The 1990s can be described as cataclysmic in terms of technological progress, as then the foundations were laid for things that today we take for granted and that determine both our lives and our daily lives.
In the early 90s, in 1990 in particular, the first internet browser was released! The internetUndoubtedly the biggest revolution of the last 50 years, it was not at all easy to use and easily accessible until 1990, when the first application was released that simply and quickly brought users in touch with the information they were looking for.
The browser would be known as the program that gave access to the World Wide Web from most operating systems and devices, allowing surfing. WorldWideWeb was the name of the program that would later be renamed Nexus so as not to be confused with the World Wide Web itself.
1991 was the time for another great revolution, the advent of Linux! But also the first website, the one that uploaded it online CERN. "I'm building a free operating system (just for hobby, it won't be big or professional)," Linus Torvalds wrote on Aug. 25, adding another stone to the tech landscape we know today as it sparked the open source revolution.
In 1992 the first text message was sent, what we call today SMS, the feature that would change telephone communication from oral to written. Neil Papworth wished Richard Jarvis a "Merry Christmas" on his Vodafone Orbitel 901 mobile phone.
In 1995, Windows 95 arrived! Windows existed for a whole decade in the world, with the 1995 version however it would occupy the entire market as the No. 1 operating system on the planet. A pan-empire that would last for at least 20 years. They also brought with them Microsoft Internet Explorer, the browser that would dominate the market for over a decade.
Two years later, the newspapers were playing another piece of news: Steve Jobs was returning to Apple, a move that would not just change the company into a giant, but also the tech industry itself. In 1997, Apple Computer was literally dying, only to magically return from the other world to dominate.
So we kind of got to 1998, the year when a series of things were going to happen that no one realized in their day how big revolutions were.
This almost faded remnant of the technological nostalgia of the 80s, Apple, launched a new computer with a focus on the Internet: iMac told him and it was exactly what the mind of the great visionary wanted Steve Jobs.
At the same time, the pioneering search engine developed by two Stanford PhD students, BackRub, would be renamed to become a commercial and business-like innovative algorithm that served the most relevant answers to the world's searches.
It was not exactly a revolution, as the search engine war was already raging and BackRub was not exactly a scare. How did the two peddlers say their search engine? Google said so and would immediately eliminate all competition with the slogan "Don't be evil"!
In the same year, always in 1998, the e-bookstore that had been established four years earlier announced that it would be turned into a grocery store, selling everything. The largest source of books would be the world's largest online store, the e-commerce boulder we all know as Amazon! Meanwhile, making its owner, Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, stealing the title from the No. 1 croissant for years Bill Gates.
And speaking of Gates and Microsoft, again in 1998 the much-publicized lawsuit of the American State against Microsoft took place, which allowed all this to happen. Not exactly a technological event, but a business one, just as colossal as the Microsoft monopoly lawsuit that stifled competition paved the way for companies like Apple and Google to gain market share.
Without the "US vs. Microsoft" case that limited the hegemonic role of the biggest tech company of the time to do whatever it wanted with its Windows and partner software, whatever happened in 1998 would be nothing more than footnotes to the history that no one would remember or know today…
An "internet machine" Jobs called his engineers to fix, although he could not know the sequel. As it turned out, the ambitious new Mac was launched with an emphasis on easy internet access. The machine not only redefined the design and style of technology products, but also did something even more important.
It set Apple on the path from becoming a mid-sized PC maker to the world's largest technology company. The iMac he made bold strategic choices, choices that the conservative wisdom of the time characterized as completely wrong business.
Just ten months after his solemn return to Apple, Jobs introduced that new bitten apple product in May 1998, killing many of the company's bad devices in the meantime. Only two lived, showing Jobs's philosophy: the white Power Mac desktop and the black PowerBook notebook.
With the iMac, Apple was targeting a wider audience seeking convenience and easy access to the Internet. It was fast, with a brand new processor (twice the speed of Intel Pentium II processors) and ready to connect to the Internet, something most competing computers did not have. And it was naturally beautiful, an ornament for every office out there.
At a time when most PCs needed an external modem to access the internet, the new iMac had a built-in high-speed modem, as well as Ethernet at 100Mb. You just twist the phone cord and surf automatically and easily. At the same time, the iMac was wholeheartedly embracing a new type of port developed by Intel called the Universal Serial Bus. Yes, we know USB.
