They say that anything you post to the Internet can live on forever. For Lenna it turned out to be true, even in that pre-Web age. Sawchuck's digitized photo went on to become one of the stock images used in compression research, having now appeared in countless papers on the subject.

Many more women have since followed in Lenna's footsteps, proving the rule: Give computer geeks a public network and before you know it they'll fill it with smut.

The Web Gets out of Synch
Reading e-mail on the Web sucks; that was Microsoft's judgment in 2000, back when the Web was a page-based medium. Each HTTP request meant a roundtrip to the server that refreshed the entire page, which was no good for high-activity applications like e-mail clients. So, to make Outlook Web Access 2000 more usable, Microsoft developers created a way for browsers to communicate with Web servers, by loading small amounts of data asynchronously.

Surprisingly, the idea stuck. Despite a troubled history with Internet Explorer, the Mozilla Project built similar functionality into Mozilla 1.0 in 2002, calling it XMLHttpRequest. The floodgates were opened, and a new way of coding for the Web was born.

It's hard to believe that Facebook, GMail, Google Maps, and countless other Ajax-enabled sites owe their existence to Microsoft's lead. But it's a good thing they did; if they had waited for the W3C to standardize XMLHttpRequest, they would still be waiting today.

Linux Staves Off SCO
In 2003, a black cloud had descended over open source's poster child. The SCO Group, led by new CEO Darl McBride, claimed ownership of key portions of the Linux kernel. Cautious Linux customers were warned to pay license fees to SCO, lest they find themselves on the wrong end of a copyright-infringement lawsuit.

But SCO had underestimated Linux's importance to the enterprise, and particularly to IBM. Why SCO thought it could outmatch Big Blue's lawyers (or its deep pockets) is anyone's guess. What matters is the outcome. One by one, IBM's lawyers knocked down SCO's arguments, establishing Linux's legitimacy as a matter of court record.

As the lawsuits lumbered on, McBride and company were ridiculed, then bankrupted. Meanwhile, the Linux business boomed. With allies such as Computer Associates, IBM, Novell, and Red Hat willing to take up its defense, the open source OS was clearly here to stay. Ironically, the lawsuit that was meant to be the death blow for Linux may have succeeded only in ushering in its golden age.