Once in a while, a few technologies
come together and some new class of product or
service completely disrupts the old way of doing
business. Three fairly recent examples: the electronic
spreadsheet, desktop publishing, and the Internet.
A new phenomena, currently called podcasting,
has the potential to be today’s next big
wave.
Let’s look at the dawn of electronic spreadsheets,
around 1980. Apple II personal computers with
storage (floppy disks), memory (48K of RAM), and
visual displays were affordable. Dot matrix printers
were inexpensive and fast enough. And VisiCalc
allowed you to put together budgets and forecasts.
The results were revolutionary. Imagine doing
spreadsheets today they way they were done then:
all calculations were done on a calculator and
entered on green columned paper that only had
8 to 12 columns and 40 to 80 rows. All calculations
needed to be performed twice, to make sure that
there were no errors. If any one figure changed
in the spreadsheet, every single calculation needed
to be performed all over again.
Look back at how the Macintosh, postscript,
Pagemaker, and laser printing came together in
1985. The result was desktop publishing and it
completely changed the way we create documents.
Before 1985, no one knew what a font was. Cutting
and pasting was, literally, getting a scissors,
cutting something out, and pasting it on your
type-written page.
And can we imagine working before TCP/IP, high-speed
long distance data transmission, standard communications
protocols, HTML, email, and Al Gore created the
Internet?
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