The iMac was truly irresistible, showing the future of technology. A technology that defined the same in many places. Jobs boasted of his iMac stereo speakers and CD-ROM slot, as well as this satisfying 15-inch screen with a resolution of 1024 × 768, in a setting where most PCs used cheap 13-inch color screens for crying.
And then he commented on this amazing: "The back of this thing looks much better than the fronts of the others, by the way"! His own computer was colorful, with vivid and fancy colors, where the others were just… beige. And they were running Windows.
It was the fast, easy to use and stylish computer for the everyday person who wanted to get on the internet. It was the beginning of Apple's philosophy that would make it a colossus like no other. Ease of use, elegant design, good performance and quality components, whatever it means Apple Lossless Audio CODEC (ALAC), Today, it all started with the iMac revolution. In 1998, always…
The diary wrote September 27, 1998 when this strange logo of an even stranger as a search engine name would go online. It all started in 1995, when a Larry Page, who had just graduated from the University of Michigan, visited the famous Stanford and fate wanted Sergey Brin to take him to the university.
"According to some reports, they disagreed on almost everything during this first meeting," she said. Google in its official history. By 1996, the two students were working together on a search engine called BackRub that could search over 16 million web pages. The student project even contained links to Brin's homepage and Page's homepage, as they appeared on Stanford's servers.
The following year, the two decided to rename their electronic machine "Google", "a word game with the word '' googol '', a mathematical term for the number representing the number 1 followed by 100 zeros". They chose it because they felt it reflected their vision, their mission to organize a seemingly infinite amount of information on the internet.
Until 1998, Google was working feverishly to get better and better. In August, Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim cut a $ 100.000 check for the two children to make their algorithm a business reality. The check is being cut at Google, Inc., which would not have acquired legal status before September. Only then did they open a corporate bank account to redeem the hefty check.
Earlier that month, Page and Brin moved into Susan Wojcicki's garage, which became the first headquarters of Google. Wojcicki would become a big head of the company, head of the entire advertising department, while today is the CEO of YouTube. With the $ 100.000 pillow, the two children formally hire Craig Silverstein, also a PhD candidate, as their first employee ever, a student they knew from Stanford.
But the money was not enough for the aspirations of the young entrepreneurs and in the same year they will go out again for money. They will raise about $ 1 million from three major funders (including family and friends) and one of them will be Jeff Bezos, boss of the online bookstore Amazon.com.
Before the end of the year, Google had shown its teeth, raised another $ 25 million in a new round of financing and was now the hottest Silicon Valley to show. In 2000, Yahoo, one of the largest websites of the time, announced that it would use Google as its primary search engine.
When it went public in August 2004, it had a market capitalization of $ 23 billion…
"Amazon.com Extends Beyond Books," the New York Times headline wrote on August 5, 1998, and continued: "In a move that goes beyond the sales of books on the Internet, Amazon .com said yesterday it had bought Junglee Corporation, which runs a service that allows people to shop for everything from clothes to computers.
Amazon.com, as they called the online bookstore then, also bought Planet All, which also ran an online service with a huge user base (over 1,5 million members). To find $ 187 million for Junglee and $ 93 million for Planet, Bezos was forced to liquidate part of his stock.
This is how the Amazon to the most successful internet marketer, now having a customer base that reached 3,1 million people.
With this double move, Amazon recorded sales of $ 203 million for the first time in its history in the first half of next year, selling everything. As for its founder, the former stockbroker who gave up everything for his online bookstore, he saw Amazon's stock skyrocket and his personal fortune climbing to $ 2,5 billion!
The only expansion Amazon has made so far has been to add CDs to its books. And he continued to sell only books and music, as he was not directly involved in everything else: "We are constantly focused on helping people find and discover things they want to buy," he said. Bezos, "We are not limited to selling only our own things".
Such was the commercial echo of Amazon's expansion that Time magazine named its founder and boss "Person of the Year" in 1999, acknowledging that it did much more than anyone else to establish e-shopping.
Bezos' unconventional business plan proved to work, against all odds and against the stubbornness of a portion of investors who did not consider such an activity profitable.
By 2011, Amazon had 30.000 employees in the United States, a number that would jump to 5 in the next five years. By the end of 180.000, the colossus was employing 2017 people across the length and breadth of the world.
It was now a giant, a giant that acquired one company after another, swallowing the competition and thus expanding into other industries. In 2017, say, it acquired the alternative Whole Foods supermarket chain for $ 13,4 billion.
The foundations for everything were laid again in 1998…