This year is a very special year for Insight, we are celebrating our 25th Anniversary. Happy Birthday to us. To commemorate how much the tech industry has changed in that time we have created a timeline of tech evolution celebrating some of the biggest innovations since 1988.
25 years is a relatively short space of time but for the tech industry that is equivalent to a millennia. During this time the industry has fundamentally changed, moving from an era when desktop PCs were just taking off to the current boom in the popularity of mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones.
Possibly the most radical change to the industry occurred in 1990 when Sir Tim Berners Lee created HyperText Transfer Protocol or HTTP standardising communication between servers and clients and effectively inventing the internet. This has not only changed the industry but changed the world impacting how we access information, consume media but also communicate this has changed dramatically since the creation of social networks like Facebook and Twitter.
While the internet gave human beings access to a wide range of information sources it was manufacturers who gave us the ability to access it. The growth in the popularity of smartphones and tablets has been phenomenal and has answered that very question of how consumers access information while on the move. The change in the behaviour of consumers has created new opportunities and challenges for the IT industry and this is only expected to increase as the availability of 4G services becomes more widespread.
I also think it is amazing how the timeline highlights how quickly companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook have become household names. It is astonishing how much these companies have grown in less than 20 years and it will be interesting to see where they are 5 years never mind 20.
It will be fascinating to see what changes will happen within the tech industry over the next 25 years, will smart clothing such as watches and Google Glass take off? Will desktop PCs still exist? Is the cloud going to replace software as we know it? There are so many questions waiting to be answered. If the next 25 years are as exciting as the last the future is going to be a remarkable place.
