pre history | antiquity | pre industrial era | industrial era

2007

(1)The Baltic state of Estonia (N-Europe) is the world's first country to vote in a national parliamentary election via the Internet. E-voting is held for a parliamentary election on March 4, for the first time. In 2005 it was used in limited held local elections.

Estonia's government is one of the few in the world that embraces the IT technology to its fullest extent.(2)

To show how vulnerable a country can be with its budding IT infrastructure:

On May 17 A three-week wave of massive cyber-attacks on the small Baltic country of Estonia, the first known incidence of such an assault on a state, is causing alarm across the western alliance, with Nato urgently examining the offensive and its implications. (5)

Allegedly Russia is behind these attacks because of the problems arising over the relocation of the war memorial statue of the fallen soldier during WWII. History will show if this is just speculation and a prelude to the cold war II or not.

january 1st;
Apple drops computer from its name as it becomes a company who deals with more than computers.

Apple introduces the iPhone to the public at the January Macworld Conference & Expo.

This type of phone - though you may question if you can call it like that any longer - introduces several new features. The way this touch screen works (wipe, push, and press) is a feature not seen on earlier mobile telephones.
On 1 July Apple released the iPhone (US only) and sold it for 500 or 600 USD depending on the memory and other features.

For the records: one iPhone = 28.5 gram of gold(6)

During that weekend bidding for an iPhone at the eBay site went up to 700 USD. A day later investigations by Portelligent in Austin (Texas), showed that the profit margin was 100%; not abnormal for Apple though. Consequently biddings at eBay dropped to nearly 200 USD.

Walking out of the shop with your new gadget brings you no working machine, to activate it is by closing an expensive contract with AT&T @ 50$/mth. One serious shortcoming: The communication band chosen by ATT and Apple causes your Internet connection to perform below standard. Other frequencies are unavailable at the time. (see text box to the right for more details)

Power blurb

In Apple's own words:

iPhone combines three amazing products — a revolutionary mobile phone, a wide screen iPod with touch controls, and a breakthrough Internet communications device with desktop-class email, web browsing, maps, and searching — into one small and lightweight handheld device. iPhone also introduces an entirely new user interface based on a large multi-touch display and pioneering new software, letting you control everything with just your fingers. So it ushers in an era of software power and sophistication never before seen in a mobile device, completely redefining what you can do on a mobile phone. 

The challenge: hack this machine.

Only 10 minutes after the first sale the innards of the machine are shown on the internet.
Another four days later the machine is hacked by Norwegian Jon Lech Johansen, also known to have hacked the copy protection of DVD's. The hack makes it possible to use the machine as iPod and Wifi-interface without closing a contract with AT&T.

January 30;
Microsoft releases Microsoft Windows Vista to the general public.

To use this version you need a PC not older than 2 years. Acceptation goes not without critical notes: not all configurations are friendly to the new version and upgrading for older computers is a must.
Security, a much heralded feature of this new version, seems to be relative weak. Even before the boxes hit the shelves the so called super tight security, in both copy protection and user protection is hacked successfully.
Compatibility is also an issue, not many software packages or hardware configurations are officially supported at introduction time.

February 28;
Another milestone in the everlasting faster than you campaign is demonstrated by AMD. The company demonstrates the Accelerated Computing Solution that breaks the Teraflop Barrier in a single-system: a “Teraflop in a Box”. The system is running a standard version of Microsoft® Windows® XP Professional and holds an AMD Opteron™ dual-core processor and two AMD R600 Stream Processors. Upping performance in a single system to more than 1 trillion floating-point calculations per second, using a general “multiply-add” (MADD) calculation. This achievement represents a ten-fold performance increase over today’s high-performance server platforms, which deliver approximately 100 billion calculations per second.(3)

What is a Teraflop?
In the supercomputing field, “flops” is an acronym meaning
FLoating point Operations Per
Second, a measure of a computer’s ability to perform floating point calculations. A teraflop is one trillion floating point operations per second.

During the past five years, the number of internet users has doubled.

According to a German study 1.25 billion people, apr. 1/5 of the world population, can access the internet. The same study assumes that the next few years less technologically advanced countries will start catching up in terms of internet use. The expected growth for the next three years is between five to 10 percent. Faster than in the Europe, Japan or the USA.(4)