In some industries, 10 years passes by with little in progress or innovation. The IT industry rarely goes a day without progress or innovation so a look back over ten years of PC Live!, the IT industry and Ireland is quite an undertaking.
PC Live!’s launch could be resold today as a computing antiques magazine. The magazine came accompanied by a 3.5-inch floppy disk that featured six programs. One of the six was Winlotto, a program that enabled your computer to choose your lotto numbers. Unfortunately, we do not know how many previous winners of the lotto used Winlotto.
Paul Healy, the editor, wrote an article detailing how to get on the Internet and the prices of the ISPs advertised seem quite costly indeed. For example, Ireland On-Line charged IR£25 (EUR*34.25) registration fee IR£10 (EUR*13.70) per month for 20 hours of dial-up access.
Most of the computers featured in the magazine look old fashioned and lack any the style of the contemporary PCs. Instead of Imac blues or Dell blacks, there is off-white and more off-white.
Welcome to Windows 95
1995 was a good or bad year for computing depending on how many times your copy of Windows 95 crashed. Microsoft’s new OS hit Ireland in August of that year and sold 3 million copies worldwide in its first five weeks. It featured a revamped interface, Plug and Play compatibility, Internet connectivity, and the all important start button.
Its mix of 16- and 32-bit code did make it crash frequently, but when you spend $200 million on a publicity campaign that has the Rolling Stones’ “Start me up” (costing $12 million for the rights), who needs dependability.
Since then, the public has seen Windows 98, NT, ME, and XP roll out on PCs everywhere. We are all holding our breaths waiting for Bill Gates’ next instalment which undoubtedly will be flawless.
Playstation puts down marker
Sony entered the games console market in 1995. The Playstation, now remembered fondly as the PS1, was released in Europe in September.
Sony entered a market that was up until then controlled by Nintendo and Sega. Sony changed that and took over the market. Nintendo’s N64 kept them in the race but its later release (almost two years) left it second best. The Sega Saturn, which was rushed out to stores to beat Sony, failed miserably. Sega rides off in the console sunset.
Sony has stayed on top in the console wars and their second-generation console, the PS2, holds almost half the market ahead of Microsoft’s Xbox in second and Nintendo’s GameCude which languishes in third.
Next year will see console war jumped into the third generation. The X360 will release first in December with the PS3 in the spring of 2006 and the Nintendo revolution later that year. Gamers take your positions.
First Internet cafe
Dublin saw a first in ’95 when Underground Cybercafe opened and became Dublin’s and Ireland’s first Internet café. Although no longer in operation, it will always be the first.
Perhaps their hours (6pm to 6am) combined with their rules (no smoking, no meat, no shoes and no alcohol) finished them off. The Irish love their meat, alcohol, and shoes. The ‘no smoking’ was clearly years ahead of its time.
Currently, there are a number of Internet cafes located around Dublin and Ireland’s other major cities. All of them allow you to keep your shoes on.
Netscape goes public
In August of 1995, Netscape went public and ushered in the dot-com initial public offering (IPO) madness. The 15-month old company started the day at $28 a share and hit a high of $74.75, a near record. Yahoo, Amazon.com and E-trade followed Netscape’s lead.
As company founders and employees sold their shares for millions, the clock on the dot-com bubble began to tick. In late 2000 and through 2001, the dot-com boom began to implode. Many dot-coms closed and an economic recession began, a recession that is still being felt today especially in the US. People still flock dot-com IPOs based on the company’s marketability rather than a long-term business plan. Will we ever learn?
Switch to CD ROM
February 1996 saw John Collins take over as editor of PC Live! and witnessed the swap over to a cover CD ROM. The switch to CD ROM allowed a greater number of programs on the cover disk. The first CDROM had all of the previous programs from the floppies archived on it. This great advancement did not stop some readers from lamenting the loss of the lovely floppy.
That month also saw the three month-old search engine Altavista running at over 2 million hits a day. Alta Vista was quite the popular search engine until a little upstart known as Google came about in 1998 and became the dominant force in web-based searching.
Besides the honour of being in the dictionary, Google is now the world’s biggest media company based stock market value. Currently, Google is worth about $80 billion and chose our very own Dublin to base its European headquarters.
Virtual reality was a reality in 1996
In 1996, we featured a virtual reality gaming console for the home. The VFX1 by Forte came with a variety of games including Doom, Dark Forces, and Rebel Assault II. Our reviewer at the time Gordon Smith was impressed and remarked that virtual reality in the home was a reality and no longer a media hyped fantasy.
Nearly ten years on and virtual reality in the home has still never taken off. Back then, the price would have been a turn off with the VFX1 retailing at IR£999 (EUR*1368.63). Then or now, anything priced above the average cost of a normal gaming console is never going to achieve commercial success.
Online publishing arrives
We launched our computing information site in ’96 with the launch of Info Live. It featured a plethora of computing information from suppliers to software. Our current website at www.techcentral.ie offers news and analysis of the computing world similar to our magazine.
Multimedia PCs
Intel’s new Pentium Processor came out at the start of 1997. The MMX, available then at 166 and 200 MHz, was a huge hit. It improved performance, allowed for media rich applications, video, and audio. This was a landmark chip and Intel has continued its chip innovations since. The most recent positive for Intel came when Apple recently announced that it was switching from its traditional PowerPC Architecture to Intel CPUs.
Man meets machine
1997 saw man fall to the computer. Not in a Matrix style takeover but rather on the chessboard. A year earlier, IBM supercomputer Deep Blue lost to world chess champion Garry Kasparov 4-2. IBM took the loss badly and doubled the computers power allowing it to compute 200 million moves per second. Kasparov lost 3.5 to 2.5. IBM retired the computer refusing to rematch Kasparov (who accused IBM of cheating) so we still don’t know how deep the rabbit hole goes.
