Government Computer News
25 years: A technology timeline
This timeline excludes a few technologies that might seem obvious choices, but they appeared before 1982. The Internet, for instance, was designed in 1974, though it did not open up until the 1980s. Personal digital assistants first appeared in 1975. TCP/IP goes back to the 1970s. Even in a time of accelerated technology advancements, innovations take time to gestate — wikis, which have caught fire in recent years, date to 1995.
Digg
De.licio.us
Slashdot
Technorati
1982
IBM PC: Computers as a low-cost assemblage of electronic Lego parts made every neighborhood electronics geek a computer technician and every small office and home work room a data center.
RELATIONAL DATABASES: The second generation of RDBMS systems began to take hold.
1983
GPS/GIS: The Global Positioning System was opened for use by civilian aircraft in 1983, beginning a trend that — combined with great advances in geographic information systems and mapping tools — led to agency data visualized in layered maps and cars telling their drivers where to turn.
1984
CD-ROM for computers: Flattened two entire industries, data storage and music dissemination.
Its successor, the DVD (1996), killed off the video tape.
FLASH MEMORY: Invented in 1984 at Toshiba, it found its place in small devices.
Smart phones, digital cameras, other devices (and, soon, laptops) all rely on Flash.
1985
NETWORK FILE SYSTEM: The file system that brought us to the age of network storage. No longer would your data be hostage to the computer in which it was created — or to backup tape.
1987
POWERPOINT: The one you love to hate. All the knowledge in the world boiled down to easy, succinct, bullet-pointed meaninglessness.
PERL: God’s own duct tape, at least when working in Unix-based systems.
1989
WORLD WIDE WEB: Invented by Tim Berners-Lee, it would soon change the way governments, business and people operate.
1990
SLIP/PPP (Serial Line Internet Protocol and Point-to-Point Protocol): We’ve forgotten about this now, but SLIP/PPP — mostly PPP — is what got everyone on the Internet via dial-up modems back when broadband was an obscure industry term.
1991
LINUX: A Unix knockoff that is the world’s largest hobby project for coders. A select few are among the world’s best.
HYPERTEXT MARKUP LANGUAGE: You send the instructions to the remote computer and let it figure out how to render the layout, dummy! PCI SLOTS: Rumors are unconfirmed that the national boost in technology productivity came from the thousands of admins who no longer had to fiddle with the IRQ settings each time they installed a new peripheral.
1991
GRAPHICS COPROCESSORS: They made the fancy stuff possible by pulling graphics data away from the CPU and eventually gave rise to separate graphics cards.
1992
THE BROWSER: It made the Web work for the rest of us.
1993
E-MAIL: Electronic mail goes back to the 1960s, but it really started taking off with Web use. By 1997, the volume of business e-mail surpassed that of regular mail.
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