That was then, what happened next?

Steve Jobs appeared in our launch issue as interim Apple chief executive, outlining the features in the company’s forthcoming Mac OS X operating system.

Jobs, who 10 years on is chief executive of Apple, is possibly a man of very little ambition since he has shown no desire to change jobs at all. At least he dropped the “interim” – that must save some money if Steve pays for his business cards by the word.

Steve’s dress sense over the years has mirrored the lack of changes in his job status, with the great man invariably choosing to wear either a long-sleeve black T-shirt, or a short-sleeve black T-shirt. Still, when you’re the visionary genius behind such fashionable gadgets as the iPhone, you can get away with dressing like a member of a Curiousity Killed the Cat tribute band.

Back when IT Week started, Paul Maritz was vice president for platforms and applications at Microsoft. He was interviewed in the launch issue about the software giant’s desktop and server strategies, and a forthcoming upgrade to Office.

Ten years on, he hit the headlines in February 2008 when he sold Pi, the company he founded in 2003, to EMC. Maritz is now president and general manager of the new Cloud Infrastructure and Services Division at the storage giant. Sounds like a vapour unit to us, though.

Eric Schmidt had been chief executive at Novell for just over a year when he featured in the launch issue to discuss his achievements so far.

Now, after what might have seemed a brave move at the time, he is the chairman and chief executive of Google and a member of the board at Apple. So, we expect there has been little evidence of belt tightening in the Schmidt household.

We also covered plans to combat spam by the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI). Some readers may be scratching their heads and wondering what the DTI is. Yes, it’s the very same government agency that in 2005 re-branded briefly as the Department for Productivity, Energy and Industry, or DPEI. Very briefly, in fact: the new name lasted just four days.

The DTI’s £30,000 rebranding got such a hostile reception that the government performed a swift U-turn and announced it would stick with the old name. Then two years later it splashed out again to rechristen the agency the Department for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform – or Berr.

We round off our trip down memory lane with the Royal Mail. Back in 1998, it launched a service called RelayOne that let users turn email into printed mail that could then be delivered in the post. The service was slow, expensive, and not exactly ground-breaking. In fact, this “email-to-letterbox solution” never took off and was soon axed. “RelayOne was only handling 400 items a month and it was not commercially viable,” a rather shame-faced Royal Mail admitted at the time.

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