Now more than ever, digital technology has become a staple in our professional and private life.

The revolution can’t be ignored as it is changing the way people travel, work, interact & organize their daily activities. And it does it at high speed.

With some of the enthusiasm brought by this digital age, this podcast is about celebrating impactful innovations on their day of birth.

We’ll find out how some brillant minds set the path with new ways to solve old business problems, create new opportunities, and changed the society entirely.

I’m your host, Vincent Giraud. Welcome to the digital innovation days!

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.

The software used certain features from Apple’s WebKit open-source rendering engine as well as Firefox, and its source code was made available by Google as part of its Chromium project. Google Chrome stood out due to a multitude of features. For starters, it strictly focused on web standards. This came at a time when Microsoft was struggling with proprietary web standards for its own web navigator, Internet Explorer. Chrome also introduced the idea of sandboxing in a web browser. By sandboxing individual tabs, if one of them crashed, the others would not be affected. This led to improved speed and stability although it required each tab to use as much dedicated memory as the first one. However, when any tab was closed, it released its allocated memory, effectively solving a problem many older browsers were facing and which could only be fixed by restarting them.

Today, Google Chrome is the undisputed leader in web browsers. With a market share of nearly 65%, it is the most popular web browser in 2021. It is more than just a web navigator now. In fact, it can be viewed as a complete platform that can run on different operating systems including Windows, Android, Linux, macOS, and iOS. From its release till now, Google Chrome has added value for the users and helped drive innovation in the field.

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 dominant language for Common Interface Gateway (CGI) programming. The regular expression and string parsing abilities that this language offered brought it immense popularity as well. System administration tasks that were too complex for a shell script but not worth the effort when coding in C, were easily done with Perl. This also became the perfect language to interact with databases, leading to its widespread use to implement dynamic websites. True to its motto of TIMTOWTDI (“there is more than one way to do it”), Perl cemented its position as a very versatile and flexible language since it allowed the user to adopt any kind of programming style, be it procedural or object-oriented.

Although Perl may not be sitting atop the list of the most commonly-used programming languages today, its uniqueness largely stems from its compatibility with other programming languages. Perl is being used throughout the web and it is also termed as the “duct tape of the Internet” because it tied together systems and interfaces that could not work together prior to Perl. While many think that Perl has “died” as a language now, it is still being heavily used not just for maintaining existing projects but also for creating new ones. In fact, it is still considered among the best coding languages to increase one’s employability as well as remuneration.

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 rather than being “world wide”.

By 1991, several other web servers had been created, all located at CERN. By this time, it had been successfully tested that document retrieval could be performed from web servers on incompatible computer systems. However, since all the web servers were at CERN, the possibility of retrieving data from halfway across the world was questionable. To do so, a computer was set up with the help of Paul Kunz, a physicist at Stanford University. This server was located at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) and by the end of 1991, it went live, becoming the first web server outside Europe.

What started from a single NeXT computer at a nuclear research lab in Europe has now grown into an indispensable part of the internet globally. A world without web servers means a world where information cannot be retrieved from any part of the world within an instant - essentially unimaginable. The millions of servers online are responsible for displaying website content by storing, preprocessing, and delivering the requested web pages to users. The sheer significance of this invention can be gauged by the fact that all data that are shared over the internet today are hosted on web servers. And while the first web server could only retrieve data from other servers located in CERN, today this retrieval can quickly be done across oceans and continents.

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 IPv6 format (like 2400:cb00:2048:1::c629:d7a2). Web browsers interact and load internet resources using IP addresses. While this is completely understandable for machines, it is exceptionally difficult for humans to memorise more than a few IP addresses. To make accessing websites easier, the DNS was created which translates domain names (such as google.com) to IP addresses. While the way the DNS works involves several servers and can be a long-winded process, it takes a few milliseconds only to fetch an IP address given a domain name.

If it weren’t for the DNS, we would still be using difficult-to-remember strings of numbers like 192.58.9.34 instead of the easy and memorable domain names that we use today. DNS enabled users to have a more user-friendly, collaborative, and diverse internet. With over 363.5 million registered domain names, the DNS is not only a fundamental part of the internet today but also its backbone. In fact, if a DNS is not responding, a connection to other websites over the internet cannot be established. Interestingly, before personal computing became popular, the few users over the internet could memorise and recognise some familiar IP addresses but this is beyond practical in today’s time and age with millions of domain names and even more IP addresses, which further underscores how significant the DNS is.

