10 turning points in tech history

[VelMurugan]

10 turning points in tech history

Ever wondered what were the biggest inventions/innovation or incidents that have shaped the information technology industry as it is today? The watershed events and milestones that paved the computing history? Can you imagine today a world without Internet? Or how much the rhetoric in the US may bash outsourcing, it has altered and continues to alter the global economy.

ComputerWorld recently did a listing of the top 15 turning points in the technology history. Here we present to you top 10 from the list. The turning points that define the IT industry as it is today.

Source : indiatimes

[VelMurugan]

Apple's NeXT

In late nineties, Apple Computer was in deep troubled times. Facing tough competition from Microsoft, its market share was declining. Microsoft's Windows NT and Windows 95 had outpaced the aging Mac OS in features and technology.

Apple's CEO Gil Amelio was desperately looking for a way to save the company. In December 1996, Amelio bought NeXT for $400 million and welcomed back the company's founder Steve Jobs as an 'informal adviser'.

Within eight months of the acquisition, Amelio was out and Steve Jobs became Apple's interim CEO. Jobs returned to the company after Apple had losses totaling $1.86 billion in a two-year period. As part of the turnaround, Jobs unveiled an unprecedented partnership with Microsoft CEO Bill Gates in August 1997, who invested $150 million in Apple. Apple on its part included Internet Explorer browser on the Mac.

However, Jobs' biggest coup came in May 1998, when he unveiled iMac. iMac combined computer and monitor into a single unit. A stunning success, iMac helped revive Apple sales and remains one of the biggest money makers. In 2007, Mac accounted for 43 per cent of the company's revenue.

In October 2001, Apple unveiled its first iPod, the digital music player further galvanised the company's position in the market. The portable music players continue to dominate the global market.

[VelMurugan]

GNU Project

Very few of us know that it was a printer problem that actually triggered the free software movement. A programmer at MIT's AI labs, Richard Stallman, widely regarded as the founding father of free software, wanted to fix Xerox printer drivers.

However, Xerox's move to proprietary drivers prevented Stallman to access the printer's source code. Citing copyright and trade secrecy, Xerox refused to release the code.

This made Stallman launch the GNU Project to create a free Unix-like operating system. With the launch of the GNU Project, he started the free software movement and, in October 1985, set up the Free Software Foundation.

[VelMurugan]

Microsoft to be split into two!

Can you imagine the technology landscape today if Microsoft had been split into two? In June 2000, US District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson ruled that Microsoft should be broken into two companies.

Jackson decided that Microsoft could retain its operating systems for PCs, TV set-top boxes, handheld computers and other devices. But the company would be forced to create a separate firm for its other software and Web products -- such as Outlook, Internet Explorer, BackOffice and the Microsoft Network (MSN) --resulting in sweeping changes from corporate offices and homes to the entire Internet.

Of course, the split never happened. The US appeals court overturned Jackson's ruling, eliminating the breakup. Had the decision stuck on, it would have radically tilt the balance of power in the technology industry. Microsoft itself is said to have described the breakup plan as "a death sentence".

[VelMurugan]

Handspring sets in smartphone era

Apple iPhone may have made smartphones mainstream with the launch of iPhone in 2007. But it was a breakaway Palm execs' company, Handspring, which gave the world its very first smartphone.

Handspring was founded by Jeff Hawkins, Donna Dubinsky, and Ed Colligan, the original inventors of the Palm Pilot and founders of Palm Computing in June 1998. The trio left Palm during late nineties during the time Palm, which created PDA market, was finding it tough to guard its turf against rivals.

The company launched the Handspring Visor line of products on September 14, 1999. Unlike most Palm products, Visor allowed add-on hardware modules.

This allowed company's partners to experiment and came up with VisorPhone. The phone became a hit and plans were made to combine phone's functionality with a PDA. So, in 2001 Handspring unveiled Treo. Except for the earliest model, all Treo devices were smartphones with integrated cellular phones, and nearly all featured built-in keyboards to enhance email and SMS functionality.

Bowing to Treo's popularity, Palm acquired Handspring in 2003. Thus began an era of smartphones, with standalone PDAs effectively becoming a history.

[VelMurugan]

World gets spam

Can you imagine what had happened had Digital Equipment Corporation's marketing manager Gary Thuerk not sent a mail to every Arpanet address in 1978.

The mail, widely referred as the world's first spam, was sent to 393 recipients on ARPANET to advertise the availability of a new model of DEC computers.

