| Capability | Doug Engelbart | Organizations/Careers | Interactive Computing | Internet/Web | Politics/World | |
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50 anniversary of the biggest US H-bomb test at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific. US first ground based missile interceptors takes place. Russian missles soon makes this outdated. Target deadline for the erication of polio. The Queen Mary 2 launched in Southampton. It iss be 3 1/2 times as long as (the Tower of) Big Ben. The worlds last transcontinental railway opens in Australia. Galileio, a global navigation satellite launched. It is a European & Chinese project. Sales of cameras on phones in the US exceeds the combined sale of digital cameras and film cameras. NASA's robot Genes returned to earth with samples of the solar wind. |
IBM sells its PC business to a Chinese company. |
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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. Asian Tsunami the largest international catastrophe.. The war in Iraq shows no signs of turning into peace. |
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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. |
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. Digital TV launched in Europe. |
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. First analogue satellite transmission in the UK (BSkyB). |
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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DR T. Erwin from the Smithsonian calculates that there are 30 million species of insects.
The MIDI standard was officially adopted. Early versions had been around since the seventies. |
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. |
Atari develops dataglove. |
Modern smiley introduced by Scott Fahlman. :-) Netnews distributes 500 msgs/day to 100 sites in <100 newsgroups. DNS invented.It was beginning to be a useful part of the Internet by about 1985. |
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 sells NLS to Tymshare Inc. of Cupertino, CA. 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 transferred to DCA, now DISA http://www.disa.mil/ John Vittal develops MSG, the first all-inclusive email program. |
Arthur Ashe first black man to win Wimbledon Civil War in Lebanon. Pol Pot becomes the communist dictator of Cambodia |
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Henry Jay Heimlich , in 'Emergency Medicine', described a subdiaphramatic thrust, pushing up suddenly on the soft tissue of the diaphragm, which sharply reduced death from choking. This maneuver is based on the reserve volume of air that stays in the lungs after exhalation The first bar-coded products arrive in America. |
ARPA and RADC support became ever more for supporting applications and developments for other organizations for targets formulated by others (e.g. the National Software Works) -- and the continuing pursuit of augmentation along my strategic vector virtually stopped. Gave up our high-performance, local display system for the line-processor supported, remote display system -- to make ourselves live with the same remote services as our NIC clients and Utility customers. [On principle, we gave up our integrated, direct-view graphics and the fast response of our direct-memory-access, local display generator.] Opened our "Workshop Utility Service" -- delivering NLS service over the ARPANET to DoD customers as pilot applications of office information service; had gone out on bid for commercial time-sharing services, selected Tymshare Inc. of Cupertino, Ca.; their host, named Office-1 provided the computer service; we fielded special trainers and application development staffs and cultivated special customer representatives into a spirited community. |
Telenet opened, a commercial network service which later became a part of SPRINT. Computer Lib/Dream Machines by Ted Nelson. Steve Jobs takes a job at Atari Inc., designing computer games with his friend, Stephen Wozniak. The FCC has by now decided exactly what frequencies are to be used for mobile phones. |
Engineer David Ahl suggests Digital Equipment produce an inexpensive version of its PDP-8 minicomputer, for US$5000. Top management call the idea foolish. Southwest Technical Products Company introduces the TVT-11 kit for US$180, and ASCII keyboard kit for US$40. Creative Computing, the first magazine for home computer users, is founded. Bravo is developed for the Xerox Alto computer. It is the first WYSIWYG program for a personal computer. The UNIX Time-Sharing System is published in CACM by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. It is a revision of the 1973 paper. University of California at Berkeley (UCB) gets Version 4 of UNIX. Berkeley begins making major enhancements to UNIX and sets the stage for becoming a major distribution center for their version of UNIX. Keith Standiford converts UNIX to PDP 11/45. The Elements of Programming Style by Kernighan and Plauger is published. |
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U.S. President Nixon resigns. Futureworld (sequel to Westworld) uses 3D CGI |
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Bruce Horn joins PARC Learning Research Group. At the Lakeside prep school in Washington state, Bill Gates tells a friend "I'm going to make my first million by the time I'm 25. |
Alto personal computer becomes operational. Client/server architecture is invented. First UNIX development support group is formed in Bell Labs. The UNIX philosophy begins to emerge. Thompson delivers first UNIX paper. Graphics Symbiosis System (GRASS) developed at Ohio State by Tom DeFanti. The Micral, the earliest commercial, non-kit personal computer based on a micro-processor, the Intel 8008 released. Thi Truong developed the computer and Philippe Kahn the software. |
First international connections to the ARPANET. Bob Kahn poses Internet problem. RFC 454: FTP Conference calls over ARPAnet. ARPANET News publishing starts. ARPA study shows email composing 75% of all ARPANET traffic |
