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1996(7)

Corel purchase WordPerfect, Quattro Pro, and the PerfectOffice application suite from Novell for US$180 million in cash, stock, and future licensing royalties.

Intel introduces the 200 MHz Pentium processor, shipping it initially in small quantities. It incorporated 3.3 million transistors, and performed at 284 MIPS. Price was US$599 in quantities of 1000.

Microsoft releases Windows NT 4.0. Microsoft also unveils Windows CE operating system for hand-held PCs. Code-name of the project was Pegasus. "CE" stood for Consumer Electronics.

The first successful and affordable Personal Digital Assistants (PDA) the Palm Pilot becomes available to consumers, with memory large enough to hold thousands of contacts, appointments and notes. PDA's can do calculations, play games and music and potentially download information from the Internet. Since the interface was very easy to use it becomes an in mediate hit with consumers. It is small and light enough to fit in a shirt pocket and runs for weeks on a few AAA batteries.(4)

IBM launches OS/2 Warp 4, in San Francisco, California. Price was US$249.

CD-ReWritable (CD-RW) is announced. The technology is developed by a five-company consortium.

Apple Computer buys the NeXT Software company for about US$425 million in cash and Apple stock. 

One of the first web shops is opened by IBM: World Avenue. IBM calls it a "Web shopping mall" that allows online vendors to rent virtual storefronts. This is one of the earliest examples of commercial site hosting. However, the online mall concept fails to catch on, and IBM will close World Avenue a year later. (10)

The New York Times , which previously offered its content through America Online, announce that it has launched its own web site. The first paper to do so.
As consumers move from proprietary services like AOL to the Web throughout late 1995 and 1996, proprietary services begin to lose customers, and many publishers start to migrate their content to the Web. (10)

January. General Electric (GE) sells its Genie online service. GE was one of many corporations that tried to enter the online service game in the early 1990s. However, the rise of the web draws customers away from online services, and many ventures, like Genie, are sold and turned into Internet Service Providers (ISP). (10)

February. Pointcast, a little-known company in Cupertino, California, announces a beta version of its Pointcast software. The service, which grabs information from the Web to display it on the user's screen, kicks off a year of industry hype about "push" technologies. The hype fades after a year or so when consumers fail to embrace push-technology over active web browsing. (10) Push technology will evolve into the annoying pop-up windows a few years later. On its turn triggering a tug of war between the advertisers and the commercial defenders. Anti pop-up utilities will be a standard feature of most browsers in about 6 years.

In March and April, Lycos, Excite, and Yahoo, al search engines went public. All will perform strongly. (10)

June, eBay is founded by Jeff Skoll and Pierre Omidyar as a collector's exchange site that will grow into the world's largest "personal trading community"

Microsoft releases its Internet Explorer browser on August 11, 1996, to compete with Netscape's Navigator software. The two companies engaged in a rapid series of upgrades and promotional offers to win market share. (10) The way Microsoft pushes this browser, e.g. by integrating this into the MS Window software, will in about 8 years result to that some 96% of all web users use Internet Explorer. Some courts will rule that this practice is crossing the line of legal competitive commercial behavior and deems that Microsoft must separate Internet Explorer from their Windows operating system. It will take years of legal battle and counter attacks before Microsoft will comply. However practice will neutralize the court's decision, by enabling to disable IE as a standard browser. And it seems that the US legal system is forgetting what it started with.

October. Prodigy, once one of the top three online service providers, re launched itself as an Internet access provider. Sears and IBM have launched the joint venture in the late 1980s but sold it in 1996 as online service customers migrated to the web. Although Prodigy continues to provide a proprietary online service, the company's management says that Internet access will become the company's main focus. Prodigy will go public in 1998. (10)

1997

Bluetooth technology is invented by Dutchman J. Haaften employed by Ericsson (Sweden). In about 2 years time this technology will be adapted as an industry standard because Ericsson has put the technology in the public domain as an open architecture. The latter is also one of the main reasons why the PC technology is flying high since the mid eighties. Bluetooth is suitable to be built into many appliances, but was developed for the mobile telephony.

