Right now, I think it’s clear that LLMs are contributing to, almost, a paradigm shift in how we approach technology. Whether you love them or hate them (I appreciate the utility, but have concerns about how they’re created), they’re here to stay. Even if the long forecast AI bubble popping occurs, Microsoft or Google or Meta or somebody will snap up the big names at pennies on the dollar, and they services will continue. Though subscription fees might increase…
Why do I feel this way? If I look back on a long career that started a few years before I actually had my first job, with the Rubber Keyed Wonder, the ZX Spectrum, then I have seen some things. Some helped, some didn’t. Some succeeded, some fizzled out along the way, usually because a better option appeared. I think LLMs are starting to provide the foundation for better options that will shake technology, development, and technical operations to their foundations.
It’s an adopt or die moment, and me? I’m going to choose the “not dying” path.
Anyway, here is a potted history of Things I Have Seen, Occasionally Endured, and Always Learned From.
Technology Leaps: 1982–2025
Over four decades of inflection points that changed how we build, ship and think about technology.
The Spark
1982–1984
8-bit Home Computing & the Bedroom Coders
The ZX Spectrum arrived in 1982 and changed a generation. For £125, Sinclair put a programmable computer in ordinary British homes. You learned to code because there was nothing else to do with it until you typed in a program from a magazine or loaded one from a cassette tape. The Commodore 64 followed with better graphics and sound. At school, BBC Micros introduced an entire generation to programming through the BBC Computer Literacy Project. Between the bedroom and the classroom, a uniquely British pipeline of self-taught programmers was born, along with an entire games industry.
1985–1986
The 16-bit Leap & the GNU Manifesto
The Atari ST and Commodore Amiga pushed home computing into 16-bit territory with capabilities that felt like science fiction after the Spectrum. Proper graphics, sampled sound, multitasking. Meanwhile, Richard Stallman published the GNU Manifesto in 1985 and founded the Free Software Foundation, arguing that software should be free to use, study, modify and share. It was a radical idea at the time. It would take over a decade to reshape the industry, but the philosophical groundwork was laid here.
The Foundation Years
1987–1989
Personal Computing Goes Mainstream
IBM PC clones, DOS and early networking. Computing moved from the back office to every desk. Compilers, dBase and Lotus 1-2-3 were the tools of the trade.
1990–1995
4GLs, RAD & the Visual Revolution
Fourth-generation languages and Rapid Application Development tools transformed who could build software and how fast. Visual Basic let you drag controls onto a form and ship a working application in days. Delphi, PowerBuilder and Progress 4GL abstracted away the plumbing. For the first time, the emphasis shifted from writing code to solving business problems. It was the original low-code movement, decades before anyone used that term.
1990–1993
The World Wide Web, Linux & the GPL
Tim Berners-Lee’s invention at CERN and the Mosaic browser opened the floodgates. Linus Torvalds released Linux in 1991, licensed under Stallman’s GPL, proving that a community of volunteers could build something to rival commercial software. Client-server architecture replaced mainframe thinking. The free software philosophy now had its killer application.
1995–1996
Windows 95, Java & the Consumer Internet
The Start button changed everything for end users. Java promised “write once, run anywhere.” ISPs and dial-up brought millions online for the first time. E-commerce was born.
The Internet Age
1997–1999
Open Source Goes Mainstream
Eric Raymond’s “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” gave the movement its manifesto for the business world. Netscape open-sourced its browser. The Open Source Initiative was founded in 1998, rebranding Stallman’s free software ideals into language that enterprises could embrace. Apache dominated web servers. The implications were enormous: the infrastructure of the internet was being built on code that anyone could inspect, modify and redistribute. Every major technology wave that followed would stand on open source foundations.
1998–2000
The Dot-com Boom (and Bust)
Venture capital flooded into anything with a .com. Google launched. The bust that followed taught painful lessons about sustainable technology businesses, but the infrastructure investments endured.
2001–2003
Agile, Broadband & the LAMP Stack
The Agile Manifesto in 2001 began reshaping how software was built. Broadband replaced dial-up. Apache, MySQL, Linux and PHP proved that an entirely open source stack could power the web at scale. Red Hat showed you could build a billion-dollar business on free software.
2003–2005
Virtualisation Changes the Data Centre
VMware turned physical servers into software. Suddenly one box could run dozens of workloads, and provisioning dropped from weeks to minutes. It was the first real abstraction of infrastructure away from hardware, and it laid the conceptual groundwork for everything cloud computing would later become.
2004–2005
Web 2.0 & Social Media
Facebook, YouTube, and AJAX-powered web apps turned users from consumers into creators. The web became a platform, not just a publishing medium.
Cloud & Mobile Revolution
2006
Cloud Computing Arrives
AWS launched S3 and EC2, making infrastructure a utility. This was a genuine paradigm shift: from capital expenditure to operational expenditure, from months to minutes. Nothing in infrastructure has been the same since.
2007–2008
The Smartphone Revolution
The iPhone redefined what a computer could be. The App Store (2008) created entirely new business models and put a supercomputer in every pocket. Mobile-first thinking reshaped every industry.
2008–2010
DevOps, GitHub & Continuous Delivery
The DevOps movement broke down the wall between development and operations. GitHub (2008) transformed how developers collaborated and supercharged open source contribution. Continuous integration and delivery pipelines transformed release cycles from quarterly events to daily occurrences.
Platforms & Scale
2010–2012
Big Data & the NoSQL Movement
Hadoop, MongoDB and Cassandra emerged as the volume, velocity and variety of data outgrew relational databases. Data became the new oil (or at least that’s what the conference slides said).
2013–2014
Containers & Infrastructure as Code
Docker made containers accessible to everyone. Terraform and CloudFormation brought infrastructure under version control. The “pets vs cattle” metaphor became gospel. Immutable infrastructure moved from theory to practice.
2015–2016
Kubernetes & Microservices
Kubernetes won the orchestration wars. Microservices architecture promised (and sometimes delivered) independent deployability and team autonomy. The complexity trade-off became a recurring debate.
2016–2018
Serverless & Platform Engineering
AWS Lambda and its equivalents abstracted away servers entirely. Platform engineering emerged as teams built internal developer platforms to tame cloud complexity and improve developer experience.
2018–2020
Low Code/No Code: The 4GL Redux
Microsoft Power Platform, OutSystems, Mendix and others promised to democratise application development all over again. The pitch was familiar to anyone who remembered RAD and 4GLs, but now with cloud-native backends, AI-assisted logic and enterprise connectors. The reality proved more nuanced: citizen development worked for simple workflows, but governance, vendor lock-in and the limits of visual abstraction created challenges that echoed lessons from decades earlier.
The AI Inflection
2020–2021
Remote-first, Zero Trust & Observability
The pandemic accelerated a decade of digital transformation into months. Zero trust security models replaced perimeter thinking. Observability evolved beyond monitoring as distributed systems demanded deeper understanding.
2022–2023
Large Language Models Go Mainstream
ChatGPT brought AI from research labs to every knowledge worker’s desktop. The speed of adoption was unlike anything before it. Code generation, content creation and reasoning capabilities began reshaping entire professions.
2024–2025
Agentic AI & the New Stack
AI moved from chat interfaces to autonomous agents that can reason, plan and execute. Coding agents, browser agents and workflow automation are redefining what it means to build and operate software. The full implications are still unfolding.
One response to “A personal timeline of technological leaps”
Well said .We need to adopt for the changes