Abortion legalized in U.S. U.S. Pulls Out of Vietnam. U.S. Vice President Resigns. Westworld (uses 2D computer graphics) |
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Pocket Calculators introduced. Pioneer 10 was the first vessel launched from Earth to pass through the asteroid belt and send back close-up images of Jupiter. Computerized axial tomography, or CAT scanning, was introduced. |
Began developing our first, integrated Help system. Formulated the "AKW Architecture" -- implemented in stages. Implemented the "shared-screen," televiewing mode of online collaboration between two or more NLS users. |
Kay joins PARC. Atari formed with Nolan Bushnell at the head. After graduating from Homestead High School in Cupertino, Steve Jobs enrolls in Reed College in Portland, Ore. He drops out after one semester. Louis Pouzin leads the French effort to build its own ARPANET - CYCLADES |
Alan Kay also proposes a portable personal computer. Project "Alto" begins. UNIX OS is rewritten in C which opened the door for porting. Wang Laboratories introduces its first small business computers, the 2200 series. 5 1/4 inch diskettes first appear. Demonstration of LUNAR, the first natural language of database system which understands natural language queries. Video game Pong developed for Atari. Hewlett-Packard announced the HP-35 as "a fast, extremely accurate electronic slide rule" with a solid-state memory similar to that of a computer. The HP-35 distinguished itself from its competitors by its ability to perform a broad variety of logarithmic and trigonometric functions, to store more intermediate solutions for later use, and to accept and display entries in a form similar to standard scientific notation. |
Larry Roberts writes first email management program. ICCC at the Washington D.C. Hilton with demonstration of ARPANET. First computer to computer chat. International Network Working Group (INWG) formed. RFC 318: Telnet specification. ZOG development begins at Carnegie Mellon (distributed hypertext). Development of Private Line Interface (PLI) to encrypt messages over the ARPANET, demonstrating the first secure traffic sent ovver a packet switch network. |
M*A*S*H T.V. Shows Premiers. Terrorists Attack at the Olympic Games in Munich Watergate Scandal begins. |
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VCRs introduced. Mariner 9 spacecraft began to map Mars, and quickly established that there were no channels and that the seasonal variations were caused by the alternate deposition and displacement of windblown dust. |
Bell Labs becomes the only company to respond to the FCC's deadline to respoond to more frequencies being made available for mobile telephone use. |
Steve Wozniak and Bill Fernandez build an early personal computer. The First Edition of UNIX manual is written. Texas Instruments develops the first microcomputer-on-a-chip, containing over 15,000 transistors. 3M introduces a 1/4 inch tape drive and cartridge. The National Radio Institute introduces the first computer kit, for US$503. Niklaus Wirth invents the Pascal programming language. IBM introduces the 23FD floppy disk drive. Wang Laboratories introduces the Wang 1200 word processor system. |
Ray Tomlinson invents email program to send messages across a distributed network. |
London Bridge brought to the U.S. United Kingdom goes decimal for currency. |
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Hawking and Penrose proved that the Universe must have had a beginning in time. In the seventies LCD screens would start to appear in calculators and such. Citizens and Southern National Bank in Valdosta, Ga., instal the first automatic teller machine. |
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DEC begins shipping PDP-11 and revolutionizes the computer industry by selling 250,000 systems. Bell Labs gets a PDP-11 to do text processing for the legal department. System is developed and implemented in UNIX. The standard DEC OS is never installed. Sonic Pen 3-D input device Pierre Bezier from Renault develops Bezier freeform curve representation. |
First publication of the original ARPANET Host-Host protocol. ARPANET hosts start using Network Control Protocol (NCP), first host-to-host protocol. |
My Lai. American soldiers accused of murdering entire town of Vietnamese civilians. Beatles Break Up. Palestinian group hijacks five planes. Protesting students at Kent State shot. |
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Neil Armstrong becomes the first man on the moon with Apollo 11. At the end of the 60's the scheduled airliners had become the principal method of long distance passenger transport on most international and domestic routes, carrying more than 300 million passengers a year. First V/STOL aircraft, the Hawker-Siddley Harrier, enters service. |
Began design of windowing capability for NLS. Developed concept of a user "reaching through" his personal workplace (i.e. his familiar online working files and application programs) to access less basic, specialized data and application processes (and other people); i.e. the "reach through" should provide access to these, translated by the integrated support system, so as to appear as coherent parts of his familiar, personal workplace. Specified our first mail and "Journal" system as part of an explicit pursuit of a "Dialog Support System," planning for it to be part of our ARPANET-NIC service. Developed document-outputting capability processing our composite, text-graphic document files to drive a service-bureau, CRT-based, full-page, Stromberg-Carlson photo printer to produce documentation with graphics and text mixed on the same pages. Became the second host on the ARPANET with our SDS 940. (UCLA was first, UCSB next, then the University of Utah, then ....) |
