Science and technology
Definition Representative scientific and
technological advances and developments
The 1990’s saw the blossoming of the World Wide Web,
great strides in genetics, the launching of the Hubble Space
Telescope, and such growing dependence on computers that
Y2K was a problem.
Many forces drove progress in science and technol-
ogy in the 1990’s. The United States government’s
research budget grew from $30 billion in 1990 to $43
billion in 2000, with the majority of the increase go-
ing to the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The
NIH and the Department of Energy (DOE) spon-
sored the Human Genome Project. The National
Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
scored with the Hubble Space Telescope and the ex-
plorations of Mars and Jupiter. The Gulf War pushed
the development of weapons and other military
gear. As computer chips became ever more capable
and ever smaller, they were placed into almost any-
thing, from cars to kitchen stoves. The World Wide
Web grew, cellular telephones multiplied prodi-
giously, and the younger generation adopted text
messaging.
Electronics and Communication As complex elec-
tronic circuits were made ever smaller and cheaper,
electronic devices became smaller, more capable,
and more portable. Cellular telephones evolved
from bulky, heavy bag phones to models that easily
fit into a shirt pocket. As the world moved into the
twenty-first century, a poll byWiredmagazine found
that people viewed the mobile telephone as the tech-
nological advance that they used most in their daily
lives—more than computers, e-mail, or the Internet.
By 1999, there were more than seventy-six million
wireless telephone subscribers.
Other devices that gained popularity during the
1990’s were MP3 (MPEG Audio Layer 3) players and
the digital video disc (DVD). MP3 itself is a com-
puter format that can compress tens of megabytes of
high-quality audio data into only a few megabytes
without losing quality. The players could store one
or more hours of music on a memory card or stick.
The sound played back over earphones worn by the
listener. DVDs are optical storage devices that can
hold gigabytes of data, about fifteen times more
than compact discs (CDs), and DVDs can load infor-
mation onto a computer twenty times faster than
CDs. DVDs can be formatted either for video or digi-
tal information.
The roots of the Internet go back to the early
1960’s. Cold War jitters led to the thought that the
telephone system was especially vulnerable. An attack
on a few central locations could cripple the whole sys-
tem. The first computer network linked research lab-
oratories to a few large computers. The network grew
from there with the addition of other sites and later
with the annexation of private webs. Aiding the
growth, relatively inexpensive but powerful desktop
computers became available in the mid-1980’s. The
World Wide Web became publicly available in 1991
with the invention of hypertext markup language
(HTML). HTML allowed users to create Web pages
and link them to the Web. Hypertext transfer proto-
col (HTTP) is the set of rules that allows computers
across the world to talk to each other. Unfortunately,
browsing the Web required knowledge of several ar-
cane computer commands. Mosaic, the first program
to make browsing easy, was released in 1993. Mosaic
allowed its users to exchange not only text but also
color photos, sound bites, and video clips. With the
release of Netscape Navigator in 1994, Web browsers
went commercial. By 1999, e-mails outnumbered
first-class letters delivered by the U.S. postal system,
and the Web linked seventy million Web sites world-
wide. True to its origins, the Web still has no central
hub or central control.
Since the earliest days, travelers out of sight of
known landmarks have probably wished for some
way to know exactly where they were. The Global
Positioning System (GPS) was developed to solve
that problem. The first of ten developmental GPS
satellites was launched in 1978. Twenty-four new
satellites were launched between 1989 and 1994
when the system became fully operational. The sys-
tem also requires several ground stations that moni-
tor the orbits of the satellites and send this informa-
tion up to the satellites. In use, a receiver on the
ground must simultaneously pull in signals from
four or more satellites. A computer in the receiver
gains time and position information from these sat-
ellite signals that enables it to calculate its location
on Earth: longitude, latitude, and altitude. Ori-
ginally, GPS was developed for the military, and sig-
nals received by civilians were downgraded. The
downgrading was ended at the end of the 1990’s so
that both civilians and the military can locate posi-754 Science and technology The Nineties in America