We celebrated plenty of moments in technology history in 2024, from the release of Intel’s first blockbuster chip 45 years ago – the 8088 – to 20 years since Google launched Gmail.
We even marked the release of ‘The Matrix’ 25 years ago, in a year when large language models (LLMs) were advancing at pace on the march to, one day we imagine, artificial general intelligence (AGI).
But there are plenty more technology anniversaries and milestones, many of which have had an unmeasurable impact on organizations the world over, that you should keep an eye out for as we enter 2025. From the birth of Microsoft to the very first search engine, there are some landmarks you really wouldn’t want to miss.
80 years since the ‘first computer bug’
Depending on your perspective, many security admins will look forward to, or dread, the monthly Patch Tuesday round of updates and bug fixes that require the mass patching of terminals. But have you ever wondered why such errors in computing are referred to as ‘bugs’ in the first place? Sure, they’re annoying, cause problems, and they can sometimes be difficult to eliminate – so the parallels are clear. But the answer may be quite literal – it involved the discovery of an actual bug in a computing system on September 9, 1945.
Operators of the Harvard Mark II, a massive electromechanical computer that was being built to perform ballistic calculations for the US Navy, traced an error to a moth trapped in a relay. They extracted the insect from the mechanism and taped it to a log book alongside a note reading: “First actual case of a bug being found”. Joking about the dual meaning of ‘bug’ even back then, however, suggests that the term to refer to computing errors was in common usage – meaning its actual etymology precedes even the moth’s capture.
70 years since ‘fiber optics’ was coined
Lighting-fast fiber broadband is essential for modern businesses – with a huge amount of data being created each year (seemingly exponentially) and the vast potential of big data analytics to give organizations new insights that can feed into decision-making. The use of large language models (LLMS) and other online-facing applications, too, wouldn’t be possible without fiber optics – a technology that has been researched for decades.
Although the concept was discovered in the 1800s, the term itself was first coined in 1955 by the physicist Narinder S Kapany who was also the first person in the world to practically use the technology. Kapany – known as the ‘father of fiber optics’ incorporated the technology into an endoscope (a tool used to image inside the human body) and transmitted images. He went on to start his own company five years later in California. It wasn’t until many years later, however, that the communications side was developed, and then evolved into the systems we have in place now.
55 years since the computer mouse was patented
Apple brought the first computer mouse to a personal computer in 1983, with Lisa – the first machine to have a graphical user interface. But the device wouldn’t be popularized until the release of the Apple Macintosh a year later, when the computer mouse began to really enter the mainstream for the first time.
However, it was 14 years prior, in 1970, that Douglas Engelbart received a patent for his “X-Y Position Indicator For A Display System”. He first demonstrated the device in 1964, 20 years before the Macintosh launch, and finally submitted the patent in 1970 with the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). It was then that SRI licensed the technology to Apple, among other companies like Xerox. Engelbart called the first prototype of this device a “mouse” because the cord resembled a tail. It had a wooden body and a single, tiny button on top – and the best computer ‘mice’ have come a long way since.
50 years since Microsoft was founded – with the first version of Windows launched 10 years later
A pivotal moment to celebrate in 2025 is the founding of Microsoft on April 4 1975 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The company’s software is arguably at the very heart of manyt modern enterprises today, thanks to its flagship Windows operating system and a variety of additional tools and services offered on top – including Teams, Edge, Copilot, and many more.
There are other ecosystems, of course, but it’s often difficult to escape planet Microsoft when running a large organization these days. The company started life having created the Microsoft BASIC programming language – which dominated the 1970s and 1980s, before moving onto create Windows 1.0 — also celebrating its 40th anniversary in 2025. The company has moved on to create plenty more hardware and software platforms for modern computing – and it’s near-impossible to see how the world of modern computing would be the same, for better or worse, without the influence of this American technology behemoth.
45 years since IBM struck a fateful agreement with Microsoft that led to the birth of MS-DOS
On the subject of Windows 1.0 – that system (and those that followed) would not have been possible without a critical deal struck between IBM and Microsoft on November 6 1980.
IBM was interested in creating an operating system for its IBM PC – and was originally seeking to license CP/M, a popular software at the time. But failure to agree terms meant the company then looked elsewhere, and instead asked Microsoft to develop something similar. IBM and Microsoft were already working together to deliver BASIC for the IBM PC, so the two companies were on good terms.
