July
The iPhone 3G finally comes to the UK on 11 July, and everyone lines up nice and orderly to pick theirs up.
A bit of a surprise from virtualisation darling VMware, which posted slightly less spectacular results than usual and promptly ditched its chief exec and founder Diane Green. New chief Paul Maritz quickly made changes by making its hyper visor free.
The search engine Cuil launched, looking to knock Google from its happy perch we all know how that went
BT announced it would invest 1.5 billion into bringing fibre broadband to the masses. Barclays kicked off the layoff season by offshoring IT jobs. Microsoft warned on DNS problems, saying attacks were imminent. And British hacker Gary McKinnon lost the first of many appeals.
The Museum of Computing officially lost its home, and Microsoft looked to reboot its deal with Yahoo. A server crash took down London's Oyster card network, leaving many getting free travel on the capital's public transport network. Two weeks later, it happened again.
Meanwhile, analyst firm Gartner started making some noises about cloud computing
August
The Beijing Olympics showed off what could be done with organised IT, as rumours of a new Microsoft operating system started to surface.
The credit crunch started to take its toll, as demand for IT workers fell, and HBOS cut IT jobs.
Asus launched another Eee PC, and London got an interactive crime map, despite concerns the mashup will hit housing prices.
Dan Kaminsky, the guy who discovered the DNS vulnerability, warned that it's going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better.
And Transport for London terminates the Oyster card contract but over money, not the previous month's errors, it said.
September
It's a big month for mobile. And cloud computing. And browsers.
Nokia started to ship its shiny new N96 and RIM's BlackBerry Bold arrived in the UK. But the device that got the rumour mill churning was the first phone to use Google's Android system, which the web firm finally acknowledged would be an HTC device.
Ahead of VMware's annual virtualisation conference, Microsoft announced it too will set its hyper visor free. At VMworld 2008, the virtualisation firm pushed a massive cloud computing campaign, including a cloud OS for data centres.
Google surprised this month with the launch of a beta version of its very own browser Chrome. Also this month, Google and Yahoo decide to go ahead with their tie-up, after competition concerns nearly scuppered it.
The economy continues to wreak havoc on IT jobs, as HP slashes 25,000 jobs. The government actually punished someone for losing data in this case, dropping PA Consulting from a 1.5 million contract. In other public sector news, the government showed off images of the first ID cards.
Vint Cerf, the father of the internet' warned that we're starting to run out of domain names.
And the Large Hadron Collider started up at CERN in Geneva and we didn't all die, contrary to the unfounded concerns of some. The joy doesn't last long, as hackers take down part of the LHC information network, and a leak halts the experiment.
