Three Interesting examples of IT Solutions from Three Different Decades (Week 1)

1) Computer Space (The First Video Game) (1971)

In 1971, there was a small game company named Nutting Associates, which kindled the fire of the modern game industry (which is worth over 170$ billion) with a game named Computer Space. It was a arcade type video game which featured a controllable spaceship that could be maneuvered and two flying saucers controlled by hardware which you needed to blow up. Although the whole concept of the game was simplistic and there was nothing much to it, it was still a start of a new age for the gaming industry and a backbone for future arcade games that followed such as Pong, Pac-Man, and such. The computer back in the time were too expensive for average customer use and the game could not be sold in bulk due to this. The developers of the game (Nutting Associates) came up with an idea to design a system that would have been cheaper to afford back in the day and was still capable of running the game. The original Design did not utilize any microprocessors, and the game run entirely on a state- machine with monochrome graphic elements held in diode arrays. The games final design had 2 dimensional black and whit sprite graphics and although it did not receive the mass success that the developers hoped for, it was still a beginning of a new era for video games.

1) Foundation of Confinity (PayPal) (1998)

Back in 1998, Internet wallets were not as popular as they are today and people were not too accustomed to using electronic payments rather than cash. However, 3 crazy developers changed this trend for good and forever. Peter Thiel, Luke Nosek, and Max Levchin came together and founded Confinity wallet and it soon became one of the most popular payment methods for online shopping and money transfers for different services. In March 2000, Confinity surpasssed a 1 million customer mark, and in June 2001, the develpoers changed its name to PayPal, the online wallet we use and love today. As the time passes the customer base grew to a whopping 377 million customers in 2020. And it is continuing to grow adopting new tech solutions such as PayPal Mobile which allowed customers to make transactions using their smartphones, and cooperating with companies like Xoom to expand their ability to handle international transfers.

1) Development of 4G Technology (2009)

 

One significant achievement in IT industry of our decade is the new 4th generation of cellular networks. The new generation was developed and first used commercially in 2009 introduced in Oslo and Stockholm first. While the previous (3G) generation users could only get peak bandwidth  speeds of 14 Mbps(Megabits per second), With 4G LTE technology introduced, the users could get up to 100Mbps of bandwidth speed. The sheer download speed, although is important, is not the only new invention introduced with the 4th generation. The latency often referred to as ping, which is important for gaming or video streaming services, has also decreased with the new generation of cellular devices. Previously on the 3rd generation the ping was averaging at around 85ms(milliseconds), with the new technology it has been reduced al the way down to an average of 45ms. While this improvement could not seem so important on paper, this has made a huge impact in terms of quality of HD video streaming.