20 years in IT history: Connectivity

In 1994 two lawyers began advertising their services by posting to Usenet groups en masse. They were widely reviled (their ISP revoked their access), though in all fairness, someone was going to walk through that door sooner or later. "Green Card" spam (the villains were immigration lawyers) was the opening gun of the age of malware for profit, which eventually evolved into hundreds of flavors of spyware, extortion schemes, Trojan horses, key loggers, zombies, phishers, bots and so on. Today the average CIO probably spends more time and energy worrying about blocking the bad that networks can do than extending the good.

1995: Convergence

The Israeli company VocalTec announced Internet telephony and RealAudio, streaming audio. These two announcements marked the beginning of the great convergence carnival.

The VocalTec rollout presaged the struggle that VoIP was about to catalyze between telecommunications and IT. The core idea is that someday soon the network is going to eat it all up-voice, music, video, news, data. Everything will be connected to everything else. It's inevitable, but that doesn't make dealing with the business, legal, political and technological issues all this raises any easier.

1996: The Dotcoms