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Digital Lifestyle Timeline

  1. EARLY HISTORY
    the five machines that matter: zuse z3, eniac, manchester baby, whirlwind, pdp-8

  2. 01-01-1801 tech nws - milestone - Jacquard develops an automatic loom controlled by punched cards

  3. 01-01-1822 tech nws - milestone - Babbage designs his first mechanical computer, a decimal difference engine for tabulating polynomials

  4. 01-01-1906 tech nws - milestone - vacuum tube invented

  5. 01-01-1941 tech nws - milestone - Zuse z3 (electromechanical general purpose computer, no conditionals)

  6. 01-01-1946 tech nws - milestone - ENIAC (first electronic general purpose computer, Turing Complete)

  7. 01-01-1947 tech nws - milestone - invention of the transistor

  8. 01-01-1948 tech nws - milestone - Manchester Baby (first stored-program, Williams tube memory) - successfully executed its first program on 21st June 1948

  9. 01-01-1951 tech nws - milestone - Whirlwind (first to allow interactive computing)

  10. 01-01-1957 tech nws - milestone - the integrated circuit, ic, invented

  11. 01-01-1959 tech nws - milestone - programming language: COBOL

  12. 01-01-1964 tech nws - milestone - programming language: BASIC

  13. 01-01-1965 tech nws - milestone - PDP-8 (at $15,000 a very affordable computer: 50,000 sold)

  14. 09-12-1968 tech nws - milestone - mother of all demos: Doug Engelbart demonstrates mouse, hyperlinked text, videoconferencing (watch at youtube)

  15. MODERN HISTORY
    the five machines that matter: the alto, altair, apple 2, ibm pc, commodore 64

  16. 01-01-1971 tech nws - milestone - first cpu - start of the micro revolution - The Intel 4004 was a 4-bit central processing unit (CPU) released by Intel Corporation in 1971. It was the first complete CPU on one chip, and also the first commercially available microprocessor. Such a feat of integration was made possible by the use of then new silicon gate technology allowing a higher number of transistors and a faster speed than was possible before.The 4004 employed a 10-?m silicon-gate enhancement load pMOS technology and could execute approximately 92,000 instructions per second

  17. 01-01-1972 tech nws - milestone - programming language: C & Smalltalk


  18. Xerox Alto

  19. 01-01-1975 tech nws - milestone - modern gui - The Alto, a research machine at Xerox Parc, has Gypsy, a word processor with wysiwyg, windows, menus and mouse. Created in Smalltalk. (What you see is what you get: what's on the screen will look the same when printed)


  20. Mits Altair

  21. 01-01-1975 tech nws - milestone - computers - first micro - Altair 8800 -The MITS Altair 8800 was a microcomputer design from 1975 based on the Intel 8080 CPU and sold by mail order through advertisements in Popular Electronics, Radio-Electronics and other hobbyist magazines. The designers hoped to sell only a few hundred build-it-yourself kits to hobbyists, and were surprised when they sold thousands in the first month.The Altair also appealed to individuals and businesses who just wanted a computer and purchased the assembled version. Today the Altair is widely recognized as the spark that led to the microcomputer revolution of the next few years: The computer bus designed for the Altair was to become a de facto standard in the form of the S-100 bus, and the first programming language for the machine was Microsoft's founding product, Altair BASIC.

  22. 01-01-1976 tech nws milestone - computers - IMSAI 8080 introduced - similar to but more reliable than Altair of 1975

  23. 01-07-1976 tech nws - milestone - computers - apple 1 introduced - The Apple I went on sale in July 1976 at a price of $666.66,[3] because Wozniak liked repeating digits[4] and because they originally sold it to a local shop for $500 and added a one-third markup. About 200 units were produced. Unlike other hobbyist computers of its day, which were sold as kits, the Apple I was a fully assembled circuit board containing about 60+ chips. However, to make a working computer, users still had to add a case, power supply transformers, power switch, ASCII keyboard, and composite video display. An optional board providing a cassette interface for storage was later released at a cost of $75.

  24. 01-01-1977 tech nws - milestone - computers - apple 2 introduced - The Apple II was an 8-bit home computer, one of the first highly successful mass-produced microcomputer products, designed primarily by Steve Wozniak, manufactured by Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.) and introduced in 1977. In terms of ease of use, features and expandability the Apple II was a major technological advancement over its predecessor, the Apple I, a limited-production bare circuit board computer for electronics hobbyists which pioneered many features that made the Apple II a commercial success. Introduced at the West Coast Computer Faire in 1977, the Apple II was among the first successful personal computers; it launched the Apple company into a successful business.

  25. 01-10-1977 tech nws - milestone - computers - first commodore - The Commodore PET (Personal Electronic Transactor) was a home/personal computer produced by Commodore starting in 1977. It was a top seller in the Canadian and United States educational markets, and was Commodore's first full-featured computer, which would form the basis for their entire 8-bit product line, including the Commodore 64.

  26. 01-01-1978 tech nws - milestone - applications - first spreadsheet - 1978 Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston develop Visicalc (screenshot), the first spreadsheet, which speeds up Apple II sales. Later on the spreadsheet was the killer app for IBM-PCs sales to companies (Lotus 123) (fire in the valley)

  27. 01-01-1979 tech nws - milestone - handhelds - music players - walkman - sony introduces the first walkman

  28. 12-08-1981 tech nws - milestone - computers - ibm pc introduced - The IBM Personal Computer, commonly known as the IBM PC, is the original version and progenitor of the IBM PC compatible hardware platform. It is IBM model number 5150, and was introduced on August 12, 1981. It was created by a team of engineers and designers under the direction of Don Estridge of the IBM Entry Systems Division in Boca Raton, Florida. Alongside "microcomputer" and "home computer", the term "personal computer" was already in use before 1981. It was used as early as 1972 to characterize Xerox PARC's Alto. However, because of the success of the IBM Personal Computer, the term PC came to mean more specifically a microcomputer compatible with IBM's PC products.

  29. 01-01-1982 tech nws - milestone - media tech - cd - In 1982 the compact disc (cd) was introduced for music. In 1985 the cd-rom, holding 650MB computer data, was introduced. In 1991 the recordable 650MB cd-r became available. Current versions can store 700MB.

  30. 01-01-1982 tech nws - milestone - computers - commodore c64 introduced - 64kb csg 6510 1.0 mhz $595 20 million sold

  31. 01-01-1982 nov - tech nws - milestone - computers - first pc clone - de Compaq Portable is de eerste IBM-PC kloon - 128kb ram / intel 8088 4.77 mhz

  32. View a list of all computers produced between 1975 and 1985

  33. View a gallery of pictures of the 25 computers leading up to the Apple Mac

  34. MODERN GUI & INTERNET
    the five machines that matter: apple mac 128k, psion 3a, the windows 95 pc, palm pilot, nokia communicator


  35. Apple Mac 128k

  36. 01-01-1984 tech nws - milestone - computers - gui - first mac - Apple Macintosh 128k, the first commercial computer with wysiwyg, windows, menus and mouse. The development team, including Steve Jobs, actually went to visit Xerox Parc for a demo of the Xerox Alto. / motorola 68k 8.0 mhz $2500

  37. 01-01-1984 tech nws - milestone - handhelds - first organizer - Psion Organiser I - The Psion Organiser I model, launched in 1984, was based on an 8-bit Hitachi 6301-family processor, with 4K of ROM and 2K of battery-backed RAM, and had a single-row monochrome LCD screen. The machine provided a simple flat-file database, calculator and clock, and had no operating system. The Organiser I supported removable storage write-once devices which used EPROM storage. The machine could host two of these so-called DATAPAKS (or simply PAKs), to which it could write data but which needed to be removed from the machine and erased by being exposed to ultraviolet light before they could be re-used.

  38. 01-01-1990 tech nws - milestone - media - types - world wide web invented - Tim Berners-Lee invents World Wide Web on a NeXT (first webpage)

  39. 01-03-1991 tech nws - milestone - internet - Commercial Internet eXchange (CIX) Association, Inc. formed by General Atomics (CERFnet), Performance Systems International, Inc. (PSInet), and UUNET Technologies, Inc. (AlterNet), as NSF lifts restrictions on the commercial use of the Net


  40. MOSAIC browser

  41. 01-01-1993 tech nws - milestone - media tech - mosaic browser introduced - Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina distribute MOSAIC over the Web (precursor of Netscape) for free. The WWW starts to take off. (Hobbes' Internet Timeline -> http://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/)

  42. 01-01-1993 tech nws - milestone - handhelds - psion 3a - highly usable pda - Besides its agenda with multiple views, it features a database, a word processor, a spreadsheet with charts, world times and more. With an optional modem, it could connect to the Internet. It could be programmed in OPL (Organiser Programming Language), with easy access to menu and graphical functions. Its EPOC system would be transformed into Symbian, a smartphone OS that in 2010 still has a larger marketshare than iPhone, Android and Blackberry.

  43. 01-01-1993 tech nws - milestone - handhelds - apple newton - not-so usable pda -The MessagePad was the first series of personal digital assistant devices developed by Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.) for the Newton platform in 1993. Some electronic engineering and the manufacture of Apple's MessagePad devices was done in Japan by the Sharp Corporation. The devices were based on the ARM 610 RISC processor and all featured handwriting recognition software and were developed and marketed by Apple. The devices ran the Newton OS.

  44. 01-10-1994 tech nws - milestone - internet - geocities website which made having a homepage easy for millions of users. GeoCities was originally founded by David Bohnett and John Rezner in late 1994 as Beverly Hills Internet (BHI). In its original form, site users selected a "city" in which to place their web pages. The "cities" were named after real cities or regions according to their content — for example, computer-related sites were placed in "SiliconValley" and those dealing with entertainment were assigned to "Hollywood" — hence the name of the site. Ten years after Yahoo! bought GeoCities, the company announced that it would shut down the United States GeoCities service on October 26, 2009 and GeoCities websites actually became unavailable on October 27, 2009. There were at least 38 million user-built pages on GeoCities before it was shut down.