Tymnet built as part of Tymshare service. Advanced Micro Devices is founded by Jerry Sanders and seven others from Fairchild Semiconductor. AT&T Bell Labs drops out of MULTICS project. A system which was supposed to support 1000 on line users can barely handle three. Out of the ashes grows the most influential operating system in history, UNIX. Thompson develops the interpretive language B based upon BCPL. Ritchie improved on "B" and called it "C". C becomes perhaps the most popular language for professional software development, and is the basis for the C++ object-oriented extensions ten years later. |
Honeywell releases the H316 "Kitchen Computer", the first home computer, priced at US$10,600 in the Neiman Marcus catalog. Busicom, a Japanese calculator manufacturer, asks Intel to build a custom-chip set for a new calculator. Ted Hoff suggests that instead of set of chips, they create a general-purpose programmable chip. (Intel is initially not anxious to produce processor chips to compete with their customers for memory chips, but eventually decides to take a chance in this new field.) Computer Terminal Corporation visits Intel, asking them to integrate about 100 TTL components of their Datapoint 2200 terminal's 8-bit CPU into a few chips. Ted Hoff says they could put it all on one chip, so Intel and CTC sign a contract for it. ( The resulting chip becomes Intel's 8008 processor. ). Intel announces a 1 kilobit RAM chip, which has a significantly larger capacity than any previously produced memory chip. IBM builds SCAMP, one of the world's first personal computers. Computer Space arcade game built by Nolan Bushnell |
ARPANET commissioned by DoD for research into networking. BBN delivered an IMP to UCLA hooked by 50 Kbps circuits to SRI and UCSB. |
Charles Manson and "family" arrested. Rock-and-Roll Concert at Woodstock. Senator Edward Kennedy Leaves the Scene of an Accident Sesame Street First Airs. Yasser Arafat Becomes Leader of the PLO. Richard M. Nixon president. |
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ARC got its name after the 68 conference. They basically needed a name, but the group prior to the 68 conference was also, for all intents and purposes an ARC. |
Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore found Intel Corporation. (Intel begins as a memory chip producer, but will soon switch to the new field of microprocessors.) Dennis Ritchie completes work on his doctorate at Harvard and joins Bell Labs to work on MULTICS project. University of Utah asks Dave Evans to form a CG department in computer science. Evans & Sutherland Calma, Computek, Houston Instrument, Imlac founded. Wm. McGowan joins MCI. |
Alan Kay DynaBook, 68 Demo & Seymour Papert. The US Patent & Trademark Office grants patent 3,387,286 to Dr. Robert Dennard, of the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. The patent is for a one-transistor DRAM cell and the basic idea in the three-transistor cell. ( Dynamic RAM (Random Access Memory) will become the standard short-term storage medium for programs and data during processing. Sutherland Head Mounted Display (Sword of Damocles), developed in 1966, shown at the AFIPS Conference) |
Request for proposals for ARPANET sent out by Lawrence Roberts of ARPA in August; responses received in September. |
Martin Luther King Jr. assassinated Robert F. Kennedy assassinated. |
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Three U.S. Astronauts killed during simulated launch. First heart transplant. Lynn Margulis established that the main internal structures of eukaryotic cells originated as independent living creatures. Known as 'endosymbionts,' these organisms were "originally taken up in the course of feeding by an unusually large host cell that had already acquired many properties now associated with eukaryotic cells" Color TV starts inthe UK. |
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Alan Kay studied at the University of Utah. MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies founded by Gyorgy Kepes. |
Andy van Dam and others build the Hypertext Editing System and FRESS. GE introduces first full color real time interactive flight simulator for NASA. Experiments in Art and Technology started in New York by artists Rauschenberg and Kluver. Instant replay and Slo-Mo introduced using Ampex HS-100 disc recorder. Arthur Samuels finished building a computerized checkers player which could model the opponent's options, recognize its tactics, and make predictions on that basis. |
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Che Guevara killed. First Super Bowl. Six-Day War in the Middle East. |
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All source-code development, maintenance and documentation now fully moved into the NLS environment (providing natural and powerful support for structured programming). Began planning for move to time shared environment. |
Alan Kay enrolled at the University of Utah in Electrical Engineering. Ken Thompson finishes studies at University of California at Berkeley (UCB) and joins technical staff at AT&T Bell Telephone Laboratories to work on MULTICS. |
Steven Gray founds the Amateur Computer Society, and begins publishing the ACS Newsletter. Some consider this to be the birth-date of personal computing. Brown's HES (Nelson & van Dam). Seymour Papert designes the programing language LOGO as a computer language for children. Group 1 FAX machines (using CCITT compression) Lincoln Wand developed. Plasma Panel introduced. Hewlett-Packard entered the general purpose computer business with its HP-2115 for computation, offering a computational power formerly found only in much larger computers. |
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Black Panther Party established . Mao Zedong Launches the Cultural Revolution. Mass draft protests in U.S. Star Trek T.V. series premieres. |
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Japan's Bullet Train opens. Many fighter aircraft achieve Mach2 in the sixties. Ccosmic background radiation discovered. Roger Brown writes that naming, for a child, begins at the level of distinctive action. Cambridge Instruments produced the first commercial scanning electron microscope. Research starts in LCD screens around this time. Biochemical change at the receptor level is shown to be the molecular basis of memory. |
