From Windows 95 to Today: No One Has to Be Left Out

There's an image I can't get out of my head: the family computer booting up, the fan roaring like a jet engine, and then, all of a sudden, that blue sky with white clouds from Windows 95. Turning on the machine was an event. You had to wait, and waiting was normal. You didn't "use" the computer in a hurry: you sat down in front of it the way you'd sit down to visit someone important.

Back then, technology was a single road, and we all walked it together. One Start button, four programs, one telephone for the whole house. We all learned the same way, making the same mistakes, asking the same cousin who "knew about computers." Technology moved slowly enough to let us catch up. We grew up alongside it: the machine and us, educating each other.

Today it's the opposite. You open your phone and there are ten apps for the same thing, three different ways to pay the electric bill, a QR code taped to every restaurant table, and a new password to invent every week. Thousands of options, all at once.

For someone born into the modern world, that abundance is a party: pick, compare, switch whenever you like. But for someone who didn't get to learn the new technology in time, that same abundance is disorienting. And it does something worse: it leaves people out. The bank assumes you know how to use the app. The paperwork assumes you have email. Nobody decides it on purpose; the world simply starts speaking a language nobody ever taught you.

Without Quite Meaning To

Here's something I learned early: technology doesn't just give us options; it also puts each of us in a place — without quite meaning to. It assigns you a spot in line without ever asking.

My story with BlackBerrys is the proof. When I was 16, in Anaco, the BlackBerry was the serious phone, and updating one was a chore that scared just about anybody. I learned to do it almost as a game. And that one small skill positioned me: I became "the kid who knows" on my block. I didn't plan it. Technology set me in a place that, over the years, became my trade — and later, my company.

But the coin has two sides. Just as it moved me toward the front, it kept nudging others out without anyone ever signing that decision: the woman who always paid her bills at an office that closed one day "because everything is online now"; the man who ran his business for thirty years with a notebook and is now told to invoice over the internet. Capable people, people who know how to do things no app knows how to do, left outside because the door was moved somewhere else.

No One Has to Be Left Out

And here is what I really want to tell you: being left out is not a condition — it's a situation. Conditions you carry; situations you change. And this one changes with something very simple that technology doesn't include in the box: a patient person by your side.

I see it every week. The same person who swears they're "no good at this" sends their first invoice by email, makes their first video call, watches their business show up on the internet. They didn't change; the treatment changed: someone explained things without rushing, in their language, without making them feel bad for asking twice.

That's why Reyes Project exists. Since 2008 my job has been the same, even as the gadgets keep changing names: bringing technology closer to people. If the digital world left you behind, it wasn't your fault; what you were missing was someone to bring it within reach. That's what we do — calmly, on WhatsApp, and with no jargon.

The next time a gadget makes you feel out of place, remember the blue sky of Windows 95. We all started there: waiting, understanding nothing, in front of a brand-new screen. Nobody is born modern; we all learn with someone at our side. That's what we're here for.

— Alexis