1981-2000
Main
The Radio
The Wright Bros.
Assembly Lines
R. H. Goddard
Main
Technicolor
Liquid-Fuel Rockets
Television
Animation
Pennicillin
Main
A-Bomb
ENIAC
Polio Vaccine
Sputnik
NASA
Main
The Apollo Missions
Floppy Disks
Video Games
Apple I
Main
Personal Computers
Windows 1.0
WWW
Deeper Blue
Cloning
Napster
1901-1920| 1921-1940| 1941-1960| 1961-1980| 1981-2000| home|

Home

If you stayed with us this far you've almost made it. This last twenty years have been the best so far. The PC followed up on the Apple. Bill Gates programmed Windows 1.0. The World Wide Web spread its arms and you can see how far it has grown now. Deeper Blue, the IBM super-computer, beat the world chess champion, even though it was expected to lose by a landslide. Dolly was cloned in Edinburgh, Scotland. Finally the internet file sharing software, Napster, makes a boom over the world wide web showing what the internet has the potential to be.

Personal Computers | Windows 1.0 | WWW
Deeper Blue | Cloning | Napster

1981

The Personal Computer

If IBM had known what it could have done by selling PC's, instead of just business computers, not just thinking they were a fad made by Apple, they would have cornered the entire PC market in a year.

IBM released their personal computers after noticing that the Apple 1's and 2's weren't wearing off in popularity. The personal computers were simply smaller, less powerful versions of the ones that they sold to big corporations. You could do what you wanted with them. Play games, type, just do what you want to with it.

1983

Windows 1.0

Bill Gates was a college dropout from Harvard University, that wasn't challenged enough by the classes. Gates worked in his parents garage, and programmed Windows 1.0 for his startup company, Microsoft.

Looking at his creation, Windows, he should have dropped out of college earlier. Windows is one of the most complex programs that most computers can run. It has almost become the standard operating system around the world. Windows 95 was where Microsoft finally got over a difficulty hump and it shows if you used Windows 95. The only problem with Windows was it's strength, which got the Microsoft company that makes it, split into 2 divisions.

1989

WWW

The world wide web is a enormous system of computers that are connected over the internet by phone lines hooked up on the computers. It was realized what it could be by the Department of Defense; it was built by Tim Berner Lee for his work at CERN (Nuclear Research Facilities in Geneva, Switzerland), and finally modified by the WWW Consortium at Massachusetts Institute for Technology.

Since that time, the world wide web has grown to all stretches of the world, even many countries that were once thought to be impossible for any technology to get into.

*If the internet seems hard to use, remember it was built by rocket scientists.

1996

Deeper Blue

For many years it was unimaginable. It was the stuff of B-rated films. Computers would never outsmart human beings. Deeper Blue, the IBM super computer, beat Gary Kasparov, the world's youngest international chess champion. In Deeper Blue's 36th move, it subtly to Kasparov's queen, leaving Gary nearly defenseless without his strongest piece. Gary lost the match to the supercomputer.

1997

  

Dolly

If anything is the ultimate goal in the Biotechnology Industry, it is cloning. If a spieces died out, eventually you could clone it and bring the entire spieces back to life. Many of them would be very similar, but the spieces would be alive.

Ian Wilmut and his peers were the first to clone a living creature. After hundreds of failures, the sheep Dolly was born as an exact clone at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, Scotland.

How?  |  Why?

1999

Napster

In our opinion, the internet and world wide web were created to get whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted it. Napster does exactly that. With the touch of a button, you can get almost any song you want, which causes a lot of controversy among record companies. The peer-to-peer access mean you can get files from other people's computers, for free most of the time. Napster was not the first to use this, but it was the first to make it easy to use. But, if we are already swapping mp3's right now, how much and what could we swap in the next "100 Years of Technological Invention and Innovation?"

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