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2004 |
50 anniversary of the biggest US H-bomb test at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific. US first ground based missle interceptors due to be in place. Target deadline for the erication of polio. The Queen Mary 2 will be launched in Southampton. It will be 3 1/2 times as long as (the Tower of) Big Ben. The worlds last transcontinental railway due to open in Australia. Galileio, a global navigation satellite due for launch. It is a European & Chinese project. Sales of cameras on phones in the US set to exceed the combined sale of digital cameras and film cameras. NASA's robot Genesis due to return to earth with samples of the solar wind. |
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10 additional countries join the EU. Olympic games in Athens. South Africa celebrates 10 anniversary of the end of apartheid. Iraq celebrates a new national day. |
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NASA lost contact with Pioneer 10. Galileo destructs, After traversing almost three billion miles and surveying Jupiter WMAP satellite produces a portrait of the early universe. Space shuttle Colombia explodes. Voyager 1 is now further away from earth than any other man-made object - possibly having reached the end of the solar system. 160,000 year old skulls found. They are the oldest near-human remains found. |
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The first official Swiss online election takes place. .af is registered to Afghanistan. |
Largest pre-war anti-war protests in history. USA invades Iraq. Hutton Inquiry in the UK regarding the Iraq War & David Kelly. Global SARS alert. |
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Hormone therapy is shown to be more damaging the beneficial for healthy women. 7 million year old fossils found in Africa. |
On January 4, the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center becomes Palo Alto Research Center Incorporated, an independent company. Ted Nelson get a Ph.D. from Keio University, in Media and Governance. Thesis: "Philosophy of Hypertext." |
Internet2 now has 200 university, 60 corporate, and 40 affiliate members. aero, .name & .coop begins resolving. Internet radio stations protest proposed song royalty rate increases. Spain web protest against law requiring all commercial Web sites to register with the government. A new US law creates a kids-safe "dot-kids" domain (kids.us) to be implemented in 2003 . The FBI teams up with Lycos to disseminate virtual wanted posts across the Web portal's properties. |
USA invades Afghanistan. Euro introduced. Corporate scandals: |
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Sony announces a porting of Linux to the PlayStation 2. |
Microsoft releases Office X, the porting of the Office suite to MacOS X - which is, ultimately, a Unix variant. Microsoft releases Windows XP (aka Windows NT 5.1) Features: Tons of eye candy. Apple releases the G4 Titanium PowerBook. Apple introduces the iPod, the first portable music player to pack 1,000 songs in a pocket-sized enclosure. |
The first live distributed musical "The Technophobe & The Madman" over Internet2 networks debuts. VeriSign extends its multilingual domain test bed. Forwarding email in Australia becomes illegal. High schools in five states become the first to gain Internet2 access. Napster becomes a subscription service. First treaty addressing criminal offenses committed over the Internet. Code Red worm and Sircam virus. A fire in a train tunnel disrupts Internet traffic. .biz and .info museum begins resolving. First uncompressed real-time gigabit HDTV transmission across a wide-area IP network takes place on Internet2. .us domain operational responsibility assumed by NeuStar. Viruses: Code Red, Nimda, SirCam, BadTrans. Emerging Technologies: Grid Computing, P2P. |
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Major commercial hardware vendors (Compaq, IBM, Dell, SGI, Fujitsu) begin to sell desktop and laptop computers with Linux pre-installed. Sun releases Solaris 8 sources under the Foundation Source code license. Sun announces that it will release the source code for its Star Office suite. SGI sells Cray to Tera Computer. |
Apple announces Aqua, the new look for the MacOS X client, based on FreeBSD and Mach microkernel. PlayStation 2 released. Microsoft X-Box prototype shown at SIGGRAPH 2000. Microsoft Windows 2000 (AKA Windows NT 5) becomes available in stores. Features: The Internet Explorer web browser application finally takes over the Windows NT UI. The Millennium Bug. Few problems are encountered during the year rollover. Experts warned about that computers programmed in the 1990 and 1970s might recognize the year 2000 as 1900, which could cause failures. The financial services spent an estimated $9 billion to fix the problem. |
72.4 million computers on the Internet. Web size estimates by NEC-RI and Inktomi surpass 1 billion indexable pages. The US timekeeper ( USNO ) and a few other time services around the world report the new year as 19100 on 1 Jan. Internet2 backbone network deploys IPv6. Various domain name hijackings took place in late May and early June, including internet.com, bali.com, and web.net. French court rules Yahoo! must block French users from accessing hate memorabilia. Hyped technologies:ASP, Napster Emerging Technologies: Wireless devices, IPv6 Viruses: Love Letter.A massive denial of service attack is launched against major web sites, including Yahoo, Amazon, and eBay. Lawsuits:Napster, DeCSS. |
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Microsoft is ruled of monopoly in the market for personal computers. David Evans dies at age 74. |
Apple releases Mac OS X, based on Mach, and begins the Darwin project.OS X is a Unix based OS with their Macintosh GUI. RISCOS Ltd releases RISC OS 4 for RiscPC, A7000 or A7000+ machines. |
