Usenet

Usenet's roots go back to 1979 when the idea of sharing information and news within a community of computer users is realized by two graduate students. They develop conferencing software and connect computers at Duke and the University of North Carolina. Usenet grows and subsequently turns into a network that connects tens of thousands of sites around the world, from mainframes to PCs.
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Spam

The term "spam" is believed to be derived from the Spam sketch on the BBC comedy series Monty Python's Flying Circus. The sketch features a small restaurant in which every item on the menu includes Spam meat. With the commercialization of the Internet, the term was adopted to mean something excessive and undesirable (like the menu in the sketch) in the context of email and user group postings.
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FORTRAN

The FORTRAN programming language is developed at IBM in 1957. FORTRAN represents a major milestone in computing. The language provides a higher-level way to program, replacing machine and assembly code. FORTRAN catches on quickly as complex programming is done in hours instead of weeks. It is adopted by the scientific and military communities and is used extensively in the space program.
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Dbase

Jet Propulsion Laboratory programmer Jeb Long develops Dbase in the late 1970s. Long's file management program is written in FORTRAN and runs on a UNIVAC computer. A few years later, he works with Wayne Ratliff to create a PC version of the program, which they name Dbase. Dbase and subsequent releases become enormously popular, bringing database management to homes and small businesses.
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The Electric Pencil

Michael Shrayer develops a program that allows people to create, edit, store, retrieve and print documents on a personal computer. Completed in late 1976, his yearlong effort results in the first PC word processing program called The Electric Pencil. In 1979, Micropro International releases the first commercial descendant of The Electric Pencil, called WordStar.
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NLS

Douglas C. Engelbart and a group of Stanford Research Institute researchers demonstrate the online system NLS on December 9, 1968. Developing the project since 1962, NLS features such things as hypertext, object addressing and dynamic file linking, and an x-y display coordinate system. Those on hand also see the debut of the computer mouse.
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IBM PC

IBM sells its personal computing division to Lenovo Group on December 8, 2004. The deal makes China-based Lenovo the third-largest PC maker in the world, behind Dell and Hewlett-Packard. For IBM, the deal ends a twenty-five year run in the PC market but gives them a partnership with Lenovo, providing a franchise in the world's fastest, and soon to be largest, information technology market.
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