Looking Back to the Tech Shifts of 1999
It’s long been argued that the 90s was the “decade that shaped the future of technology” – the time when today’s leading tech mainstays were at their infancy.
Before we take on the forecasted advances in the arena of consumer electronics for 2019, let’s take a look back on what came to be in 1999 – the year that heralded the coming of the new millennium.
On June 1, 1999, pioneering peer-to-peer internet sharing service Napster went live.
Founded by Shaun Fanning and Sean Parker, the filesharing site became the go-to portal for downloadable songs encoded in MP3 format – a standing which mired it in controversy in the area of copyright infringement for songs that were actively shared within its network.
By the year 2000, Napster’s popularity compelled authorities and aggrieved parties in the US to file lawsuits against it and its proponents, eventually leading to its shutdown in 2002.
In time, a second Napster iteration was launched, this time as a music streaming service that, as its site blurb reads, “100% legal. Stream the music you want and download your favorite songs to listen offline.”
Though not the first online entity to serve as a conduit for file sharing, Napster did well in rousing interest in the area of digital content distribution, all-in-all paving the way for the likes of “Apple Store,” “Google Play,” and other subscriptionbased content/entertainment platforms to be.
In October 1999, Nokia released what it touts as the “world first WAP-capable” phone – a phone that wasn’t just for texting and calling but also a mobile internet browser.
Dubbed the “7110,” the model was designed to support the “wireless application protocol” (WAP) standard – the precursor to the likes of EDGE, 2G, 3G, 4G and LTE.
Designed with a “Navi-Scroller,” the handset was topped with a monochrome graphic screen
In April 1999, an Israeli company named M-Systems filed for a US patent titled “Architecture for a [USB]-based Flash Disk.”
The patent credits Amir Ban, Dov Moran and Oron Ogdan as the inventors of the device – a portable storage device that was designed to work with the Universal Serial Bus (USB) ports of computers: the USB Flash Drive.
Though it wasn’t until the early 2000s when USB Flash Drives became commercially available, the development of the technology led to the eventual end of the floppy disk, the pre-USB Flash Drive data storage standard which pop-culture now pegs as the “save icon.”
In June of 1999, Apple introduced a line of entry-level laptops that were intended for the general consumer market: the “iBook.”
Sold between 1999 to 2006, the line basically served as a complement to Apple’s then-high end “PowerBook” laptop line. In 2006, the line was discontinued and was replaced with Apple’s “MacBook” – a line of Apple-branded laptops that came with processors by Intel.
Early “iBook” model variants were powered by a 366 MHz processor that was backed by 64 gigs of RAM, a graphics processing chip with 4 MB RAM and storage options of up to 10 gig hard drives – hardware specifications that are only a fraction compared to the specs that are touted by today’s laptops and smartphones.
On June 23, 1999, American semiconductor firm Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) introduced the “Athlon” line of processors – a processor line that drew a following among gamers as the reasonably priced alternative over those that were produced by Intel.
Often pitted against Intel’s “Pentium III” and “Pentium IV” processors (along with processors like VIA’s “C3” and “C7”) at the time of its release, the line is credited to have sparked the “build your own gaming computer rig” trend – mostly owing to its lower price in comparison to processors released by other brands at the time.