First Internet Bank of Indiana , the first full-service bank available only on the Net. IBM becomes the first Corporate partner to be approved for Internet2 access. European Parliament proposes banning the caching of Web pages by ISPs. US State Court rules that domain names are property that may be garnished. MCI/Worldcom, the vBNS provider for NSF, begins upgrading the US backbone to 2.5GBps A forged Web page made to look like a Bloomberg financial news story raised shares of a small technology company by 31%. First large-scale Cyberwar takes place simultaneously with the war in Serbia/Kosovo Abilene, the Internet2 network, reaches across the Atlantic and connects to NORDUnet and SURFnet The Web becomes the focal point of British politics as a list of MI6 agents is released on a UK Web site. Though forced to remove the list from the site, it was too late as the list had already been replicated across the Net. Activists Net-wide target the world's financial centers on 18 June, timed to coincide with the G8 Summit. Little actual impact is reported. DoD issues a memo requiring all US military systems to connect via NIPRNET, and not directly to the Internet by 15 Dec 1999. ISOC approves the formation of the Internet Societal Task Force (ISTF). Vint Cerf serves as first chair Free computers are all the rage (as long as you sign a long term contract for Net service). business.com is sold for US$7.5million (it was purchased in 1997 for US$150,000 Viruses: Melissa, ExploreZip. .ps is registered to Palestine (11 Oct) Internet access becomes available to the Saudi Arabian (.sa) public in January. Somalia gets its first ISP - Olympic Computer. |
The Euro the new European currency. Fear of Y2K. JFK Jr. dies in plane accident. Killing spree at Columbine High School. NATO Attacks Serbia. Panama Canal returns to Panama. |
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Viagra on the Market. India and Pakistan test nuclear weapons. Observations reveal that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, showing that there must be some antigravity force, referd to as dark energy. First two modules of the International Space Station joined. First human embryonic stem cells grown artificially. |
Compaq buys DEC. The Open Source movement get momentum. The press discovers Linux and the Open Source movement. Torvalds appears on Forbes. Oracle, Informix, IBM, Compaq and others announce support for Linux. Netscape goes open source with the name Mozilla. SGI and Microsoft form partnership to develop APIs; SGI will develop NT-based PCs. Compaq pays US$3.3million for altavista.com. |
MPEG-4 standard announced. XML standard introduced. |
Web size estimates range between 275 (Digital) and 320 (NEC) million pages for 1Q. Network Solutions registers its 2 millionth domain on 4 May. US Depart of Commerce (DoC) releases the Green Paper outlining its plan to privatize DNS on 30 January. Companies rush to Turkmenistan NIC in order to register their name under the .tm domain. Internet users get to be judges in a performance by 12 world champion ice skaters on 27 March, marking the first time a television sport show's outcome is determined by its viewers. Electronic postal stamps become a reality, with the US Postal Service allowing stamps to be purchased and downloaded for printing from the Web. Canada kicks off CA*net 3, the first national optical internet. ABCNews.com accidentally posts test US election returns one day early. San Francisco sites without off-city mirrors go offline as the city blacks out on 8 December. Chinese government puts Lin Hai on trial for "inciting the overthrow of state power" for providing 30,000 email addresses to a US Internet magazine. He is later sentenced to two years in jail. Open source software comes of age. Bandwidth Generators: Winter Olympics, World Cup, Starr Report, Glenn space launch. Hyped technologies:E-Commerce, E-Auctions, Portals. Emerging Technologies: E-Trade, XML, Intrusion Detection. |
U.S. President Clinton impeached. 'Titanic' becomes the largest grossing motion picture in US history. |
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Pathfinder sends back images of Mars. Scientists Clone sheep. Tallest buildings in the world built in Kuala Lumpur. DVD technology unveiled. |
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Apple announces the resignation of Gil Amelio. Steve Jobs takes on expanded role and later becomes interim CEO. Apple buys NexT. Apple cancels of the Newton spin-off. Newton discontinued several months later. The Apple Store launched and is a runaway success, and within a week was the third-largest eCommerce site on the web. The Future of Information by Ted Nelson. 1997. Published in Japan in one special edition. |
Jobs announces two new Apple machines: the PowerMac G3, and the PowerBook G3. Mac OS 8 is finally released. Selling 1.25 million copies in less than 2 weeks, it becomes the best-selling software in that period. iMac launched. Linux becomes the operating system of choice of ISP. Windows NT share in industry is arising, at the expense of UNIX. |
101,803 Name Servers in whois database. 2000th RFC : "Internet Official Protocol Standards" 71,618 mailing lists registered at Liszt , a mailing list directory. In protest of the DNS monopoly, AlterNIC's owner, Eugene Kashpureff, hacks DNS so users going to www.internic.net end up at www.alternic.net Domain name business.com sold for US$150,000 Early in the morning of 17 July, human error at Network Solutions causes the DNS table for .com and .net domains to become corrupted, making millions of systems unreachable. Hyped technologies:Push, Multicasting |
British Au Pair on trial for murder. Hale-Bopp comet visible. Hong Kong returned to China. Princess Diana Dies in Car Crash |
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Pope John Paul II affirms evolution by natural selection. AIDS triple therapy cocktails are shown to be effective at halting the disease. It costs about $15 thousand a year. First succeessful clone; Dolly the sheep. |
Spindler was asked to resign as CEO and was replaced by Gil Amelio, the former president of National Semiconductor. Apple announces that it would be acquiring NeXT, and that Steve Jobs would be returning to the fold. Newton department was spun off into a wholly-owned subsidy, Newton, Inc. ARPA becomes DARPA. US telecommunication companies wants to ban IP Telephony. Malaysian Prime Minister Mohamad, PLO Leader Arafat, and Phillipine President Ramos meet for 10 minutes in an online chat session. The controversial US Communications Decency Act becomes law in the US. |
Linux 2.0 is released. Quake hits game market. New Deal releases New Deal Office 2.5, which was formerly PC-GEOS. IBM Releases OS/2 Warp 4 with a significant facelift for the Workplace Shell. Microsoft releases Windows NT 4.0 with the same user interface as Windows 95. |
