38 THE POWER OF POSSIBILITY NISC | 50 YEARS OF INNOVATION AND MEMBER SERVICE It was an exciting time to be an information technology company — as long as you weren’t left behind by the trans- formational changes. NCDC and CADP tried to keep costs down for their Members, but they faced pressure to adapt to the new advances. “[Members] were always frustrated that we weren’t able to move faster in terms of our development, but we just didn’t have the resources. We were operating with a very small margin,” says Vern Dosch, who was then General Manager of NCDC. Meanwhile, when telecoms provided new services, they The first personal computers emerged in the 1970s as hobbyists’ toys, but by 1984, PCs were outselling mainframes. In 1990, a British computer scientist created the World Wide Web, and in 1992, University of Illinois students and researchers designed the first widely used web browser. Within a few years, in 1995, 18 million Americans were online, where they could witness the launch of Amazon, Yahoo!, eBay and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer™ and the creation of Java™ programming, which allowed for motion, not just static text, on the internet. Vern Dosch, NCDC General Manager, and Gary Hobson, CADP General Manager, sign consolidation documents in 2000, creating NISC. continued from page 36