  45. 01-01-1995 tech nws - milestone - programming languages - java - Sun presents Java, a cross-platform programming language

  46. 09-08-1995 tech nws - milestone - internet - netscape browser - netscape ipo is start of the internet stock boom 1995-2001

  47. 24-08-1995 tech nws - milestone - windows 95 introduced, the version of windows that would bring microsoft desktop domination - Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented graphical user interface-based operating system. It was released on August 24, 1995 by Microsoft, and was a significant progression from the company's previous Windows products. During development it was referred to as Windows 4.0 or by the internal codename Chicago. In the marketplace, Windows 95 was a major success, and within a year or two of its release had become the most successful operating system ever produced. It also had the effect of driving other major players in the DOS-compatible operating system market out of business, something which would later be used in court against Microsoft. Some three years after introduction, Windows 95 was succeeded by Windows 98.

  48. 15-12-1995 tech nws - milestone - internet - altavista internet search - AltaVista publicly launched as an internet search engine, the most popular one before Google

  49. 01-01-1996 tech nws - milestone - media tech - dvd - The first DVD players and discs were available in November of 1996 in Japan and in March of 1997 in the United States. The recordable DVD became available in the year 2000.

  50. 01-01-1996 tech nws - milestone - handhelds - palm pilot - commercially very successful - The Palm Pilot 1000 and Pilot 5000 were early Palm PDAs produced by Palm, Inc. (then a subsidiary of U.S. Robotics). It was introduced in March 1996. The Pilot uses a Motorola 68328 processor at 16 MHz, and had 128 KB (Pilot 1000) or 512 KB (Pilot 5000) built in memory. The PDA has a plastic case (various colors). Its dimensions are 120x80x18 mm and weight is 160 grams. The Pilot has a 160x160 pixel monochrome LCD tactile panel, with a "Graffiti input zone" presented in the bottom third of the screen.


  51. Nokia Communicator

  52. 01-01-1996 tech nws - milestone - handhelds - mobile phones - early smartphone - Nokia Communicator 9000 introduced

  53. 15-09-1997 tech nws - milestone - internet - google internet search - Start of Google, the search engine that would become bigger than AltaVista. The domain name for Google was registered on September 15, 1997, and the company was incorporated on September 4, 1998. It was based in a friend's (Susan Wojcicki) garage in Menlo Park, California. Craig Silverstein, a fellow Ph.D. student at Stanford, was hired as the first employee.

  54. 01-01-1998 tech nws - milestone - handhelds - music players - 1st flash mp3 jukebox - called MPman as a paraphrase of Sony's Walkman

  55. 01-01-1999 tech nws - milestone - handhelds - music players - 1st hd mp3 jukebox - Compaq Personal Jukebox (mp3)

  56. 01-01-1999 tech nws - milestone - chips - 1 GHz chip - the Intel Pentium III cpu reaches 1 GHz speeds

  57. 01-01-1999 nov - tech nws - milestone - p2p - napster file sharing - Napster starts a file sharing service mainly used for mp3 sharing. Recognition of the term 'MP3' by users moves from 8 to 60% (per cent), according to a study in the first six months of the year by the music webzine 'Webnoize'... (digitalcraft.org)

  59. 01-01-2000 tech nws - milestone - stats - handhelds - mobile phones - internet - world - At the start of the new millenium, 750 million people were using a cell phone, up from 1 million in 1993. 451 Million people had access to the internet, up from 15 million in 1995.

  61. 01-01-2001 tech nws - milestone - os - windows xp introduced

  62. 15-01-2001 tech nws - milestone - media - types - wikipedia free online encyclopedia - Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger begin Wikipedia. As of today [2005-03], there are 491018 articles in English / every day hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world make tens of thousands of edits and create thousands of new articles. (wikipedia)

  63. 23-10-2001 tech nws - milestone - handhelds - music players - apple ipod mp3 walkman - Apple's 'Breakthrough' iPod - CUPERTINO, California -- Apple has introduced a new digital music device called the iPod that can store 1,000 songs and copy a CD in 10 seconds. About the size of a pack of cards, the 6.5 ounce portable device is based on a 5-gigabyte hard drive. It syncs automatically with Apple's iTunes software via a speedy FireWire connection, allowing consumers to have a jukebox full of songs at their fingertips. Unveiled on Tuesday by Apple's CEO Steve Jobs at a special event at Apple's campus in Cupertino, California, the diminutive player allows consumers to download their music into the tiny system in less than 10 minutes. 'It's never been this fast or this easy before,' Jobs told assembled reporters. The iPod is expected to hit Apple's online store and the company's retail outlets on Nov. 10. It will cost $399. For all Jobs' excitement, though, Apple users at Mac discussion sites seemed a bit crestfallen that the device wasn't as revolutionary as the company had promised last week. Indeed, many said it was over-priced and under-powered. 'Apple has introduced a product that's neither revolutionary nor breakthrough, and they've priced it so high that it's reminiscent of the Cube,' a post on MacSlash said. The message then offered some ideas for what 'iPod' might stand for. These won't make Jobs happy: 'I Pretend it's an Original Device,' it suggested, or 'idiots Price Our Devices.' Others offered 'I'd Prefer Owning Discs!' and 'I Prefer Other Devices.' There were some people who liked it, of course ('Impressive Piece of Design') but it was stunning how many seemed at least indifferent to the new toy. Jobs showed a video of several musicians trumpeting the wonders of the iPod, including Moby and Seal. (wired)

  64. 01-01-2002 tech nws - milestone - chips - 1gb flash card - SanDisk introduces a flash card with 1 GB of storage


  65. second life

  66. 01-01-2003 tech nws - milestone - media type - virtual world - second life introduced, where at all times 40.000 people are immersed in a 3d world they create themselves...

  67. 01-04-2003 tech nws - milestone - music - apple itunes store - iTunes store starts selling legal music downloads for 99c per song

  68. 27-01-2004 tech nws - stats - milestone - handhelds - mobile phones - world - 1 billion users worldwide (1993: 1 million)


  69. first e-book using e-ink

  70. 07-07-2004 tech nws - milestone - media tech - first e-ink ebook - The Sony Librie 1000ep is the first application of e-ink, an ebook reader (yahoo)

  71. 26-07-2004 tech nws - milestone - chips - dual core chips - IBM is readying a dual core version of its PowerPC 970 processor, called the PowerPC G5 by Apple (yahoo)

  72. 30-07-2004 tech nws - milestone - handhelds - mobile phones - media - convergence - tv on mobile phone - MobiTV is a subscription service that streams live TV to your Sprint PCS Vision cell phone (yahoo)

  73. 05-09-2004 tech nws - milestone - chips - dual core chips - Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. are revving up for what they see as the next big step in the evolution of x86 processors ? the introduction of dual processing cores. Both companies are demonstrating technology that puts two processing cores on a single chip, providing users with almost double the processing power in the same amount of space. (yahoo)

  74. 07-09-2004 tech nws - milestone - handhelds - mobile phones - 1st hd on mobile phone - Samsung introduces the first cell phone with a 1.5Gb harddisk (yahoo)

  75. 12-10-2004 tech nws - milestone - handhelds - media - types - bubble - Orb data bubble - The Orb company is rolling out a service that gives you access to your homebound multimedia content anywhere, on any device?desktop PC, laptop, PDA, even phone?that has a Web connection. 'The goal is to provide spontaneous access to your media, wherever it exists,' explains Jim Behrens, Orb's CEO. The impetus for the service, he says, was the frustration Orb's founders felt with the burgeoning number of multimedia file types (three leading music formats, several conflicting video schemes, a half-dozen major image types) and the disparate devices required to access them. (yahoo)

  76. 14-10-2004 tech nws - milestone - chips - intel cancels 4GHz chip - Intel Corp. on Thursday canceled plans to introduce its highest-speed desktop computer chip, ending for now a 25-year run that has seen the speeds of Intel's microprocessors increase by more than 750 times. Since the introduction of the 5-megahertz 8088 processor in 1979, Intel has cranked up the clock speed of its PC chips with remarkable consistency, until now. Intel's 3.8 gigahertz Pentium 4 chip -- which is equivalent to 3,800 megahertz -- will be the fastest on the market for the foreseeable future. (yahoo)

  77. 15-10-2004 tech nws - milestone - handhelds - pdas - 1st hd on pda - The Sharp SL-C3000 PDA contains a 4GB hard drive made by Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. This capacity is about 30 times bigger than the storage in Sharp's previous PDA model, the SL-C860, which had 128MB of flash memory, according to the company. (yahoo)

  78. 13-11-2004 tech nws - stats - milestone - handhelds - pdas - microsoft windows mobile beats palm in q3 2004 - Microsoft unseated the Palm system with worldwide sales of more than 1.3 million units over the third quarter of the year, compared with slightly more than 850,000 for the Palm, according to a new report from research firm Gartner Inc. (yahoo)

  79. 10-12-2004 tech nws - milestone - stats - handhelds - mobile phones - world - almost 25% of world citizens has mobile phone - Mobile phone subscribers around the globe totaled nearly 1.5 billion by the middle of this year, about one quarter of the world's population, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) said on Thursday. - handheld (yahoo)

