Chris Backe - Becoming a Digital Nomad: Your Step by Step Guide to the Digital Nomad Lifestyle

In a way, we have a rocket scientist to thank for digital nomads.

In 1972, former NASA engineer Jack Nilles was permitted to work from home on a complex NASA communication system. People asked how he could be working when he was at home, and his response, telecommuting , became a well-known term. He soon began to research telecommuting and teleworking at the University of Southern California, and was the lead author of the seminal book, The Telecommunications - Transportation Tradeoff . Telecommuting was an 'alternative to transportation,' it proposed, and since it would reduce the number of commuters, it could solve issues like gridlock, long commutes to work, and potentially helping the national energy crisis the US was experiencing at the time. While the internet and the personal computer as we know them didn't yet exist, the authors predicted new technologies would emerge that would be as revolutionary to life as the automobile.

Another very early example of telecommuting and working with computers while away from the office comes from 1973. According to a January 1974 Cycle World article, a series of cassette tapes, phone adapters, and plastic time cards were used to time the ISDT, a six-day motorcycle endurance race held in the Berkshire Hills in Massachusetts. (Computers had been used in previous events, but only for backups, or they had created a lot of problems.) After riders had checked in, the worker would call the computer center and replay the tape, passing data to a computer in Michigan for compilation at a-then-state-of-the-art 75 baud, or bits per second.

Fast forward to December 1997, when a book by Hitachi executive Tsugio Makimoto and Electronics Weekly writer David Manners was released. It prophesied that smaller and more powerful computer chips, along with new mobile devices and greater internet connectivity, would lead to a revolution in how people worked, lived, and traveled.

The title: Digital Nomads .

Despite the extensive experience of both these authors, and although the book came from a well-known UK publisher, it was virtually ignored by the public. Maybe it was just ahead of its time, or perhaps people were too caught up in the dot-com boom. Whatever the case, it predicted the future lifestyle and foresaw the technological shift that was coming.

Before the 20th century ended, a few more building blocks were put in place that made the digital nomad lifestyle technically possible. Paypal launched in 1998, making it possible for people to get paid without a bank account, and laptops began offering wi-fi in 1999. Elance (now Upwork), also launched in 1999, was one of the earliest places to make money as a freelancer online. Still, this was an exceptionally early time to be a digital nomad.

The concept of living and working wherever you like resurfaced in Tim Ferriss' 2007 best-selling book The 4-Hour Workweek , which put forth a way to "escape the 9-5, live anywhere, and join the new rich". Also released in 2007: Apple's first iPhone, a category-defining device that offered mere mortals the chance to compute from virtually anywhere in the world. Between the 2007-2008 financial crisis and the realization that a better way to live and work may exist, the 'digital nomad' lifestyle gradually gained mainstream acceptance. Even the US federal government employed over 100,000 remote workers in 2009, the same year National Geographic also started a ' Digital Nomad' blog .

By this point, the tools needed to make remote work a reality were coming online. Skype and Google Adsense started in 2003, while Facebook and Twitter became available to everyone in 2006. People began leaving six-figure jobs and booking one-way flights to faraway countries to begin a new life one where showing up to an office job became less important than actually doing good work, wherever they might be.