A Brief History of Information Technology

My nephew Shitij came to my room asking for some help. He is studying in the first year of computer science engineering and got an assignment to interview a ‘senior’ IT professional. I was the easiest, certainly not the best, catch for him. Some of his questions really brought me back into those nostalgic feelings. The best part was the realization of being one among the most fortunate group of people born in the early 80s since we could witness some of the most interesting transformations in the IT industry. Here is an abstract from this interview:

Q) When was the first time you saw a computer?

[Me] I was studying in 4th grade when our school procured its first computer. It is hard to believe now, but that was the only room in the entire school that time to have an air-conditioner. To have a glimpse of the computer, we had to keep our shoes outside the lab (the only other place I had seen that happening was entering a temple/place of worship). The computer teacher was regarded as the most learned teacher of the school with all other teachers feeling jealous of him.

The first program we wrote on that computer was using QBASIC. I am sure you might not have even heard this term before. I still remember the first definite question in our test was to spell the full name of QBASIC which is “Quick Beginners All purpose Symbolic Instruction Code”. 

Q) Describe your initial experiences with software development

[Me] The single word that describes that era is “curious”. Black Unix screens, large (8 inches) floppy disks and Object Oriented Programming are some of the key things I still remember. From games like Bricks to numerous workflow applications that we used to create, the focus used to be on the back-end logic rather than front-end look & feel. Applications used to focus on solving tasks rather than providing end-user experience. This was the era of ‘custom-built’ applications. Whenever a business thought of solving a problem with software, they would start building up a custom application for them. This gave rise to a huge market of application development and maintenance.

Q) What is the most memorable moment for you?

[Me] It would definitely be the time I first connected to the internet and created my own email account on Hotmail. Those days we had a dial-up connection modem fitted through the land-line telephone. Compared to today, the speed was obnoxiously slow. People of my age won’t be able to forget the peculiar sound of a dial-up modem though. 

The applications during this period had started focusing on inter-connectivity and data transfer. Also, by this time storing and retrieving data records had become quite popular. Information Security started emerging as a big concern. I remember the proud moment when I won the national contest on software development for my encryption software based on AES (Advanced Encryption Standard).  

Q) Which one would you describe as the greatest transformational period in IT history?

[Me] Without any doubt, Y2K and “Dot Com” bubble time period. This was the time when IT industry went from its peak to sudden trough. It was NOT a failure of the technology but the failure of expectations. This is was the time when the entire world got inter-connected with under-sea cables. Telecommunications had revolutionized the definition of IT. We saw the focus shifting to customer experience rather than back-end computations. Amazon and eBay were truly born, Google changed the concept of surfing and focus on collecting data had started. I would call that time period as the birth time of modern IT.

Another big transformation was the shift of buyers’ preference from custom-built applications to off-the-shelf software. The biggest drivers of this shift were the ERP vendors. Everyone was talking about replacing ‘legacy applications’ with ERP solutions. Companies like SAP and BaaN saw a huge demand while the market heated up with many emerging players including Microsoft and Oracle.

 Q) I guess the next must be a stabilization and growth phase? Anything interesting?

[Me] Very true Shitij. This period saw lots of mergers & acquisitions. Many new buyer segments emerged. Technology buying no longer remained limited to CIO’s office rather it got distributed among different business units e.g. Marketing, HR, and Procurement. A new breed of IT vendors starting disrupting the market. For instance, Salesforce marched ahead with the strategy of selling directly to CMO rather than CIO. There were 4 key technologies that led the growth of IT industry in this time period, popularly known as SMAC viz. Social, Mobile, Analytics, and Cloud. A new breed of ‘disruptors’ emerged with very different business models. The entire IT discussion shifted from infrastructure & maintenance to customer experience and time to market. User ratings became the new norm and data insights the new currency.

Q) That brings us to the present era. What would you like to highlight about the present IT industry?

[Me] You might tell this answer better than me (laughing loud). This age has re-defined Information Technology into Business Technology i.e. Technology that defines business. IT is no longer a support function to a business, rather a backbone to it. IT is re-defining the nature of business itself. For example, the world’s largest taxi firm, Uber, owns no car and world’s most popular media company, Facebook, creates no content.  The focus for businesses has changed from ‘system of records’ to ‘systems of engagement’. End users expect every experience ‘personalized’ and technology is teaching itself through artificial intelligence and cognitive computing. Channel or medium has become irrelevant. Desktop or mobile, in-shop or at home, personal or social, there is no engagement pure offline nor pure online.

Q) Final question for today, what next should we expect?

[Me] This is the trickiest one. I am not an astrologer but have few thoughts. The biggest change our IT industry is waiting for long is on the compute side. We are still running Charles Babbage type architect of computing viz. Input -> Processing -> Output. This will certainly change and would trigger a new era in … (This answer is much longer and deserve to be another post).

I hope I could justify my nephew’s assignment as well as your time reading through this post. Do share your answers to above questions. It will be interesting to see how you experienced those phases.