  80. 09-02-2005 tech nws - milestone - chips - cell chip - IBM, Sony, Toshiba Unveil Nine-Core Cell Processor / Researchers from IBM, Sony Computer Entertainment Incorporated (SCEI), and Toshiba today unveiled the long-awaited Cell microprocessor, revealing a multicore, multithreaded gaming engine described as 'a supercomputer on a chip.' The three companies disclosed some of the first technical details about the four-year project at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco. Cell is expected to be the chip used in Sony's PlayStation 3 gaming console, and its performance should reach ten times the capability of current PC processors, the companies said. The prototype chip discussed Monday is comprised of one 64-bit PowerPC processor core and eight separate processing cores that the companies call 'synergistic processing elements,' or SPEs. The cores can support multiple operating systems and programming models through the use of virtualization technologies, said Jim Kahle, director of technology at the Design Center for Cell Technology, and an IBM fellow. (yahoo)

  81. 2001-2005 rise of the blog


  82. blogs

  83. 07-03-2005 tech nws - stats - milestone - media - types - blogs - Currently, some 27 percent of online U.S. adults read blogs, and 7 percent pen them, according to The Pew Internet and American Life Project. (yahoo)

  84. 30-03-2005 tech nws - milestone - beyond 100 trillion flops - computer speed record - IBM's Blue Gene/L, being assembled for the department's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, performed 135.3 trillion floating point operations per second running benchmark software, the National Nuclear Security Administration said. The result eclipses the 70.72 teraflops that a smaller version of the system achieved running the Linpack benchmark program last fall. Blue Gene, being assembled for the NNSA for simulating the performance and safety of nuclear weapons and other applications, became the world's fastest supercomputer last September, surpassing a Japanese government-funded system. (yahoo)

  85. 20-04-2005 tech nws - milestone - Moore's Law, the guiding principle that has driven the computer chip industry, celebrates its 40th birthday this week. The 'law' was adopted after Intel co-founder Gordon Moore wrote in a 1965 article that the number of transistors on a chip would double every 24 months. (bbc)

  86. 15-06-2005 tech nws - milestone - virtual earths - microsoft and google working on virtual earth projects - A war of the virtual worlds is gearing up between search engine company Google Inc. and software maker Microsoft Corp., as the two tech rivals race to bring competing digital versions of planet Earth onto the World Wide Web. / MSN Virtual Earth is scheduled for a release this summer; the software will let users view images 50 to 100 feet above the tops of buildings in many urban areas. Microsoft is not including rural areas at the time of the software's launch. (yahoo)

  87. 08-07-2005 tech nws - milestone - stats - media - internet - broadband usa increases 34% in 2004 - High-speed Internet use by U.S. businesses and households rose 34 percent in 2004 to 37.9 million lines, the Federal Communications Commission said Thursday. The figures were cited by the agency's chairman as proof that the FCC's broadband policy is working. Digital subscriber line, or DSL, service increased 45 percent last year to 13.8 million lines. Cable modem use climbed 30 percent to 21.4 million lines. (yahoo)

  88. 01-09-2005 tech nws - milestone - average laptop now sells at $1000 - Good news if you're in the market to buy a laptop computer: The price is coming down. The Wall Street Journal reports the average price of a laptop is now about $1,000, down from $1,250 last year and $1,640 in 2001. Some are selling for even less. (yahoo)

  89. 08-10-2005 tech nws - milestone - media - types - bubble - webapps - transmedia 'glide' - Microsoft isn't the only company moving its applications online in response to the emergence of the software-as-a-service model exemplified by Google and Salesforce.com. On November 15, a New York-based startup called TransMedia plans to release an integrated suite of consumer media applications that has the potential to radically alter the balance of power among Internet and software service providers. The software, announced in mid-October, is called Glide Effortless. It's a set of 12 applications for content creation, communication, e-commerce, and sharing. The apps are Glide Photos, Glide Music, Glide Video, Glide Docs, Glide AllMedia, Glide Contacts, Glide Calendar, Glide Timeline (Glide?s search engine), Glide Mail, Glide Cast (audio, text, and video conferencing), Glide Share and Glide Shops. Because the apps were developed simultaneously, they work in concert with elegance not evident in other loosely linked software programs like Apple's consumer media applications or Microsoft Office. [...] Integration is a key benefit of the software. Glide Mail, for example, has been designed to work with the suite's photo, music, video, document, and streaming environments. It allows users to easily and securely send all sorts of media files, playlists, slideshows, and podcasts to anyone as tiny 5K messages. (yahoo)

  90. 14-10-2005 tech nws - milestone - intel enters billion-transistor processor era - LONDON ? Intel Corp. has started sampling an Itanium-2, 64-bit microprocessor that was made by linking together 1.72 billion transistors. The processor, codenamed Montecito, was discussed as far back as August 2002, but it is now sampling to some Intel customers, a company spokesman said. Montecito exceeds the billion-transistor count because the Itanium-2 processor architecture is itself complex ? a 64-bit processor intended for server applications ? and the Montecito model integrates two processing cores. It also has 26-Mbytes of on-chip cache (208-Mbits), according to reports. Intel?s first dual-core processor for mobile applications such as notebook computers, code-named Yonah, is also due to start shipping for revenue at the end of the year and to launch in volume in 2006. Intel announced it was accelerating its schedule to get to one billion transistors on an IC in July 2004, saying it was aiming to deliver a billion-transistor chip in 2005, rather than the original target date of 2007. 'The goal was a billion transistors in 2007. The [new] goal is a billion transistors in 2005,' said Jai Hakhu, vice president of Intel's Technology Manufacturing Group at the time. 'This has been advanced by a couple of years,' Hakhu then added, without elaborating on which Intel chip would reach the milestone first. The chip industry has produced monolithically integrated billion-transistor circuits for some time in the form of DRAM and flash memories with monolithic capacities of 1-Gbit and more. Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. announced in September that it had developed a 16-Gbit NAND flash memory, made using a 50-nanometer manufacturing process technology, with mass production planned for the second half of 2006. That memory is believed to store 2-bits of data per cell but the number of transistors on that 16-Gbit sliver of Samsung silicon is greater than the number of human beings alive today. In the next generation every person alive or dead could have one of the transistors named after them with plenty to spare. The industry broke the million transistor barrier with 1-Mbit DRAMs in 1986 and with the Intel 80486 32-bit processor in 1989. The 80486 was manufactured in a 1.0-micron CMOS manufacturing process, had 1.2 million transistors, and operated at up to 50-MHz clock frequency. (cmp media)

  91. 17-10-2005 tech nws - milestone - education - LeapFrog's pentop computer hits store shelves - LeapFrog Enterprises Inc.'s (NYSE:LF - news) Fly 'pentop computer' hit retail shelves on Monday, and the educational toy maker is expecting strong sales after racking up strong online 'pre-sales.' 'Our hopes are strong for it,' said LeapFrog President Jerry Perez in an interview. 'There's nothing else in the market like it.' The Fly pentop computer is a talking, computerized pen that can translate words into other languages, or help with math and spelling homework. It gives users audio feedback as they write and draw on special 'Fly paper.' For instance, a user can draw a calculator, touch the handwritten digits and functions to perform an operation, and then hear the answers announced. The product was available on store shelves on Monday, but consumers could place early orders online at retailers like Amazon.com (Nasdaq:AMZN - news) and Target (NYSE:TGT - news) to have the product shipped to them the first day it was available, Perez said. 'Pre-sales have been fabulous,' Perez said. LeapFrog, known for its LeapPad line of electronic learning toys, had been a Wall Street favorite after its 2002 initial public offering. But a string of disappointing reports hurt its credibility with investors, and the company has said it relied too heavily on LeapPad, a junior-sized laptop system that holds interactive workbooks that teach skills like reading and math. The Fly pentop computer is a chance for LeapFrog to expand its product line and boost holiday sales. 'I definitely think LeapFrog is putting a lot behind this,' said Anita Frazier, an analyst with market research firm NPD Group. 'I don't necessarily think it's a make or break product for the company, but it's a big opportunity.' LeapFrog shares rose almost 5 percent to $13.87 on Monday. and Perez attributed the rise to the fact that the Fly was showing up on store shelves. 'The only thing we can point to is the Fly launch,' he said. When pentop computer was announced in January, LeapFrog said a group of children aged 8 to 13 helped develop the product, and it will offer a range of applications for learning, communicating and playing. The target age range for the product is roughly 8 to 14 years, but Perez said the platform and its applications could expand to other age groups. Leapfrog, which has a Schoolhouse division that puts its products in schools, is also trying to put Fly in the classroom. The pen costs $99, with applications and accessories retailing in a range between $4.99 to $34.99. Perez said he did not think the price tag would keep parents from buying the product for their children. 'Parents are more than willing to stretch' he said, to buy educational products. (yahoo)

  92. 29-10-2005 tech nws - milestone - e-ink - 'electronic paper' goes color - YOKOHAMA, JAPAN-- E Ink, a U.S.-based developer of electronic-paper type flat-panel displays, has developed a color version of its screen technology and is showing it at the FPD International exhibition that opened Wednesday in here. The screen was developed by E Ink with color-filter supplier Toppan Printing and the sample on show was completed within the last few weeks, said Darren Bischoff, senior marketing manager for the Cambridge, Massachusetts, company. It's based on similar technology to the company's monochrome displays that are already in production and can be found in a handful of products like Sony's Librie electronic book reader. Aimed at Small Devices The main difference is the addition of a color filter. The prototype on display in Yokohama is a 6-inch display with 400-by-300-pixel resolution. That works out to 83 pixels per inch, which is half that of the commercial screen used in the Sony e-book reader. The screens are reflective, which means they use ambient light reflected through the display rather than a backlight. They offer high contrast and appear much closer to paper in appearance than other flat panel displays. E Ink anticipates the display will be ready for sale at the end of 2006, said Bischoff. Potential applications include ATM screens, digital camera viewfinders, and mobile phones, he said. (yahoo)

