2000 to Today Fiber and the Acceleration of the Digital World
When fiber optics first entered corporate networks in the early 2000s, it still felt like a technology from a distant future. Copper cabling was everywhere, server rooms ran reliably on twisted pair, and gigabit Ethernet seemed fast enough for almost any business application. But beneath the surface, something fundamental was shifting. Data volumes were exploding […]
1980–2000 – From Coax to Structured Cabling: How Physical Infrastructure Became the Backbone of Digital Business
When the first corporate networks emerged in the early 1980s, infrastructure was above all one thing: improvised. Thick coaxial cables wound their way through offices, were daisy-chained from computer to computer, connected with T-connectors, poorly documented and barely secured. If a single connection failed, half the network often went down with it. And yet, it […]
1973–1978 – How TCP/IP Turned Isolated Networks into One World
In 1973, a quiet but far-reaching revolution began one that still defines every digital system we touch today. At a time when computers were room-sized machines locked inside research facilities, a radical idea started to take shape in the background. Two researchers, Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn, were working on something that sounded almost modest […]
1969 – ARPANET and the Birth of the Connected World
Networks are everywhere today. Invisible. Taken for granted. Data moves around the globe in milliseconds, applications respond in real time, entire economies depend on stable connections. Yet this state was never planned. It is the result of a development that began in 1969 with a small, almost inconspicuous research project. With this article, we are […]