t double in capability every 24 months for half a century.
The Internet and the 1990s Surge
Transistors shrank into microprocessors. Microprocessors powered personal computers. And personal computers, once connected to each other through the internet, created an entirely new kind of boom in the mid-1990s. The commercialization of the World Wide Web after 1993 turned computing from a productivity tool into a communication platform, a marketplace, and eventually an entertainment system. Companies like Amazon, Google, and eBay were all founded between 1994 and 1998.
The speed of adoption was unlike anything before. Television took 22 years to reach 50 million users. Mobile phones took 12 years. The internet compressed that timeline even further, and each new platform built on top of it adopted faster still. This period, often called the dot-com boom, saw enormous investment pour into technology companies. The bubble burst in 2000 when stock valuations outpaced actual revenue, but the underlying technology kept advancing. Broadband replaced dial-up. Server infrastructure expanded. The foundations for the next wave were being laid even during the downturn.
Smartphones Put a Computer in Every Pocket
The launch of the iPhone in 2007 kicked off the most visible technology boom in modern memory. Apple sold 1.39 million iPhones that first year. By 2008, that number jumped to 11.63 million. By 2012, it hit 125 million. The growth was staggering, but the iPhone was just the leading edge. Global smartphone sales went from 172 million units in 2009 to nearly 1.22 billion in 2014, a sevenfold increase in five years.
At the same time, feature phones (the basic handsets that dominated before smartphones) collapsed. Over 1.3 billion feature phones sold in 2011. By 2015, that number had dropped to under 450 million, and it has continued falling since. Smartphones didn’t just replace old phones. They replaced cameras, GPS devices, music players, alarm clocks, newspapers, and, for many people, computers themselves. The smartphone boom also created the app economy, mobile payments, ride-sharing services, and social media platforms that now have billions of users.
Cloud computing grew alongside smartphones, giving companies the ability to store and process data on remote servers instead of local machines. This made it cheaper and faster to launch new digital services, which accelerated the cycle of innovation even further.
The AI Boom: The Latest Wave
The most recent technology boom centers on artificial intelligence. Total investment in AI has grown more than thirteenfold since 2014, according to Stanford University’s AI Index. Generative AI tools, the kind that can write text, generate images, and hold conversations, moved from research labs to mainstream products starting around 2022. The pattern is familiar: a breakthrough technology (in this case, large language models trained on massive datasets) suddenly becomes accessible to ordinary users, and adoption accelerates at a pace that surprises even the people building it.
Each boom builds on the infrastructure of the one before it. AI requires the processing power that came from decades of Moore’s Law, the data generated by billions of smartphone users, and the cloud computing platforms built during the 2010s. This stacking effect is why each wave arrives faster and hits harder than the last. The gap between the steam engine and electricity was about a century. Between the transistor and the personal computer, roughly 30 years. Between the smartphone and mainstream AI, about 15.
Why the Boom Keeps Accelerating
The short answer to “when did technology start to boom” is that it depends on which boom you mean. The industrial boom began around 1750. The electrical and automotive boom started around 1870. The digital boom launched in 1947 with the transistor. The internet boom hit in the mid-1990s. The mobile boom started in 2007. The AI boom arrived around 2022.
But the deeper pattern is that technology booms are not separate events. They are chapters in an accelerating story where each breakthrough creates the tools for the next one. Electricity made it possible to build the labs that invented the transistor. The transistor made it possible to build computers. Computers made it possible to design smartphones. Smartphones generated the data that trains AI. The boom didn’t start once and end. It started, and then it started going faster.