Microsoft looked to a small Seattle-based company called Seattle Computer Products (SCP) that had developed a system called Quick-and-Dirty Operating System (QDOS), and suggested that QDOS could work well for IBM’s requirements. Microsoft licensed and further developed the platform, leading to IBM PC-DOS (later 86-DOS) – which shipped with IBM PCs. However, just weeks before the first IBM PC shipped, Microsoft bought full rights from SCP for 86-DOS and included a clause that allowed them to sell the operating system to other companies under the name MS-DOS. This move partially fuelled Microsoft’s rise to prominence as a dominant computing company in the latter 20th century.
40 years since Windows 1.0 created
Completing our trilogy of Microsoft-related anniversaries in 2025 is 40 years since the launch of Windows 1.0 — the $99 operating system — on November 20 1985.
Windows 11 may bes the company’s latest operating system, but the story started with Windows 1.0 in 1985, first released to manufacturing firms in the US and was built on the MS-DOS platform. The first Windows OS included dedicated apps like Paint, Notepad and Calculator – as well as support for a computer mouse and multitasking.
35 years since the internet’s first search engine
Search engines like Google are now synonymous with the internet – especially with the birth of the World Wide Web – and it’s near impossible to find information without accessing one. However the origins of the search engine starts on September 10 1990 and the creation of Archie by Alan Emtage, a postgrad at McGill University in Canada. Archie’s name is derived from “archive” (just drop the v) and its earliest versions would trawl through a list of public anonymous file transfer protocol (FTP) sites.
The project began with a request to connect Emtage’s university to the internet – which was denied in light of the then-exorbitant costs. But Archie allowed users to snoop around the earliest incarnation of the internet, albeit with limited functionality. Users would make a request for searching files, which they then had to download before learning if there was anything actually there. Many thought Archie was lost, but the Serial Port actually resurrected it earlier in 2024.
30 years since the start of modern ecommerce
Two very important things happened in 1995 that would change the way shopping worked forever – the launch of eBay on September 3,and Amazon.com’s debut as an online bookseller on July 5.
Ecommerce is now a gigantic industry, thanks in part to greater internet access and the movement to cashless payments, but its first incarnation was very different to what we are used to. In fact, you can trace its origins to Michael Aldrich, who in 1979, connected a modified TV to a real-time transaction processing computer using a domestic phone link.
AuctionWeb (later known as eBay) was the brainchild of computer programmer Pierre Omidyar as a way to make a little extra money – putting sellers and buyers together – and the first time sold was a broken laser pointer for $14.83. Amazon.com, which now dominates the world of ecommerce, started life as an online book retailer after Jeff Bezos examined various products that could be marketed online – trimming the list to five (CDs, hardware, software, videos and books) and then to one.
25 years since Microsoft declared tablets were the future — a decade too early
Some of the best business laptops around today are actually 2-in-1s that can be used as tablets when the mood strikes. Tablet-based computing is often seen as a modern phenomenon, with no huge market for the form factor until Apple launched the iPad in 2010, and we now have a variety of iPads that you can choose from if seeking to boost your productivity, as well as plenty of business-friendly tablets – with Microsoft’s Surface Pro among them – but if Bill Gates had his way, we’d have been using these devices as far back as the year 2000.
On 13 November that year, the then-Microsoft chief software architect demonstrated a fully functional prototype that was the size of a pad of paper and an inch thick. He used the device to demonstrate the latest Microsoft Office suite and various new innovations – including “rich ink” and “smart tags”.
But things didn’t work out for the new form factor, partly due to its weight as well as the lack of dedicated applications. While it wasn’t the first tablet ever (that title belongs to Enfield CT’s 1986 Letterbug), the launch did popularize the term “tablet” and, in 2002, we saw the first fleet of Microsoft Tablet PCs designed to run Windows XP hit the market.
25 years since the first true SaaS service went live
Software as a service (SaaS) is now a ubiquitous cloud offering helping drive growth across the world, with the global market expected to grow to more the $350 billion in the 2030s. While much of this surge is recent, its history spans decades – going back as far as 1961 with MIT’s Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS). This proto-SaaS system let users access one single powerful computer simultaneously from different locations.
But SaaS didn’t truly grow into its own until the turn of the millennium when companies like Salesforce came into being. Salesforce.com – as it was known then – launched on February 7 2000 at an event themed around “the end of software” in San Francisco, with its first customer relationship management (CRM) platform seeing the light of the day.
Back then, SaaS was only seen as something that scrappy start-ups and plucky small businesses could adopt – but with improvements and added functionality, coupled with faster internet connections, enterprises soon began tapping into its potential. Now, SaaS – and the subscription model that was created to accompany it – is everywhere – and for good reason.
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