About this site & contact


The original owner of the domain digitalwire.com was a company called Digital Wire Consulting GmbH that I founded in 1995 in Zurich (Switzerland). It was one of the first ISP/web companies in Switzerland. The company went out of business in 2002 but I retained the domain name just in case I wanted to start something again.

I’ve been fascinated with computers since the early 1980’s when I started to write my first ‘BASIC’ programs. What followed was a series of excursions into all sorts of programming languages, computers and operating systems.
I’ve been a keen follower of Internet technology either through my own ventures or out of sheer interest. But only recently (around 2007ish) have I started again to pay more attention to the computing landscape, as I believe we have entered a new era – the era of ubiquitous computing (aka. the fourth industrial revolution)

This is evident in the rapid change of how we define computers and computing. Smart devices of different forms and types are rapidly arriving in the market at prices that would have been unthinkable. But other factors contribute as well, for example, new generations use computers as if they existed forever – they grew up with this tool and have transformed the computing experience for all of us.

Not since the 1980’s has there been so much innovation in such a short time span. Moore’s law had been upheld all this time, but only recently has it really started to make impact in how we use computers on a very large scale.

Urs Gubser
Urs Gubser on Mastodon

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Will Libra change the world?

Image
I have some history with this – no, not directly but I’ve been researching the various attempts that Facebook made in order to enable their user base to make person to person as well commercial payments. I could be wrong but none of these efforts seemed to have panned out for Facebook. Case in point, Facebook has had an  e-money license  for their Irish and Spanish subsidiaries for nearly three years – this licenses are in theory “passportable” throughout Europe which would have given Facebook the opportunity to offer some form of payment service throughout the EU. I’ve known of some implementations in France and the UK but never anything that would have enabled them to go cross-border. In other words, Facebook has had to deal with the same payment fragmentation landscape in Europe and elsewhere than the rest of us. When Facebook officially threw in the towel by  shutting down  the P2P payment service on its messenger platform, I knew this was ominous. On the other hand, and like
Read more

Information technology is no more

Image
(Image source: datwyler.com)  As many have during the summer, I have taken a break and did some reading. To my amazement, I have seen the term of “IT” or information technology in much of the literature that I read over the summer. And I started to wonder if we’re doing ourselves any favors by still insisting on using this term. I tried to answer that question for myself, and have come to the following realization:  The term information technology has its origin in a world where computers were largely absent – it was first mentioned in a 1958 Harvard Business Review  article . The article singled out three distinct elements: “technique of processing large amounts of information rapidly”, “statistical and mathematical methods to decision-making problems” and finally, “the simulation of higher-order thinking through computer programs”. The article further explained that information technology would have its greatest impact on middle- and top management. To be very clear, the article was
Read more

Is Web3 the new world order, or just utopia?

Image
(source: Adobe) As it is with all technological change, every industry must understand, assess, and prepare to incorporate the “new” with the existing. The payment industry, which is undergoing almost constant change, is no exception to this rule. But to understand this change, we must start at the beginning – with Web 1.0 or the “static web”, so called because you would load all the data at once from a web server. This would start to change at around the turn of the millennia with Web 2.0. In 1999, Microsoft experimented with what later would be called “AJAX” (Asynchronous JavaScript And XML) , which was an enhancement to its web browser so that it could asynchronously pull data from the web server without refreshing the whole page. This enabled websites to become more interactive and behave more and more like applications.  It was this underlying technology together with Javascript frameworks that enormously simplified content creation and self-publishing, and ultimately gave rise to
Read more