9,272 organizations find themselves unlisted after the InterNIC drops their name service due to non-payment. Various ISPs suffer extended service outages. Domain name tv.com sold to CNET for US$15,000 MCI upgrades Internet backbone speed from 155Mbps to 622Mbps. 7 new generic Top Level Domains announced. A malicious cancelbot is released on USENET wiping out more than 25,000 messages The WWW browser war, fought primarily between Netscape and Microsoft, has rushed in a new age in software development, whereby new releases are made quarterly with the help of Internet users eager to test upcoming (beta) versions. List of restrictions on Internet use. Hyped technologies:Search engines, JAVA, Internet Phone Emerging Technologies: Virtual environments (VRML), Collaborative tools, Internet appliance (Network Computer). List of Country domains registered. 33.6 kbps modems & 56 kbps modems become available. |
Mad Cow Disease hits Britain. Two Royal divorces. Unabomber arrested. |
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DVD announced as an industry standard. First planet discovered in another solar system. The genome of H. Ifluenzae is sequenced. This is the first baterial genome to be decoded. |
Microsoft reports that the employee headcount totals 17,801 people. Microsoft reports revenues of $2.02 billion for the first quarter of fiscal year 1996 which ended September 30, 1995. The net income for this time was $499 million dollars. Microsoft and NBC combine to enter a 50:50 partnership to create two new businesses. One of them is a 24 hour news and informatoin cable television chanel. The other is an interactive on-line news service distributed on MSN. DreamWorks SKG founded by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen. DreamWorks SKG and Microsoft form DreamWorks Interactive. Wavefront and Alias merge. |
Windows 95 released. It beats old records, selling over 1 million copies in the first 4 days. Microsoft Bob for Windows 95 announced. The Microsoft Network, MSN counts more than 525,000 members in its first three months of service. On a related topic, Microsoft also announced the release of the final version of Microsoft Internet Explorer 2.0 for Windows 95. Be introduced BeOS at Agenda 96. The first version was designed to run on a custom multiprocessor system known as the "BeBox". Later made available for Power PC and Intel systems. |
NSFNET reverts back to a research network . Main US backbone traffic now routed through interconnected network providers. Iran's first commercial ISP, comes online. Hong Kong police disconnect all but one of the colony's Internet providers for failure to obtain a license. Sun launches JAVA. RealAudio, an audio streaming technology, lets the Net hear in near real-time Radio HK, the first commercial 24 hr., Internet-only radio station starts broadcasting WWW surpasses ftp-data in March as the service with greatest traffic on NSFNet based on packet count, and in April based on byte count. Traditional dial-up systems begin to provide Internet access. Registration of domain names is no longer free. The Vatican comes on-line. vatican.va First official Internet wiretap. Operation Home Front connects, for the first time, soldiers in the field with their families back home via the Internet. First person declared a munition. Hyped technologies:WWW, Search engines. Emerging Technologies: Mobile code (JAVA, JAVAscript), Virtual environments (VRML), Collaborative tools. List of Country domains registered. Sony PlayStation introduced. Internet Explorer 2.0. |
Ebola Virus Spreads in Zaire. Gas Attack in Tokyo Subway. Oklahoma City bombing. Yitzhak Rabin assassinated. Diplomatic relationships are fully normalized between Vietnam and the US, one year after the end of the US embargo. Pixar Inc. produces the hit film 'Toy Story.' |
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Channel Tunnel opens, connecting Britain and France. HDTV standard for transmission adopted in US. Hubble Space Telescope confirms existence of a black hole. Fermat's last theorem sloved. |
Marc Andreessen and colleagues leave NCSA to form "Mosaic Communications Corp" (later Netscape) with Jim Clark. release 1st beta. RedHat is founded. MIT/CERN agreement to start W3 Organisation is announced by Bangemann in Boston. World Wide Web Consortium founded. SGI and Nintendo team up for Nintendo 64 games console. |
Apple announces the PowerMac family, the first Macs to be based on the PowerPC chip. Linux 1.0 is released. Iomaga Zip drive introduced. Doom hits game market. Facetracker used by SimmGraphics to animate facial expressions for Super Mario. QNX Software Systems releases the first embeddable microkernel windowing system, the Photon microGUI. |
NSFNET traffic passes 10 trillion bytes/month. WWW edges out telnet to become 2nd most popular service on the Net behind ftp-data. ARPANET/Internet celebrates 25th anniversary Communities begin to be wired up directly to the Internet. US Senate and House provide information servers. Shopping malls arrive on the Internet. First cyberstation, RT-FM, broadcasts from Interop in Las Vegas. Arizona law firm of Canter & Siegel "spams" the Internet with email advertising green card lottery services; Net citizens flame back. You can now order pizza from the Hut online. Japanese Prime Minister on-line. UK's HM Treasury on-line. hm-treasury.gov.uk First Virtual, the first cyberbank, open up for business Radio stations start rebroadcasting round the clock on the Net. List of countries connected to NSF. O'Reilly, Spry, etc announce "Internet in a box" product to bring the Web into homes. 28.8 kbps modems are the norm. |
Nelson Mandela elected President of South Africa. O.J. Simpson arrested for double murder. Rwandan Genocide begins. ILM earns Oscar for special effects for 'Jurassic Park'. |
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The supercollider is cancelled. Hubble repaired. |
Sculley leaves Apple, replaced by Michael Spindler. Fortune magazine names Microsoft, "The Most Innvoative Company." DARPA becomes ARPA. Linux is ported to non-Intel platforms (MIPS, Alpha,...). FreeBSD and NetBSD are released, under the BSD licence. Digital Domain founded by James Cameron, Stan Winston, and Scott Ross. After years of struggle and $250 million, Next shuts down its hardware division. However, its operating system flourishes. Sculley resigns as Apple's CEO. |
