Madeline Bennett

The IT industry, and the way we live and do business, has undergone huge change since IT Week launched on 18 May 1998. Back then, email and the internet – two things the business world is completely dependent on now – existed in a much cruder form compared with today’s versions.

Flicking through IT Week’s first issue, with its stories about high-performance 333MHz Pentium II chips, lightweight 2.5kg laptops and video-conferencing systems costing a mere £7,000, really brings home how far technology has advanced since 1998. The terms “e-business” and “e-commerce” both featured heavily back then, but have since fallen by the wayside as the internet has evolved into the de facto way of trading. Novell was also the subject of several articles in the launch issue, but fails to make the same impact today.

However, many of the issues raised by the first IT Week journalists back in 1998 still strike a chord today.

Other items covered at the time of launch included Microsoft delaying the release to manufacturing of Windows 98, while corporate interest in upgrading to the latest operating system was reported to be extremely low – rather like reading our most recent articles on corporate attitudes towards Vista. Elsewhere, the DTI was readying its plans to combat spam, the industry was bemoaning the lack of female technology workers, and IT managers were struggling to get board-level recognition.

So while the next few pages demonstrate how far we’ve moved on in the past decade, let’s hope that when the 20th birthday issue of IT Week comes out in May 2018, these areas will finally have been resolved.

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