Facebook was founded on the 4th of February, 2004, as “The facebook” by Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Chris Hughes, and Dustin Moskovitz, following the high popularity of Facemash. In 2003, these four Harvard students created Facemash, an online service to judge and rate how attractive their fellow students were. The pictures received 22,000 votes from 450 students. However, since this was in violation of the university rules, Facemash was shut down after just two days. Zuckerberg, however, noticed how well-received and popular Facemash was and registered the domain name: thefacebook.com. In February 2012, Facebook filed to become a public company, raising $16 billion in May - the largest Initial Public Offering (IPO) for any internet company till then.

What started as a Harvard social networking website is now the biggest global internet phenomenon today. With nearly 3 billion monthly active users, it is the leading social media platform. However, today, Facebook has transitioned beyond just a place for people to share their lives with their friends. It is an entire ecosystem offering opportunities to thrive in multiple facets of life - business, entertainment, politics, journalism, communication, etc. In fact, this tech giant has grown to the point where it owns a few of the most popular social media networks available to us - WhatsApp and Instagram, for instance.

Over the years, among the challenges that Facebook had to constantly battle, privacy and misinformation remain significant problems. Users have been sceptical of the confidentiality of their data and concerned over the veracity of the information they consume. That being said, it is undeniable that Facebook has forever altered computing and technology. It has been a driving force in open source for many years and shared its innovative hardware and software tools with the broader community. It has, furthermore, given birth to Big Data (in the form of Cassandra database), created millions of jobs, became a major platform for political parties to contest elections, helped organise revolutions, and decided what news is. To put it simply, we have not seen a bigger and more powerful internet phenomenon in our times than Facebook.

The revolutionary launch of Google Maps on the 8th of February, 2005, transformed the way we use maps for directions and navigate the world with our smartphones. Initially, it was launched for desktop as a solution for people to get from one point to another. Today, it’s a gateway to exploration - whether you are travelling by car, bike, public transport, boat, wheelchair, or on foot.

Google Maps makes use of a combination of data sources such as aggregate location data, real-time users feedback, historical traffic patterns and local government data along with machine learning. There are multiple views that a user can switch between depending upon their need(s). With over 1 billion monthly active users, it ranks high among the leading mapping applications worldwide. It offers driving directions for 194 countries, spanning over 28 million miles of road. It can provide local information for more than 80 million places across the world and live traffic data from over 50 countries. All of this data is kept up-to-date and reliable with tens of thousands of updates daily.

Although Google was not the first to introduce online maps (the world wide web supported the first online maps in 1993), it brought digital maps to the mainstream and popularised their usage. Interestingly, a wide array of other applications and services today rely on Google Maps - Uber, Airbnb, WhatsApp, and UrbanSpoon all are based on Google Maps application user interface (API). This service was invented with the vision to “create one seamless, browsable map of the entire world” - a daunting task that Google Maps has accomplished exceptionally well. The marriage of complicated technologies and diverse data sources in Google Maps has humanised and contextualised location to make it more relevant to us, as should be the purpose of technology and innovation.

The introduction of the IBM Portable Personal Computer 5155 - a product whose roaring success surprised many, including IBM itself - on the 16th of February, 1984 popularised personal computers for everyday use. Weighing about 30 pounds, this computer had the following specifications: built-in ROM Basic, 256K memory standard, 9-inch 25x80 monochrome amber screen which could display graphics, DOS, and Intel 8088 4.77MHz CPU. The keyboard could be detached or folded and snapped shut in the case covering the computer. Priced at $2900, it was an immediate hit with the public and became the first personal computer to gain widespread adoption by the industry.

Initially, IBM could not find enough applications for this PC to justify acceptance on a broad basis. Moreover, even if this idea could be approved, it would not have been completed in a short timeframe. However, Bill Lowe, a lab director at IBM, stepped forward and claimed that he could develop a portable personal computer within a year. It was then that a team consisting of 12 developers was established which set out to create this device in 12 months. They were tasked with devising a plan for the software, hardware, marketing setup, and sales strategy. As the plan progressed, more talent and expertise was brought into this project.

Although personal computers were available as early as the 1970s, they provided very few applications that did not justify widespread and mainstream use. However, IBM offered a full suite of important applications that could justify broad adoption by the market. It became so popular that for a year or two, the Columbia Business School required every student to have this computer. In addition to this, it was IBM’s brand recognition as well as the massive marketing campaign that led to the fast growth of the personal computers industry. Furthermore, this computer was widely cloned and gave birth to a vast ecosystem of hardware, software, and peripherals to use with it.