Apple introcuces the first mass-market PDA Newton, (and launches the name PDA- Personal Digital Assistant). Microsoft ships Encarta. The first multimedia encyclopedia designed for a computer. Microsoft introduced MS-DOS 6.0 Upgrade. Microsoft releases the first version of Windows NT. Microsoft releases the improved Mouse 2.0. Word celebrates its 10th aniversary. Figures show that there are more than 10 million Word users worldwide. People licensed to the Windows opperating system now totals more than 25 million users. Sample Pro DV editing suite setp for the time includes 64MB RAM. Disk array and compression codecs allow for nonlinear editing and full motion video. Myst released and in 1998, it became the top selling game of all time. For the first time, Hypermedia encyclopedias sell more copies than print encyclopedias . |
Several Web broswers available. Around 50 known HTTP servers. WWW presented at Online Publishing 93 , Pittsburgh. Robert Cailliau gets go-ahead from CERN management to organise the First International WWW Conference at CERN. US White House comes on-line whitehouse.gov/ Worms of a new kind find their way around the Net. Internet Talk Radio begins broadcasting. United Nations (UN) comes on-line. US National Information Infrastructure Act. Businesses and media begin taking notice of the Internet. RFC 1437: The Extension of MIME Content-Types to a New Medium. |
Cult Compound in Waco, Texas assaulted World Trade Center bombed. 'Jurassic Park' - ILM and Steven Spielberg 'Babylon 5' uses Amiga and Macintosh generated CGI. |
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Microsoft kicks off its first ever TV ad campaign. Microsoft approved a 3-for-2 stock split. AT&T sells its ownership interest in Sun. |
Microsoft Windows for Workgroups 3.1 ships. Microsoft ships Access Database for Windows. Apple introduces QuickTime. |
1.3 million computers on the Internet. Number of hosts breaks 1,000,000 Internet .Society (ISOC) is chartered (January). IAB reconstituted as the Internet Architecture Board and becomes part of the Internet Society. First MBONE audio multicast and video multicast. RIPE Network Coordination Center created to provide address registration and coordination services to the European Internet community. Veronica, a gopherspace search tool, is released by Univ of Nevada. World Bank comes on-line. The term "surfing the Internet" is coined by Jean Armour Polly. Zen and the Art of the Internet is published by Brendan Kehoe. List of countries connected to NSF. 14.4 kbps modems are introduced. |
Official end of the Cold War. Riots in LA after the Rodney King verdict. 'Lawnmower Man' |
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Microsoft purchases a 26 percent share of Dorling Kindersley, Ltd., a London-based publisher and international packager company. Cirque Corporation founded (trackpad/touchpad). Sun creates the SunSoft subsidiary and announces Solaris. A finnish student at the University of Helsinki, Linus Torvalds, learns of Minix, and writes a kernel based on it. Linux 0.01 goes on the net under GPL. Instantly, he started receiving patches and enhancements. Defense Data Network NIC contract awarded by DISA to Government Systems Inc. who takes over from SRI in May. US High Performance Computing Act (Gore) establishes the National Research and Education Network (NREN). |
Apple released its first generation of PowerBooks (laptops), which were an instant success. Microsoft announces new Excel 3.0 for Windows 3.0. It also announces Excel for Mac., expected to ship in a few months. |
NSF lifts restrictions on the commercial use of the Net. Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS), invented by Brewster Kahle, released by Thinking Machines Corporation. Gopher released by Paul Lindner and Mark McCahill from the Uni of Minnesota. World-Wide Web (WWW) released by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN . Paul Kunz installs first Web server outside of Europe, at SLAC. PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) released by Philip Zimmerman. NSFNET backbone upgraded to T3 (44.736Mbps). NSFNET traffic passes 1 trillion bytes/month and 10 billion packets/month Start of JANET IP Service (JIPS) which signaled the changeover from Coloured Book software to TCP/IP within the UK academic network. IP was initially 'tunneled' within X.25. RFC 1216: Gigabit Network Economics and Paradigm Shifts. |
Collapse of the Soviet Union. Operation Desert Storm. South Africa repeals apartheid laws. |
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To start its 15th anniversary celebration, Microsoft exceeds $1 billion dollars in sales, earning $1.18 billion for the year, becoming the first software company to exceed $1 billion in sales in a single fiscal year. Microsoft launches its largest, most expensive campaign in the company's history to date. It is for the Windows Computing Marketing Program. Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is founded by Mitch Kapor. |
Microsoft announces Windows 3.0. Motif is released by OSF. (UNIX). Commodore releases Amiga Workbench 2. PC-GEOS released by GeoWorks. |
The first GUI Web browser is developed by Tim Berners-Lee. Archie released by Peter Deutsch, Alan Emtage, and Bill Heelan at McGill. The World comes on-line (world.std.com), becoming the first commercial provider of Internet dial-up access. The first remotely operated machine to be hooked up to the Internet, the Internet Toaster by John Romkey, (controlled via SNMP) makes its debut at Interop. Oak programming language developed by Jim Gosling, later to become Java. ARPANET name ceases to exist. |
Lech Walesa becomes first President of Poland. Nelson Mandela freed. |
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NASA launches the Galileo space craft on a 14 year mission to survey the solar system. Voyager reaches Neptune. Malaria cure approved by the US FDA. It is too expensive to be used in poor countries, where 1 million dies each year. |
Tymshare acquired by McDonnell Douglas Corporation. Doug's house went up in flames while he and his family found themselves in their night attire standing among a crowd of onlookers. |
Autodesk funds Xanadu project development until 1992. UCLA sponsors the Act One symposium to celebrate ARPANET's 20th anniversary & its decommissioning. |
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Number of hosts breaks 100,000. First relays between a commercial electronic mail carrier and the Internet. Cuckoo's Egg by Clifford Stoll tells the real-life tale of a German cracker group who infiltrated numerous US facilities |
Berlin Wall falls. Exxon Valdez Spills Millions of Gallons of Oil on Coastline. Students Massacred in China's Tiananmen Square. |
