A C Clarke 1990

© Science Photo Library.
Satellite communications dishes at a ground station in Bavaria, Germany.
		1990 Alan Huang, an engineer at AT&T, demonstrates a prototype opticalcomputer. This uses photons - light particles - to carry data and canpotentially reach calculation speeds a thousand times greater than existingelectronic computers.
1990 Commercial Internet Exchange (CIX), a universal commercial connection pointto the Internet, is formed to allow commercial networks to connect to the Internet.
		1990 After nearly three decades of research and development, the ARPANET is decommissioned.Its legacy is the Internet: an international packet-switched network ofnetworks linking more than 300,000 host computers.
1990 Tim Berners-Lee, British computer consultant, and Robert Cailliau, engineer, ofthe European Organisation for Particle Physics, part of the Centre Europe´en; de Recheiche Nucle´aire; (CERN), draft a proposalfor an innovative 'hypertext' information system - which they call the World Wide Web or W3 - for the international high-energy physics community. They write: 'HyperText is a way to link and access information of various kinds asa web of nodes in which the user can browse at will. It provides a singleuser-interface to large classes of information (reports, notes, data-bases,computer documentation and on-line help). We propose a simple scheme incorporating servers already available at CERN.' The proposal is approved, and the World Wide Web is launched in 1990.
		1990 The US Department of Commerce estimates the value of the fibre optic marketworldwide at $3.8bn; they anticipate it will grow to $10.8bn by 2000.
1990, February Launch of Adobe Photoshop a program for manipulating images digitally.
		1990, June Nolan Bushnell unveils Commodore's CDTV.
1990, June The US Federal Trade Commission begin an investigation into Microsoft Corp.,for alleged monopolistic practices in the PC software market. The following month, Microsoft announces their sales revenues for the previous year, and become the first personal computer software company to exceed $1 billion in turnover.
1991 Hewlett-Packard introduce their first colour image scanner.
		1991 The total annual volume of international telephone traffic is estimated at 35 billiontelephone minutes, according to the London-based International Instituteof Communications.
		1991, March BBC World Service Television is launched via satellite, broadcasting 18hours during the week and 12 at weekends. It extends its coverage to 38Asian countries in October the same year.
1991, August The National Science Foundation, which operates high-capacityInternet lines in the US, withdraws its restriction on commercial use, allowing companiesand individuals to operate on the Internet and make a profit for the firsttime.
		1991, October Philips launch CD-I on the consumer market. .
1991, December Apple launch QuickTime, which enables movies to be played on all computers operating systems. It soon becomes the industry standard,and today is in every multimedia producer's kit.
		1991-93 Development of Berners-Lee and Cailliau's 'universal hypertext system' continues. In 1991, Berners-Lee posts the software code for the World Wide Web to severalUSENET newsgroups, ensuring global distribution. The first server (Web hostcomputer) is a NeXT workstation at CERN. Other servers are set up throughoutthe high-energy physics community. By the end of 1992, there are 26 servers operating. Thefirst browsers (software designed to allow remote computers to communicatewith hosts) are developed. The Web is growing.
		1992, January Apple Computer chairman John Sculley coins the term Personal Digital Assistant,to describe hand-held computers that operate via a stylus on a liquid crystal display. Test versions, known as the Newton, are demonstrated publicly a year later. IBM report their first-ever year-end loss, of $564 million.
© Science Photo Library. Intelsat VI		1992, May 7-16 The Intelsat VI (F3) communications satellite as seen from the space shuttle Endeavour on mission STS-49. The satellite had originally beenlaunched on 14th March 1990 by a Titan rocket,but it failed to be raised to its geosyncuronous orbit. The main goal of mission STS-49 (7-16th May 1992), the first by the Endeavour ,is to capture the satellite and bring it into the cargo bay, where a new perigee kick motor is installed. Intelsat VI (F3) is designed for a variety of voice, video and data communicationswith 48 combined transmitter and receiver systems. It has an expected operationallifetime of 10 years.
1992 The compact disc passes the cassette as the most popular medium for recorded music.
		1992, July Forbes magazine names Bill Gates the richest man in the US, with a net personalworth of $6.4bn (£3.4bn).
1993 Launch of Wired magazine in the US.		Wired magazine
		1993 Premiere of Spielberg's Jurassic Park, a showcase for special effectsproduced using Silicon Graphics machines and software.
1993 America's first high-power Direct Broadcast Satellite (DBS) is launched.It is followed by another the same year and a third in June 1995. Between them they have the capacity to deliver 200 TV channels,which can be received by a 45.7cm (18in) dish antenna anywhere in the US.
		1993, January IBM report a year-end loss of $4.96 billion - the highest single-year lossin history for any US company.
1993, Spring The US National Center for Supercomputer Applications (NCSA) release thefirst browser to offer easy, point-and-click access to the World Wide Web. Called Mosaic, it makes use of the graphical interface conceptfamiliar to Macintosh and Windows users and is heralded as the 'killer application'the Internet is waiting for. It is also free and can be downloaded fromsites across the world. In the first year, NCSA estimate more than one millioncopies of Mosaic have been downloaded from their site alone. More than 2.5 million people worldwide now read USENET postings every month. The Internet has grown to encompass more than 1.7 million host computersand 13,000 regional, national and international networks. There are some 10 terabytes of publicly available data.
