As I was completing the manuscript for the first edition of A History of Modern Computing, I found myself anxiously looking over my shoulder, worrying that some new development in computing would render what I had just written obsolete. My concern was well grounded: as I was writing the final chapter, at least one event occurred that threatened to upset the narrative structure I had erected. That was the fanfare that surrounded Microsoft’s introduction, in the fall of 1997, of version 4.0 of its Internet Explorer—an introduction that led the U.S. Justice Department to file an antitrust suit against the company. I had not been paying much attention to Microsoft’s Web strategy at the time, but I was confronted with the excitement surrounding Internet Explorer literally on the day I put my completed manuscript of A History of Modern Computing into a FedEx package for shipment to the publisher. The antitrust suit did in fact turn out to be one of the biggest developments in computing since 1995, and this edition will examine it at length. Are other developments now lurking in the background, which, when they surface, will render any attempt to write a history of computing impossible?
