A year at a time, from 1979 to now.

In 1979, machines looked down at Earth and crossed the space around Jupiter. I was eight, and the future had moved into the sky.

In 1980, India placed Rohini in orbit and Sinclair put a computer within reach of a determined household.

In 1981, the shuttle flew twice, India put APPLE into orbit, and the personal computer became a serious machine.

In 1982, the computer I would receive a year later entered the world.

My father handed me a ZX Spectrum in 1983, and I have been chasing that feeling ever since.

By 1990 I was in a London classroom on a BBC Micro, a machine the whole country had agreed children should learn on.

In January 1995 the whole web was small enough to read like a village.

You cannot sell anything on a network until someone invents the lock.

Yahoo was born as a list. I was betting the list would run out of names.

On the last day of April 1995 the internet stopped belonging to the government.

May 1995 was the month the giants admitted they had missed it.

The web's most-used language started as one man's personal home page.

In July 1995 the everything store was a man shipping books from his basement.

On August 15, 1995 the internet reached India, and I started selling names for a country that was not online yet.

eBay proved strangers would trust strangers, as long as the system remembered who kept their word.

The same month the web learned to share, it learned to spy.

November 1995: a war and a peace treaty in the same week.

1995 ended with machines that could search, and machines that could think.

In 1999 a ruler decided to build a city for the internet in the desert, and I was on the team that drew it.

In 2000 the bubble burst while I stood inside the city we had just built for it.

In 2001 they buried the internet, and Wikipedia and the iPod were born at the funeral.

By 2002 the survivors stopped talking about eyeballs and started talking about revenue.

In 2003 the network stopped being pages and started being people.

In 2004 the web got personal, and a company gave away a gigabyte to prove a point.

In 2005 the last gatekeeper fell, and everyone became a broadcaster.

In 2006 the cloud quietly arrived, and building a company stopped requiring a fortune.

In 2007 the computer became the phone, and the phone became everything.

In 2008 the banks broke, and someone quietly published nine pages that answered them.

In 2009 the new money was mined into existence, and payments left the counter.

At the end of 2010 I held Bitcoin worth a fraction of a cent, and watched it walk toward a dollar.

By 2012 I was betting the phone in your hand was the whole bank, and the whole shop.

In 2013 I joined eigital, and in the labs the machines quietly started to learn.

In 2014 we started talking to our computers, and they started talking back.

In 2015 the two threads of the next decade were both spun in the same year.

In 2016 a machine learned intuition, and my last doubt about where this was going fell away.

In 2017 I started eatOS, because the businesses that feed us were running the worst software in the building.

The people who make your world larger