  93. 30-01-2006 tech nws - milestone - stats - media - internet vs tv - People Spending Equal Time On TV, Web - The average online consumer spends the same amount of time on the Web, as the do on TV, a market research firm said. Respondents to a U.S. consumer survey said they spend 14 hours a week on line, which is the same amount of time in front of a television, JupiterResearch said. 'Even the most intensive users of newspapers and magazines spend less time reading these publications than they do online or watching TV,' JupiterResearch analyst Barry Parr said in a statement. 'TV and newspaper companies risk losing an entire generation of users unless they immediately start promoting their online products,' The Internet is displacing the use of other media, such as radio, magazines and books. The latter is suffering the most, with 37 percent of all online people reporting that they spend less time reading books because of their online activities. The report also found that intensive online users are the most likely demographic to use advanced Internet technology, such as streaming radio and RSS feeds. (yahoo)

  94. 14-08-2006 tech nws - milestone - stats - total pc sales - world - Historical PC Sales Top $3.1 Trillion - The personal computer celebrated its 25th birthday this past weekend. Although its age is known, its weight wasn't. But on Monday, one analyst estimated that the total PC market to date is worth $3.1 trillion. IBM introduced the PC on August 12, 1981. It cost $1,565, had a 16-bit microprocessor, 12 font styles, 8 background colors and no mouse or hard drive. But it set the standard for the ecosystem that made the PC a part of our daily experience because it was compatible with non-IBM software. IBM released the machine with the go-ahead for other manufacturers to develop similar machines on the same software base. (yahoo)

  95. 24-08-2006 tech nws - milestone - flashtops - Hot Flash: 'Flashtops' Take On the Memory Market - Flash memory continues to evolve quickly and grow more usable. The solid-state, rewritable silicon memory chips, which hold content without requiring power, are mostly known as gadgets the size of packs of gum that plug into computers' USB ports to add extra storage. But thanks to recent fabrication breakthroughs, they have become much more versatile in a relatively short period of time. Portable flash thumb drives that can hold up to 4GB of data are now readily available, and 8GB and 16GB versions aren't far behind, industry insiders said at the recent Flash Memory Summit at the Wyndham Hotel here. Consumers also can expect to see the first 32GB, three-quarter-inch-thick flash-based laptops in the Western and European markets within a year. Samsung previewed its first flash-powered laptop at the CeBIT conference in Hanover, Germany, in March 2005, and launched the first batch of consumer units?dubbed 'Origami'?in May in Japan and Korea. These first 'flashtops' feature a 32GB, 1.8-inch solid-state drive created by Samsung engineers. At the time, however, flash memory was selling for about $30 per gigabyte, so the 32-GB drive would have cost $960 just for the memory itself. The flashtops' initial retail price was about $3,700. Prices have come down slightly since spring, and they are expected to continue to decline as fabrication factories come up with more efficient ways to manufacture the silicon wafers. But flashtops will remain relatively expensive for the next few years, industry insiders said. These new laptops undoubtedly will appeal to only a certain slice of the overall market?those not planning to use their notebooks to store a lot of music, video, photos or other space-hogging content. People who will use flashtops will be those who simply want to utilize basic functions: to cruise the Internet, use e-mail, and write and store word processor or spreadsheet documents. But the faster performance of flash-based laptops (at 53MB per second, NAND flash reads data about 300 percent faster and writes 150 percent faster than a conventional laptop hard drive), silent operation (no cooling fans needed), lightweight form factor and much-improved battery life are hard factors to ignore. (yahoo)

  96. 13-02-2007 tech nws - milestone - stats - internet - broadband - finland - Ninety-six percent of Finns have broadband internet - Ninety-six percent of Finns have access to broadband Internet and 50 percent to third-generation (3G) mobile telephony, a study published by the communications ministry showed. Four out of five municipalities now offer high-speed internet connections, compared to two out of three two years ago. The difference between the number of municipalities with broadband and the number of people using it is explained by the heavy concentration of people living in urban areas. Finland, which is home to the world's biggest mobile phone maker Nokia, has one of the world's highest levels of new technology penetration. According to official statistics and professional organisations, more than 75 percent of Finns regularly or occasionally use Internet. For those under the age of 40, the figure is 100 percent. Meanwhile, the rate of mobile telephony use exceeds 100 percent, which means that there is more than one mobile phone per person in the country of 5.2 million inhabitants. (yahoo)

  97. 02-11-2006 tech nws - milestone - stats - internet size - world - Internet mushrooms to more than 100 million websites - Online journals known as blogs and virtual shops for small businesses have pushed the number of websites past the 100-million mark, an Internet monitoring firm reported. A survey by Britain-based Netcraft determined that the number of websites on the Internet climbed from 97.9 million in October to slightly more than 101 million in November. The 100-million-site milestone 'caps an extraordinary year,' Netcraft concluded. The number of websites on the Internet has already grown by 27.4 million in 2006, compared with the 17 million sites added in all of 2005, according to Netcraft. 'Blogs and small business websites have driven the explosive growth this year, with huge increases at free blogging services at Google and Microsoft,' Netcraft said in a survey report. The Internet has doubled in size since a May 2004 Netcraft survey that found 50 million websites. Netcraft's first survey was conducted in August 1995 and showed 18,957 websites. (yahoo)

  98. WEB 2.0: wikipedia - google docs - facebook
    the three machines that matter: the windows xp pc, the iphone, the android phone


  99. Wikipedia

  100. 17-02-2007 tech nws - milestone - stats - wikipedia in website top 10 - Wikipedia Breaks Into U.S. Top 10 Sites - Wikimedia Foundation Inc.'s popular Wikipedia online encyclopedia cracked the top ten list of most popular Web sites in the U.S. for the first time in January, according to comScore Networks Inc. Wikipedia sites ranked ninth with 42.9 million unique visitors last month, ahead of the sites from The New York Times (number 10), Apple Inc. (number 11) and Viacom International Inc. (number 12), comScore reported Thursday. Wikipedia, which already ranked in the top ten list of most popular Web sites globally, has been quickly gaining popularity in the U.S., where its parent company, the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, is based. In January of last year, Wikipedia sites ranked in the 33rd spot with 18.3 million unique visitors. By July, it had climbed to the 18th spot on the list with 28.1 million unique visitors, and in November it ranked 12th with 39.1 million unique visitors, according to comScore. In doing its tally for Wikipedia, comScore also counts visits to other Wikimedia sites, like Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikibooks and Wikinews, but most of the traffic comes from the Wikipedia encyclopedias, a comScore spokesman said. Wikipedia started in January 2001 with its English-language site, which currently has more than 1.6 million articles. The Wikipedia project has since grown significantly and has more than 5 million articles in more than 200 languages, according to WikiMedia. Access to Wikipedia is free. Volunteers contribute the encyclopedia's content, which can be edited by anyone accessing the sites. (yahoo)

  101. 22-02-2007 tech nws - milestone - business - media - saas - google - Google to sell online software suite - Google Inc. will begin selling corporate America an online suite of software that includes e-mail, word processing, spreadsheets and calendar management, escalating the Internet search leader's invasion on technological turf traditionally dominated by Microsoft and IBM. The expansion, scheduled to be unveiled Thursday, threatens to bog down Microsoft Corp.'s efforts to persuade businesses to buy the latest version of its market-leading Office suite that was developed along with its new Vista operating system. Google's software bundle, to be sold for a $50 annual fee per user, also poses a challenge to International Business Machines Corp. and its Lotus suite. While Google's latest foray into the corporate software market seems unlikely to topple the status quo right away, AMR Research analyst Jim Murphy said it's only a matter of time before the Mountain View-based company becomes a major player. 'This is just the beginning,' Murphy said. 'The real impact of what Google is trying to do probably won't be evident for another five years.' Google has been offering a free version of its online software suite called Google Apps for the past six months. More than 100,000 small businesses and hundreds of universities nationwide are using the free service, Google said. (yahoo)


  102. iPhone

  103. 06-07-2007 tech nws - milestone - handhelds - mobile phones - apple iphone introduced - Apple's iPhone makes it to stores - Apple's much-hyped iPhone has finally gone on sale in the US. Some people had been queuing for days outside Apple and AT&T stores across the US to ensure they got hold of one of the devices. Hundreds more began queuing during Friday because stores did not start selling the iPhone until 1800 local time (2300 BST). Apple said buyers visiting its stores would not be able to walk out with more than two iPhones each. More than 600 people were outside two Apple stores in New York and at one of them, customers cheered as the doors opened, Reuters news agency said. Similar scenes were reported in other cities. 'I've gone through several phones, even the expensive ones,' Albert Livingstone, 62, who queued up in Chicago, told Reuters. 'This is different. It's the newest toy. I'm 62 - I don't have much time left to buy toys.' (bbc)

  104. 24-10-2007 tech nws - milestone - media - social networks - facebook worth $15B - On October 24, 2007, Microsoft announced that it had purchased a 1.6% share of Facebook for $240 million, giving Facebook a total implied value of around $15 billion.


  105. android phone

  106. 05-11-2007 tech nws - milestone - handhelds - mobile phones - android introduced - from wikipedia (2010): Android is a mobile operating system initially developed by Android Inc. Android was purchased by Google in 2005.[4] Android is based upon a modified version of the Linux kernel. Google and other members of the Open Handset Alliance collaborated to develop and release Android to the world. The Android Open Source Project (AOSP) is tasked with the maintenance and further development of Android Unit sales for Android OS smartphones ranked first among all smartphone OS handsets sold in the U.S. in the second and third quarters of 2010, with a third quarter market share of 43.6%. Android has a large community of developers writing application programs ("apps") that extend the functionality of the devices. There are currently over 100,000 apps available for Android.[12][13] Android Market is the online app store run by Google, though apps can be downloaded from third party sites (except on AT&T, which disallows this). Developers write in the Java language, controlling the device via Google-developed Java libraries. The unveiling of the Android distribution on 5 November 2007 was announced with the founding of the Open Handset Alliance, a consortium of 79 hardware, software, and telecom companies devoted to advancing open standards for mobile devices. Google released most of the Android code under the Apache License, a free software and open source license. The Android operating system software stack consists of Java applications running on a Java based object oriented application framework on top of Java core libraries running on a Dalvik virtual machine featuring JIT compilation. Libraries written in C include the surface manager, OpenCore media framework, SQLite relational database management system, OpenGL ES 2.0 3D graphics API, WebKit layout engine, SGL graphics engine, SSL, and Bionic libc. The Android operating system consists of 12 million lines of code including 3 million lines of XML, 2.8 million lines of C, 2.1 million lines of Java, and 1.75 million lines of C++.