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Microsoft and IBM expand on their partnership. They agree to do a joint project to develop a full range of systems software offerings for the 1990's. Apple sues Microsoft for copyright infringement for GUI. AT&T BUYS 20% OF SUN MICROSYSTEMS, and the battle lines are formed. IBM, DEC, HP, and others form Open Software Foundation (OSF) to compete with the AT&T/Sun alliance. They decide to use the AIX Kernel. UNIX International (UI) is formed in response to OSF as an international consortium of System V UNIX users to work closely with AT&T to promote open systems and influence future development. David Cutler leaves DEC and joins Microsoft (October 31) to develop Windows NT. |
PICT format introduced by Apple. Apple releases GS/OS, a 16-bit operating system with a Macintosh-like GUI for the Apple IIGS. IBM releases OS/2 1.10 Standard Edition (SE) which added a graphical user interface called Presentation Manager. (OS/2 1.0 was text mode only!) The 1.10 GUI was written by Microsoft and looked like Windows 2. NeXT computer selects Mach Kernel for its NeXTStep OS. The NeXT Computer is released for $6500. It includes a 25 MHz '30 processor, 8 MB RAM, 250 MB optical disk drive, math coprocessor, digital processor for real time sound, fax modem, and a 17" monitor. Microsoft begins evaluating the Mach Kernel. HP releases HP/UX. |
2 November - Internet worm burrows through the Net, affecting ~6,000 of the 60,000 hosts on the Internet. CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) formed. NSFNET backbone upgraded to T1 (1.544Mbps) CERFnet (California Education and Research Federation network) founded. Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) established. Internet Relay Chat (IRC) developed by Jarkko Oikarinen. |
Pan Am Flight 103 bombed over Lockerbie. U.S. downs Iranian airliner. |
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DNA first used to convict. Neutrinos from supernoa discovered underground. First anti-cholesterol drug. A living specimen of the Coelacanth is found, after hainvg been beledtobhve been extinct since the time of the dinosaurs. |
Microsoft purchases Forethought, Inc., an applications software company. which develops and markets PowerPoint, a top-selling presentation application. LucasArts formed. |
Apple introduces the Mac II, the first color Mac. Apple bundles HyperCard with every Macintosh, developed by Bill Atkinson. Microsoft ships Operating System/2 (OS/2). Microsoft announces Windows 2.0. .Microsoft ships its first CD-ROM application. Microsoft comes out with Excel for Windows. This is the first Windows-only program. GIF format introduced by CompuServe. VGA (Video Graphivs Array) invented by IBM. |
Number of hosts breaks 10,000 Number of BITNET hosts breaks 1,000 First TCP/IP Interoperability Conferenc, name changed in 1988 to INTEROP Email link established between Germany and China using CSNET protocols. Hypertext '87 Workshop held in North Carolina |
Klaus Barbie, the Nazi Butcher of Lyons, Sentenced to Life in Prison New York Stock Exchange "Black Monday". West German Pilot lands unchallenged in Russia's Red Square. 'Max Headroom' - computer-mediated live action figure. 'Willow' (Lucasfilm) popularizes morphing |
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Challenger Space Shuttle explodes. Chernobyl nuclear accident. U.S.S.R. Launches Mir Space Station. Voyager reaches Uranus. PCR invented for amplifying DNA sequences, (key technology for modern genetics). |
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Microsoft moves its "campus" headquarters to Redmond, Washington. Ericsson starts manufacturing mobile phones. Pixar purchased from Lucasfilm by Steve Jobs. CGI group starts at Industrial Light and Magic (Doug Kay and George Joblove). |
IBM releases AIX (UNIX). Apple threatens to sue Digital Research because the GEM desktop looked too much like Apple's Macintosh. Digital Research cripples the desktop application so Apple will not sue. The new GEM desktop now has just two unmovable, non-resizable windows for file browsing. |
NSFNET created, opening Internet access to all IETF & IRTF comes into existence. The first Freenet comes on-line. Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) designed to enhance Usenet news performance over TCP/IP. academ.com Mail Exchanger (MX) records developed by Craig Partridge allow non-IP network hosts to have domain addresses. The great USENET name change; moderated newsgroups changed. New England gets cut off from the Net as AT&T suffers a fiber optics cable break. TIFF image file format introduced at Aldus. |
Ferdinand Marcos Flees the Philippines. Iran-Contra Scandal. U.S. Bombs Libya. |
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CD-ROMs High Sierra (ISO9660) standard introduced. Ozone hole found over Antartica. |
Sculley becomes the head of Apple. Wozniak resigns in February. More than 1,200 employees are laid off in a restructuring in June. Jobs, 30, resigns to form Next Inc. Microsoft celebrates its 10th anniversary. AT&T publishes the System V Interface Definition (SVID) in an attempt to standardize the UNIX interfaces, which was strongly influenced by the 1984 /usr/group standard. ISO introduced the POSIX standard. |
Microsoft announces the retail shipment of Microsoft Windows. Adobe Postscript introduced. Geos released for Commodore 64 and later the Apple II. Commodore introduces the Amiga 1000 with the Amiga Workbench Version 1.0. |
Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (WELL) started. SIMNET developed to interconnect microcomputer-based combat vehicle simulators on a common network. Information Sciences Institute (ISI) at USC is given responsibility for DNS root management by DCA, and SRI for DNS NIC registrations. Symbolics.com is assigned on 15 March to become the first registered domain. 100 years to the day of the last spike being driven on the cross-Canada railroad, the last Canadian university is connected to NetNorth in a one year effort to have coast-to-coast connectivity. |
Famine in Ethiopia. Mikhail Gorbachev Calls for Glasnost and Perestroika New Coke Hits the Market. Wreck of the Titanic found. Hole in the Ozone Layer discovered. |
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Motorola intoduces the first hand-held mobile phone, the Motorola 8000. Sting theory debuts. DNA fingerprinting introduced. |