In this year IBM releases Deep Blue
A super computer tailored to beat a world champion chess player: Garry Kasparov. The machine performs at a trillion Flops. But many critics are saying that it has only beaten Kasparov by brute force and had little to do with AI. Fact is that it is the most powerful computer for this year.

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who left the company in 1985 to found Next Software and later become president of Pixar, returns to Apple as interim CEO. Two years later, he will still be in the "interim" position.

Sun files a lawsuit against Microsoft, accusing the software giant of undermining Sun's Java programming language. Sun alleges that Microsoft is trying to disrupt Java development by distributing a version of Java not compatible with that used by the rest of the industry. (10)

Amazon.com, an online bookseller, goes public in May. The day before the IPO, Barnes and Noble sues Amazon for allegedly falsely advertising itself as "the world's largest bookstore." Nevertheless, the online bookseller closes 30 percent above its opening price. The lawsuit will be settled later this year.

America Online buys its onetime rival, CompuServe. Rather than merging it into its own online offerings, AOL leaves CompuServe as a separate service. (10)

April. Microsoft buys Web TV Networks. The company's technology allows users to read e-mail and surf the Web on their television sets. The $425 million purchase is Microsoft's largest Internet-related acquisition to date. (10)

June. The USA Supreme Court rejects the Communications Decency Act. Part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the act makes it a felony to distribute "indecent material" on the Internet. The court unanimously rules that the law violates the First Amendment: freedom of information. (10)

The Frauenhofer Institute (Germany) releases the MP3 format, even when the Institute patents the format there will be no royalties asked for its use, a influential stimulant to make it the PC's core, and many more appliances, music system.

1998

The first affordable digital cameras come on the market, the number of brands and models are increasing by the day

They are at first very simple camera's with mainly USB ports and special cables or equipped with memory cards or modules. The quality (480 x 640) and saturation is very poor. But the next year better cameras will see the light. But for simple web publishing this kind of digital cameras are all right. An attempt to construct a digital replacement for the normal 35mm picture cartridge is tampered by low resolution, high energy consumption and price (over 1000 US$).  Another development of digital photography is an inlay that can be placed inside the mirror reflex cameras. It means a second life for those reflex cameras gathering dust  But it still is an expensive gadget not for the normal photo amateur. The next few years will show dramatic improvements both in quality and price.

left iMac from August 1998(11) right Apple eMac from April 2002

August. Apple Inc. releases the iMac. A machine intended for starters and according to Apple it is optimized for the Internet. It's not a machine more advanced then other brands but it starts a totally new trend in computer styling and marketing.
The machine has a semi transparent colored casing and looks like a modernized terminal from the 80's, everything is build into one single box.

It is the first PC, in this decade, devoid of "legacy I/O technology". The lack of a floppy drive, and total reliance on USB connectors, instead of serial/parallel/ADB(6). This considered very risky by industry pundits. Yet it fuels USB (universal serial bus) device development, and pushes the adoption of USB by PC manufacturers. PC manufacturers start struggling to develop a truly "legacy-free" PC in the vein of Apple's original iMac.(5)

In terms of corporate survival however this new marketing strategy is also saving Apple Inc. from going under. The next few years Apple will go through a complete revival.

illustration of trapping light in a photonic crystall

Two Dutch scientists, dr. Willem Vos and dr. Judith Wijnhoven, published a report in Science on how to make so-called photonic crystals that could trap light. Their paper was inspired by that of Eli Yablonovitch back in 1987. This new publication set off a gold rush into this specific field of physics."(1). (read more over here) Speculations pointed towards the creation of unlimited memory with this technology, consuming virtually no power.(8)

Byte Magazine, one of the first personal computer magazines and at one time (end 1980's), the most important, ceased its existence as a printed publication at the end of 1998. CMP is the new owner. The once over 200 pages thick magazine had grown into an electronic magazine owned by CMP.com (www.byte.com). One could say that the web is the best place for a magazine like this where printed media for high tech information got outdated fast. Shown at left is Jerry Pournelle one of the editors from the very first beginning since 1975 and still is!

