Tech Talk / By Martha Knight

This is the time for a look-back at tech that made news, tech developments that were significant and memorable, in the year just ended. Which ones spring to your mind?

Nothing was bloviated about more than the wretched showing of the HealthCare.gov site. It just wasn’t ready for launch. It was such a mess that it hampered the launch of the program itself—the mission critical part of the Affordable Care Act, the health insurance marketplaces.

The buggy, glitchy, crash site repelled visitors and customers by the millions. Whether they were visiting the site to check out what was available, or seriously trying to find health care coverage and enroll in it (buy health insurance), huge numbers failed in their mission, through no fault of their own. Some web development pros were called in, and they have done major surgery and other procedures aimed at saving HealthCare.gov and the program it serves. Things are much better now, but not perfect. And the embarrassment continues to glow like the permanent blush of a rosacea rash.

Edward Snowden’s piercing whistle blat seems like a major political story, but, in addition, it is a monumental revelation concerning spycraft technology. The U.S. NSA, National Security Agency, has been spying on us, this country’s citizens, and other inhabitants, and other countries’ inhabitants and even heads of state, for years, without telling us or even the Congress.

We know this now because Snowden, a former NSA contractor, has released proof of that, as found in an enormous cache of documents. Major telecom and internet communications companies have been involved in this massive invasion of our privacy.

Those companies haven’t liked it but felt helpless to speak up. As I write this, new revelations tell us the companies have known about only some of how their own security provisions have been defeated. Now they are beginning to complain.

Meanwhile, courts are batting the legality and constitutionality of the NSA’s wholesale domestic spying, from one court to another. In the past week  NSA practices have been possibly unconstitutional, then legal but not necessarily desirable, then legal but regrettable but probably necessary.

Steve Ballmer announced that he would leave Microsoft this coming August or sooner. He has overseen cataclysmic shifts in the company since becoming CEO in 2000, succeeding Bill Gates.

The company went from being a software giant known for the Windows operating system and Office suites to one active in data centers, a search engine, internet use, cloud-based applications and game systems. Still, MS has been outperformed by Apple. The next CEO will have to lead the reimagining of the company into a major player in device and service products.

There was plenty of reporting about Bitcoin, but that doesn’t mean it is well understood. Bitcoin is a crypto currency, a peer-to-peer system for financial transactions, devised by Satoshi Makamoto (a nom-de-plume) in 2009. Bitcoins are units of digital currency.

An individual Bitcoin is worth about $1,200 last time I looked. But millibitcoins, or MilliBITs, are worth one-one thousandth of that, or $1.20. The value of Bitcoins is so volatile it can change $500 each, overnight. France has become leery of the cybermoney, and China is banning its use, and India seems to be clamping down.

A few years ago President Barack Obama carried his BlackBerry everywhere. The ubiquitous devices were what we called our smartphones, generically. At least, that’s what the corporate world had adopted and was issuing to execs and road warriors by the millions.

But even its devoted users have abandoned the incredible shrinking company and its services. Its days dwindle down to a precious few, even though there’s a touchscreen BlackBerry Z10.

Apple and Android smartphones have become enormously popular, and have undergone cycle after cycle of development, while BlackBerry was cutting 4,500 workers and losing close to a $1 billion every quarter. The company tried to go private and sell itself to Fairfax Financial Holdings, but Fairfax couldn’t raise the capital for an actual buyout. Instead, Fairfax put together a consortium that loaned the company some operating cash. As of now BlackBerry’s survival as a company is seen as doubtful.

Google Glass was unveiled late in 2012. There were other “wearables,” from wrist-computers to shirts with connectivity, but the one that caught the technophiles’ fancy was Glass. Eager would-be first-wave adopters paid $1,500 for prototypes.

Head-mounted as glasses with a computer display mounted on the frames, the Explorer version responds to voice commands. Facial recognition is an app or feature, and this has given rise to privacy issues which await court rulings. Google says facial recognition will not be enabled in the Glass models produced and marketed in 2014. Another issue is whether users may drive while wearing the device.

Dell went private again, Yahoo bought Tumblr for $1.1 billion and jumped into the microblogging and social networking biz with both feet, Twitter issued an IPO in November, and Samsung came out with that Galaxy Gear watch.

All in all, 2013 was a year of exciting tech innovations. What will 2014 bring?