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Sculley fights with Gates over the introduction of Windows 1.0. Bruce Horn leaves Apple. Alan Kay becomes Apple Fellow. Tim Berners-Lee takes up a fellowship at CERN. AT&T agrees to divest itself of the Bell Operating Companies and obtains the right to enter the computer business. AT&T was broken up. The political landscape no longer favoured large companies for mobile phone licences. Fortune runs an article saying that 750 universities around the world, about 80% of those offering computer science degrees, have UNIX licenses. Sun founded (Stanford University Networks) by Andy Bechtolsheim, Scott McNealy, Bill Joy and Vinod Khosla. |
On January 22nd, Apple introduces Macintosh. The Macintosh bundled with WYSIWYG word processor MacWrite. Digital Research announces its GEM interface. 'Window system X' announced at MIT. Apple introduces the LaserWriter. Microsoft ships BASIC and Multiplan simultaneously with the intro of the Mac. Microsoft announces they will soon be shipping Word, Chart, and File for Macintosh. McDonnel Douglas introduces the Polhemus 3 Space digitizer and body Tracker. Radiosity born at Cornell University. |
Domain Name System (DNS) introduced. The protocols which make the DNS work were pioneered and standardized by Paul Mockapetris . Number of hosts breaks 1,000. JANET (Joint Academic Network) established in the UK using the Coloured Book protocols; previously SERCnet. Moderated newsgroups introduced on USENET (mod.*) Neuromancer by William Gibson where he coins the term 'cyberspace'. Kremvax message announcing USSR connectivity to USENET. |
Huge Poison Gas Leak in Bhopal, India. Indira Gandhi, India's Prime Minister, Killed by Two Bodyguards. Vietnam War Memorial opened in Washington, DC. |
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Reagan announces Star Wars. Sally Ride becomes the first American woman in space. Sony and Philips introduce 1st CD player. W & Z particles are discovered, the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces are unified. |
Paul Allen resigns as Microsoft's Executive Vice President, but remains on the Board of Directors. Richard Stallman, creator of EMACS and the Lisp Machine, starts GNU at MIT. First GPL. Alias founded in Toronto by Stephen Bingham, Nigel McGrath, Susan McKenna & David Springer. Jobs recruits John Sculley, formerly president of PepsiCo., as Apple president and CEO. |
Apple introduces the Lisa which featues pull down menus and menu bars. This is Apple's precursor to the Macintosh. Microsoft introduces the Microsoft Mouse. Particle systems debut . ILM computer graphics division develops "Genesis effect" for Star Trek II - The Wrath of Khan. SGI IRIS 1000 graphics workstation. Autodesk introduces first PC-based CAD software. IBM released its PC Jr. and PC-AT. The PC-AT, was several times faster than original PC and was based on the Intel 80286 chip. It sold for $4,000. |
Cabbage Patch Kids are popular. Soviets Shoot Down a Korean Airliner. U.S. Embassy in Beirut Bombed. |
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AT&T announces official support for UNIX and makes its first commercial release: UNIX System III. Jim Clark founds Silicon Graphics. Adobe founded by John Warnock. Autodesk founded & AutoCAD released. |
Modern smiley introduced by Scott Fahlman. :-) Netnews distributes 500 msgs/day to 100 sites in <100 newsgroups. Atari develops dataglove. |
E.T. released. Falklands invaded by Argentina. Michael Jackson releases Thriller. EPCOT Center opens at Disneyworld. |
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Pac-Man is extremely Popular. Millions watch royal wedding on T.V. First woman appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Sony Betacam. Space shuttle's first flight. First artificial heart, the Jarvik 7, operated by Dr. Robert Jarvik into Dr. Barney Clark. The heart, powered by an external compressor kept Clark alive for 112 days. |
Microsoft becomes a privately held corporation. Bruce Horn leaves PARC. Joins Apple. 'Literary Machines' by Ted Nelson. Major revision, 1987. Translated also into Japanese and Italian. Logitech is s founded. |
IBM introduces it PC, which uses Microsoft's 16-bit operating system, MS-DOS 1.0, and other Microsoft languages such as COBOL, BASIC, and PASCAL. Xerox debuts the Star which features double-clickable icons, overlapping windows, dialog boxes and a 1024*768 monochrome display. |
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Assassination attempt on the Pope. Assassination attempt on U.S. President Reagan. New Plague Identified as AIDS. Ronald Reagan president. 'Looker' includes the virtual human character Cindy (Susan Dey) - 1st film with shaded graphics. |
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Ted Turner Establishes CNN. Sony Walkman introduced. In the early 1980s, Peter E. Wheeler argued that, with the shift to bipedalism, whole body cooling (retaining only head hair and developing sweat glands) released a physiological constraint on brain size in Homo. Smallpox eliminated. A theory that the dinosaurs were killed of by an asteroid put foreward. Early reports of rare cancers in homosexual men, shows the start of the AIDS epidemic. Alan Guth proposed an 'inflationary' theory of the early Universe. |
Apple now has several thousand employees, and is beginning to sell computers abroad. Apple goes public in November at $22 a share, making Jobs and Wozniak millionaires MIT Media Lab founded by Nicholas Negroponte. Pacific Data Images founded by Carl Rosendahl. |
Apple III released. Atari releases PacMan. Turner Whitted of Bell Labs publishes ray tracing paper. Hanna-Barbera, largest producer of animation in the U.S.,begins implementation of computer automation of animation process Quantel introduces Paintbox. Three Rivers Computer Corporation introduces the the Perq graphical workstation. |
While consulting for CERN June-December of 1980, Tim Berners-Lee writes a notebook program, "Enquire Within Upon Everything", which allows links to be made between arbitrary nodes. Each node had a title, a type, and a list of bidirectional typed links. "ENQUIRE" ran on Norsk Data machines under SINTRAN-III ARPANET grinds to a complete halt on 27 October because of an accidentally-propagated status-message virus. It takes several days to resurrect the network. |
Failed U.S. rescue attempt to save hostages in Teheran. John Lennon assassinated. Mount St. Helens erupts. Rubik's Cube popular. Disney uses computer graphics for the movie Tron. |
