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It arrives in a glistening Shrek-green carapace, and breaks the mould of the boring beige box forever. The new £999 Apple iMac enthuses the most cynical PC aficionado about the way computers look as much as how they work, and the heresy is there's no floppy drive. No sooner have we been seduced by its charms than Apple enslaves us with wireless networking. The Apple AirPort router provokes PC users to demand the same privileges, and WiFi hotspots begin to invade airports, stations and cafés.

Windows 98 force-feeds Internet Explorer and networking into our lives in a bid to shut out other software companies from the market. The web has arrived on a mass scale. BT begins to roll out broadband, turbo-charging download speeds, getting us all so excited we fail to notice that it is charging us twice for using the same antique copper wires. The Handspring Visor kicks off the smartphone market with full PDA and mobile phone functions thanks to the VisorPhone add-on, which clips into the springboard slot in any Visor PDA.

The Rio PMP3000 becomes the first commercial MP3 player, liberating compressed audio files from our computer hard disks into our numb skulls. Intel's 333MHz Pentium II processor is faster and cooler than its forerunners - until the AMD K6-III clocks in at 400MHz, cramming 23 million transistors into its guts. Intel escalates the chip challenge with the Pentium III. Apple wades in by offering the PowerMac with a 500MHz option, the first personal computer capable of over one billion floating-point operations per second. AMD retaliates with the Athlon 750MHz, followed by a 1GHz chip. Stop! Stop! But, of course, it never stops.

When Windows 2000 is launched, it is claimed to be more reliable than 95, 98 and NT. When Windows XP is launched, it is claimed to cure interminable compatibility problems, but that's because so much time has passed since the problems cropped up that most of the incompatible software is now obsolete.

The success of Microsoft's Xbox is a genuine milestone, allowing internet connection for real-time multiplayer games. The fact it costs $299 (around £150) in the US, and almost double that at £299 in the UK, seems unfair.

The new millennium heralds a spate of ludicrous law suits, including BT's claim to the rights to all hyperlinks, Amazon's claim to have patented one-click ordering, and Maz Technology's claim to own the patent for the encryption of any document. They are all laughed out of court. Meanwhile, Microsoft considers paying over a billion dollars to settle class action lawsuits brought by Californian residents, who claim the company has abused its market position and overcharged for its software. Surely this sort of unpleasantness will be resolved quickly?

1 1998-2002: The way we were Our publicity material says that "Our office is slap bang in the heart of the West End. We're just a stone's throw away from Charlotte Street and its many bars and restaurants, five minutes from Oxford Street and Soho, and right in the hub of London's media land." We're obviously even prouder of our new premises than we were of the last place. As the boss so eloquently puts it, "Dennis is like a family - we're a very sociable company - and you can feel it in the atmosphere the minute you walk through the door and see the fish tank. It continues right up through the modern, bright and vibrant offices where the majority of our magazines are made." That's the atmosphere and not the fish tank, of course. As we laugh in the face of the phantom Millennium Bug, our aggressive shiny pages are replaced by yummy, silky paper that is altogether more eco-friendly and pleasant on the eyeball. To compensate, we beef up the packaging and our covers are now robust enough to withstand all the crystal-cased goodies we present to our readers. In the technical annexe, we have a group of dedicated disc editors who make sure that those 11 billion bits of free clip art really are essential. Mobile computing allows us to contribute on the hoof, and contributors no longer feel the need to phone up and check if emails and attachments have arrived safely. It's a workplace revolution, not just for us but for the entire nation. The bulk of each issue is dominated by what we still call IBM compatibles, although we also feature four dedicated sections catering for Acorn, Amiga, Atari and Macintosh. Our news and reviews now embrace a much wider range of products and services, as new buzzwords grab the public interest. DVDs, scanners, laptops, camcorders, flat-panel displays, wireless networks - it feels like the future has arrived.