20 years in IT history: Connectivity

A student at the University of Helsinki named Linus Torvalds released a half-finished operating system, hoping that a few hands might be willing to help out. To his surprise, he found hundreds and then thousands of programmers willing and able to work on the program, which he named Linux. As it turned out, a large network is perfect for supporting projects that are themselves networks, projects made up of pieces that can be worked on in isolation and then combined...over the network. These types of enterprises are enormously efficient, leveraging small investments in time and energy by many people into highly useful (and usually free) tools. Linux was one of the first of these massively parallel collaborations, but soon enough they would sprout up everywhere, from cartography ("mashups") to encyclopedias. And the Web itself.

1992: Windows A very young Bill Gates holds a Windows 1.0 floppy disk.

In 1992 Microsoft finally got a functional version of its latest operating system out the door. Windows 3.1 advanced the art in two ways; it was the first version to carry a useful graphics interface, allowing inputs and outputs to be represented and altered by manipulating icons. And more important, Microsoft's immense marketing power meant it went on desktops everywhere in the world, becoming a de facto standard.

1993: Mosaic

Mosaic was released by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. What Windows 3.1 was to the microcomputer, Mosaic was to the World Wide Web. Together, they acted to standardize the Internet, allowing all the 3.1 installations (and other compatible machines) to talk to each other with reasonable levels of predictability and stability.