  107. 29-11-2007 tech nws - milestone - stats - handhelds - mobile phones - Global cell phone use at 50 percent - HELSINKI (Reuters) - Worldwide mobile telephone subscriptions reached 3.3 billion -- equivalent to half the global population -- on Thursday, 26 years after the first cellular network was launched, research firm Informa said. Since the first Nordic Mobile Telephony (NMT) networks were switched on in 1981 in Saudi Arabia, Sweden and Norway, mobile phones have become the consumer electronics sector with the largest volume of sales in the world. "The mobile industry has constantly outperformed even the most optimistic forecasts for subscriber growth," Mark Newman, head of research at Informa said in a statement. "For children growing up today the issue is not whether they will get a mobile phone, it's a question of when," Newman said. In recent years the industry has seen surging growth in outskirts of China and India, helped by constantly falling phone and call prices, with cellphone vendors already eyeing inroads into Africa's countryside to keep up the growth. The Nordic start for mobile telephony was the basis for the success stories of Finnish Nokia (NOK1V.HE) and Sweden's Ericsson (ERICb.ST). Fast growth in Asian wireless markets has since helped Korean Samsung Electronics (005930.KS) and LG Electronics (066570.KS) as well as China's ZTE (0763.HK) take their place among the top six cellphone vendors globally. But although mobile subscriptions have reached the equivalent of 50 percent of the population, this does not mean that half the people in the world now have a mobile phone, since Informa said 59 countries have mobile penetration of over 100 percent -- where some owners have more than one phone. "The economic difference between the more mature markets and those in developing countries is highlighted by the vast differences in operators' revenues per user," Informa said. Hutchison Whampoa's (0013.HK) 3 operation has an average revenue per user of just over $70 a month in Britain, while Hutchison's Sri Lankan operator counts revenues of below $3 per user. According to the International Programs Center of the U.S. Census Bureau, the total population of the world reached 6,634,294,193 on Thursday. At the same time 2,571,563,279 people were using the most widely used mobile technology, GSM (Global System for Mobile communications), according to global trade body GSM Association. The second largest mobile technology, CDMA, had 421.4 million users at end September.

  108. 18-03-2008 tech nws - milestone - in memoriam - Arthur C. Clarke dies - Science fiction impresario Arthur C. Clarke is dead, according to published news reports. And as of 3 p.m. PDT Tuesday, the Wikipedia article on Clarke has also already been updated with a banner across the top that reads, "This article is about a person who has recently died." Clarke was the author, or co-author, of dozens of fiction and non-fiction books. But he will likely always be best known for his novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, which he later turned into a landmark film with Stanley Kubrick.

  109. 06-10-2008 tech nws - milestone - handhelds - mobile phones - Apple sold 10 million iPhones in 2008 - By using some fairly interesting IMEI collection, the folks at Mac Observer have found that Apple sold 10 million iPhones in 2008, reaching and potentially surpassing Steve’s original stated goal. By looking at phones sold over the last few months, Mac Observer’s “Apple Finance Board” found that the phone has gone through nine 1 million unit runs. Adding this to the known sales they found the total number was far above analyst expectations.

  110. internet overtakes newspapers

  111. 24-12-2008 tech nws - milestone - stats - media - news source - internet overtakes newspapers - Some 40 percent of those surveyed by Pew Research for the People & the Press say they get most of their international and national news from the Internet, up from 24 percent in September 2007. [newspapers 35%] TV, however, continues to be cited most frequently as a main source for international and national news, according the study.

  112. 26-12-2008 tech nws - milestone - stats - computers - laptops vs desktop - For the first time ever, laptop sales have exceeded desktop sales worldwide, nearly four years sooner than anticipated. For the first time ever, laptop sales have exceeded desktop sales on the global level, at least according to iSuppli, a market research firm. In the third quarter of 2008, PC laptop sales increased forty percent over Q3 2007, to 38.6 million units sold. This is in contrast to desktop PCs, which dropped 1.3%, with a total of 38.5 million units sold. HP came out the victor, having sold the most laptops at 14.9 million units sold in Q3 2008. Dell came in second, with 11 million units sold, with Acer, Lenovo, and then Toshiba coming in for the roundup. This change, while anticipated, was not expected until 2011. "This marks a major event in the PC market because it marks the start of the age of the notebook. The notebook PC is no longer a tool only for the business market, or a computer for the well-off consumer; it's now a computer for everyman," said principal analyst for compute platforms at iSuppli, Matthew Wilkins. So what caused laptop computers to jump so rapidly? Netbooks. Thanks to the small, cheap, mass-selling devices, which often run Intel's Atom processor and a Linux distro or XP, the overall laptop sales numbers have jumped tremendously.

  113. 28-10-2009 tech nws - milestone - energy - electric cars - electric car drives 500+ km on one charge - A record for a Tesla Roadster driven on a single charge was set at 313 miles (501 km) in Australia on Tuesday. Tesla Roadster owner Simon Hackett and his friend Emilis Prelgauskas drove his electric sports car from Alice Springs, Northern Territory, to Coober Pedy, South Australia, as part of an alternative-fuel vehicle rally called the Global Green Challenge. The Tesla's electric-charge port door was sealed shut at the start of the 313-mile journey and the trip was filmed for a documentary, as well as monitored by contest officials. The Tesla's lithium ion battery, which the company assures owners will last over 200 miles between charges under normal driving circumstances, had 3 miles to spare when the team reached its destination in Coober Pedy, according to Hackett's chronicles of the race experience on his company blog. (Hackett happens to also be the founder and managing director of Internode, an Australian national broadband and Internet services company.) Hackett said in his blog the achievement is actually a record for any production electric car, not just a Tesla Roadster, which is why his team was so careful to record it. To squeeze as much distance out of the Tesla's battery as they could, Hackett and Prelgauskas tried to drive at a consistent speed of 55 kph (roughly 34 mph) for a large portion of the almost 12-hour journey. "The security seal was applied to the charge port door when we started the journey. As this is being done as part of the Global Green Challenge, we have a full set of official verifiers here who will attest to the results and to achieving the outcome. We were followed along the journey by our support crew and a documentary film crew--so we have it on film," said Hackett. While Tesla Motors is not an official sponsor of the contest or Hackett, the company has shown support by spreading the news of Hackett's success. It's not hard to imagine why as Tesla poises for a major retail expansion. The stunt may certainly speak to consumers who likely drive nowhere near 313 miles in a single day, but are still reluctant to hem themselves in with a car restricted to a limited number of miles between recharges.

  114. 27-01-2010 tech nws - milestone - handhelds - tablets - ipad introduced - SAN FRANCISCO — Apple today introduced iPad, a revolutionary device for browsing the web, reading and sending email, enjoying photos, watching videos, listening to music, playing games, reading e-books and much more. iPad’s responsive high-resolution Multi-Touch™ display lets users physically interact with applications and content. iPad is just 0.5 inches thick and weighs just 1.5 pounds— thinner and lighter than any laptop or netbook. iPad includes 12 new innovative apps designed especially for the iPad, and will run almost all of the over 140,000 apps in the App Store. iPad will be available in late March starting at the breakthrough price of just $499. “iPad is our most advanced technology in a magical and revolutionary device at an unbelievable price,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “iPad creates and defines an entirely new category of devices that will connect users with their apps and content in a much more intimate, intuitive and fun way than ever before.”

  115. 15-02-2010 tech nws - milestone - stats - handhelds - mobile phones - Number of Cell Phones Worldwide Hits 4.6B - International Telecommunication Union Says Mobile Subscriptions Will Continue to Climb Despite Global Economic Slump - (AP) The number of mobile phone subscriptions worldwide has reached 4.6 billion and is expected to increase to five billion this year, the U.N. telecommunications agency said Monday. Mobile phone providers in rich countries offer advanced services and handsets, while people in developing countries increasingly use the mobile phone for health services and banking, said the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). "Even during an economic crisis, we have seen no drop in the demand for communications services," said the agency's Secretary-General Hamadoun Toure. "The simplest, low-end mobile phone can do so much to improve health care in the developing world," Toure said in a statement, citing examples of patients receiving reminder messages on their mobile phone ahead of a medical appointment or text messages instructing them how to take complex medication. The number of mobile broadband subscriptions worldwide is expected to exceed one billion this year, the agency said. There were around 600 million such subscriptions at the end of 2009, it added. Web access by people on the move, including through laptops and smart mobile devices, will probably surpass web access from desktop computers within the next five years, the agency said.

  116. 01-03-2010 tech nws - milestone - stats - internet use - news - handhelds - mobile phones - The new study found that 26 percent of Americans get news on their phones. Pew doesn't have comparable data for say, two or three years ago. But evidence of the shift in habits can be seen in this finding: Younger cell phone owners are more likely to look for news on their phones. About 43 percent of those under 50 said they are mobile news consumers, compared with 15 percent of older respondents. Still, some things don't change. Readers' No. 1 concern when they look for news on their phones: the weather. Of the 37 percent of cell phone owners who said they use the Internet on their phone, 72 percent said they check weather reports. Current events came in second with 68 percent. Pew's survey offered a wide range of statistics on people's news habits. It showed people are not relying on one medium. Just shy of 60 percent of respondents get news from both online and offline sources. And 46 percent said they use four to six different types of media on a typical day. The Web is also helping to turn the news into more of a social experience: More than 80 percent of respondents get or receive news via e-mailed links.

