Do you remember? I certainly do. As a baby boomer with a 40-year career in media, communications and (digital) marketing, I’ve survived multiple “revolutions”.
When Gondwana opened its first lodge at the Fish River Canyon in 1996, the slinger telephone was its link to the rest of the world.
When Gondwana was founded in the 1990s, the digital age was just warming up. The World Wide Web had arrived (quietly, in 1989), and offices began replacing typewriters with computers – though not without a fair amount of suspicion... Getting online required a modem, patience, and a bit of luck. If someone picked up the phone, that was it. Connection lost. Try again.
Mobile phones started appearing too, brick-like by today’s standards, and by the late ’90s, SMS had become the new shorthand for communication. Fax machines slowly bowed out as email took over.
In 2008 Gondwana’s reservations team received the latest digital voice recorders and fax equipment.
Back then, I worked at a radio station. News scripts were typed on a typewriter (no backspace, only bravery), and research meant real books. Interviews were recorded on tape reels, editing involved scissors and tape (yes, actual tape!); and music for live broadcasts came from two turntables that required perfect timing and steady nerves. If something went wrong, you didn’t “undo”, you simply started over.
Right up until the 1990s, many offices in Namibia were still using manual typewriters.
Fast-forward two decades, all of this had migrated onto one single screen. No tape jams, just the occasional frozen cursor.
Gondwana was born in 1996, a year that felt a bit like science fiction becoming reality. Dolly the sheep made headlines as the first cloned mammal; a computer challenged world chess champion Garry Kasparov (and won!); and Toy Story became the first fully computer-animated film. Not a bad year to be born.
In 2005, the year this photograph was taken, the bulky CRT monitors of the late 1990s were gradually being replaced by the new flat-screen monitors.
In many ways, Gondwana grew up alongside the digital age – learning, adapting, and evolving with it. By the time I joined the company in 2010, Gondwana already had quite a strong digital foothold, using its website not just to showcase accommodation, but to tell stories about Namibia, about nature and sustainability, long before it became fashionable.
Gondwana’s website in 2006.
Then came social media. Gondwana joined Facebook in 2011, just as the world discovered the irresistible urge to share everything. What started modestly has grown into a lively digital presence, connecting people across continents with Namibia’s landscapes – one post, one photo, one “like” at a time.
Today, everything is faster, smoother, and – on most days – working. Guests book their journeys online in minutes, stories travel instantly, and even artificial intelligence has joined the team. Our AI assistant, Gecco, is always ready to help – efficient, polite, and blissfully unaware of what a tape jam is.
The author of this article in the 1990s at a computer
that still had a floppy disk drive.
And me? I still marvel at the pace of digital change. I learn something new every day – most of the times because I find it really inspiring, sometimes because I have no choice. And yet, despite all the innovation, there’s one thing technology hasn’t replaced: real human connection.
When the internet goes down, there’s nothing left to do but swivel away from the screen, pour a cup of coffee, and have a proper conversation with a colleague.
No Wi-Fi, no filters, no buffering. Just the original social network.
Author: Inke Stoldt
Photos: Gondwana Collection
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