20 years in IT history: Connectivity

Also, on July 21, Steve Jobs demoed the first cheap wireless modem. Wireless networking did not take the world by surprise. For years everyone had understood that the need to embody connectivity in physical wires was an immense constraint on the growth of networking (and a fatal one, in the case of mobile devices). People had been hammering away at the problem for at least a decade, and a few very expensive solutions were running here and there.

What was different about Apple's AirPort was that it was cheap enough for mass adoption. Over the next several years, wireless LANs began to crop up everywhere. They didn't necessarily work perfectly; the technology came with many headaches, beginning with security and dependability, and CIOs were to spend many hours hammering out the bugs. They did not, however, do much of that in 1999, for that year CIOs were preparing for the imminent end of civilization, generally known as the Y2K bug.

2000: Millennial Change and Angst

First, Y2K went off without a hitch, proving that luck is on the side of those smart enough to be working on well-posed problems and establishing ERP as the way businesses organized themselves.

Second, an Internet company (GoogleGoogle) developed a well-grounded solution to the problem of making money over the Net. Alles zu Google auf CIO.de