Beveloped the mouse as part of an explicit search for optimum screen-selection techniques in association with our online-application framework. Moved NLS to a stand-alone CDC-3100, with online disk pack, 16K of 24-bit memory, line printer, paper-tape and punched-card I/O, custom built display. Full structured files, with in-file addressing and uniform text- and structure-manipulation commands. |
Ericsson introduces MTA, the world's first automatic mobile phone system. IBM has almost 3/4 of the world computer market. AT&T, GE, IBM and Project MAC at MIT join together to develop the time-sharing system MULTICS (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service) Utah computer science department founded. |
Ted Nelson coins the word Hypertext in the 1965 publication of Literary Machines. Tektronix Direct View Storage Tube (DVST). BBN Teleputer uses Tektronix CRT. Gordon Moore, head of research and development for Fairchild Semiconductor, predicts that transistor density on integrated circuits would double every 12 months for the next ten years. (This prediction is revised in 1975 to doubling every 18 months, and becomes known as Moore's Law.) DEC introduced the PDP-8, the first commercially successful minicomputer. The PDP-8 sold for $18,000, one-fifth the price of a small IBM 360 mainframe. The speed, small size, and reasonable cost enabled the PDP-8 to go into thousands of manufacturing plants, small businesses, and scientific laboratories. |
ARPA funds a fact finding paper on "Network of time sharing computers". Introduction of Grafacon, a tablet device for digitizing graphical data for computer entry. |
Los Angeles riots. Malcolm X assassinated New York City great blackout U.S. Sends Troops to Vietnam. |
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Decides to bypass the online typewriter and go directly to display workstations. Bill English was the first to arrive. In the beginning of 64. He got his M.S. at Stanford in 62. He had come to know Doug through his work on core memory. |
The computer industry has instlled about $10,000 million worth of equipment, a growth rate of almost 50% a year, and a third of a million people working in the industry. The US has more than 20,000 installations, 5,000 in western Europe and less than 2,000 in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. |
ASCII 7-bit standard introduced. BASIC computer language introduced. The first third generation computer built, using integrated circuits. Project MAC starts at MIT. RAND tablet input device (also called Grafacon). |
Paul Baran writes on packet-switching. Online transaction processing made its debut in IBM's SABRE reservation system, set up for American Airlines. Using telephone lines, SABRE linked 2,000 terminals in 65 cities to a pair of IBM 7090 computers, delivering data on any flight in less than three seconds. |
Beatles Become Popular in U.S. Cassius Clay (a.k.a. Muhammad Ali) becomes World Heavyweight Champion. Civil Rights Act Passes in U.S. Hasbro Launches GI Joe Action Figure. Nelson Mandela sentenced to life in prison. Warren Report on JFK's Assassination Issued. |
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Murray Gell-Mann and, independently, George Zweig, invents the notion of a more fundamental particle than neutrons and protons which Gell-Mann named the 'quark.' Edward Lorenz found what was probably the first example of a 'strange attractor,' a flow in phase space in which orbits converge to an object which is neither a fixed point nor a limit cycle. |
Along with ARPA, NASA began providing the funds for his own research laboratory, which he later dubbed the Augmentation Research Center. [Notes On ARC & SRI] Invents the chorded keyset as a one-handed alternative for character input in an interactive environment. Tried unsuccessfully to develop a workable system using a long-distance data link from Menlo Park to Santa Monica, with the SDC Q32 as a time-sharing host, and a CDC 160A as local communication manager and display driver. |
MCI (first known as Microwave Communications, Inc.) founded by Jack Goeken and begins developing a microwave-based network. |
First public demonstration of computer-based communications system built by BBN for Massachusetts General Hospital. Sketchpad developed beginning in 1961 by Ivan Sutherland at MIT is unveiled. Computer generated film by Edward Zajac at Bell Labs. Charles Csuri makes his first computer generated artwork . DAC-1, first commercial CAD system, developed in 1959 by IBM for General Motors is shown at JCC. Lockheed Georgia starts graphics activity. Michael Noll at Bell Labs starts his Gaussian Quadratic series of artwork. Roberts hidden line algorithm (MIT). Fetter of Boeing creates the "First Man" digital human for cockpit studies. |
Martin Luther King Jr. Makes His "I Have a Dream" Speech. JFK Assassinated. Lyndon B. Johnson president. |
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Thomas Kuhn writes on paradigms. Rachel Louise Carson published 'Silent Spring', which concerned the dangers of pesticides. |
Doug Engelbart's ground breaking 'Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework,' published. [Full Text] Doug Engelbart approaches Licklieder for funding, having read his 'Man-Computer Symbiosis', paper [Full Text] Launched a long-term R&D program with the following basic Framework Principles. |
Licklieder leaves Bolt, Beranek and Newman, (BBN) in Cambridge, MA. Licklieder becomes the first director of IPTO, the Information Processing Techniques Office at ARPA. Ted Nelson gets an M.A. in Sociology at Harvard. |
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J.C.R. Licklieder writes a series of memos discussing his "Galactic Network" concept. First successful demonstration of computer time-sharing. Paul Baran described 'packet switching,' the breaking down of data into labeled packets, and how this would be crucial for the realization of a computer network. |
