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05/26/1982
IBM PC: Computers as a low-cost assemblage of electronic Lego parts made every neighborhood electronics geek a computer technician and every small office and home work room a data center. RELATIONAL DATABASES: The second generation of RDBMS systems began to take hold. -
05/26/1983
GPS/GIS: The Global Positioning System was opened for use by civilian aircraft in 1983, beginning a trend that ' combined with great advances in geographic information systems and mapping tools ' led to agency data visualized in layered maps and cars telling their drivers where to turn. -
1984
CD-ROM for computers: Flattened two entire industries, data storage and music dissemination. Its successor, the DVD (1996), killed off the video tape. FLASH MEMORY: Invented in 1984 at Toshiba, it found its place in small devices. Smart phones, digital cameras, other devices (and, soon, laptops) all rely on Flash -
1985
NETWORK FILE SYSTEM: The file system that brought us to the age of network storage. No longer would your data be hostage to the computer in which it was created ' or to backup tape. -
1987
NETWORK FILE SYSTEM: The file system that brought us to the age of network storage. No longer would your data be hostage to the computer in which it was created ' or to backup tape. -
1989
WORLD WIDE WEB: Invented by Tim Berners-Lee, it would soon change the way governments, business and people operate -
1990
SLIP/PPP (Serial Line Internet Protocol and Point-to-Point Protocol): We've forgotten about this now, but SLIP/PPP ' mostly PPP ' is what got everyone on the Internet via dial-up modems back when broadband was an obscure industry term -
1991
LINUX: A Unix knockoff that is the world's largest hobby project for coders. A select few are among the world's best. HYPERTEXT MARKUP LANGUAGE: You send the instructions to the remote computer and let it figure out how to render the layout, dummy! PCI SLOTS: Rumors are unconfirmed that the national boost in technology productivity came from the thousands of admins who no longer had to fiddle with the IRQ settings each time they installed a new peripheral. -
1992
THE BROWSER: It made the Web work for the rest of us -
1993
E-MAIL: Electronic mail goes back to the 1960s, but it really started taking off with Web use. By 1997, the volume of business e-mail surpassed that of regular mail. ADOBE PDF: Lawyers and other control freaks love it! Also, it was perhaps the first truly effective document- sharing technology.