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2000

Serious Millennium bugs were not reported after the transition to the new millennium. Some date related displays were a hundred years off (see below). But in the whole the major disasters as foretold by some (news) pundits stayed out.

At one of the first working days in 2000 you saw this:

A few satelites were off the air for some hours, and some other minor accidents with systems happened. But thanks to the measures taken by major companies and most governments in industrialized countries no serious accidents occured.

to read on millennium click here

Microsoft chairman Bill Gates resigned as CEO of his own company to dedicate himself to the development of software. Calling himself Software Architect, a title which also can be found in books from the Science Fiction scene (e.g. Asimov's Foundation series).
One of his reasons were that he did not want to spent most of his time with political and legal issues and processes against his company. That he said drains almost all of his energy and creativeness. He will devote his time and energy towards the architecture of software.
His long time friend Steve Ballmer took over the helm.

Blue gene processor; picture courtesy IBM archives

IBM released a follow up of Deep Blue. Nicknamed Blue Gene it operated at 1 Quadrillion Ops per second (one peta flop) and was a thousand times faster than Deep Blue.

This computer was to be used for modeling human proteins. The search for the cause of the folding of human proteins (14) started. Unraveling the genetic code could help pharmaceutical laboratories to develop medicines.

The experimental architecture of the machine is called SMASH (Simple, Many And Self Healing) as it was designed to reduce the number of instructions for a particular processor to speed up processing. It also had what was called massive parallelism to handle about 8 million simultaneous threads of computing and possessed "self healing" abilities to prevent failures.

February 6. The website of the History of Computing Foundation was published and a few months later a foundation was formed (May 11) to ensure the continuity its existence.

AMD Athlon internal view (14)

On the sixth of February the 1000 Mega Herz(9) or Gigaherz barrier is broken by AMD's Athlon micro processor. To be followed a few days (9th) later by Intel's Pentium III also running on 1000 Mega Herz. In tests they appeared to be each others equal, but the Intel chip was somewhat less tolerant towards higher temperatures.

March, Iridium Satellite LLC, the company that promised to revolutionize global communications with its satellite mobile phone system, files for bankruptcy protection.

Enigma, 1940(12)

At Bletchley Park museum the Enigma machine was stolen from the exhibition room. The Enigma was a coding machine used by the Germans during W.W.II. Because of this machine's so called 'unbreakable' code the development of computers went into an overdrive. Hereto the Bombe and Colossus were developed and put to the job of cracking the codes.
After the Bletchley Museum agreed to pay over 45.000 EUR or 40.000 US$ the machine returned in October 18. But some of the coding wheels are still missing. This was the first time a computing device is stolen from a museum at a ransom.

May, the “I Love You” virus, a.k.a. the “Love Bug” and the “Love Letter” worm, attacks e-mail systems and multiplies across the Internet in only six hours. Like its predecessor “Melissa”.

Cyber attacks brought some major web sites down here attackers made use of tens of powerful computers in various American cities and bombarded sites of  e-Bay, Amazon, CNN and Buy.com with large amounts of data: requests for information. This tactic⁽⁶⁾ was called "Denial of Service" and proved to be fatal to Yahoo some weeks before. This caused Yahoo to down its servers for a few hours.
The first victim ://Buy.com an online cyber shop - that went through a successful IPO⁽⁵⁾ this month - was unavailable for a few hours caused by this attack. Buy.com got 800 MBit per second to process about 8 times the maximum capacity of what the infrastructure(4) could handle. Usually the traffic is about 30 Mbit per second. According to Buy.com the attacks were retraced to powerful computers from Boston, New York en Chicago.
After this auction house e-Bay had to endure an attack. Servers from eBay in San Jose could not cope with the traffic and went down too: customers could not be served anymore. This means the company could not earn money during that time. A spokesperson of e-Bay said they were cooperating with other sites that were hit and the authorities to find out the identity of the so called "cyber terrorists" .
Two hours after the attack on E-Bay, Amazon.com got its share of the "Denial of Service" attacks. This very popular on-line shop went down for over an hour. About the same time CNN got under attack. Only after two hours the attack on CNN could be fended off. Possibly by just pulling the plug first and later to deny service (counter attack) to computers that were generating too many requests.
Spoke persons of all Internet companies stipulated that the hackers did not have access to data stored on the attacked servers. It is said that the FBI was involved in the investigation to catch the hackers.(8)
 

In Russia there were this year many "unemployed" scientists but with almost no money to realize their projects. Promising and interesting developments did not reach the market because of that. One of the examples was a virtual world globe that just waited to be picked up by the entertainment market.

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This globe represented a virtual world in which you could walk, run and fall down without you had to wear a data suit. It was developed by the brothers Latypov (www.virtusphere.com) (10)

June, a federal judge orders Microsoft to breakup, condemning Microsoft as a monopolist and orders the company to separate its MS Windows operating system product from their other software applications. Microsoft appealed the ruling.

