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Google publicly announced Chrome OS in July 2009. The operating system was built around the idea that a lightweight browser-focused computer could be simpler, safer, and faster to maintain than a traditional desktop. Read more
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Microsoft launched Bing in June 2009 as the successor to Live Search. Competing with Google required far more than building a web crawler: a modern search engine had to index billions of pages, rank them quickly, fight spam, and learn from user behavior. Read more
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Google revealed Wave at its I/O conference in May 2009 as an attempt to rethink email and collaborative communication. A “wave” was a shared document and conversation that multiple users could edit in real time. Read more
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Oracle announced in April 2009 that it would acquire Sun Microsystems for about $7.4 billion. Sun owned technologies that sat at the center of enterprise computing, including Java, Solaris, SPARC processors, MySQL, and a large collection of open-source projects. Read more
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A few years ago, browsing the web on a phone felt like a reduced version of the real internet. Pages were difficult to read, connections were slow, and many sites seemed designed for a large screen and a mouse. That experience is changing quickly. Read more
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Intel launched the Xeon 5500 series, codenamed Nehalem-EP, in March 2009. The server processors replaced the front-side-bus architecture that had connected CPUs to a shared chipset interface for years. Read more
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WhatsApp was incorporated in February 2009 by Jan Koum and Brian Acton. The service did not begin as the global messaging platform it later became; its earliest idea was closer to showing short status messages beside contacts. Read more
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A new programming question-and-answer site called Stack Overflow has become one of the places I enjoy visiting. The idea is simple. A programmer asks a clear question. Other programmers answer it. Useful answers move upward through voting, and the discussion stays focused on solving the problem. This sounds small, but it feels different from searching through long forum threads. Read more
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Microsoft released the public beta of Windows 7 in January 2009. Although the new system looked like a major correction after Vista, much of its kernel, security model, and driver architecture actually came from Vista. Read more
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By the end of 2008, cloud computing had become more than an experimental hosting model. Amazon was expanding AWS, Google had launched App Engine, and Microsoft had announced what would become Azure. Major software companies were now designing products around infrastructure delivered over the Internet. Read more
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The phrase “cloud computing” is appearing more often, and I am still not sure I like the name. The cloud usually means somebody else’s computers, located somewhere I cannot see, providing storage or processing through a network. Read more
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Google published the Android source code through the Android Open Source Project in 2008, shortly after the first commercial Android phone reached consumers. This gave manufacturers and developers access to most of the operating system’s underlying code. Read more
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Android 1.0 reached consumers in October 2008 with the T-Mobile G1, manufactured by HTC. The software already contained many ideas that would remain central to Android: a notification system, home-screen widgets, deep Google-service integration, and an application marketplace. Read more
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A personal website is not a very practical object. It needs time. Pages break. Links change. Designs become old. Sometimes you spend an hour changing something that almost nobody will notice. Read more
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Google released the first public beta of Chrome for Windows in September 2008. The browser arrived with a minimalist interface, but its architecture was more radical than the appearance suggested. Read more
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Intel entered the consumer solid-state drive market in 2008 with products such as the X25-M, which quickly became known for strong random-access performance. SSDs had no mechanical heads or spinning platters, so they behaved very differently from hard disks. Read more
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Apple opened the iPhone App Store in July 2008 alongside iPhone OS 2.0. The store launched with roughly 500 applications and gave third-party developers an official way to distribute native software to iPhone and iPod touch users. Read more
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Version control becomes important the first time a project grows large enough that “final”, “final2”, and “really-final” stop being funny file names. A proper system keeps the history of changes and allows us to return to an older version when something goes wrong. Read more
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Mozilla released Firefox 3 in June 2008 after a public campaign that attempted to set a world record for software downloads in a single day. The release included a new bookmarking and history interface known as the “Awesome Bar,” improved standards support, and major performance work. Read more
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A Multi-Function Display, usually called an MFD, is one of the cockpit systems that interests me because it brings many different kinds of information onto a single screen. Instead of giving every function its own instrument, the display can change according to what the pilot needs at that moment. Read more