Windows Vista launched at retail for consumers on January 30, 2007, following a November 30, 2006 release for volume-license business customers. Retail editions: Home Basic ($199 upgrade), Home Premium ($239 upgrade), Business ($299 upgrade), and Ultimate ($399 upgrade). Vista “Premium Ready” hardware required a 1 GHz CPU, 1 GB RAM, 128 MB dedicated VRAM, and a DirectX 9-capable GPU with WDDM driver support for Aero Glass transparency effects — specifications that exceeded the average PC sold in 2005–2006, when many machines shipped with 512 MB RAM and integrated graphics. Read more
AMD’s move to 65 nanometer desktop processors in 2006 was not the kind of launch that instantly changed what users saw on the screen. There was no new operating system, no dramatic interface, and no single feature that made a computer feel transformed overnight. Still, process transitions like this are part of the quiet machinery behind every generation of faster and more efficient hardware. Read more
For most of my computing life, the floppy disk was one of the most normal objects in the room. Documents, homework, small programs, configuration files: these moved between computers on a square piece of plastic small enough to disappear into a pocket. The 1.44 MB capacity of the 3.5-inch high-density disk — the format that became standard in 1987 — felt reasonable because many of the things we wanted to move were small enough to fit. Read more
Microsoft released Windows Vista to volume-license business customers on November 30, 2006 (build 6000.16386 RTM), allowing enterprises to begin testing and deployment before the January 30, 2007 retail consumer launch. The release concluded a five-year development cycle that began as “Longhorn” in 2001 and was reset in August 2004 after the WinFS transactional filesystem — intended to make all Windows data addressable through a unified query interface — proved undeliverable. The reset moved Vista’s codebase onto Windows Server 2003 SP1, trading the ambitious WinFS vision for a more conservative but shippable release. Read more
Mozilla released Firefox 2 on October 24, 2006, approximately two years after Firefox 1.0 (November 9, 2004) and one year after Firefox 1.5 (November 29, 2005). Firefox 2 ran on the Gecko 1.8.1 rendering engine and introduced features that addressed the practical experience of heavy browser users: session restore (automatically recovering all open tabs after a browser crash, the first major browser to offer this as a built-in feature), inline spell checking for text fields and text areas using the same red-underline convention as desktop word processors (checking as users typed in web forms and comment boxes), a redesigned tab bar with a close button on each individual tab (earlier Firefox versions had a single close button at the far right of the tab bar, requiring users to select a tab before closing it), a search plugins list in the search box dropdown allowing one-click installation of new search engines from any website, and enhanced phishing protection using Google’s Safe Browsing API to warn users before loading known phishing URLs. The anti-phishing feature was significant: IE 7 (released October 18, 2006, just six days before Firefox 2) also added phishing filtering as a response to the same threat, revealing that both browsers were tracking the same security problem simultaneously. Read more
Facebook opened registration to anyone aged 13 or older with a valid email address on September 26, 2006. At that moment, the service had approximately 9.5 million registered users, almost entirely university and high school students. Myspace had approximately 100 million registered users at the same time and was the dominant social network; Friendster had peaked and was declining; LinkedIn served professionals. The open-registration decision came three weeks after a product change that would define Facebook’s growth: the News Feed, launched September 5, 2006, which displayed a continuous stream of friends’ activity (status updates, photo uploads, relationship changes, group joins) on the home page — replacing the model of navigating to individual profiles to discover activity. Read more
The Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) released SPEC CPU2006 in August 2006, replacing SPEC CPU2000 (released August 2000). The six-year gap between releases reflected how dramatically hardware had changed: CPU2000’s workloads fit comfortably in cache and DRAM configurations typical of 2000, making results in 2006 more reflective of L2 cache performance and compiler optimization than real-world application behavior. CPU2006 contained two suites: CINT2006 (12 integer workloads) and CFP2006 (17 floating-point workloads), all substantial programs compiled from source and run to completion rather than synthetic microbenchmarks. Workloads included gcc (compiler), bzip2 (compression), h264ref (H.264 video encoding), perlbench (Perl interpreter), namd (molecular dynamics simulation), milc (quantum chromodynamics lattice simulation), and astar (path-finding algorithm) — programs with diverse memory access patterns and instruction mix characteristics. Read more
The web is becoming larger faster than anyone can follow by visiting sites individually. Technorati, which tracks blog growth, estimates that a new blog is created every second in 2006 and that the blogosphere doubles roughly every six months. Technology sites, news pages, personal journals, project logs: the volume is growing faster than reading time. Read more