Auction site eBay, started as a location where founder Pierre Omidyar's girlfriend could swap Pez dispensers with other collectors, launched a spectacular IPO. The company's stock price soared 163 percent on its first day of trading. (10)

The U.S. government decided to privatize the registration of Internet addresses called: URL's (Uniform Resouce Locators). Government contractor Network Solutions had enjoyed an exclusive government contract during the last six years, registering some two million names at seventy dollars apiece. The government created the Internet Corporation for Assigned Numbers and Names (ICANN) to help privatize the business. (10)

October. The Justice Department's long-awaited antitrust suit against Microsoft Inc. was launched. The government alleged that Microsoft engaged in predatory and anti-competitive business practices regarding its operating system. The case dragged on for several years. (10)

October. President Bill Clinton (USA) signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a law that imposed new safeguards for copyrighted materials on the Internet. The legislation also barred technologies that can crack copyright protection devices. (10)

November. America Online (AOL) bought Netscape rocking the online world. Some industry analysts say the move will make AOL powerful enough to challenge Microsoft's dominance in the technology industry. (10)

(3)

Google is founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Stanford Ph.D. candidates, who developed a technologically advanced method for finding information on the Internet. Google is a play on the word googol meaning "an unspeakable large number". Google's use of the term reflects the company's mission to organize the immense amount of information available on the web.(2)

1999

On February 10, ICL (Electrolux) brought out their version of the Kitchen Computer. A Web/Java based application integrated in a refrigerator.
Honeywell that tried to introduce a similar device in 1969 had to abandon the project.
ICL was one of the first to try it again 30 years later. Time will prove whether this machine is too early again. (see also Honeywell 1969)

picture ICL

Palmtop computers with color displays com within reach of the average consumers. Prices will go down to less than 200 US$ for palmtops with about the same features. In the next five or six years palmtops (later called PDA's) will become more and more complex and the price will rise to about 500 USD including features like bluetooth, gps, mpeg player, movies and telephony

picture: www.pcmagazine Feb 2000

The Millennium bug is taken seriously now by almost al industrialized countries. Those who are willing to spent the money fix most of the errors found in programs that were related to calculations with dates and codes that could relate to leap years and the so called signal codes (99 meant often end of record or file).
The main advantage however of these actions are that the firms and governmental organizations that take action on the millennium issue now have an big advantage on their competitors. They clean out all old programs, some times modernize them and throw out the stuff where functionality can be taken over by more modern programs or hardware. They can now make a fresh start.

The plummeting price of PCs leads some companies to offer free or very cheap PCs if users sign up for online services. One company, Free-PC.com, distributes free computers to people who agree to share personal information and download Internet advertising.
Disney and Infoseek launch the Go Network (January)
Disney and Infoseek create the Go Network and launch an aggressive advertising campaign to drive traffic to the site. In July, Disney buys a majority stake in Infoseek. (10)

Prodigy Classic online service folds (January)
Citing Y2K computer problems, Prodigy announces it will shut down its Prodigy Classic online service. The company had focused on its Internet service provider business for several years, but maintained the online service, which still had about 208,000 customers. (10)

Gates increases philanthropic efforts (August)
Bill Gates merges his two charitable foundations, the William H. Gates Foundation and the Gates Learning Foundation, into one organization, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The merger created the country's richest charitable foundation, worth $17.1 billion. The foundation committed $750 million over the next five years to buy vaccines for more than 25 million children in nearly seventy poor countries. (10)

We now enter the 21st century. A new millennium. What will it bring?