Government Technology - December 2007 - (Page 18)

20 YEARS IN REVIEW IN THE BEGINNING SOMETIME IN THE 1980s BY 1987 1987 IBM PS/2 released Super Dimension Fortress is launched, now one of the oldest UNIX BBS’s still in existence DEC_07 j j 18 the Industrial Age came to an end. It’s impossible to say when, exactly, but the advent of the personal computer and its growing ubiquity heralded the end of the era and ushered in a new one — the Information Age. The Information Age is unique in history. From the Stone Age to the Bronze Age to the Iron Age, everything humans accomplished in the past — be it art, literature, machines or mathematics — was in most ways a tangible thing. The Information Age is different. This is the time of the knowledge economy, an era where imagination trumps labor and ideas are commodities. The Information Age is the antithesis of the Dark Ages — a time of regression and stagnation. It’s the Enlightenment; only this time the paintbrush has been replaced by Photoshop and the canvas by FrontPage. And it all started with a desktop box that most assumed was little more than a glorified calculator. PCs had become a fixture in the office and began appearing in countless homes. Many were now powered by Intel’s 80386 microprocessor; the first commonly used 32-bit CPU. (Amazingly it was only this year, 2007, that Intel finally ceased production of the 386.) As computers’ prominence grew, so did their capabilities. The PC was the public face of the late ’80s computer boom. But behind the scenes, data centers powered the growing appetite for networked connectivity, all manner of electronic information exchange and transaction, and a blossoming online frontier known as the Internet. While to this day they’re criticized for being slow adopters, governments at all levels quickly seized upon — or at least recognized — the fundamental changes triggered by “information technology.” Yet with this potential came an equal amount of uncertainty. The floodgates of IT were just beginning to open, and a torrent of confusion threatened to sink government before it learned to swim. That was where we fit in. Government Technology was conceived as a life preserver for state and local government awash in mystifying new tools and capabilities. For 20 years, this magazine has reflected your experiences, your struggles and your successes. Microsoft and IBM jointly develop OS/2 1 988 Perl programming language is released IBM AS/400 released HP launches computers with RISC (reduced instruction set computer) processors ISDN invented In 1984, Michael Dell was a college student who had $1,000 and an idea. A year later, his small company had generated more than $70 million by offering customers custom-built systems. Shortly thereafter, the company would become the world’s largest PC retailer. Robert Morris Jr. releases the Morris Worm, which infects as many as 10 percent of computers on the Net ITIL, the Information Technology Information Library, traces its origins across the Atlantic. In the late 1980s, the framework laid out by ITIL was quickly embraced throughout Europe, but it would be another decade before Americans even heard of ITIL. http://www.govtech.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Government Technology - December 2007

Government Technology - December 2007 Contents Point of View Big Picture Profile The Last Mile GT Spectrum Well...How Did We Get Here? Dark Spaces A Paler Shade of Green? Decertification Dilemma Game On Two Cents Products Signal:Noise

Government Technology - December 2007

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