Summers have always been important in the field of Information Technology.
On a hot day in August 1981, a major development is announced that will change the whole world. IBM presents the creation of a “machine” that will be addressed to “home” users and will work autonomously (without connection to giant Main Frames of the time) …
The first IBM Personal Computer (IBM PC) is a fact!
Equipped with a floppy Disc or two of 5.25 inches, 4 MB RAM and operating from an “unknown” startup from Seattle, which had been founded just 6 years ago and was called Microsoft. The software was called MS DOS – Microsoft Disc Operating System. IBM’s estimate for the demand for this new PC was calculated at 200 thousand units within a year. Only there was a small problem. The stock was sold out in just 2 months… In the first year, sales exceeded 1 million…
Big Blue (IBM’s “Big Blue”) was so confident that it did not bother to exclusively bind the MS kids (the now-deceased Paul Allen and the then 25-year-old Bill Gates), resulting in a very short time in starting a global industry – literally out of nowhere, with the IBM PC clones, the so-called IBM Compatibles…
Compaq, Dell, Hewlett Packard and thousands of other companies around the world followed in its footsteps and developed their own brand, with INTEL processors, but with the same operating system… All except one, Apple, which had started in 1975 with its enlightened leader Steve Jobs, which brought to the fore another graphical environment, the Macintosh, in contrast to its text screen. “tasteless” IBM… An environment that was however locked (proprietary) and no one had the right to copy or clone it.
The technological revolution has begun!
A little later in the summer of 1984, just three years after the world’s first appearance of personal computers, somewhere in Athens, two twenty-year-old friends discuss a new business that a third friend will open and is looking for a partner. The innovative computer shop would be called Microland…. Two years later, the two friends buy the company with very little money. And this is the beginning of the journey into Technology!
The return to old times has a romantic mood, a fragrance, it is loaded with many dreams, successes and failures through which important experiences and long-lasting friendships were built. The times were more optimistic and there was certainly a much “easier” market than today.
Summer (again) of 2000, amidst the turmoil of the Stock Exchange and the anticipation of the Olympic Games, we decide to make a new start, leaving behind everything that tied us to the old company. We acquire “Cosmos Computers” and start once again from the beginning.
Having with us capable and experienced partners from the past, we start with an excellent mood and a strong shareholder structure and set as a unique strategy, to make Cosmos the number one system integrator in Greece. An extremely ambitious goal for the time.
From the first personal computers, the first Novell networks, the appearance of the mouse (!), Windows 3 (with the first graphical interface), the introduction of the Internet, Jeff Bezos in 1995 – then the startup of Amazon – explaining how he could sell books online, the creation of In.Gr in August 1999, the frenzy with .Com in 2001 and thousands of other stories, we reach today where Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, Cloud and Robotics seem very new, advanced, promising or to some “scary”…
However, evolution is inevitable, especially in the IT and Telecommunications sector, which is developing at a dizzying pace and always causing turmoil with its changes. How do we respond to the challenge of the “disruptive economy/technology”?