Intel launched the Core 2 Duo desktop processor family on July 27, 2006 under the codename Conroe, simultaneously releasing the Core 2 Extreme X6800 ($999, 2.93 GHz), Core 2 Duo E6700 ($530, 2.67 GHz), E6600 ($316, 2.4 GHz), and E6400 ($224, 2.13 GHz). The launch ended Intel’s four-year pursuit of the NetBurst microarchitecture that had defined Pentium 4 (launched November 2000) and Pentium D (launched May 2005). NetBurst had relied on very long pipeline stages — up to 31 stages in Prescott (2004) — to achieve high clock frequencies, reaching 3.8 GHz, but the deep pipeline imposed penalties on branch mispredictions, reduced instructions-per-clock efficiency, and generated substantial heat: Prescott-based Pentium 4 chips at 3.6–3.8 GHz consumed 84–115W TDP and required elaborate cooling solutions. Intel’s own engineers had begun calling the Prescott thermal situation “the burning building.” The Core microarchitecture Intel introduced in Core 2 derived instead from the Pentium M (Banias/Dothan) lineage — the laptop processor Intel Israel had designed in 2003 based on the P6 architecture of the Pentium Pro (1995) and Pentium III. Core used a 14-stage pipeline (versus Prescott’s 31), executed up to 4 instructions per clock cycle (versus Pentium 4’s 3-wide issue), and shared a single 4 MB L2 cache between both cores (versus the Pentium D’s two separate L2 caches with no direct inter-core communication path). The 65nm manufacturing process (Intel P1264 node) allowed higher transistor density and lower leakage versus the previous 90nm Prescott. Read more
Blu-ray Disc reached consumers on June 20, 2006, when Samsung launched the BD-P1000 player in the United States at $999. Sony, Pioneer, and Panasonic shipped additional players in July and August 2006, priced between $799 and $1,299. Blu-ray’s 405nm blue-violet laser (from which the format took its name) allowed the pit size on disc to shrink to 0.32 micrometers, versus 0.74 micrometers for DVD’s 650nm red laser — producing 25 GB per layer versus DVD’s 4.7 GB. Dual-layer Blu-ray stored 50 GB, enabling 1080p video at 40+ Mbps bitrates alongside lossless Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD Master Audio tracks, compared to DVD’s standard 9 Mbps MPEG-2 video. Read more
The web feels different lately. A few years ago, most websites were closer to digital brochures. You visited, read something, and left. The website belonged to whoever built it, and visitors were an audience, not participants. Read more
Windows Vista Beta 2 reached a broad public audience in 2006 and gave many PC users their first serious look at Microsoft’s next desktop operating system. After the long life of Windows XP, expectations were high. Vista promised a more modern interface, stronger security boundaries, better search, and a platform prepared for newer hardware. Read more
Apple released Boot Camp as a public beta on April 5, 2006, three months after the first Intel Macs shipped in January 2006. The software was a free download including a startup disk partition assistant, a Windows driver disc creator (packaging Apple’s drivers for the GPU, audio, keyboard, trackpad, iSight camera, and Bluetooth onto a CD for installation inside Windows), and firmware updates enabling a dual-boot menu at startup. Read more
Amazon launched Simple Storage Service, better known as S3, in March 2006. At first glance it looked like a simple storage product: put files somewhere on the internet, retrieve them later, and pay for what you use. The deeper change was that storage stopped being something every small team had to buy, rack, monitor, replace, and over-plan before a product had even found its audience. Read more
Novell engineer David Reveman demonstrated Xgl and the Compiz window manager at a Linux conference in January 2006, and a video of the demo spread rapidly on the early internet through February 2006 — showing Linux desktop effects that looked more advanced than what Windows XP offered: windows that wobbled like jelly when moved, a rotating cube exposing four virtual desktops, transparent window decorations, and smooth minimizing animations that collapsed windows into the taskbar with a fire effect. The demo reached millions of viewers through Google Video and early YouTube, generating significant attention for desktop Linux among users who had never seen 3D compositing in any OS. Read more
For a long time, using a website has followed a familiar rhythm. I click a link or submit a form, the browser waits, and then the whole page appears again. It works, but it often reminds me that I am moving from one document to another. Recently, some websites have started to feel different. Read more
Steve Jobs opened Macworld Expo 2006 on January 10, 2006 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco with the announcement that Apple had shipped its first Intel-based Macs — available for purchase that day: an updated iMac with Intel Core Duo at 1.83 and 2.0 GHz (17-inch at $1,299; 20-inch at $1,699) and the MacBook Pro, a new name replacing the PowerBook G4 line, at 1.67 and 1.83 GHz ($1,999 and $2,499). Jobs had announced the intention to switch from PowerPC to Intel at WWDC on June 6, 2005, setting a two-year transition timeline; the actual transition completed in 14 months. The processors were Intel’s dual-core Core Duo (codename Yonah) built on Intel’s 65nm process — the same platform used in Centrino laptop processors — with a shared 2 MB L2 cache and a 31W TDP, making it suitable for the iMac’s all-in-one thermal design and the thin MacBook Pro chassis. The Core Duo delivered substantially better performance per watt than the PowerPC G5 IBM had supplied for the Power Mac and the PowerPC G4 Freescale had supplied for the PowerBook; the G5’s heat output had prevented Apple from shipping a G5-based laptop, leaving the PowerBook G4 at 1.67 GHz as the maximum while Intel laptops had advanced significantly. Jobs demonstrated the iMac Core Duo running a video transcode “four to five times faster” than the Power Mac G5 iMac it replaced. Read more