Andy Warhol exhibits the Campbell's Soup Can. Cuban Missile Crisis. First person killed trying to cross the Berlin Wall Marilyn Monroe dead. |
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Soviets launch first man in space. First Jet powered executive Jets. Lateralization in animal brains shown. Holland circulated a technical report entitled "A Logical Theory of Adaptive Systems Informally Described," in which he propounded a general theory of adaption, i.e., if an agent is going to be adaptive, it requires feedback. UNIMATE, the first industrial robot at General Motors, designed by Joe Engelberger and George Devol. |
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Bay of Pigs Invasion. Berlin Wall constricted. Peace Corps Founded. John F. Kennedy president. |
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First televised presidential debates. Lasers invented. US domestic air traffic increased more than fourfold from 1950. Eugene Merle Shoemaker proved that an asteroid created the 1.2-mile diameter crater near Flagstaff, AR, and theorized that the moon's craters had a similar origin. This was confirmed by Apollo 17 in 1972. Theodore H. Maiman described the first laser, which used a synthetic ruby rod as the lasing medium. |
By 1960, a thriving computer industry has been established. 26 computer companies in the US, 7 British, three German and one French. John Whitney Sr. founds Motion Graphics, Inc. |
Digital Equipment introduces the first minicomputer, the PDP-1, for US$120,000. It is the first commercial computer equipped with a keyboard and monitor. PDP stands for Program, Data, Processor. The minicomputer represents an important size and power step from mainframe toward personal computers. 50 were built. They needed no air conditioning and required only one operator. "Spacewar" first video game on PDP-1 at MIT. William Fetter of Boeing coins the term "computer graphics" for his human factors cockpit drawings. John McCarthy invented a new language for AI, 'List Processor,' or 'Lisp,' in which every list defined a recursive mathematical function, e.g., plus , which could then be nested inside other functions, e.g., ( times (plus 2 2)( minus 5 3)) becomes ( times 4 2) becomes 8. AT&T designs the Dataphone, the first commercial modem, specifically for converting digital computer data to analog signals for transmission across its long distance network. A team of people from different computer companies and the Pentagon introduce COBOL, Common Business Oriented Language. Designers hoped a COBOL program would run on any computer for which a compiler existed with only minimal modifications, a bit like Java today. It was designed for business use, early COBOL efforts aimed for easy readability of computer programs and as much machine independence as possible. |
BBN designs a priority-interrupt system for the DEC PDP-1, enabling time sharing. Joseph Carl Robnett 'Lick' Licklieder , in "Man-Computer Symbiosis," pictured"a network of [online 'thinking'] centers, connected to one another by wide-band communications lines and to individual users by leased-wire services" [Full Text] |
Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho Released. Brazil's Capital moves to new city. |
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Konstantin Gringauz , employing Soviet Luniks Satellites, observed the first signs of the solar wind. Luna III , a Soviet satellite, photographed the far side of the moon. R. H. Whittaker added a fifth domain, fungi, to the taxonomy of living things |
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At Fairchild Semiconductor, Robert Noyce constructs an integrated circuit with components connected by aluminum lines on a silicon-oxide surface layer on a plane of silicon. Students in Rochester 's and McCarthy 's computer programming class at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology called elaborate switching networks for model railroads 'hacks,' and, transferring the usage to programming, the designers of elaborate software solutions 'hackers'. |
Castro becomes dictator of Cuba. International Treaty makes Antarctica Scientific Preserve. Kitchen Debate Between Nixon and Khrushchev. U.S. quiz shows found to be fixed. |
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Lego available. Jet transport comes to stay in the west. Lunar space exploration starts with the USSR's Luna flyby and the US Pioneer 4 followed by the Luna 2 impact and Luna 3 probe missions. Heisenberg , in 'Physics and Philosophy', wrote: "If actually all our knowledge is derived from perception, there is no meaning in the statement that the things 'really exist;' because if we have perceptions of things it cannot possibly make any difference whether the things exist or do not exist. Therefore, to be perceived is identical with to be existing" |
A couple of projects came along which were closer to his intended direction. |
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At Texas Instruments, Jack Kilby completes building the first integrated circuit, containing five components on a piece of germanium half an inch long and thinner than a toothpick. BBN purchases first computer, the LGP-30, designs the USAF Sonic Fatigue test Facility (1 million watts of acoustic power). A joint United States and European committee, including among its members, Backus , Alan Perlis , and McCarthy , was formed to create a universal programming language, 'Algorithmic Language,' or 'Algol.' In the course of creating Algol, Backus and Peter Naur invented 'Backus-Naur notation' for giving the formal definition of a programming language. Although little used after its completion in 1960, Algol was the precursor of 'Pascal.' The first SAGE center goes online at McGuire Air Force base in New Jersey. |
Chinese Leader Mao Zedong Launches the "Great Leap Forward". Hula Hoops Become Popular. |