As man fell to computer, VHS was about to meet its eventual conqueror. DVD players were better in quality, sound, and convenience. Although very expensive at their release, DVD players have become the industry standard. Currently, the cost of a DVD player is actually less than that of a VHS, and with DVD recorder becoming more prominent, the VHS is going the way of the cassette and 8-track.
Remember Top Tips
In September that year, PC Live! began publishing monthly alternating between the standard PC Live! and a PC Live! Top Tips that was full of PC tricks and tips.
First MP3 player
1998 saw an important hardware release. The first portable MP3 player was released. Although most people point to Diamond Multimedia’s Rio MP300 as the first, they are wrong. Saehan’s MPMan was sold in Asia in the spring of 1998 and released in the US a few months before Diamond’s September release. Why is the Diamond device incorrectly called the first? Publicity. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sued Diamond in an attempt to stop the release of their product on the basis that it infringed on copyright.
Diamond won on two fronts, in the courts and because of the amount of free publicity it received. The RIAA thought that suing an American based company would be easier than suing a Korean based company resulting in Diamond’s MP3 player receiving the ‘first’ title.
Nowadays, there are a number of different companies with a variety of portable MP3 players, but none more successful than the Apple Ipod. The Ipod launched in October of 2001 and is currently on its fourth generation along with the Ipod mini which is in its second generation.
The key behind Apple’s success it is style and storage capacity. The Ipod has a sleek thin design and its white earbuds are as much a fashion statement as any clothes or shoes.
The storage capacity is also huge with fourth generation 60GB iPods storing photos as well as music with a colour LCD. The smallest Ipod, the Ipod shuffle, has 512MB which is still more than the Packard Bell featured in our launch issue – a mere 420MB.
Online content comes of age
One of the many cultural changes resulting from the worldwide proliferation of the Internet is the development of the online media. Although sceptical at first, nearly every news organisation is now online. Newspapers, magazines, radio stations, and television organisations must have an online news supply otherwise they are losing potential readers/listeners/viewers and advertising revenue. Two events of the past ten years have really shown the power of the new media.
In 1998, Independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s 445-page report was released over the Web. The report was filled with the raunchy details of the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinski affair. Servers crashed as millions of people raced to get a read of the report.
September 11th, 2001 needs no introduction. Terrorists attacked America and nearly 3000 people died. Unwilling to wait for radio or television, millions of people around the world turned to the web for up to the minute news. Some sites experienced trouble dealing with extra traffic and were forced to add more servers. The event proved just how important the online media had become, and how much people depended on the online media.
Music for free
In 1999, a college kid released Napster, a simple peer-to-peer file-sharing program, and ushered in the age of illegal music downloads. Shawn Fanning, who started his company with his uncle, released the program in the autumn of 1999 because he wanted an easier way to search for music.
By December of that year, the vigilant RIAA were suing. The lawsuit brought huge publicity and thus more users. A month before Napster shut down in March of 2001, there were 26.4 million people using the software.
RIAA and various artists argued that the p2p software was hurting their sales and the music industry as a whole. Some artists found their songs and albums on Napster before the release dates. Some would query if it did actually hurt the artists.
Radiohead’s album Kid A appeared on Napster three months before its release. As an experimental album, the record company did little promotion and it received little airplay. By the time of the release, millions had downloaded the album, and the executives feared the worst. Kid A capture the number one slot in the US charts where Radiohead had never even broke the top 20. It beat out Eminem and Madonna.
As Napster died, a variety of copycats like LimeWire, BearShare, and Grokster grew in popularity. They took over Napster’s mantle as record companies argued over how to control online music.
Today, there are good, cheap ways to buy online music. Apple’s Music Store has taken the lead in legal online music downloads. With more and more online stores opening in countries every month, Apple is trying to take the market by storm. 2005 saw Ireland’s Music Store start up.
As for the p2p downloaders, they still share their music across the net with the RIAA and similar organisations (IRMA here Ireland) suing as many people as they can get their hands on.
The US Supreme Court has just ruled that p2p file-sharing servers can be held liable if their users trade in illegal copies of music. Let the litigation begin.
WebTV
Unison, Ireland’s only TV-Internet service, launched in February of 2000 by Internet Ireland Ltd, a joint venture between Chorus Communication and Independent News and Media. This also included the launch of Unison.ie which united 27 newspapers under one site.
Although the website is an excellent news resource, the Unison TV-Internet box has not been a resounding success. It seems people prefer to search the web from a PC than from their television sets.
Dreaded tech downturn
At the end of 2000, PC Live! got its third and current editor, Stephen Cawley. This appointment coincided with Gateway’s decision to pull out of Dublin in August of 2001 cost the local economy about IR£50 million (EUR*63.5 million). It meant that 900 staff lost their jobs in a massive redundancy announcement. The IT sector was slowing down and it looked as if the Celtic Tiger had been tamed.
Four years on and Ireland has the highest growth rate of any European country. And after a small lull in the IT sector back in 2001-02, the calls are going out again to 6th year secondary school students to consider choosing the IT industry for future employment.
Prognosis
Ten years of the highlights of computing news. Imagine how long this article would have been in I had gone into the thousands of products we covered and the rest of the news.
In our 20th anniversary issue, imagine how old Ipods and PS3s will look. Imagine how old a 3.5-inch floppy will look for that matter. Worst of all, imagine how much older all of us will look.
Regardless, hopefully in ten years, you will be reading PC Live! as we continue to supply our readers with the latest goings on in the personal technology world.
.
Ltd
