Software and Coding
What makes the hardware do anything. Operating systems and compilers, open source and Linux, the languages from Fortran to Python, the spreadsheet, version control, and the developers writing all of it.
Part of Technology
24 moments in this segment.
- - Unix Created at Bell Labs. 1969. Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie create Unix on a discarded PDP-7 at Bell Labs. The operating system that became the substrate for everything from servers to smartphones; macOS, Linux, Android, iOS all descend from it.
- - Microsoft Founded. April 4, 1975. Bill Gates and Paul Allen found Microsoft to sell BASIC for the Altair. Within 25 years, the most valuable company in the world. Gates is 19 at the founding.
- - VisiCalc - First Spreadsheet. October 1979. Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston ship VisiCalc on the Apple II. The first killer app: businesses bought Apple IIs just to run it. Killed the punched-card era of accounting.
- - Sun Microsystems Founded. February 24, 1982. Andy Bechtolsheim, Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy, Bill Joy. "The network is the computer." Dominates the engineering workstation market through the 1990s; Java ships in 1995. Bought by Oracle 2010.
- - Adobe Founded. December 1982. John Warnock and Charles Geschke leave Xerox PARC to found Adobe. PostScript ships in 1984; Illustrator in 1987; Photoshop in 1990. The graphic-design industry runs on Adobe within a decade.
- - Lotus 1-2-3. January 26, 1983. Mitch Kapor's Lotus 1-2-3, the spreadsheet that established the IBM PC platform. Outsold every other business application for the rest of the decade.
- - GNU Project Announced. September 27, 1983. Richard Stallman announces the GNU Project, a free Unix-compatible OS. The GNU GPL (1989) and the broader free-software movement that followed reshape the entire software industry; Linux (1991) completes the GNU stack.
- - Microsoft Excel Released. September 1985. Microsoft Excel ships for the Macintosh, Microsoft's first GUI application. Windows version follows in 1987; by 1993 Excel has overtaken Lotus 1-2-3 as the dominant spreadsheet.
- - Linux Kernel Released. September 17, 1991. Linus Torvalds, age 21, releases version 0.01 of the Linux kernel. By 2024, runs on every Android phone, every Chromebook, the majority of web servers, and the world's top 500 supercomputers.
- - Java Released. May 23, 1995. Sun Microsystems releases Java. "Write once, run anywhere." By 2024, ~9M Java developers; the dominant enterprise programming language for 25+ years.
- - Salesforce Founded. March 8, 1999. Marc Benioff founds Salesforce, first major company built entirely on the SaaS model. "No software." By 2024: world's largest CRM, $250B market cap.
- - Firefox 1.0. November 9, 2004. Mozilla Firefox 1.0, the browser that broke Internet Explorer's 95% market share. By 2010, ~30% global market share. Established the open-web alternative throughout the 2000s.
- - GitHub Launches. April 10, 2008. Tom Preston-Werner, Chris Wanstrath, PJ Hyett launch GitHub. The default home of open-source software within five years. Microsoft acquires for $7.5B (2018).
- - Docker Released. March 20, 2013. Solomon Hykes releases Docker. Application containers redefine software deployment within 3 years. By 2024, Kubernetes (which depends on container patterns Docker mainstreamed) runs the majority of production cloud workloads.
- - Satya Nadella Becomes Microsoft CEO. February 4, 2014. Satya Nadella succeeds Steve Ballmer as Microsoft CEO. Within 5 years, Microsoft passes Apple to become world's most valuable company. The most successful tech-CEO transition of the decade.
- - VisiCalc Demo. Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston demoing VisiCalc, the killer app that made the Apple II a business machine.
- - Figma Public Beta. October 2016. Figma, collaborative browser-based design tool, exits beta. By 2024: industry-standard product-design platform; Adobe's $20B acquisition attempt blocked by antitrust 2023.
- - WeWork S-1 + Adam Neumann. August 2019. WeWork files S-1. Within weeks: IPO postponed, Adam Neumann ousted, valuation crashes from $47B to $8B. The defining late-decade Silicon Valley fall-from-grace.
- - Java Launch Demo. 1995. James Gosling and the Sun team demoing Java, the "write once, run anywhere" promise that would define enterprise software for 25 years.
- - Snowflake IPO. September 16, 2020. Snowflake goes public; largest software IPO in history at $33B valuation. Defined the cloud-data-warehouse category.
- - GitHub Copilot Reveal. June 29, 2021. GitHub Copilot launches in technical preview. First widely-used AI pair-programmer; built on OpenAI Codex. The product that proved generative AI could do real software-engineering work.
- - Cursor IDE Goes Viral. June 2024. Cursor, the AI-native VS Code fork, goes viral in tech-Twitter. By end of 2024, $100M ARR. The first AI-native IDE to find product-market fit.
- - Claude Code Released. February 2025. Anthropic releases Claude Code, agentic coding from the terminal. Within months, default daily-driver for many engineers; the productivity-AI category continues its consolidation around Claude.
- - Cursor Hits $100M ARR. January 2025. Cursor (Anysphere) crosses $100M ARR; closes $105M Series C at $2.6B valuation. The first AI-native IDE to scale to enterprise revenue.
