Yahoo closes GeoCities: how the web lost millions of home pages
Yahoo bought GeoCities for billions in 1999 and switched it off a decade later. The closure became a turning point for web preservation.
THE 2009 STORY
Explainers
Tech history
What happened, why it mattered and what came next. Each explainer is written for vnunet and reviewed against published sources.
The 2008 MacBook Air: the laptop pulled from an envelope
Steve Jobs introduced the MacBook Air at Macworld in January 2008. Its compromises looked radical then and became normal for laptops.
THE 2008 STORY
The netbook era: small, cheap laptops that briefly drove PC growth
The Asus Eee PC started a boom in low-cost mini laptops that propped up PC sales, until tablets and thinner laptops took their place.
THE 2007–2012 STORY
How PDF became an international standard
Adobe handed control of PDF 1.7 to ISO, turning a proprietary format into ISO 32000-1 in 2008.
THE 2007–2008 STORY
The Storm worm: the botnet that started with a weather headline
In January 2007 an email about deadly storms in Europe spread a Trojan that built one of the largest peer-to-peer botnets of its time.
THE 2007 STORY
GPLv3: how the free software licence was rewritten
After 18 months of public drafting, the Free Software Foundation published version 3 of the GNU General Public License in June 2007.
THE 2007 STORY
Mobile phones and the vanishing bees: how a scare story was cleared
In 2007 a newspaper report suggested mobile phone signals might be behind the mysterious loss of honeybee colonies. The researchers it cited disagreed, and later science pointed to other causes.
THE 2007 STORY
The UK identity card scheme: from Act of Parliament to shredded register
Britain legislated for national ID cards backed by a central biometric register, then abolished the whole scheme within five years.
THE 2006–2010 STORY
When Bill Gates told people to buy CDs: Microsoft and the DRM debate
In December 2006 Bill Gates said digital rights management caused too much pain for honest buyers, at a time when Microsoft was selling DRM technology.
THE 2006 STORY
Wikipedia locks the doors: vandalism and the end of fully open editing
After a false biography made headlines in late 2005, Wikipedia restricted new article creation and introduced semi-protection.
THE 2005 STORY
The 2005 Sidekick hack: a celebrity phone breach and online account security
In February 2005 the address book and notes from Paris Hilton’s T-Mobile Sidekick appeared online. The breach showed how weak account recovery could expose data synced to the cloud.
THE 2005 STORY
Firefox’s rise: how a non-profit browser took on Internet Explorer
Firefox launched in 2004 and within five years had grown into a browser used by hundreds of millions, reopening the browser market.
THE 2004–2009 STORY
PalmSource and the Linux Palm OS that never quite arrived
In 2004 the maker of Palm OS promised to rebuild it on Linux for phones. Ownership changes, few devices and the iPhone overtook the plan, and Palm went its own way with webOS.
THE 2004–2009 STORY
Dell in the 2000s: the direct-sales giant that had to change
Dell built the world’s biggest PC business by selling straight to customers. In the mid-2000s, customer-service anger, a battery recall, criticism of its advertising and a resurgent HP forced it to rethink.
THE 2004–2008 STORY
The Anna Kournikova worm: a toolkit, a tennis star and a global outbreak
In February 2001 an email promising a photo of the tennis player spread worldwide. It was built with a point-and-click virus generator.
THE 2001 STORY
OpenOffice.org: the free office suite that challenged Microsoft Office
Sun Microsystems bought StarOffice, released its code as OpenOffice.org and gave the world a free alternative to Microsoft Office, then lost it to a fork after Oracle took over.
THE 2000–2011 STORY
Bill Gates steps back: how Microsoft handed over from its founder
Bill Gates gave up the chief executive job in 2000 and stopped working full-time at Microsoft in 2008. The eight years between were a long, staged handover through antitrust cases and a changing industry.
THE 2000–2008 STORY
Microsoft vs Linux: from “cancer” to Linux Foundation member
For a decade Microsoft treated Linux as its biggest threat, with leaked memos, cost studies and patent claims. Linux supporters answered every round, and in the end Microsoft joined them.
THE 1998–2016 STORY
NeXT: the computer that was cool but not enough, and the comeback it made possible
After leaving Apple, Steve Jobs built NeXT. Its black cube sold poorly, but its software ran the first web browser and became the basis of macOS and iOS.
THE 1985–1997 STORY
Psion: the British pocket computer pioneer behind Symbian
Psion made some of the best handheld computers of the 1990s, then helped create Symbian, the operating system that ran most of the world’s smartphones before the iPhone.
THE 1984–2012 STORY