Microsoft Releases Windows XP Service Pack 3
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Microsoft released Windows XP Service Pack 3 in May 2008, more than six years after XP first reached consumers and more than a year after Windows Vista launched. Read more
Blog Posts
Google App Engine Opens to Developers
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Google launched App Engine in April 2008 as a platform for building web applications without managing servers directly. The first version focused on Python applications and provided managed services for storage, authentication, caching, and request handling. Read more
Open Source Changed How I Learn
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One of the nicest things about programming is that sometimes we can look inside the thing we use. Open-source software makes this possible in a very direct way. We do not only receive a program. We can also see how it was built. For a student, this is powerful. Read more
Apple Releases the iPhone SDK
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Apple released the first iPhone software development kit in March 2008, finally giving developers an official way to build native applications for the iPhone. Until then, Apple had encouraged third-party developers to create web applications that ran in Safari. Read more
Microsoft Opens More of Its Server Protocol Documentation
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Microsoft announced broader publication of technical documentation for important Windows client and server protocols in February 2008. The move followed years of antitrust pressure and complaints that competitors could not interoperate easily with Microsoft’s dominant enterprise software. Read more
Netbooks And The Return Of The Small Computer
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Computers have spent many years becoming more powerful. Faster processors, larger screens, stronger graphics cards, and more storage are easy improvements to understand. The recent interest in netbooks suggests that another direction can also be attractive: maybe a computer can become useful by becoming smaller and simpler. Read more
MacBook Air Redefines the Thin Laptop
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Apple introduced the first MacBook Air in January 2008 as an unusually thin notebook, just 0.76 inches at its thickest point. Reaching that size required removing or shrinking components that laptop users still considered normal. Read more
Amazon Expands the Idea of Cloud Computing
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By the end of 2007, Amazon Web Services had turned “cloud computing” from a vague phrase into a practical development model. S3 offered object storage, while EC2 let developers rent virtual machines by the hour instead of buying physical servers. Read more
Google Announces Android
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Google and a group of hardware and mobile companies announced Android in November 2007 through the Open Handset Alliance. Unlike Apple’s tightly integrated iPhone, Android was presented as a software platform that many manufacturers and carriers could adapt to their own devices. Read more
Ubuntu 7.10 Expands Desktop Linux
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Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon” was released in October 2007 with a stronger focus on desktop polish. Compiz desktop effects were enabled by default on supported hardware, and the distribution improved monitor configuration, printing, and automatic handling of graphics drivers. Read more
Wikipedia And The Changing Habit Of Looking Things Up
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When I was younger, looking something up usually meant finding the right book. An encyclopedia had weight, order, and a limited number of pages. If the information was not there, the search had to continue somewhere else. Read more
Apple Introduces the iPod Touch
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Apple introduced the iPod touch in September 2007, only a few months after the first iPhone. It removed the phone radio but kept the multi-touch interface, Safari browser, Wi-Fi networking, and much of the same software foundation. Read more
VMware Fusion Brings Virtualization to Intel Macs
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VMware released Fusion 1.0 for Intel-based Macs in August 2007. Boot Camp already allowed Mac owners to restart into Windows, but Fusion let Windows run inside a virtual machine while Mac OS X remained active. Read more
Tactical Environment Software
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Tactical environment software is an interesting example of software that must work with a large amount of changing information. In a military or operational environment, a user may need maps, weather data, positions, communication information, surveillance reports, and mission plans at the same time. The important problem is not only collecting this information. It is presenting the right part of it clearly enough to support a decision. Read more
Intel and the Industry Push Multi-Core Computing
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By 2007, dual-core processors were becoming standard in mainstream PCs, and the industry was clearly moving away from the old strategy of increasing clock speed every generation. Power density and heat had made that path increasingly difficult. Read more
The Phone Is Becoming a Computer
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For many years, a mobile phone was mainly a phone. It made calls, sent messages, stored a few contacts, and maybe had a simple game. That idea is starting to look old. Read more
The First iPhone Goes on Sale
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The first iPhone went on sale in the United States on June 29, 2007. It combined a capacitive multi-touch screen, a mobile version of OS X, a real web browser, phone functions, and an iPod-style media player in one device. Read more
Google Street View Appears
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Google launched Street View in May 2007 with imagery from a small number of US cities. The feature turned Google Maps from a top-down map into something closer to a navigable photographic model of real streets. Read more
Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn Is Released
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Ubuntu 7.04 “Feisty Fawn” was released in April 2007. It arrived when desktop Linux distributions were working hard to make installation, drivers, multimedia, and wireless networking less intimidating for ordinary PC users. Read more
Adobe Announces Creative Suite 3
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Adobe announced Creative Suite 3 in March 2007, bringing major applications such as Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Flash, and Dreamweaver into one generation of tools. For Mac users, CS3 was especially important because it was the first Creative Suite version designed to run natively on Apple’s Intel-based Macs. Read more