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For the first time, more passengers fly across the Atlantic than crossed by sea. Noam Chomsky , in 'Syntactic Structures', attacked behaviorism and proved that linguistic grammars are analogous to Turing machines and that both are hierarchical: word strings below phrase structures below transformations between sentence structures. Kees Boeke , in Cosmic View: The Universe in Forty Jumps , a book intended for children, illustrated what one would see by adding a zero, or power, to the scale of a square picture of two people on a picnic blanket, moving in and out twenty times. |
Doug knocked at HP's door, who were in the instrument business at the time. They were nice and offered him a job as they liked the patents. Both Mr.. Hewlett and Mr.. Packard interviewed him. I he asked if they planned to get in to computers. The head of research said "gee Doug, not a chance". Gets a research position at Stanford Research Institute, now SRI International. |
Bill Norris starts Control Data Corporation (CDC). Digital Equipment Corporation founded. |
John Backus and his team introduce 'FORTRAN,' the Formula Translation language for the IBM 704 computer. Philco Corporation introduces the first transistorized computer, the Philco 2000. |
Soviet Union launches Sputnik. EEC, the European Economic Community Established. |
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T.V. remote control invented. Velcro introduced. Russian Tupolev Tu-104 introduced as the first sustained jet transport. G. Miller , dealing with conscious perception and short-term memory in the context of information theory, published "The Magical Number Seven, plus or minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information." In it, he measured the 'amount of information' by equating it with ' variance:' "Anything that increases the variance also increases the amount of information". Beno Gutenberg and Charles Richter pointed out that earthquake tremors follow a power law: In any given area in a year, the number of earthquakes that release a certain amount of energy is inversely proportional to that energy. Clyde Cowan and Frederick Reines confirmed the existence of the neutrinos. Jo Hin Tjio and Albert Levan determined that the human genome has 23 chromosomes. Al Hubbard developed the rule in the therapeutic use of LSD-25 that it was contingent on the mind set of the person taking the drug and the setting in which the experience occurred. |
Then he was an acting assistant professor at Berkeley. Teaching basic electrical engineering,. One singular event happened- he and his wife had had 3 children. His wife got this great theory if you get your first 2 closely together there would be less sibling rivalry, but the unplanned number three came and hour later! It became a matter of teaching and bringing up the kids. 2-3 hours a day of great focus and concentration. So no more evening time for the crusade. He made some friends in other faculty though. There was a BBQ at an economics professors. Doug helped clean up afterwards and they got talking. The economics professor wanted to know what kind of research he was planning to get started. What kind of research he'd do would be important for his career etc. Doug told him about computers and augmentation - there came a point when he didn't look very interested. He looked at Doug and said: Do you know how promotions are done at university? Doug remembers the moment well: My jaw dropped, guess I don't. It's about peer review: If you don't get papers published you won't advanced. Papers get published by peer review.Talk like this and they won't get reviews. So much for blindly looking for an academic career! |
A U.S. District Court makes a final judgment on the complaint against IBM filed in January 1952 regarding monopolistic practices. A "consent decree" is signed by IBM, placing limitations on how IBM conducts business with respect to "electronic data processing machines". ( Though personal computers are twenty years in the future, this consent decree will limit IBM's success and ability to compete in the marketplace.) AT&T enters into "consent decree" with US government and agrees to restrict its business to furnishing "common carrier communications services", which keeps it out of the computer business. |
IBM introduces the first hard drive. The first transistorized computer is completed, the TX-O (Transistorized Experimental computer), at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (While not a microcomputer, this is is a step forward in the evolution of reducing the size of computers.) It is also reported that the Leprechaun at Bell Labs was the first transistorized computer. The transistorized computers were much more reliable and consumed much less power than the vacuum tube/valve computers. Lawrence Livermore National Labs connects graphics display to IBM 704; use film recorder for color images Alex Poniatoff at Ampex introduces the VR1000 videotape recorder with a 2"tape, the first practical broadcast quality VTR. Nathaniel Rochester and John Holland published computer programs which simulated neural networks. Herbert Simon , Allen Newell and Clifford Shaw demonstrated 'Logic Theorist,' their complex information, i.e., not standard algorithmic, but 'heuristic procedure,' at a conference on 'AI,' (a term invented by John McCarthy). In 1956, Wesley Clark , Ken Olsen , and Harlan Anderson finished a transistor-driven interactive computer, the TX-0, the ancestor of the Digital Equipment Corporation's, or DEC 's, TX-2. John McCarthy at MIT, coins the phrase 'Artificial Intelligence'. |
Elvis on Ed Sullivan's Show. Grace Kelly marries Prince Rainier III of Monaco. Hungarian Revolution. Soviets put down Hungarian revolution. Khrushchev denounces Stalin. Suez Crisis. "In God We Trust" has been appearing on coins since 1864, and now becomes the US's motto. |
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Jet powered heavy bombers in service. Fighter aircraft capable of Mach 1 commonplace in the 50's.
