Tech Trends Articles
Whither Twitter: What’s Next for the Social Platform? I wrote about Twitter several years ago because many people I knew “didn’t get it.” Endeavoring to explain what it was, how it worked, and what made it different from other social technologies like the better-known Facebook, I talked about Twitter’s history and its use at the…
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HISTORY OF HEDY LAMARR: TECHNOLOGY INVENTOR Hedy Lamarr, the Austrian-American actress and Hollywood legend known as “the most beautiful woman in the world,” is remembered today, November 9, on the anniversary of her birthday for her pioneering work on the technology that would become the basis for today’s WiFi, GPS, and Bluetooth communications systems. What?…
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Historical parallels between the what Martin Luther did with the moveable type printing price that was the spark that ignited the Reformation and the advent of modern technologies that similarly transformed the Internet into the World Wide Web.
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HISTORY OF THE INTERNET: OVER 50 YEARS AGO On October 29, 1969, at 10:30 PM, a computer grad student at U.C.L.A. named Charley Kline sent a message to S.R.I. (Stanford Research Institute.) It was the first connection between computer networks. The Internet began! We set up a telephone connection between us and the guys…
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HISTORY OF THE IBM PC: 41 YEARS AGO Forty-one years ago, the IBM PC was released. On August 12, 1981, IBM announced its first “personal computer,” though it had previously been famous for its IBM System/370 mainframe computer. I operated one of these mainframes in a raised-floor data center in the early ’80s.
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HISTORY OF WORLD BACKUP DAY There isn’t much history, as the first celebration of this geek holiday was in 2011. World Backup Day is barely a decade old. But the need is real, now more than ever before. Especially in light of this salient fact: April Fools’ Day. March 31, the day before, is an…
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HISTORY OF MACINTOSH: A 38 YEAR LOVE AFFAIR The now-famous Macintosh computer turns 38. When Apple President Steve Jobs launched this computer at the Flint Center on De Anza College campus on January 24, 1984, to the theme from Chariots of Fire, he called it “insanely great!” The $1.5M “1984” Super Bowl commercial filmed by…
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2020: IT WASN’T THE BEGINNING OF THE NEW DECADE? With the beginning of the 2020 New Year, you saw articles everywhere that discussed the end of the decade or declared that 2020 was the beginning of the new decade. But 2021 is the beginning of the new decade. Q: Isn’t 2020 the beginning of…
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HISTORY OF VACCINES: WHAT THIS MEANS FOR CORONAVIRUS Today, Pfizer and BioNTech announced that they are submitting their Coronavirus vaccine to the Food and Drug Administration for Emergency Use Approval. What are vaccines, when were they first developed, and what is the road to an approved vaccine in today’s world? “Vaca” in the word vaccine sounds…
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HISTORY OF HITACHI: FOUNDERS DAY, FROM 1910 The multinational conglomerate Hitachi, Ltd. traces its history back to Namihei Odaira, a 19th-century pioneering electrical engineer. In Japan, during the Meiji Era of the late 1800s, with the move from a feudal society to an industrialized nation-state, the country wanted to take its place among the nations of…
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Secrets of the Partner Series – Channel Partners – Part 3 – Recipe for a Successful Channel [ In this final blog of the Channel Partner Series, Wayne Greene and I detail our kitchen-tested recipe for a successful channel. Make sure you refresh yourself first with our first two blogs, Part 1 and Part 2.…
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Secrets of the Partner Series – Channel Partners – Part 2: Conflicts [ I co-wrote this article with a colleague from my Cisco days, Wayne Greene. This appeared originally on his blog. ] Wayne: Bill, on our first blog on Channel Partners we covered a lot of ground on this issue, especially on setting…
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