  117. 02-04-2010 tech nws - milestone - in memoriam - Ed Roberts dies - Henry Edward Roberts, designer of the Altair 8800 personal computer that inspired Bill Gates and Paul Allen to enter the software business, has died aged 68. "We are deeply saddened by the passing of our friend and early mentor, Ed Roberts," Microsoft co-founders Gates and Allen said in a statement issued late Thursday. "Ed was truly a pioneer in the personal computer revolution, and didn't always get the recognition he deserved," they continued. Roberts was a founder of Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), a retailer of electronics kits for hobbyists. There he designed the Altair 8800, arguably the first personal computer. When Popular Electronics magazine featured the Altair on its cover in January 1975, Gates and Allen offered to develop a version of the programming language Basic for the new computer, setting up Microsoft (then known as Micro-Soft) to do so. "Ed was willing to take a chance on us -- two young guys interested in computers long before they were commonplace -- and we have always been grateful to him, the two Microsoft founders wrote. "The day our first untested software worked on his Altair was the start of a lot of great things. We will always have many fond memories of working with Ed in Albuquerque, in the MITS office right on Route 66." "He was an intense man with a great sense of humor, and he always cared deeply about the people who worked for him, including us," Gates and Allen said. That caring attitude was not just extended to his employees: A few years after the launch of the Altair, Roberts sold MITS to move to Georgia, where he went on to study medicine and become a country doctor.

  118. 20-04-2010 tech nws - milestone - stats - handhelds - mobile phones - texting - teens - Third of U.S. teens with phones text 100 times a day - LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – A third of U.S. teenagers with cellphones send more than 100 texts a day as texting has exploded to become the most popular means of communication for young people, according to new research. The study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, which offers a glimpse into teen culture and communication, found that texting has risen dramatically even since 2008, eclipsing cell phone calls, instant messaging, social networks -- and talking face-to-face. The Pew Research Center said that three-fourths of young people between the ages of 12 and 17 now own cellphones and of those that do, girls typically send or receive 80 text messages per day and boys, 30 per day. "Texting is now the central hub of communication in the lives of teens today, and it has really skyrocketed in the last 18 months," Pew researcher Amanda Lenhart said, attributing the rise in part to payment plans that allow unlimited texting. The study's authors also say that, unlike phone calls, text messaging can be quietly carried out under the noses of parents, teachers or other authority figures and, unlike computers, it can be done almost anywhere. "We've kind of hit a tipping point where now teens expect other teens to respond to text messaging and to be available," Lenhart said. "There is definitely an element of text messaging that fits so seamlessly into their lives." Text messaging has become so much a part of teenagers' lives that 87 percent of those who text said that they sleep with, or next to, their phone. Study author Scott Campbell said focus groups conducted by Pew also offer insight into the subtleties of teen communication and culture, revealing for example that, while boys don't typically use punctuation, for girls such nuances are critical. "If a girl puts a period at the end of a text message (to another girl) then it comes across as she's mad," Campbell said, which explains the prevalence of smiley emoticons. "They have these practices because they've learned that texts can lead to misunderstandings," Lenhart said. "It's a deliberate thing and it's also part of a culture that's interested in differentiating itself from adult culture." The percentage of teens with cellphones who sent at least one text message a day increased from 38 percent in 2008 to 54 percent in September 2009, according to the study. Meanwhile 38 percent of teens said they daily make at least one cell phone call, 30 percent said they talk on a landline phone and 24 percent said they used instant messaging.

  119. 19-05-2010 tech nws - milestone - stats - sales - handhelds - mobile phones - Cell phone, smartphone sales surge - 314M normal phones - 54M smartphones - Mobile phone and smartphone sales are on a roll, according to figures released Wednesday by market researcher Gartner. In the first quarter, customers worldwide bought 314.7 million mobile phones, a 17 percent increase year over year. Smartphones sales specifically jumped 48.7 percent from the year-ago quarter, as 54.3 million units flew off the shelves. Demand within mature markets and lower prices are part of the reason for the double-digit gains, Gartner said. For the quarter, the usual mobile phone makers topped the ranks, with Nokia in first place with a 35 percent market share, followed by Samsung, LG, Research In Motion, and Sony Ericsson. But smaller players have also started to inch their way up the ladder. Hong Kong-based G-Five climbed into the list of top 10 mobile manufacturers worldwide, winning 1.4 percent of the market. An array of other manufacturers across Asia also made a big dent in market share, collectively accounting for 19 percent. This surge had some impact on the top five companies, Gartner said, as their collective market share dropped to 70.7 percent in the first quarter from 73.3 percent a year ago. Among the top five, Nokia continues to face strong competitive challenges. Although its midmarket phones sold well in the quarter, the company doesn't yet have any high-end products driving sales. Its MeeGo-based devices and other higher-tier phones won't have an impact until the end of the third quarter at the earliest, Gartner predicts. Nokia's impending reorganization, announced last week, is a sign that the company is also trying to improve its standing among investors. As for the rest of the pack, Samsung and RIM saw sales and market share grow during the quarter, while LG and Sony Ericsson watched their results drop. In the smartphone arena, the industry enjoyed its strongest year-over-year sales growth since 2006, according to Gartner. Ranked by smartphone operating system, Nokia's Symbian led the pack with a 44.3 percent slice of the market. But that was down from the 48.8 percent share a year ago. Among the top five smartphone operating systems, the iPhone and Android were the only ones to enjoy growth in market share from a year ago. The first quarter proved to be Apple's strongest yet, helped in part by overseas sales from mature regions such as the U.K, but also new markets such as China and South Korea. Demands for Android phones continued to grow in the first quarter, especially in North America, where sales jumped 707 percent from a year ago. What does Gartner expect for the near term? Mobile e-mail, text-messaging, and social networking will continue to spark demand for smartphones and enhanced phones with hardware keyboards. But in Gartner's view, the most successful companies will be the ones that control an integrated product in terms of operating system, hardware, and services. To stay competitive, manufacturers must integrate hardware, the user interface, the cloud, and social networks to continued to attract consumers, Gartner said.

  120. 25-05-2010 tech nws - milestone - stats - internet - usage - More Than One in Four Use Internet Worldwide, Says ITU - About 26 percent of the world's population were online at the end of 2009, and mobile telephony is booming with the number of mobile subscribers likely to reach the 5 billion mark this year, according to a report released Tuesday by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). The number of Internet users has doubled between 2003 to 2009, according to the report. While the evolution of the ICT (information and communications technology) sector has been impressive, many people are still missing out on the benefits of an information society, Sami Al Basheer Al Morshid, director of the ITU's Telecommunication Development Bureau, told reporters on Tuesday at an ITU conference in Hyderabad in south India. Over 80 percent of people in developing countries still do not have access to the Internet, let alone through broadband access, said Susan Teltscher, head of the bureau's market information and statistics division. In the developed world, almost 60 per cent of households had Internet access, compared to only 12 per cent in the developing world, according to the report. Penetration of fixed broadband in developing countries was far lower, at about 3.5 percent at the end of 2009. More public Internet access facilities will be required in the developing world to make up for patchy access at home, work or schools, Teltscher said.

  121. 25-05-2010 tech nws - milestone - stats - sales - netbooks - laptops - Netbook, laptop sales growth biggest in 8 years - Netbooks - Netbooks grew 71 percent during the first quarter of 2010, but are beginning to get squeezed by cheaper laptops. Last year was one of the most discouraging for PC makers as consumers hit hard by the recession started pinching their pennies. But 2010 saw a big reversal of last year's decline: Gartner released data on Tuesday that showed mobile PCs grew to just under 50 million units during the first quarter of 2010. That's an increase of 43.4 percent from the same quarter a year ago, good enough to be the best quarter for mobile PC makers in eight years. The success of the category is in line with what Intel reported last month. Its profits jumped 433 percent for the first quarter, compared to the same period a year ago, mostly thanks to the strength of its mobile chip sales. Though they did well, the first quarter of 2010 could also be the last hurrah for mininotebooks, or Netbooks. They saw a spike in growth of 71 percent from the same period a year ago, but in some geographic regions their sales are already beginning to slow. That's because consumers are "beginning to understand the limitations of mininotebooks, especially in the face of aggressive price cuts of regular notebooks," said Gartner analyst Mika Katagawa. The average mobile PC was sold for $732, compared to a year ago, when the average price was $868. But cheaper laptops are not the only reason. Mininotebooks could also be getting squeezed by touch-screen tablets, which are priced close to mininotebooks. Lots of buzz surrounding Apple's iPad is also helping to attract a lot of attention to the new form factor for consumers. As of early May, Apple had sold 1 million iPads. IDC expects 7.6 million tablets to ship by the end of 2010, and for the category to hit 42 million units by 2014. Gartner does not count devices like the iPad in the mobile PC category, however. It's included as a "media tablet" and is reported with statistics for mobile devices. That category is expected to see huge gains over the next year as the iPad and its competitors from Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Asus, and others begin trickling into stores.

  122. 26-05-2010 tech nws - milestone - business - apple - marketvalue - Apple Jumps Past Microsoft as Biggest Tech Company - Apple Inc shot past Microsoft Corp as the world's biggest tech company as measured by market value on Wednesday, the latest milestone in the resurgence of the maker of the iPhone, which nearly went out of business in the 1990s. Apple's shares rose 1 percent on Nasdaq on Wednesday, pushing its market value up to $225.1 billion and ahead of Microsoft's $222.7 billion, according to Reuters data. Apple shares were up 1 percent above $247 in late afternoon trading. Microsoft shares were down 2.2 percent to $25.50. Shares of Apple are worth more than 10 times what they were 10 years ago, as it has profited from revolutionizing consumer electronics with its stylish, easy to use products such as the iPod, iPhone and MacBook laptops.

