We describe the establishment and development of Icelandic language technology since its very beginning ten years ago. The ground was laid with a report from a committee appointed by the Minister of Education, Science and Culture in 1998. In this report, which was delivered in the spring of 1999, the committee proposed several actions to establish Icelandic language technology. This paper reviews the concrete tasks that the committee listed as important and their current status. It is shown that even though we still have a long way to go to reach all the goals set in the report, good progress has been made in most of the tasks. Icelandic participation in Nordic cooperation on language technology has been vital in this respect. In the final part of the paper, we speculate on the cost of Icelandic language technology and the future prospects of a small language like Icelandic in the age of information technology.