June, first survey of the entire human genome completed in a race against the clock between competitors: the Human Genome Project (HGP), and representatives of the biotechnology company Celera announced the completion of a first model DNA sequence of the human genome. This provided scientists worldwide with a map to an approximated 90 percent of the genes on every chromosome(16). Though this figure is contested by some scientists, they said that the map is just a crude cut through the entire genome and that it will take another few years to complete the entire genome. The debate that has risen is that commercial companies wanted to patent the information and scientists wanted to have it in the public domain. Ethically spoken scientists said nobody can claim copyright or patents on any material deriving form the human genome.

2001

This year brought us some virulent virus attacks, bomb letters and the first Linux virus was detected.

Official Launch of Windows 2000 - Microsoft's replacement for Windows 95/98 and Windows NT. Microsoft claimed W2K to be faster and more reliable than previous versions of Windows.
But it actually was a descendant of the NT series - thus a UNIX based kernel - the tradeoff for increased reliability was that it won't run some old DOS-based games or programs anymore.
To keep the home market happy Microsoft also released Windows ME, the newest member of the 95/98 series.(Feb. 17) (3) This version proved to have too many bugs in its software and it was going to be replaced by the next generation before long: Windows XP.

March, as Internet companies struggle to improve their financial situations, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) begins an investigation of a $12.2 million stock transaction by Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com. The allegations come at a time when Internet companies are experiencing dramatic devaluation in their stock prices. Experts point to the plummeting stock prices as evidence that the Internet stock bubble has burst.(16)

Also this year there were many cases in court concerning patents and the ongoing case of Microsoft's monopolistic behavior.

(June 29) Judge reversed a lower court decision to split up Microsoft Corporation, but also stated that Microsoft did act illegally in its actions to maintain its dominant position in the area of PC Operating Systems.

British Telecom (BT) claimed the rights on hyperlinks on the basis of a US patent (#4873662) granted in 1989. Similar patents in the rest of the world have expired. Their claim is widely believed to be absurd since Ted Nelson wrote about hyperlinks in 1965, and this is where Tim Berners Lee said he got the ideas for the World Wide Web from. This is just another in the line of similar incredulous cases - for example amazon.com's claim to have patented '1-click ordering'. (June 20) (3)
BT even started to sue Prodigy, the oldest and largest public provider, to charge license fees. The claim is dismissed on the basis that BT's claim concerned server oriented technology and not client based documents which were not even invented when BT filed its patent.

In March a federal judge issues an injunction against MP3 music site Napster, requiring the company to begin blocking copyrighted music files. The ruling deals a blow to Napster, which continues to operate despite the ruling.
In an effort to continue operating without legal restrictions, MP3 music site Napster and its partner, Bertelsmann AG, offer to pay $1 billion in licensing fees over the next five years to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). The industry association rejects the offer and legal wrangling continues.(16)

Personal Computers with CPU's in excess of 1.4 Gigahertz speed came on the market.

US Government announced restrictions on exporting cryptography technology to be relaxed (although not removed). This allowed many US companies to stop the long running, and rather ridiculous process of having to create US and International copies of their software. (Jan. 14)(3)

In concurrence with that announcement RSA Security Inc. released their RSA algorithm to the public domain, in advance of the US patent (#4,405,829) expiring on the 20th September following the relaxation of the US government restrictions earlier in this year. And by doing so the organization removed one of the last barriers to the worldwide distribution of much software based on cryptographic systems.
It should be noted that the IDEA algorithm is still under patent and also that US government restrictions still applied in some places. (Sept. 6) (3)

Screenshot MSWindows XP

Microsoft released Windows XP - the latest version of their Windows operating system. Based on the NT series kernel, it was intended to bring together both the NT/2000 series and the Windows 95/98/ME series into one product. Of course it was originally hoped that this would happen with Windows 2000 ... But only time will tell if Microsoft have succeeded with Windows XP. (Oct. 25) (3)

Gordon Moore stated (May 2nd) that his law should be changed from doubling of transistors on integrated circuitry every two years into every four or five years starting 2010 or 2020. The fact that this law held for almost 36 years was a miracle when you saw the speed of change in this field. (See also (1964)

Do we get a patron for the Internet? The catholic church wanted to propose Isodorus de Sevilla who lived in 656 and wrote probably the first western encyclopedia.
And as usual there were more candidates: Titus Brandsma (a Dutch priest- no picture), San Pedro de Regalado (Spain) and Santa Tecla (Bask - Spain)

Santa Tecla

Isodorus

San Pedro

can there also be a patron from other cultures?

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approves the AOL Time Warner merger. The merger, announced in January 2000 as the largest corporate merger in US history, is subject to conditions outlined by the FCC. The takeover marks the first time a new corporate giant created by the Internet boom used the “new economy” value of its stock to acquire an older Fortune 500 company.(16)

According to a study from IDC about 460 million people are now connected to the Internet. Forecasts want us to believe that there will be over 1 billion connections within the next 5 years, meaning a small twenty percent of the contemporay population of the world (?).

Apple released MacOS X. At it's heart is `Darwin', an Open Source kernel based on FreeBSD. Using this MacOS X finally gives Mac users the stability benefits of a protected memory architecture along many other enhancements, such as preemptive multitasking. The BSD base also makes porting UNIX applications to MacOS easier and gives Mac users a fully featured command line interface alongside their GUI.(19)

Footnotes & References