  123. 02-07-2010 Steve Jobs proclaims the post-PC era has arrived - Takeaway: On Tuesday, Steve Jobs said we’ve reached the beginning of the post-PC era, while acknowledging PCs have “taken us a long way” and that the transition could be lengthy, and uncomfortable for some. Steve Jobs believes people will be doing lot more work on tablets in the future, including heavy workloads typically associated with desktop PCs. On Tuesday, Jobs proclaimed that the post-PC era has arrived, while acknowledging that PCs have “taken us a long way” and that the transition will be lengthy, and uncomfortable for some. [...] “I’m trying to think of a good analogy. When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks. But as people moved more towards urban centers, people started to get into cars. I think PCs are going to be like trucks. Less people will need them. And this transformation is going to make some people uneasy… because the PC has taken us a long way. They were amazing. But it changes. Vested interests are going to change. And, I think we’ve embarked on that change. Is it the iPad? Who knows? Will it be next year or five years? … We like to talk about the post-PC era, but when it really starts to happen, it’s uncomfortable.” [tech republic]

    This would mean we are now using the 12th (or so) generation of computers

    1) 1946 tube generation - ENIAC
    2) 1948 ram introduced - Manchester Baby
    3) 1951 screen & keyboard - Whirlwind
    (first to allow 'interactive' computing)
    4) 1956 harddisk introduced - IBM 305 ramac
    (most later machines still used paper tape)
    5) 1958 transistor generation - IBM 7070
    6) 1965 mini-computers - PDP8 (50.000 sold)
    7) 1975 micro-computers - Altair 8080
    8) 1981 pc era - The IBM PC (3 million sold)
    9) 1984 windows, menu, pointer - The Mac
    10) 1995 Netscape era - easy to use internet
    11) 2005 broadband internet - 50% of us users
    12) 2010 post-pc era declared - the iPad

    (in 2011 more smartphones sold than pc/laptops)

  124. 22-07-2010 tech nws - milestone - stats - media - social media - Facebook’s 500 Million Members [INFOGRAPHIC] -Facebook reached its 500 million member milestone yesterday and celebrated the event with the launch of Facebook Stories. The monumental moment also played a role in the ABC World News report featuring a candid interview between Diane Sawyer and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. To commemorate the achievement, the team at Facebakers.com put together the comprehensive infographic included below (click to enlarge). The illustration breaks down the demographics of Facebook’s (Facebook) burgeoning population (according to their own data on the service), and explores the international makeup of the site.

  125. 26-07-2010 tech nws - milestone - products - Get a 15-inch Acer laptop for $299.99 - A nicely equipped Acer notebook--not Netbook--for only $299.99? That's hard to pass up. A nicely equipped Acer notebook--not Netbook--for only $299.99? That's hard to pass up. (Credit: Best Buy) Calling all students, victims of the financiapocalpyse, and other cash-strapped customers: If you're in the market for a new PC but don't have the budget for anything fancy, here's a deal you won't want to miss. Best Buy has the Acer Aspire AS5532-5535 laptop for just $299.99. Shipping adds another $17 or so, and you'll probably be on the hook for sales tax as well. Even so, this is one mighty solid PC for the price. The Aspire is a single-core (AMD Athlon TF-20) system, so it's no speed demon--but it should have no trouble keeping up with everyday computing tasks: e-mail, word processing, Hulu, etc. The rest of the specs are solid enough, starting with 3GB of RAM, a 160GB hard drive, and 802.11n Wi-Fi. Acer also supplies a DVD burner, an ATI Radeon HD 3200 graphics subsystem (way better than the integrated Intel chipset you typically find on low-end laptops), and a six-cell battery. The screen spans 15.6 inches and offers 1,366 by 768-pixel resolution, aka 720p. That makes this a mighty fine system for watching movies on the go. I do have a couple complaints. First, despite the fairly low-power processor and reasonably large battery, Acer promises only about 2.5 hours of runtime between charges. That's a little weak. Second, the Aspire has just two USB ports. There ought to be a law mandating at least three.

  126. 01-08-2010 tech nws - milestone - media - augmented reality - Japan mobile phone makers to roll out 'augmented reality' - TOKYO (AFP) – The "Terminator" had it, US fighter pilots use it and it's the next hot feature on Japanese smartphones -- "augmented reality" which peppers the world around you with useful bits of information. Imagine wearing high-tech glasses and having small, cartoon speech balloon-style tags pop up within your field of vision, overlaying real-world objects and buildings to describe what you're looking at. That is essentially what Japan's two largest cellphone operators are about to offer their millions of customers, except they will use the cameras and screens of smartphones plus vast online databases. By harnessing the power of the Internet and bringing it more deeply into people's everyday lives, they plan to change the way we perceive reality and move a step closer to digitising our world view -- literally. Japan's NTT DoCoMo is set to launch "chokkan nabi", or "intuitive navigation", in September to help people find their way around megacities such as Tokyo and Osaka and other places in Japan. "You just need to focus on a street, a building or a particular spot with your camera-equipped cellphone to see if there is a bank, a restaurant, a supermarket or other location," said a DoCoMo official. "Labels or signs indicate, for example, the distance to a chosen restaurant, schedules, menus, etc ... With a simple gesture, you can switch back to a conventional map in two dimensions." The service has so far registered some 600,000 points of interest throughout Japan, including restaurants, shops and train stations, which can be searched through user-defined criteria. The technology, developed with map maker Zenrin, uses a global positioning system (GPS) and sophisticated software to place virtual tags on real-world objects and also provide directions to places outside the user's direct view. It also links with micro-blogging site Twitter, which has been wildly successful in Japan, so that its users can spot each other in real time and real space, and tweet comments about where they are. Japan's number two mobile operator KDDI, meanwhile, has developed a platform that allows users to scan for example a CD advertising poster with their camera phone to gain additional material, such as an extract from a song. The service will then offer the user the option to buy a download of the song with just two clicks, or can guide them to the nearest real-world CD shop. The application, which also features virtual characters, is an advanced version of an already popular Japanese application for Apple's iPhone, called "Sekai Camera" or "World Camera". That programme identifies visual landmarks and then displays live and past tweets from others as "air tags" in the same location. Internationally, several operators are harnessing similar technology. Finnish cellphone giant Nokia is offering a free application called Point & Find, which involves pointing your camera phone at real-world objects to access information and functions. The service also allows users to scan barcodes to compare prices, read reviews, or save a product to a wish-list. (yahoo news)

  127. ebook overtakes paper books at amazon

  128. 01-08-2010 tech nws - milestone - media - ebooks - quote: Amazon.com's digital volumes recently overtaking sales of their hardcover counterparts - title: Soaring e-book sales speak volumes - HONG KONG (AFP) – After years of lurking in the literary wilderness, the e-book market has exploded with online retailer Amazon.com's digital volumes recently overtaking sales of their hardcover counterparts. The increase in sales has come as Amazon slashes the price on its Kindle device amid heavy competition from Apple's multi-purpose iPad and e-readers from Sony and bookstore giant Barnes & Noble. Underscoring the growth, Hong Kong's massive book fair, an annual event attended by almost one million people, wrapped up last week with visitors exposed to a brand-new section: digital reading. Beijing-based Hanvon Technology unveiled a black-and-white tablet reader that comes with 5,000 Chinese and English book titles pre-installed for about 3,400 Hong Kong dollars (440 US). Readers can download thousands more titles for as little as 20 Hong Kong dollars each on the device, which also lets users enlarge the typeface, take notes and look up words in the dictionary. "One (print) book might cost you 100 Hong Kong dollars or more, and then you have to find a place to store it," Hanvon employee Bo Bo Wong told AFP. "With this, you can have thousands and thousands of books in one place," she said. Mainland companies such as Hanvon, Acuce and Tianjin are taking on the likes of Apple and Amazon by pushing content tailor-made for the vast and rapidly growing Chinese digital market. The total value of digital publications across all platforms overtook that of traditional print publications in mainland China for the first time last year, the General Administration of Press and Publication said last week. According to the South China Morning Post, a recent survey by the Chinese Institute of Publishing Science found that nearly a quarter of the 20,000-plus people it surveyed now do most of their reading digitally. The newspaper quoted Chen Fuming, a manager of a major bookstore chain in Guangzhou across the border from Hong Kong, as saying Chinese book shops were in crisis. "Even I myself now prefer to read fiction with my mobile phone," Chen said. "It's cheap and convenient." New Zealand's Kiwa International, another company showing off its wares at the Hong Kong book fair, is using Apple's iPad as a platform for its child-targeted software. The Auckland firm's technology lets children interact with books downloaded onto the iPad by colouring in story characters and swiping words that are then repeated aloud -- in nine languages. "They can totally personalise the book," Kiwa's creative director Derek Judge told AFP. "And we provide a service to (traditional) publishers who want to enter into the digital arena." Amazon temporarily sold out of its 189-dollar Kindle e-reader last week and on Thursday unveiled a new 139-dollar model that connects online by WiFi instead of via 3G networks. "Amazon.com customers now purchase more Kindle books than hardcover books -- astonishing when you consider that we've been selling hardcover books for 15 years, and Kindle books for 33 months," Amazon boss Jeff Bezos said last month. US bookstore chain Borders has also launched an electronic book store to tap into the market, which has seen late Swedish crime writer Stieg Larsson become the first novelist to sell more than one million e-books on Amazon.com. But while British author and actor Stephen Fry is an avowed technophile, he doesn't think printed books should be written off quite yet. "Printed books certainly will continue to exist," he said at the Hong Kong fair. (yahoo news)