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Sony introduces the Walkman. Choose-your-own-adventure books debut. Voyager 1 photographs Jupiter's rings. Anatol Rapoport , after years of considering the logical conundrum called the 'prisoner's dilemma,' established that the best game theoretical strategy in iterated encounters was the simplest, 'tit-for-tat:' Cooperate in the beginning and then do whatever the other player had done in the previous round. |
Microsoft moves its headquarters to Bellevue, Washington from New Mexico. Seventh Edition UNIX PROGRAMMERS MANUAL (UNIX Version 7) is published. It is the first edition without Thompson's or Ritchie's names. It is titled "UNIX (with a TM sign) Time-Sharing System." Bell Labs starts to protect its assets. George Lucas hires Ed Catmull, Ralph Guggenheim and Alvy Ray Smith to form Lucasfilm |
PARC & Steve Jobs visits PARC. Supposedly, Bill Gates visited later... WordStar word processing software. Atari 8-bit computers introduce. Daniel Bricklin and Robert Frankston developed VisiCalc for the Apple II. VisiCalc (for Visi ble Calc ulator) automated the recalculation of spreadsheets. A huge success, more than 100,000 copies sold in one year. |
Version one smiley introduced by Kevin MacKenzie. -) |
Ayatollah Khomeini returns as leader of Iran. Iran takes American hostages in Tehran. Margaret Thatcher first woman Prime Minister of Great Britain Mother Theresa awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Nuclear accident at Three Mile Island. Vietnamese troops enter Phnom Penh and end the murderous Pol Pot regime in Cambodia. (Feb): A retaliatory invasion from China is repelled during a month-long war. Designer jeans emerge. Rubiks Cube. |
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First Test-Tube baby born, Louise Brown. Mary Leaky announced the discovery of fossilized human footprints from about 3.5 million years ago. Holland published a computer program utilizing bottom-up, learned control with feedback reinforcement or weakening, as appropriate, of the rules, or 'classifiers.' Relying on this program, 'agents' offer bids for message space in an auction-type market. The classifiers are treated like business firms who had to repay their suppliers, that is, other classifiers, thus transferring some of their reinforcement. Tamoxifen is approved - later found to prevent breast cancer. |
Augmentation Research Center closed down for lack of funding. NLS then became the principal line of business in Tymshare's newly formed Office Automation Division, but under a new name, Augment. The name change brought with it a switch from R&D to commercialization. |
Microsoft establishes its first over-seas sales office in Tokyo, Japan. Microsoft's year end sales exceeds $1 million dollars. |
Introduction in early '78 of the Apple Disk II, the most inexpensive, easy to use floppy drive ever, at the time. MIT's "Aspen Movie Map" hypermedia videodisc. Bill Joy produces first Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) of UNIX. Ritchie and Steve Johnson complete first port of UNIX to an Interdata 8/32, the first non-DEC computer to run UNIX. Note that this is nearly ten years after running only on DEC equipment. UNIX is ported to a DEC VAX, but not by Thompson and Ritchie, since they had become disenchanted by DEC and its unwillingness to support UNIX. DEC's refusal to support UNIX must be one of the all time great blunders of the computer industry. Graphics Symbiosis System (GRASS) developed at Ohio State by Tom DeFanti. Aspen Movie Map premieres, the first hypermedia videodisk. Andy Lippman at the MIT Architecture Machine Group (now Media Lab). |
TCP split into TCP and IP. First BBS created by Ward Christensen and Randy Suess. Ronald Rivest , Adi Shamir , and Leonard Adelman proposed "a mathematical procedure whereby a message can be encoded using a large (say 250-digit) number as a key.... Any message encoded with it can only be decoded given a knowledge of the factors of that number". This method is known as the 'RSA cryptosystem,' and is a type of 'public-key cryptography.' |
John Paul II becomes pope. Jonestown Massacre. |
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Voyager 2 was launched August 20th, followed by Voyager 1 sixteen days later. First Experimental Analog celluar service in the US, developed by Advanced Mobile Phone Service (AMPS). VHS home video. Gold , in an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal , hypothesized that there is much more oil and natural gas than is available near the surface of the Earth and that this 'deep-Earth-gas' is not of biological origin. Jack Corliss, in a diving bell 2600 meters below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, observed boiling, lightless deep-sea thermal vents with hundreds of species, including a nine-foot tube worm, most of them new to science. This led to an entirely alternative proposal for the origin of life. Benoit B. Mandelbrot published 'The Fractel Geometry of Nature' in which complex curves are reduced to straight lines, or fractels, and undergo invariant scaling. He modified and generalized Zipf 's law, demonstrating that fractels and scaling laws are closely related to the chaos of nonlinear dynamics. Television signals were transmitted on optical fibers. |
SRI sold their commercial rights to NLS, along with its service business of supporting customer organizations over the ARPANet, to Tymshare Inc. of Cupertino, CA. Engelbart continued to direct the Augmentation Research Center until early 1978 when the lab was closed down for lack of funding. NLS then became the principal line of business in Tymshare's newly formed Office Automation Division, but under a new name, Augment. The name change brought with it a switch from R&D to commercialization. In spite of Engelbart's efforts, the human/organizational work was cut off, including his carefully cultivated user group. ARPA and RADC provided significant support until this time. |
An official partnership agreement between Bill Gates and Paul Allen is signed. The Home Computer Revolution by Ted Nelson. |
Apple II debuted at a local computer trade show. It has 4K of memory and customers use their own TV set as a monitor, but it is Frank Crow introduces antialiasing. Larry Cuba produces Death Star simulation for Star Wars using Grass at UICC developed by Tom DeFanti at Ohio State. |
The earliest demonstration of the triple network Internet. RFC 733: Mail specification. UUCP networked-copy program distributed with Unix. First Internet rtouters developed, by BBN, Stanford & UCL, London. |
Elvis dead. Miniseries Roots Airs. South African Anti-Apartheid Leader Steve Biko tortured to death. Star Wars movie released. Jimmy Carter president. |