Colour TV experiments in the UK at Alexandra Palace. BBN develops criteria for speech privacy in buildings and is involved with the first retrofit for noise control on a commercial airliner, the Convair 340. |
Doug obtained his Ph.D, along with a half dozen patents in "bi-stable gaseous plasma digital devices," and then stayed on at Berkeley as an acting assistant professor. DOUBLE CHECK THIS ONE. To do the kind of research he wanted he thought he probably needed a PhD. He Applied to Stanford and Berkeley. Berkeley had a research project to build a computer called CALDIC (California Digital Computer) so that made him decide. However it never worked when he was there - it was not finished before he got his degree and left. They had labs and courses on digital circuit design. Making adders and multipliers and arithmetic controls, watching registers. They wrote programs in machine language. By hand. And exchanged their designs with other students to debug each others work. There was talk of research projects to make assemblers and compilers, but that was not quite a reality yet. Pretty geeky days! The idea of individuals using interactive computers was ludicrous at the time. So for his PhD thesis he did something acceptable. In 1955 he got his PhD in Electrical Engineering (with specialty in computers) through work on bi-stable gaseous plasma digital devices at UC Berkeley. At Berkeley he was biding time, learning about basic electromagnetic wave propagation, solid state physics, symbolic logic. Doug puts in a very nice way: I was basically getting my journeyman's card. I also got a bunch of patents - 13-14 from the PhD thesis. Doubt they were useful in the world... |
Steve Paulis adopted soon after birth by Paul and Clara Jobs of Mountain View. Remington Rand and Sperry Corp merge to form Sperry Rand. |
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Disneyland opens. James Dean dies in car accident. McDonald's Corporation Founded. Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat on a bus. Warsaw Pact signed. |
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First atomic submarine launched, the USS Nautilus (SSN571). First production aircraft capable of breaking the sound barrier, the North American F-100 fighter. Skinner's behaviorism inspires 'programmed learning' approach. FCC authorizes color TV broadcast. |
Report Says Cigarettes Cause Cancer. Segregation ruled illegal in U.S. Brown v. Board of Education. |
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James Dewey Watson and Francis Harry Compton Crick built a model of DNA. NTSC broadcast code. Wittgenstein published his 'Philosophical Investigations' in which he held, among other things, that the mind categorizes on the basis of 'family resemblances:' "How is the concept of a game bounded? What still counts as a game and what no longer does?... We do not know the boundaries because none have been drawn". Continental drift hypothesis becomes mainstream. Andrei Sakharov invented a fusion and fission detonator which was the basis for the first thermonuclear bomb built by the Soviet Union. His work was independent of that of Ulam and Teller . |
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Hillary and Tensing Climb Mt. Everest. Joseph Stalin dies. Dwight D. Eisenhower president. |
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Car Seat Belts introduced. Polio vaccine created. The ionic workings of nerve impulses demonstrated. First Jet transport introduced in the UK. |
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Color TV introduced. Jet powered medium bombers in service. |
Doug gets married to Ballard (Fish) in May. |
First commercial computer installed, at the U.S. Bureau of Census, the UNIVAC I. It used magnetic tape instead of punched cards. A central operator could stop the program at any time and change some of the data. |
South Africans forced to carry ID Cards identifying race. Truman signs Peace Treaty with Japan, officially Ending WWII. Winston Churchill again Prime Minister of Great Britain |
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First modern Credit Cards introduced. First organ transplant. U.S. President Truman Orders Construction of Hydrogen Bomb. US domestic air traffic increased more than sevenfold from 1940. BBN develops procedures for measuring take-off and landing noise at airports. Ben Laposky uses oscilloscope to display waveforms which were photographed as artwork. The concept of the non-cooperative game introduced by John Nash. |
Doug gets engaged in December. |
Korean War Begins. Senator Joseph McCarthy Begins Communist Witch Hunt. |
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First Non-Stop flight around the world. Soviet Union has Atomic Bomb. |
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Translation language introduced. . |
China becomes Communist. George Orwell publishes Nineteen Eight-Four. NATO established. |
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"Big Bang" theory formulated. Berlin Airlift. 2.1 million people sustained completely by air for 15 months. First conventional jet to break sound barrier the prototype of the F-86 fighter, in a dive. Cable TV installed. The term 'bit,' short for binary digit, used in print for the first time. |
Studied electrical engineering at Oregon State (then called College, now) University. Settled contentedly on the San Francisco peninsula as an electrical engineer at NACA Ames Laboratory (forerunner of NASA). |
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Gandhi assassinated. Policy of apartheid begun in South Africa. State of Israel founded. |
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Chuck Yeager breaks the sound barrier in the Bell XS-1. AT Bell Labs, D. H. Ring, assisted by R. H. Young first describes the idea of 'cellular' telephony for mobiles. This was ignored for almost two decades. Polaroid cameras invented. |
John von Neuman gives s series of lectures on The theory and techniques of electronic computers'. |
Dead Sea Scrolls Discovered. Jewish Refugees Aboard the Exodus Turned Back by British. Marshall Plan. |
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Bikinis introduced. Nuremberg Trials. |
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Dr. Spock publishes The Common Book of Baby and Child Care. Winston Churchill Gives His "Iron Curtain" Speech. |
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Microwave oven invented. U.S. drops Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Schrödinger, in 'What is Life?', asked questions about replication, structure, aperiodicity, coding, and metabolism which set biology's agenda for 30 years. Chocolate bars began to become afordable to the masses in the UK. |
Doug to Asia. Doug was in ship from San Francisco to the Philippines, a converted freighter going around the Bay Bridge and then the Golden Gate bridge when the captain came out on deck, looked at them, picked up his loud-hailer, looked at them and announced - "Japan just surrendered". Someone cried "for Christ sake just turn around!". A couple of weeks later he arrived at a camp with a red cross library -no one was using it and he read Atlantic Monthly. There was Vannevar Bush's article. |
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FDR Dies. Germans Surrender. Hitler commits suicide. United Nations founded. Harry S Truman president. |
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Ballpoint pens on sale. First German V1 and V2 rockets fired. First Jet fighter in operational service, the German Messerschmitt Me262. The British Gloster Meteor was also in service before the end of the war. |
