Technology Bytes

Originally heard during Barrett Time and shamelssly ganked from the Geek Speak Blog here are the major events that occured over the 12 year life-span of Technology Bytes:

The First Year: 1995

• Twelve years ago this month, Windows 95 hit store shelves. The day was August 24th.
• Microsoft Internet Explorer is also launched as part of Windows 95, though at this time there were only 18,957 websites on the Internet.
• In September of 1995, online auction site eBay is founded as Auctionweb, and in December, the first multilingual search engine, Alta Vista, is launched.

The Second Year: 1996

• There are now 342,081 websites online.

The Third Year: 1997

• Domain name business.com sells for $150,000.00.
• Web commentator Jorn Barger coins the term weblog.
• Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone hit British bookstore shelves. In the US, the book is titled Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

The Fourth Year: 1998

• Kozmo.com launches. This was the site that promised they could deliver just about anything in under an hour. Google opens its garage doors for business.
• The Diamond Rio PMP300 is launched.
• The Recording Industry Association of America, files a lawsuit in the Ninth U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco claiming Diamond Rio player violated the 1992 Audio Home Recording Act. The three judge panel ruled in favor of Diamond, paving the way for the development of the MP3 portable player market. The Rio retailed for $200 and had the ability to play 12 songs at 128 kilobits per second.

The Fifth Year: 1999

• SBC rolls out Asynchronous Digital Subscriber Lines to those lucky enough to be close enough to an SBC Central Office.
• Everquest is launched.
• Shawn Fanning founds Napster.
• The original MySpace site is launched as a personal file sharing service.

The Sixth Year: 2000

• On January 10th, AOL buys TimeWarner for $162 Billion, the largest corporate merger ev4r.
• On the 14th, the Dot Com Bubble reaches its peak.
• There are now nearly 20 million websites online.

The Seventh Year: 2001

• Three years after the launch of the Diamiond Rio, the first generation iPod hits the street.
• Online encyclopedia Wikipedia is founded by Jimmy Wales
• Pope John Paul II sends the first papal email from a laptop in his office. Sadly, the name Pmail didn’t stick.

The Eighth Year: 2002

• This year saw the rise of the bootable linux CD distro, Knoppix being the most notable of the group. This is why Knoppix has difficulties with motherboards that have a BIOS created before 2002.

The Ninth Year: 2003

• Apple launches the iTunes Store.
• The first flash mob is organized in Manhattan via the Web.

The Tenth Year: 2004

• Amazon.com makes the first ever full-year profit since its launch.
• Tim Berners Lee becomes Sir Tim Berners Lee, as he is knighted for his contribution to the Internet.
• The Mozilla Firefox web browser hit 1.0 this year, with Houston Geeks celebrating at a local launch party at the Saint Arnold Brewery.

The Eleventh Year: 2005

• Video sharing site YouTube.com comes online.
• The web grows more this year than during the whole Dot Com Boom as 17 million new sites go online.

The Twelfth Year: 2006

• The iPhone and the end of Harry Potter.
• As of August 2006, there are 92,615,362 websites online.