The IT Pro Podcast: 100 years of innovation

This week marks the 100th episode of the IT Pro Podcast, and to celebrate the occasion, we’ve got a special bumper episode where we’ll be looking back over the last 100 years of technological development. We examine the inventions that have led up to the present day, the impact that they’ve had, and how current innovations may impact the future. Join us as we discuss the birth of Silicon Valley, the world’s first internet service providers and the explosion of mobile technology, along with much more.

We’d also like to thank you for your continued support. We love bringing you these weekly podcasts, and we’re looking forward to the next hundred episodes.

Highlights

“When I think back to when I was in primary school, we had BBC Micros, and that kind of thing, which when you look at them aesthetically, they’re very similar to the IBM Personal Computer. So it is interesting how that filtered down. Now, at the same time as this was going on, the Xerox Star operating system was introduced, which is the birth of the graphical user interface, the GUI, and also the desktop metaphor. Lots of other things that we associate with modern computing: bitmap displays, networking, email capabilities, which is not bad in the 1980s considering there was no internet yet.”

“The big thing with the web was that it democratised information and access to information in a huge way. And without HTTP and HTML, in particular, making it comparatively easy to set up your own website with very minimal resources. Without that, the web as we know it would not exist, because it would only be for big companies and big organisations with the resources and the skills to create websites. And having this accessible open toolkit enabled anyone to start a website. And without that huge explosion in content, the web would not have been this all-consuming thing that everyone had to be on.”

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“In the UK, in 2003, the first commercial 3G networks became available. This was the originator of the term mobile broadband. I'm sure that many of our listeners remember this as a big turning point in how we use mobile devices. Without it, we don't have smartphones, we don't have social media. We don't have what we're doing here now, speaking to each other virtually, because you don't have FaceTime, all these kinds of things. You can do whatever with it. And this 24 hour connectivity really is impossible without 3G, or would have been impossible without 3G.”

Read the full transcript here.

Footnotes

ITPro is a global business technology website providing the latest news, analysis, and business insight for IT decision-makers. Whether it's cyber security, cloud computing, IT infrastructure, or business strategy, we aim to equip leaders with the data they need to make informed IT investments.

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