Digital Innovation Days Vincent Giraud

Google marked the release of its web browser on the 11th of December, 2008, when it launched the first stable public version of Chrome. Although the tech giant had previously released 3 versions for testing, they were beta versions. With the release of version 1, Chrome entered a market where users were growing frustrated with Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox was gaining momentum. By 2013, Chrome was dominating the web browser industry, clearly surpassing Internet Explorer and Firefox.Th...

Larry Wall released the general-purpose programming language Perl on the 18th of December, 1987. It was meant to offer text manipulation, web development, network programming, system administration, and Graphics User Interface (GUI) development, among other tasks. With its tagline, “easy things should be easy and hard things should be possible”, Perl was designed to make computer programming easier and faster.With the advent of the web, Perl also gained momentum. In fact, it became the domina...

When the world’s first ever web server (http://info.cern.ch/) went live at CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research) on the 24th of December, 1990, it marked the creation of one of the four essentials of the World Wide Web: HTML, web protocol, web browser, and web server. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, set up a NeXT computer at CERN as the first ever server. However, this web server was more of a small intranet for information sharing among CERN physicists ra...

The creation of the Domain Name System (DNS) on the 1st of January, 1985 transformed the way the internet was browsed. Essentially the phonebook of the internet, the DNS allowed users to access information using domain names instead of IP addresses.Each machine or device connected to the internet has a unique Internet Protocol (IP) address that is used to find and interact with a particular device. These IP addresses can be in the IPv4 format (such as 192.168.1.1) or the newer, alphanumeric I...

When Bitcoin was created by its mysterious pseudonymous developer Satoshi Nakamoto on the 3rd of January, 2009, the world was introduced to a completely new form of currency - cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is a form of binary data which acts as a payment medium. Since then, thousands of cryptocurrencies have been launched taking the current total to over 7,812. However, Bitcoin remains the most popular and traded cryptocurrency in the industry. In fact, the price movement of Bitcoin strongly...

There are very few technological events in recent history that can rival the introduction of the iPhone by Apple on the 9th of January, 2007. Dubbing it the “reinvention of the phone”, the company claimed that it was a revolutionary product that was five years ahead of any other mobile phone. Starting at $499, this first-generation iPhone offered a 3.5-inch diagonal screen, had a 2-megapixel camera, and featured the then-new multitouch features. This device was marketed as a combination of th...