A spate of stories and online postings heralding the end of the aughts
– “Worst decade ever,” proclaims Time, “Goodbye (at last) to the
Decade from Hell” — has me in a retrospective mood.

To say that
the years 2000 through 2009 have been an eventful 10 years is to state
the obvious. But still. The rolling over of two digits on the odometer
of years invites us to look back and consider all that’s changed in our
lives since we last argued about when new decades begin (pedants are
quick to point out that it’s technically not until Jan. 1 of years
ending in 1, so we have another 12 months to prepare to look back on
the first decade of the new millennium).

To do that, earlier
this week and with the help of suggestions from online readers, I
started making a list of things — products, technologies, ideas,
people — that are now commonplace but that weren’t on most of our
radar screens in late 1999. For a “radar screen” I used the Tribune’s
digital news archives and searched for when things were first
mentioned, even in passing, in our pages.