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Celebrating 25 Years

GCN Home > 10/07/02 issue

E-mail and the PC top 20 years of breakneck technology growth

By Susan M. Menke, GCN Staff

Since the first GCN was published in December 1982, the federal systems landscape has been a site of constant innovation. Here are 21 technologies that changed the way feds work.

1. Desktop computing. The IBM PC of 1981, the Apple Macintosh of 1984 and their descendants started a chain reaction that is still rippling across the world. A PC transformed the agency desktop from a paper-shuffling surface into a test bed for employee initiative and advancement. That old 1960s slogan “Power to the people” could have been written for the PC.

2. E-mail. Not until 1997 did the volume of e-mail messages draw even with the volume of paper mail delivered to most desk workers. Now e-mail and instant messaging are cutting heavily into the volume of telephone calls. But the daily sack of business e-mail is getting overstuffed with viruses, junk and come-ons.

3. Portable computing. Laptops, notebooks and personal digital assistants promised access anywhere, anytime, and they delivered. In the 1980s they were 20-pound-plus luggables. Now they’ve slimmed down and powered up; some are even rugged enough to drop on the ground without damage. And wireless phones and PDAs are merging into a mobile information one-stop device.

4. The word processor. That quintessential productivity tool, now more than a quarter-century old, topped out with bells and whistles some time ago and now seems destined for assimilation into Web authoring suites and Extensible Markup Language tools. But almost everyone still uses one of the market leaders--Microsoft Word or Corel WordPerfect. Does anyone miss running down to the typing pool?

5. The spreadsheet. VisiCalc, the first PC spreadsheet application, is as old as the PC itself. Far more than computerized ledgers, spreadsheet successors Lotus 1-2-3, Microsoft Excel and Borland Quattro Pro have kept financial operations humming ever since.

And these number-crunchers are equally useful for formatting information. Their cellular structure in some ways mimics database fields. Will spreadsheets and databases coalesce down the road?

6. The database. It’s the ultimate back end for every kind of online transaction. From 19-year-old IBM DB2 to the latest multimedia relational databases from Oracle Corp. and a score of other vendors, the database seems to be evolving into distributed, on-the-fly slices of Extensible Markup Language, custom-formatted for display on devices large and small.