1998

Intel released of 333 MHz Pentium II processor. Code-named Deschutes these processors use the new 0.25 micro manufacturing process to run faster and generate less heat than before.

A U.S. court has finally banned the long-running game of buying domain names relating to trademarks and then at selling them for extortionate prices to the companies who own the trademark. The case was based around a man from Illinois who bought www.panavision.com in 1995 and has just tried to sell it for $13,000. The current going commercial rate for domain name registration is around $100.

Microsoft released Windows '98. Some U.S. attorneys tried to block it's release since the new O/S interfaces closely with other programs such as Microsoft Internet Explorer and so effectively closes the market of such software to other companies. Microsoft fought back with a letter to the White House suggesting that 26 of it's industry allies said that a delay in the release of the new O/S could damage the U.S. economy. The main selling points of Windows '98 were it's support for USB and it's support for disk paritions greater than 2.1GB.

1999

Linux Kernel 2.2.0 Released. The number of people running Linux is estimated at over 10million, making it an not only important operating system in the Unix world, but an increasingly important one in the PC world.

AMD release K6-III 400MHz version, 450 to OEMS. In some tests it outperforms soon-to-be released Intel P-III. It contains approximately 23 million transistors, and is based on 100Mhz super socket 7 motherboards, an improvement on the 66MHz buses their previous chips were based on. This helps it's performance when compared to Intel's Pentium II - which also uses a 100MHz bus speed.

Apple release the PowerMac G4. It's powered by the PowerPC G4 chip from Apple, Motorola and IBM. Available in 400MHz, 450MHz and 500MHz versions it's claimed to be the first personal computer to be capable of over one billion floating-point operations per second.

AMD release Athlon 750MHz version.

2000

US Government announce restrictions on exporting Cryptography are relaxed (although not removed). This allows many US Companies to stop the long running, and rather ridiculous process of having to create US and International copies of their software.

Transmeta launch their new 'Crusoe' chips. Designed for laptops these prvoide comparible performance to the mid-range Pentium II chips, but consume a tiny fraction of the power. They are a new and exciting competitor to Intel in the x86 market.

Offical Launch of Windows 2000 - Microsoft's replacement for Windows 95/98 and Windows NT. Claimed to be faster and more reliable than previous versions of Windows. It is actually a descendant of the NT series, and so the trade-off for increased reliability is that it won't run some old DOS-based games. To keep the home market happy Microsoft have also released Windows ME, the newest member of the 95/98 series.

AMD Release the Athlon 1GHz.

Intel release very limited supplies of the 1GHz Pentium III chip.

British Telecom (BT) claim the rights to hyperlinks on the basis of a US patent granted in 1989. Similar patents in the rest of the world have now expired. Their claim is widely believed to be absurd since Ted Nelson wrote about hyperlinks in 1965, and this is where Tim Berners Lee says he got the ideas for the World Wide Web from. This is just another in the line of similar incredulous cases - for example amazon.com's claim to have patented '1-click ordering'. Even more absurb was the claim made in March 2002 by a 'til then unheard of company "Maz Technologies" that they had, in 1998, obtained a fairly generic patent covering encrypted storage of documents. BT's claim was finally rejected by a judge in the US on 23 August 2002.

RSA Security Inc. released their RSA algorithm into the public domain, in advance of the US patent (#4,405,829) expiring on the 20th Sept. of the same year. Following the relaxation of the US government restrictions earlier in the year (Jan. 14) this removed one of the last barriers to the world-wide distribution of much software based on cryptographic systems. It should be noted that the IDEA algorithm is still under patent and also that government restrictions still apply in some places.

2001

Linux kernel 2.4.0 released.

Apple released MacOS X. At it's heart is `Darwin', an Open Source kernel based on FreeBSD. Using this MacOS X finally gives Mac users the stabilty benifits of a protected memory architecture along many other enhancements, such as preemptive multitasking. The BSD base also makes porting UNIX applications to MacOS easier and gives Mac users a fully featured command line interface alongside their GUI.

Microsoft released Windows XP - the latest version of their Windows operating system. Based on the NT series kernel, it is intended to bring together both the NT/2000 series and the Windows 95/98/ME series into one product. Of, course, it was originally hoped that this would happen with Windows 2000 ... so only time will tell if Microsoft have suceeded with Windows XP.

Release of the `X' Box - Microsoft's games console. It cost $299 (or £299 - there's fairness), and will include the ability to connect to the internet for multiplayer gaming. The Japanese launch was the 22nd February 2000, and the European launch wasn't until March 14th 2002.

2002:

Crichton authors the book "Prey: A Novel" about a swarms of nanocomputers (the size of molecules) organizing to become new life forms, a work which speculates on and explains the merger of computer, nano, and bio technologies, artificial life, and emergent behavior.