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The first supersonic (Mach 2) transport aircraft, the Concorde, enters service. Dawkins , in 'The Selfish Gene', coined 'meme,' for bits of information which are replicated, like genes, in selected variants. Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken announced that they had solved the four-color mapping problem by establishing by trial-and-error that there is an unavoidable set of 1,936 graphs of reducible configurations, and then confirming their conclusion by computer. |
Jobs, 21, and Wozniak, 26, found Apple Computer Co. in the Jobs' family garage. Steve Wozniak designs what would become the Apple I. He offers his new computer (Apple) to Hewlett-Packard, who reject it as a non-viable product. In March, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs finish work on a computer circuit board, that they call the Apple I computer. Stephen Wozniak demonstrates the Apple I at the Homebrew Computer Club. Bill Gates offers to sell all rights and ownership of his 8080 BASIC to Ed Roberts and MITS for about US$6500. Roberts declines the offer. Hewlett-Packard begins Project Capricorn, to build a computer-like calculator. The result will be the HP-85 computer. April 1, Apple Computer born. The tradename "Microsoft" is registered . The World Altair Computer Convention is held, in a hotel near Albuquerque, New Mexico, over three days. This is the first such convention for the microcomputer industry. At the conference, Bill Gates explains his position on software piracy. In the hotel's penthouse suite, Processor Technology holds its own "booth" to promote their 4-KB memory boards for the Altair. Robert Swanson and Boyer founded Genentech on the premise that patents could replace business secrecy, attracting academic scientists who could still publish. |
Paul Terrell incorporates Byte, Inc. The term "personal computer" first appears in print, in the May issue of Byte magazine Pong computer game. Demonstration of HWIM (Hear What I Mean) the first complete speech-recognition system incorporating language understanding. Cray Research introduces its first supercomputer, the Cray-1, which operates at240,000,000 |
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North and South Vietnam join to form the Socialist Republic of Vietnam Tangshan Earthquake Kills Over 240,000. |
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Viktor Hamburger confirmed that the neuronal system is regressive, i.e., adults have far fewer axons and synapses than newborn infants but more order. Edward O. Wilson , in 'Sociobiology: The New Synthesis', analyzed the social instincts that bring together colonies of ants and bees, herds of antelope, and tribes of chimpanzee and human beings. His inclusion of the last of these was controversial: His opponents argued that the human animal was not enslaved by instincts, but rather was ruled by culture. |
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Paul Allen gets a job at MITS as Director of Software. Bill Gates, writing to Paul Allen, uses the name "Micro-soft" to refer to the partnership they share. This is the first known reference to the name. Paul Allen flies from Harvard to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to meet with Ed Roberts at MITS. Fred Moore and Gordon French hold the first meeting of a new microcomputer hobbyist's club in French's garage, in Menlo Park, California. 32 people meet, including Bob Albrect, Steve Dompier, Lee Felsenstein, Bob Marsh, Tom Pittman, Marty Spergel, Alan Baum, and Steven Wozniak. Bob Albrect shows off an Altair, and Steve Dompier reports on MITS, and how they had 4000 orders for the Altair. ( After a few meetings, the club is given the nickname "Homebrew Computer Club". ) Gary Kildall and wife Dorothy McEwen found Intergalactic Digital Research. ( The name is soon shortened to Digital Research.) John Martin sells Bill Millard on the idea of a chain of computer stores. Bill promises John shares in the company in exchange for the idea. The chain later becomes ComputerLand. Steve Wozniak proposes that Hewlett-Packard create a personal computer. The idea is rejected. [9] The Apple I computer board is sold in kit form, and delivered to stores by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Price: US$666.66. Paul Terrell orders 50 Apple computers from Steve Jobs, for his Byte Shop. Steve Wozniak begins work on the Apple II. Steve Wozniak and Randy Wigginton demonstrate the first prototype Apple II at a Homebrew Computer Club meeting. Mike Markkula, ex-marketing wizard at Intel, visits Steve Jobs' garage, to see the Apple computers. Steve Wozniak decides to remain at Hewlett-Packard, but is soon convinced that he should leave and join Apple Computer permanently. |
MITS develop Altair 8800, the first personal computer. Ed Roberts coins the term "personal computer" as part of an advertising campaign for the Altair. Gates and Allen complete BASIC and license it to their first customer MITS. The Xerox PARC-developed Gypsy word-processing system is first field-tested by end-users. Gypsy is one of the first word processors termed "WYSIWYG", meaning what you see is what you get. Gypsy runs on the PARC-developed Alto personal computer. At Xerox, John Ellenby proposes they build the Alto II personal computer, a modified Alto, making it easier to produce, more reliable, and more easily maintained. His request is approved. In Japan, IBM Japan announces the IBM 5100 desktop system, with 5-inch monochrome display. Price is about US$10,000. Digital Research copyrights the CP/M operating system. In the USSR, the Elektronika S5-11 microcomputer is introduced. Xerox management rejects two proposals to market the Alto computer. Wang Laboratories updates the Wang WPS word processor, adding a CRT display, a large disk storage, and a fast letter-quality printer. At Xerox, John Ellenby proposes they build the Alto III, to be marketed as an advanced word processing system. The proposal is shelved. Tom Snyder's "Tomorrow" TV show features the Sol computer, playing a game called "Target". At Xerox, the Display Word Processing Task Force recommends that Xerox produce an office information system like the Alto. Code name for the project is Janus. The result will be the Star computer. Thompson begins one year sabbatical at Berkeley. AT&T officially begins licensing UNIX to universities. Dractals, developed by Benoit Mandelbrot at IBM debut. |
Operational management of Internet tran |