Archive for 2023

December 25, 1990

Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), along with with his associate Robert Cailliau, were operating the first web server, info.cern.ch, and first web browser/editor, WorldWideWeb, which were reportedly able to communicate over the Internet by this date. Running on a pair of NeXT workstations, the exact date that everything was truly functioning for the first time is lost to history, but according to Berners-Lee, it was functional by the time the Christmas holiday care around that year.

Interestingly enough, Berners-Lee and his wife were also expecting their first child, due on Christmas Eve. The baby was not born until New Year’s Day, however. Regardless, in essence Tim Berners-Lee fathered two babies during the 1990 holiday season!

December 24, 1994

Seven years after introducing the GIF format, during which it became a defacto standard because of its efficient compression algorithm, Compuserve reaches a licensing agreement with Unisys over the use of the patented LZW method in the GIF specification. CompuServe was not aware of the patent when it used the LZW technique in 1987 and Unisys was not aware that LZW was used in the GIF format until 1993. By the time the settlement was reached, the use of the GIF format had become widespread on the early world wide web. During the announcement of the licensing agreement with Compuserve, Unisys made it known that they expected all commercial services or software that used the GIF format or the LZW method to pay licensing fees. While the arrangement would likely not have affected anyone who used GIF graphics on their web sites, the announcement was generally met with outrage. Many people and organizations criticized Unisys for attempting to collect licensing fees on a format that was commonly considered to be freely available. The most famous condemnation was the “Burn All GIFs” campaign by the League for Programming Freedom. The uproar over the GIF licensing arrangement led to the development of the patent-free PNG format. The LZW patent expired worldwide during 2003 and 2004 so the GIF file format is now completely free to use.

December 18, 1998

The Warner Brothers motion picture You’ve Got Mail, starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, is released to theaters. While mostly known as a romantic comedy, the film was chock-full of technology symbolism. Primarily I find interesting that the movie’s themes of business and technology was foreshadowing larger changes to come.

Starting with the obvious, the film’s title was the popular notification sound used by AOL for incoming e-mail. This showed just how quickly the Internet had become mainstream with e-mail and on-line dating starting to gain traction in the general population. At the time, AOL was the face of the Internet to those just getting their feet wet. However, it also foreshadowed one of the biggest technology deals in history. Just a little over a year later AOL would buy Warner Brothers’ parent company Time Warner, forming one of the largest media companies in history. However, the dot-com bubble burst and the merged companies never quite meshed. AOL was eventually spun-off in 2009, having lost its status in a more tech-evolved society.

Additionally, the main characters’ choice of technology was telling. Tom Hank’s character, the corporate businessman, used a Windows-based PC (an IBM no less) while Meg Ryan’s character, the small book shop owner, used a Macintosh Powerbook. The common thinking at the time was that Windows PCs were for business and Macintosh computers were for “creative” people. Of course, this was just a few years before the iPod was introduced and Apple re-revolutionized the technology industry in the 2000’s. Apple is now the consumer face of technology, whereas Windows is past its heyday even among many business professionals.

The book industry was highlighted, with the movie’s subplot exploring the struggle of small businesses against the expansion of large corporate chains. Yet in the span of about a decade after the movie was released, large corporate bookstores were on the defensive against upstart companies doing business on the Internet. For context, in 1998 after 3 years in business, Amazon.com had yet to turn a profit, yet today Borders is out of business. The rise of social media now gives small companies the ability to effectively market themselves directly to their customer base, giving them a way to compete with large corporations. All this in a relatively short time after a movie helped publicize a computer network.