  129. 23-08-2010 tech nws - milestone - stats - trends - internet use - For teens today, online ties as strong as family - For those of us who went to high school before the Internet had made its way into most households, back when evenings were more likely to be spent twisting telephone wire around our fingers than typing messages to our friends, having online relationships that are equally important to those that happen in person may sound implausible. But for teens today, online communities--be they through games, social-networking sites, or other virtual groups--offer "crucial socialization and identification experiences," according to researchers who studied 4,299 people from Spain, Japan, and the U.K. who use the social-networking site Habbo. Moreover, the study's teenagers reported feeling as much a part of their online communities as a part of their own families, and even more than a part of their offline hobby groups and neighbors. The study, called "How do young people identify with online and offline peer groups? A comparison between United Kingdom, Spain, and Japan," appears online and in the Journal of Youth Studies. The researchers, who came from the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT and the University of Turku in Finland, wrote: In the mature online societies of the U.K. and Japan, the online group provides a more socio-demographically inclusive source of identification than traditional leisure-time formations. As friends and family move online, affinity towards online groups is more likely to be a reflection of high sociability than a lack of it. This paper investigated whether or not that is true (at least among teenage Habbo users); the question of why--and what it means--will likely be studied at greater length in the years to come. Surely there are those who bemoan the idea that virtual relationships can ever be as strong as in-person ones. But even I, old enough to say that I didn't use e-mail until age 15 and a cell phone until 20, can identify with the idea that online communities, wherever they were first developed, are crucial. Because my home office is currently in an empty house. And behind that house is an empty park. And a few blocks from that park is my empty climbing gym. And my friends and family are all working. And so we send one another little keyboard utterances throughout our days. Days where being AFK is increasingly rare and, perhaps, increasingly lonely.

  130. 19-11-2010 tech nws - milestone - 25 years microsoft windows - Windows at 25: Where It's Been, Where It's Going -Tomorrow (November 20) marks 25 years since the formal introduction of Microsoft Windows. With that in mind, it's instructive to look back at where Windows has come from and where it may be going. Five years ago, I wrote an in-depth history of Windows to mark its 20th anniversary. What's interesting to note is how long it took for Windows to really become successful. Even when it was launched in 1985, it was considered late. I had first seen and written about the product that would become Windows two years earlier, when it was called Microsoft Interface Manager. In the interim, the Apple Macintosh had come out, and had really popularized the graphical user interface. With an unusual "tiled" user interface, Windows 1.0 was mainly a curiosity. Only a few products - notably Excel, which debuted earlier on the Mac - really took advantage of it. Indeed, it took until Windows 3.0 came out in 1990 before the Windows really had any widespread success, and throughout the next several years, Windows faced a lot of competition from OS/2--and legacy versions of DOS--before it became the defacto standard for personal computing. In terms of attention, Windows 95 marked the moment when Windows got the most, perhaps because it really helped make the Internet mainstream. Since then, the use of Windows has continued to grow, but consumers don't pay much attention to the operating system anymore. Even though Windows 7 has been a terrific success, most of the tech world is now focusing on mobile OSes (for smartphones and tablets) and cloud-based services. Along the way, Microsoft has been criticized--often unfairly, I think--for not being innovative. Certainly, the graphical user interface dates back far before Windows, to the Mac and the Apple Lisa, and before that, the Xerox Alto and Star projects. Nor was Windows the first Web browser, or the first program to add multitasking on top of DOS. But what Microsoft did was bring all those features together, while still mostly retaining compatibility both with the programs that came before and the widest variety of download a copy of Visicalc for DOS written in 1981 and it will run on today's Windows 7 machines. Today's biggest criticism of Microsoft is that, while Windows has succeeded in PCs, the focus of the market has shifted to smartphones and tablets, where the company is a relatively small player. Windows Phone 7 is a step in the right direction--I've lately been trying out a Windows Phone--but it still has a long way to go in a market that is dominated by the iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry. Microsoft has been trying to make tablet PCs mainstream for nearly a decade and pretty much faled except in some vertical markets, probably because of its insistence of being handwriting-based. Apple's touch-based iPad has done more to make tablets real in the past six months than all the Tablet PC efforts of the past decade. But remember, Windows was once an underdog, too. Windows Phone 7 in an interesting attempt--albeit only a first step. Microsoft executives are now talking about the need to do more in tablets as well. So it's too early to write Microsoft off completely. And while "cloud computing" is certainly coming, Microsoft is not only looking to make Windows a player there through its Azure platform, it has one of the strongest cloud platform offerings available.

  131. It's still 2007
    Today's news is still dominated by Wikipedia, Google, Facebook and the iPhone and Android devices. All these trends started in 2007.

  132. 09-12-2010 tech nws - milestone - handhelds - mobile phones - android - 300,000 Android Activations Each Day, Google's Rubin Says - Carriers are activating more than 300,000 Android devices every day, a Google executive confirmed Wednesday. Andy Rubin, vice president of engineering at Google, took to his Twitter account for the second time this week to make that announcement. "There are over 300,000 Android phones activated each day," he tweeted. That comes about two months after Google chief executive Eric Schmidt said that Google was activating 200,000 Android devices per day.

  133. 12-01-2011 tech nws - 40th anniversary of intel 4004 - Happy 40th Birthday to Intel's 4004, the Chip That Made the World Digital - Oren Frank - Happy Birthday, dear 4004. When it was born, sometime in 1971, no one, not even his parents (all were Intel engineers), could have guessed he would come this far. Now, in 2011, we celebrate Mr. 4004's festive 40th birthday. In 1971, Model 4004 was the first commercially produced and sold central processing unit (CPU); the first general purpose microprocessor that allowed engineers to program its performance to their needs. Mr. 4004 was a wonder of its time; a tiny chip, the size of a fingernail, that contained no less than 23,000 transistors, and was faster and more powerful than the world's first electronic computer that was developed in 1946, filling an entire room. Forty winters have passed, and although the story is well known, it is still incomprehensible. With the back wind of Moore's Law (which predicts that the number of transistors on a chip will double every two years), 4004 grew exponentially, and today, Intel's first line processors contain about 800 million transistors. The even more astonishing figure is the total number of chips and embedded devices in the world. This figure also celebrates a birthday in 2011, and for the first time will cross the hundred billion figure. As there are about 7 billion humans in the world, it makes for 12 chips for each man and woman on the planet -- a decisive majority for the machines. The growth that led from the founding father, 4004, and resulted in a hundred billion chips, was also not linear. In fact, most of the descendants of 4004 joined us during the last decade, suggesting that in fact this growth is still at the "knee" of the curve, at the early stages of exponential growth. They, the chips, are all around us: in almost two billion personal computers, like the one with which I write now. Dozens of them hide quietly in every modern car; they lurk in washing machines and toasters, nest in your children's toys, and wait patiently inside our vacuum cleaners. In contrast, they work very long hours inside the hundreds of thousands of Google servers spread around the world, in super computers chewing through thousands of Tera-flop calculations deep in the basements of universities and governments, and very soon they will appear inside our furniture and clothing, in our food, and eventually inside our bodies. Major aspects of modern life are managed by computerized systems, with ever-declining human involvement and control. Air traffic, the internet and the web -- with the inconceivable amount of information found in them. The energy infrastructures of countries, civilian and military management and decision systems, medical platforms, and the global financial infrastructure, all these and countless others are almost entirely dependent on the smart hardware and software combinations to keep them running, and less on the humans that initially designed them. Not sure? A few months ago the SEC installed a "kill-switch" aimed at limiting the ability of independent trade algorithms to buy and sell stocks and bonds. I can't help but remember old HAL 9000, and predict that we will see many such stories in the coming years. Beyond the boring old questions on who controls whom, the carbon or the silicon life form, it is fascinating to try and look at the cultural changes resulting from the acceleration of technology. Almost paradoxically, with the growth of computing power in our lives, technology is disappearing from sight. Since computing power is now part of almost everything we do, we take it for granted, and pay attention to it only when it fails -- similar to what happened with electrical power in the previous millennium. Almost overnight, computing has transformed from a scarcity-driven product to a state of abundance. We take for granted the ever stronger PCs, the pads and the smart-phones, Facebook, Google, Black Friday e-commerce deals, internet on planes, MRI, machine translation, digital books and movies, augmented reality, printing and viewing in three dimensions, electric cars that park themselves, and even robots circling around our legs hunting for dust. In many ways, we now live in a fundamentally different human culture -- new even for the people who watched 4004 being born just 40 years ago. A brave new world indeed. As marketing and communications professionals, we tend to believe we're catching up, and sometimes even ahead of the technology. After all, we all launched a Facebook campaign, a couple of flash sites and we even got an iPhone. I believe that the disruption created by the technology acceleration for our industry is at its early stages. As 4004 and its offspring become ubiquitous and disappear from our line of sight, the importance of writing great lines will again be paramount for marketing and communications. They will not be copy or poetry lines, but lines of code. Our future lies in writing great software that delivers brands as media and services to consumers, and we still have a unique advantage in understanding what they (and we) will want. As Brands are becoming media our clients will become publishers, and will shift to annuities -- currently called "owned media". Ask yourself, can your agency ideate and build this kind of product for them, or will the job go to Google, or to a couple of kids in a garage near you? The era of machines began only 40 years ago, and in many ways, with the acceleration and the convergence of technology around us, this year it completes its infancy, and begins to wonder about what to do when it grows up. Forty years from now, in 2051, the world will most probably be a much stranger place, even for us, geeky residents of 2011. Happy Birthday and New Year to 4004, and to all other life forms. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Oren Frank is global chief creative officer at MRM Worldwide. During his career, Frank has worked with such brands as Honda, Volvo, Microsoft, Yoplait, Heineken, Axe and McDonald's.
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