![]() ![]() The app-enabled iPhone, followed shortly by Google’s acquisition of Android and its app store, had a huge impact on many aspects of our lives, putting enormous computing power into the palm of our hands. And even that wasn’t a major paradigm shift until 2008 when Apple introduced the app store and the eco-system of third-party apps. But the big paradigm shift came in 2007 when Apple introduced the iPhone. The Blackberry was a paradigm shift because it moved cell phones into the realm of handheld PCs with the ability to send and receive email as well as organize and share information. But, until the Blackberry came out in 1999, cell phones were mostly just wireless portable telephones. But it was handheld cell phones later in that decade that made cellular into a paradigm shift in the way many people communicated. Broadband was not only much faster, but it was always connected, making the internet more integrated into our lives.Ĭar phones had been around for decades but were rare and very expensive to own and use until the cell phone networks began to emerge in the early ’80s. Before broadband, people “went online” by connecting their PC to a modem and dialing in. The next paradigm shift happened mostly in the early 2000’s when broadband began to take off. ![]() That was cemented in 1994 with the introduction of Netscape, the first popular web browser. Other than that, there hasn’t been much of a major paradigm shift in PCs unless you count laptops which are basically just portable PCs.Īlthough PCs were able to connect to online services like Compuserve as far back as the late 70s, they were mostly niche products until the mid-90s when AOL started sending floppy disks to practically everyone in America, prompting millions of people to go online. A year later, Microsoft introduced Windows, which further reinforced that paradigm shift, though it took several years before PCs with WYSIWYG interface became mainstream. The Mac was not only easy to use, but its “What you see is what you get,” or WYSIWYG interface, made it a lot easier to create visually appealing documents with integrated text and graphics. At that point computers displayed mostly text on the screen, but in 1984, Apple introduced the Macintosh, which represented the beginning of a paradigm shift. Some families bought PCs for things like keeping track of finances or for their kids to do homework. Offices were starting to use them for word processing, database management and other important tasks. At first, very few people took them seriously, but by the time IBM entered the market in 1981, they were starting to reach critical mass. I’ll start the clock in the late 1970s when personal computers were introduced. These paradigm shifts can also change how the tech affects our lives for better and worse and sometimes elicits both positive and negative attention from the public, the media and policy makers.Īs someone who’s been following technology developments since the 1970’s I’ve seen them all, but whether something is truly a paradigm shift isn’t always obvious until years later. It doesn’t happen often, but every once in a while there’s a major technology paradigm shift with new products or services that vastly change the landscape or empower us to do things we couldn’t do before. This post first appeard in the Mercury News
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