20 years in IT history: Connectivity

Sun Microsystems formed the JavaSoft group in order to develop the Java technology. Java, a language optimized for writing programs intended to run over a network, was (and is) a big deal, but the news of the year was not technical but cultural. This was the year when irrational exuberance slid behind the wheel, the year the dotcom balloon broke free of its moorings on planet Earth.

PS/2, NeXT and OOPs, Netware 3 Archie, Linux, Windows Mosaic, Spam and More, Convergence The Dotcoms, Distributed Compution, XML Wireless and Y2K, Millennial Change and Angst, Blogs Sarbanes-Oxley, Virtualization, ERP Hangover Multicore Processors, The Network, The iPhone

Much of the fever came from the spreading conviction that old business models were dying: Why would anyone ever want to go to a store anymore How could a business compete if it was carrying the overhead of a brick-and-mortar shop All this meant that anyone wanting a return on his investment had to find a place to park it in cyberspace. Somewhere. Anywhere.

1997: Distributed Computing

Jeff Lawson of Distributed.net showed how the Internet could be used to harness a very large number of geographically dispersed microcomputers to attack a single problem-in this case, a ciphertext released as a challenge by RSA (with a US$10,000 prize attached). Today distributed nets are being used to solve problems in protein folding, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, financial modeling and many other problems. Under the name grid computing, the concept has become a small but important industry, offering companies needing lots of cycles a cheap alternative to supercomputers.