Looking Back...Way Back...Before Unified Communications
This is the time when all sorts of end-of-year articles appear in the media – retrospectives about the past 12 months and predictions about what lies ahead. Mostly these take the form of lists – such as the top 5 or 10 events, developments or highlights of the period. We’ve all seen them, we’ve all read them. Now I’d like your help in preparing one that’s a bit different.
June 2009 marks the 50th anniversary of my college graduation. (Yes, I am that old, note, folks my age are not all retired and living in Florida – not that there’s anything wrong with that). The class reunion will have, among other things, a panel discussion with alumni from various professions and disciplines talking about advances in their chosen fields in the last 50 years. I’ll be lecturing on milestones in Information Technology (loosely defined as to include telecommunications) since ’59. That’s where your thoughts and opinions on the top 5 IT developments in the timeframe come in.
By way of background and reference, let’s take a brief look at the landscape in 1959. Was it the Ice Age? Did dinosaurs roam the Earth? No, not really, but my beloved Dodgers were already in Los Angeles and rock ‘n roll had taken over popular music although the “music died” when a plane crash took the lives of 3 notable pioneers. Castro took over Cuba, Alaska and Hawaii became states, the St. Lawrence Seaway opened, and the Barbie doll and Etch-A-Sketch toy were launched. (The Hula Hoop came out a year earlier).
What about Information Technology in 1959? IT as a label didn’t exist then. There was computing, of course, and telecommunications was essentially the telephone network. Some of the baseline elements of 1959 were:
- IBM shipped its first fully-transistorized mainframe, the 1401;
- The microchip or integrated circuit was invented by a Texas Instruments engineer;
- AT&T had recently introduced the modem or so-called “dataset;”
- Xerox came out with its first commercial copier;
- Computer users, manufacturers and the Federal government agreed on a programming language for business, called COBOL;
- R&D was well along at Bell Labs for the first electronic (and stored program) telephone switching system, a field trial began the next year;
- Processing of bank checks with MICR (Magnetic Ink Character Recognition) encoding was introduced.
In the next few years more breakthroughs followed:
- In 1960, a new company, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) had its first offering, the PDP-1, the precursor to the minicomputer;
- In 1961, the now familiar telephone touch-tone keypad appeared, an MIT researcher published a landmark paper on packet-switching theory; also at MIT, computer timesharing was developed;
- In 1962, AT&T started T-1 multiplex service and removable magnetic disk storage was introduced by IBM.
The fact that some of these developments have been around a half-century or so may be surprising, Going forward, there certainly have been many, many important IT developments since 1959. You no doubt have your favorites as do I. Share your top 5 by posting them in a comment on this site or emailing them to me at j.brand@comcast.net. The results of this survey will be published in February.
Thanks for your help and Happy 2009!