		1993, June The US Environmental Protection Agency officially launch the Energy StarProgram, in collaboration with 50 major PC manufacturers. The guidelineslaid down are designed to save energy by reducing power use of computer systems when they are not in use.
1993, August Compton's New Media Incorporated receive a patent on multimedia search andretrieval technology from the US Patent and Trade Office. The company thenissue a statement claiming that anyone wishing to sell information in amultimedia format must pay them a licence fee. In a reversal in April 1993,all the application's 41 claims are rejected.
© Science Photo Library. NASA's Advanced Communications Technology Satellite (ACTS). The cylindrical object closest to the camera is the Transfer Orbit Stage booster (TOS), used to propel the satellite from the low orbit of the space shuttle (which reeases ACTS into space) to its final geostationary orbit. The satellite is the box-shaped objectsitting on the TOS. The solar satellite panels and antennae are in their stowed position.		1993, September 12 NASA's Advanced Communications Technology Satelite (ACTS) is launched from Shuttle Discovery during Mission STS-51 (12-22nd September). ACTS is a testbed for future communications satellite technology, such asmulti-beam antennae and advanced signal handling.
		1993, October Launch of Myst and Doom , which today are two of the best-selling computer games.
1993, November Benny S. Lee of Everex Systems Inc., is sentenced to one year in prisonfor manufacturing and selling counterfeit MS-DOS software. This is the firsttime a prison sentence is handed down for software counterfeiting in theUS.
		1994 Over 16 million French people now have access to Télétel via 6.5million Minitel terminals. A further 600,000 PCs, mainly in offices, alsouse the system. As well as electronic Yellow Pages, Télétel provides over17,000 separate services, ranging from electronic banking to lonely hearts. One of the largest providers, French State Railways, which offers seat bookingvia Télétel, answers half a million enquiries every week.Total traffic over Télétel exceeds that of the World WideWeb.
1994 Marc Andreessen, one of the leading programmers for NCSA's Mosaic Web browser,leaves to form Netscape Communications Inc. The company release a Mosaic-basedbrowser - Netscape Navigator - which rapidly eclipses all other browsers. When Netscape Communications go public in 1995, they are valued at $2.7billion. The World Wide Web has become big business.
		1994, July Tim Berners-Lee establishes the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), based inEurope and the US. Berners-Lee is concerned that, without an organisationlike W3C to develop common software standards and protocols, the Web willdisintegrate into a number of proprietary and conflicting systems. He writes: 'The World Wide Web Consortium exists to realise the full potentialof the Web.'
1994, November 29 Orion Atlantic launch their first communications satellite, the secondprivate company to do so. The company is a partnership between eight majorspace and communications multinationals.
		1995 Launch of Java, Sun Microsystem's new programming language.
1995 By June, there are 250,000 Web servers worldwide. In the three months before the year's end, 18 million Americans and Canadiansalone have used the Web.
		1995, February Eutelsat claim that out of the 68.4 million homes that watch satellite TVin Europe, some 47 million receive their signal via Eutelsat 'birds'.
1995, April NSFNet begins a two-year phased withdrawal from its role of funding theInternet backbone. It continues to support vBNS, a backbone network foracademia. Connected to vBNS are four commercial network access points, to which the"Group of Six" commercial backbone providers connect. They are: PSINet, UUNET, ANS, AOL, Sprint, MCI, AGIS-Net99. Three hundred Internet Service Providers (ISPs) connect to the Group ofSix. By mid-1995, there are 6.6m computers connected to the Internet. NSFNet is gradually dismantled and the transition is made to the Group ofSix backbone. This process marks the moment commercialisation of the Internet.
		1995, August Microsoft, a late-comer to network communications, releases Internet Explorer.The browser, intended as a rival to Netscape, has been created by 2,000programmers at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. Microsoft engagesin an aggressive attempt to win what the press is now calling 'the browserwars'. Microsoft release Windows 95. It sells seven million copies in the two months.By March the following year, sales have reached 30 million.
		1995, December 6 Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT) successfully conduct anultra-fast, large-capacity optical transmission experiment at 400 gigabitsper second over a distance of 100km (60mi). 400 billion bits per second is a speed equivalent to sending 100 years'worth of newspapers in a second.
1996 According to statistics group Network Wizards, there are now nearly 13 millionhost computers on the Internet.
		1996 Death of David Packard, co-founder of Hewlett-Packard, one of the firsttechnology companies in what has become known as Silicon Valley. By this year, HP had 100,000 employees in 120 countries and revenues of$31bn. They are leading manufacturers of computers, printers anda broad range of electronic instruments used in industry, science and medicine. [See 1939]
1996 Intelsat has by now up to 18 satellites in operation and, since itsfoundation in 1965, has launched 33 satellites constituting five generationsof satellite technology. It operates eight telemetry, tracking and control commandstations around in the world. These are controlled from the Operations andSpacecraft Control Center in Washington DC. Its system reliability is claimed to be 99.999%.
		1996, April Silicon Graphics complete their purchase of Cray Research, the supercomputercompany, for $764 million.
1996, May 28 Texas Instruments announce they can now pack 125 million transistors into a singlesilicon chip the size of a thumbnail. (The current most complex chips have5-7m transistors). They achieve this by reducing the size of the electricalconnections between individual transistors to just 0.18 microns in width- 600 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair.

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