15 technologies and companies completing 20 years of life in 2018

In 1998, Brazil reelected a president by first voting - Fernando Henrique Cardoso - and suffered a heavy (and controversial, according to Gunther Schweitzer) defeat against France in the World Cup final. The United States almost saw its own president, Bill Clinton, lose his job because of a sex scandal. And the world has followed deaths such as singer Frank Sinatra and Cambodian dictator Pol Pot.

The technology sector has also had a lot of news in terms of product launches and new companies. To head in 2018, our colleagues at TecMundo, Mega Curioso's "big brother", selected some of these birthdays that are now two decades old and have impacted areas such as computing, astronomy, economics, the internet and games.

This is one of those articles you read, recognize products you've used or seen a lot of people using, and think how old you are getting. Or know the date of birth of things that already existed when you weren't even born. Check out the list below.

1. Windows 98

Microsoft's operating system had a daunting task: replacing one of the company's biggest hits, Windows 95. It was released on April 25, 98 and brought a number of new features and enhancements: navigation between folders within the same window, support for new peripherals. and connectors (DVD, USB, digital cameras and more), the use of more than one monitor and programs aimed at the still young internet. Not to mention that startup sound that everyone remembers to this day and the enjoyment of classic elements such as the interface, games and screen savers.

2. Google

On September 4, 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin were still students at Stanford when they founded a company to continue a project with a lot of potential: a certain search engine called Google. The first headquarters was Susan Wojcicki's garage, which soon after would also work for the company.

It was also this year that the PageRank was developed, the algorithm that allows the classification of pages found and displayed by the search engine. In the first year, the Google index already had 26 million pages.

3. iMac

The iMac G3 is the first version of those classic Apple personal computers with color back monitors. The initial model was only blue, but it started a line that still exists today. It was one of Steve Jobs's first projects on his return to Apple, which happened 1 year earlier. As technical specs, it featured 233 MHz processor, 32 MB RAM and 4 GB hard drive.

4. Nokia 5110/5120

Two historic Nokia phones on the same line came out 20 years ago. The first is the Nokia 5110, one of the first of the brand, which has been known to be shock resistant and with infinite battery life. It was one of the first mobile phones also with removable cover and colorful options for personalization. Already the 5120 was practically the same model updated and one of the first with the absolute classic Snake.

5. Intel Celeron

Chances are you've already had a desktop with an Intel Celeron family processor. This line was very popular and began in 1998 with the Pentium II-based Covington and Mendocino models, with the former not even having a built-in secondary cache.

The entire line was heavily criticized for its poor performance, but the manufacturer was very successful at launch: they were much cheaper than top line or competitors and even ended up targeting overclocks.

6. Game Boy Color

Game Boy Color was launched in October 1998 in Japan and revolutionized notebooks precisely because of the color palettes, giving the industry dominance to Nintendo. It also set off the competition for technical capability, backward compatibility, infrared connectivity support and different-tone models. Not to mention the library of new games such as Pokémon Gold and Silver.

7. Dreamcast

The Dreamcast came out on Nov. 27, was Saturn's successor and aimed to put Sega in direct competition with the PlayStation and Nintendo 64. It was technically advanced, had several special controls, such as fishing, and even a modem for internet connection. It was discontinued in 2001 without meeting sales expectations, but it has been at the heart of many people.

8. Furby

This mix of electronic toy and stuffed animal has a face that scares a lot of people, but it was a smash hit when it was launched by Tiger Electronics around Christmas 1998. Furby's highlight was continuous learning, including learning to speak the language of the game. owner, and the ability to move eyes and ears. It has already lost its fame and novelty factor, but is sold in a revamped version to this day.

9. Brasil Telecom

Brasil Telecom, or BrT, was born in 1998 with the privatization of Telebras and has operated in several states. The telephone lines, the iG and Ibest portals and the BR Turbo brand of broadband internet were the highlights of the company, which was one of the largest in the country in telecommunications. It was incorporated by operator Oi from 2009, but maintained the same original infrastructure.

10. Telephone

And there are more Brazilian companies in the area blowing 20 candles. It is Telefônica Brasil, national arm of the Spanish group Telefónica. She was also born from the privatization of Telebras. Over the years, much has changed: it has acquired the operator Vivo, using the brand in virtually all services, the operator GVT and the portal Terra.

11. Sony Memory Stick

This one doesn't bring many good memories. Memory Stick is Sony's proprietary storage card for use with cameras, PCs and the PSP. A few years later, the company recognized the loss of the battle for SD cards, which was a joint development of Toshiba, Panasonic and SanDisk, and also began to license the format. The maximum size of the first generation Memory Stick was 128 MB.

12. Mozilla

1998 was a historic year for browsers: it was the year when Netscape Navigator, the former market leader, turned free and had its source code released. Former employee there, Jamie Zawinski, the very next day opened the Mozilla.org community. The company started by providing development tools and applications to other companies, and soon had the head of a red dinosaur. Firefox, which would become the flagship of the brand, was born only in 2003.

13. PayPal

If making payments online today and maintaining a virtual wallet is normal, in 1998 it was not common. PayPal's embryo was born this year, but still under the name Confinity and making security software. It was not until 2 years after investor firm Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, Luke Nosek and Ken Howery joined X.com, a small banking company founded by none other than Elon Musk, and began to handle finance.

14. International Space Station

The International Space Station (ISS) is one of the greatest recent human space achievements, our largest construction in Earth's orbit, and is still widely used to house astronauts and their experiments. And the kickoff in building it was precisely in 1998, with the release of the Russian module Zarya. He was responsible for the station's power, storage and propulsion in its early stages. The last module was only coupled in 2011 and it should continue to receive scientists normally until 2029.

15. MySQL

MySQL is a way to manage databases from the structured query language, or SQL. It was created as free software in Sweden and is very popular to this day, especially because of its integration with PHP and various popular database features. Internal versions had been circulating before, but the first released to the public and for Windows came out in 1998.

15 technologies and companies completing 20 years of life in 2018 via TecMundo