Revolutions in information technology (IT) seem clear and inevitable when viewed from the comfort of the present day. For example, according to technology industry lore, the personal computer revolution started in 1981, when IBM introduced the first PC. The social media revolution took off in 2006, when Facebook started to accept members from everywhere, not just college campuses. The smartphone revolution began in 2007, with Steve Jobs debuting the iPhone, and so forth.
Except, none of these revolutions actually happened in the ways we think they did. IBM decided to build a personal computer after watching upstarts like Coleco and Radio Shack spend years turning toy computers into viable business machines. Facebook was not the first ...
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