Microsoft, Mahir and money, money, money

Bye-bye beige box

Tangerine? Blueberry? What hue smells best to you? This was the year of color computing. Yeah, we know the iMac hit shelves in 1998, but it was in 1999 that the rest of the market caught on to Apple's ingenuity and began to redefine the computer. The market was thick with iMac copycats -- like the all-in-one computer and monitor in bright hues from eMachines and Future Power that prompted lawsuits from Apple. But even staid corporate computer providers IBM and Dell were touched by the rainbow: IBM turned out an i Series of the ThinkPad, with a choice of seven cover colors. Dell did it up with the Web PC -- a sleek two-tone machine with round edges.

While geeks went nuts for the slim silver Sony Vaio, computer makers plied kids with pink Barbie computers and blue Hot Wheels computers. Of course, we also saw heaps of Nokia's 5100 series cell phones in lime green, cherry red and day-glo orange; and just as 1999 was coming to a close, we got a peek at the Handspring Visor, a handheld organizer running the Palm OS, in a host of vibrantly colored translucent cases. We love the colors and groovy shapes. Now we want to know, what's up with the promise of computer appliances?

Mahir mania

If you don't know who Mahir is, you must have had your head under a rock for most of November. The home page of the Turkish Stud was the oddest Net phenomenon of the year, as millions flocked to this anonymous accordion player's Web site to giggle at pronouncements that he "likes sex" and wants to "invitate" women to stay at his home in Izmir, Turkey. It was eventually revealed that the site had been created by an anonymous prankster, but no one seemed to mind, not even the ping-pong-playing Mahir. At last check, Mahir had made appearances in Time and People and was making a two-week tour of the United States, compliments of an Internet company, of course. While his fan pages multiplied like rabbits, his Web site now serves as a pulpit advocating world peace.

Worlds of elves and ogres

Last year, Ultima held the title of most innovative online role-playing game; this year, bored gamers were auctioning off their Ultima characters on eBay -- sometimes for thousands of dollars -- and buying EverQuest instead. By the end of the summer, Sony had convinced hundreds of thousands of players to spend their free time cavorting about as elves and druids in the online land of Everquest. Everquest, in turn, is now being challenged by the release of Asheron's Call, Microsoft's equally massive world of knights and ogres.

Meanwhile, Sega returned from near defeat in the console wars with the release of its own, network-capable game machine. The Dreamcast, which boasts fancy128-bit graphics and an internal modem, was subject of one of the most hyped product launches in history, including a $100 million marketing campaign. The money was apparently well-spent: Barely two months after launch, Sega had already sold a million units, putting it in good shape to compete against the upcoming next-generation consoles from Sony and Nintendo.

Gamers under fire

Before we knew much of anything about what happened at Columbine High School, we learned that killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were avid gamers -- fans of Quake and Doom. This, and a Web site left behind by Harris, sent the media into paranoid paroxysms about how the Internet and video games were breeding violence in America. The Clinton administration jumped in with a summit on teens and violence, dissecting activities like gaming to find their correlation to a plague of playground massacres, even as the gaming community rushed to defend its play. Could the millions of gamers happily shooting it out with animated foes and blowing them to pixelated smithereens really be mass murderers in waiting? they asked. Isn't it possible that blowing off steam through these violent fantasies could actually be good for you?

The debate raged on, but when dial-a-quote "experts" linked violent games to violence, we found that studies didn't back them up. A few rueful gamers reconsidered their love of killsport games, and some game makers toyed with self-regulation. But by year's end -- and after a spate of killings by people who may never have had their trigger finger on a joystick -- the political pressure on gamers seems to have dissipated into the same thin air that brought on the initial panic.

Apocalypse now?

We heard hardly a peep from the Chicken Littles of the world, crying about the sky falling and investing in survival gear to greet the year 2000. That was last year's trend. Instead, in 1999's age of "money money money," we were treated to the smug chuckles of Y2K profiteers, eagerly anticipating a global systems meltdown. Their plan? Convert all your stock and real estate to cash before New Year's Eve, then sit back with a little bubbly and toast the Millennium Bug as it wreaks havoc on power grids and incapacitates manufacturing systems. Once the Fortune 500 has been properly bound and gagged by the ensuing madness and investors have run screaming from the market, you can leisurely pick through the blue-chip stocks going for bargain-basement prices. Consider yourself charitable, they say, when you hand over a couple of thousand greenbacks for an Atherton, Calif., mansion; that ex-millionaire has nothing to eat but the memory of a luscious electronic stock portfolio, converted into a jumble of ones and zeros.

Those more intimately familiar with the systems at risk profess more confidence. Still, scads of programmers and tech execs --including Microsoft's Steve Ballmer and Cisco's John Chambers -- promise to ring in the new year at the office, just in case they're wrong when they say their systems are ready for Y2K. The cops will be on red alert too, to defend an otherwise functional world from kooks who might try to hasten the apocalypse. Most folks, however, say they'll be home for the holiday -- maybe even reading a Y2K romance novel by the fire.

• View blog reactions