ARPANet authorities are said not to be pleased by the mail which was considered to be a flagrant violation of the use of the network which was strictly intended to be used for official US government business only.

[VelMurugan]

Microsoft Office logs in!

The next turning point was the launch of Microsoft Office. Most PCs in late eighties ran on programmes like WordPerfect or Lotus 1-2-3. There were a few Microsoft alternatives, but a very few companies actually used them.

However, both Lotus and WordPerfect failed to anticipate the success of Windows and potential of GUI-based software. They seem to believe that it will be the applications that will guide user's choice of the OS.

With Windows, the clamour for GUI-based software increased. The void was soon filled by Microsoft's Word and Excel. From here began Microsoft's domination on world's desktops. And Lotus and WordPerfect fast moved to oblivion as they failed to quickly embrace Windows.

[VelMurugan]

IBM gets new life

IBM has been a technology leader. However, in early nineties the company witnessed a serious decline, laying off thousands of workers. In an advisory sent to clients, an analyst for Merrill Lynch & Company, said that he expected IBM to soon "reveal a plan to remove 40,000 or more people in 1993." The company posted a $4.97 billion loss for 1992 -- the largest in American history -- and saw its mainframe sales plunge.

This was also the time when Lou Gerstner became CEO of the behemoth. Under him, IBM regained its past glory by revamping its organisation structure and shifting its focus to software and services. Even Today, IBM's Global Services division remains one of its strongest earners.

[VelMurugan]

Birth of Internet porn

In 1973, playboy's Miss November 1972 Lenna Sjoolom became the face of the first Internet porn! In 1973, to test a new digital image compression algorithm, Alexander Sawchuk needed a photo. The requirement was of a glossy page with a variety of image properties to test against and a human face. After a small search in the university's lab, he found Lenna's picture.

And as they warn you, anything you post on Internet, may stay on forever, and so did Lenna! And today the amount of porn available on the Net is astounding to say the least! Here are some statistics on porn from Good magazine:

* 35 per cent of all Internet downloads are pornographic in nature

* Every day, 266 new porn sites appear on the Internet

* "Sex" is the most searched word on the Internet

* 70 per cent of Internet porn traffic occurs during the 9-5 workday

[VelMurugan]

Comes XMLHttpRequest!

In early 2000, Web was a page-based medium. This meant that every HTTP request took a roundtrip to the server that refreshed the entire page.

So, to make Outlook Web Access for Microsoft Exchange Server 2000 more usable, Microsoft developers created a way for browsers to communicate with Web servers. An interface called IXMLHTTPRequest was developed and implemented into the second version of the MSXML library using this concept.

Later Mozilla Foundation developed a similar functionality into Mozilla 1.0 in 2002, calling it XMLHttpRequest. This interface was modelled to work as closely to Microsoft's IXMLHTTPRequest interface as possible. Thus was born a new way of coding for the Web.

Today, Facebook, GMail, Google Maps, and Bing Maps all owe their existence to Microsoft's IXMLHTTPRequest.

[VelMurugan]

SCO sues IBM

In 2003, SCO Group, led by new CEO Darl McBride, claimed ownership of key portions of the Linux kernel. SCO Group alleged that its license agreements with IBM means that source code that IBM wrote and donated to be incorporated into Linux was added in violation of SCO's contractual rights. Members of the Linux community disagreed with SCO's claims.

SCO sued IBM for $1 billion, claiming that IBM transferred SCO trade secrets to Linux. That amount later rose to $3 billion, and then again to $5 billion.

Seems SCO failed to estimate Linux's importance to both enterprise and IBM. Writes ComputerWorld, "As the lawsuits lumbered on, McBride and company were ridiculed, then bankrupted. Meanwhile, the Linux business boomed. With allies such as Computer Associates, IBM, Novell, and Red Hat willing to take up its defense, the open source OS was clearly here to stay. Ironically, the lawsuit that was meant to be the death blow for Linux may have succeeded only in ushering in its golden age."

[VelMurugan]

Worthy mentions

Other than these top 10 some other important events that shaped the computing industry are birth of ARPANet, popularly called the father of modern-day Internet; Intel's Pentium M on which most following Intel chips were based; Y2K which brought Indian IT giants on the global business map and sowed the first seed of outsourcing; and the dotcom bust of 1999-2000 which though wiped out the frenzy related to Internet-based businesses, also established the fact that Internet economy is here to stay.