D-Day. Hitler Escapes Assassination Attempt. |
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Italy joins the Allies. Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. |
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T-shirt introduced. Fermi , pursuant to scaling-up the creation of plutonium 239, created the first controlled, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction from 'piles,' Szilard 's lattice, of uranium and graphite. The term pile has been superseded by 'reactor.' This was accomplished as part of the Manhattan Project, of which Compton was in charge of the Metallurgical Laboratory and under him Fermi commanded the physicists and Seaborg the chemists. |
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Battle of Midway. Battle of Stalingrad. Japanese-Americans Held in Camps. |
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First regular U.S. TV broadcast. 1st TV commercial (for Bulova watches). Jeep invented. Manhattan Project begins. Mount Rushmore completed. |
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Japanese attack Pearl Harbor. Nazi Rudolf Hess flies to Britain on a Peace Mission Siege of Leningrad. |
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Nylons on the market. First two way car radios introduced, in Kentucky. |
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Battle of Britain. Leon Trotsky assassinated. Stone Age Cave Paintings found in France. |
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First commercial Flight over the Atlantic. First helicopter produced and used in quantity, the Sikorsky V.S. 300. First Jet plane, the German Heinkel He 178 flies. |
Stibitz and Williams designed and built the binary 'Complex Computer,' really more of a desktop calculator. Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard design the Audio Oscillator. Vannevar Bush publishes "Mechanization and the Record" to Fortune magazine, writing about the Memex in detail for the first time. |
World War II Begins. German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact Signed. Refugees on the St. Louis Refused Entry. New York World's Fair. For the first time the worlds fair was not about the worlds cultures, but what the big corporations wanted to present as the future. |
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Color TV proposed by Valensi. |
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Chamberlain announces "Peace in Our Time" "Extinct" fish found. Hitler annexes Austria. The Night of Broken Glass (Kristallnacht). |
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Claude Shannon showed that binary mathematics was possible. George Stibitz , working with the telephone companies electromechanical relays, demonstrated a one-bit binary adding machine. |
Amelia Earhart Vanishes. Golden Gate Bridge opened. The Hindenberg disaster. Japan Invades China. |
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Hoover Dam completed. Felix Wankel designed a motor which revolved around a central shaft. |
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Nazi Olympics in Berlin. Spanish Civil War begins. |
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First practical helicopters, the co-axial Breuget-Dorand 314. During the mid 1930's economic transport airplanes emerge. A. Buseman suggests swept back wings. |
Alcoholics Anonymous founded. Germany issues the Anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws. John Maynard Keynes Suggests New Economic Theory. Social Security enacted in U.S. |
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Cheeseburger Created. The Dust Bowl. Mao Zedong Begins the Long March. Parker Brothers Sells the Game "Monopoly". |
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Wiley Post flies around the world in 8 1/2 days. In 1933, Osa and Martin conduct the first aerial photography. They photographed places including Africa and Mt. Kilamanjaro |
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Adolf Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany. FDR launches New Deal. First Nazi Concentration Camp Established. Prohibition ends in the U.S. Franklin D. Roosevelt president. |
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Air Conditioning invented. BBC starts regular TV service. Amelia Earhardt first woman to fly Solo across the Atlantic Scientists split the Atom. Zippo Lighters Introduced. First all electronic TV is made by RCA in 1932. |
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Auguste Piccard Reaches Stratosphere. Empire State Building completed. First stereo recordings. |
Al Capone imprisoned for income Tax Evasion. U.S. Officially Gets National Anthem. |
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Sliced Bread available. First television (J.L. Baird), demonstrated in an attic in Soho, London, the present location of Bar Italia. His 'Televisor' goes on sale for £18. |
Gandhi's Salt March. Pluto Discovered. Stalin Begins Collectivizing Agriculture in the U.S.S.R. |
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BBC begins broadcasting. Byrd and Bennett fly over South Pole. Car Radio invented. |
New York Stock Market Crashes. St. Valentine's Day Massacre. |
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First Oxford English Dictionary published. Bubble Gum invented. Penicillin Discovered. Frank Whittle suggests Jet propulsion. Full voice car radio introduced by the Detroit police department. Other cities follow. |
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First Academy Awards. First Mickey Mouse cartoon. |
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BBC Founded. Philo Farnsworth invents fully electronic TV. The first talking movie, The Jazz Singer. Lindbergh flies across the Atlantic. Motion picture film standardized at 24 frames per second. March 16, Dr. Robert H. Goddard successfully launched the first liquid fueled rocket at Auburn, Massachusetts. |
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First television demonstrated by J.L. Baird. Robert Goddard fires the first Liquid-Fuel Rocket. A.A. Griffith comes up with a new aerodynamic theory which will give birth to the turboprop engine. Telephone call Britain and the US starts, costing £15 for 3 minutes. |
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First Olympic Winter Games. J. Edgar Hoover Appointed FBI Director. V.I. Lenin Dies. |
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Hitler Jailed after failed coup. Ruhr Occupied by French and Belgian Forces. Time Magazine Founded. |
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Kemal Atatürk founds modern Turkey. King Tut's Tomb found. Mussolini marches on Rome. The Reader's Digest Published. |
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Lie Detector invented. True in car radios are developed in the 20's in the US. The first city to start was Detroit, where a patrol car would be alerted to a messages and would have to stop the car and call in by regular phone. |
Extreme inflation in Germany. Irish Free State proclaimed. |
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First Commercial Radio Broadcast Aired. Women Granted the Right to Vote in U.S. First national airlines/flag carriers formed, starting with KLM. |
Bubonic Plague in India. League of Nations established. |
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Nearly 200,000 aircraft built up until the end of WWI with several million flying hours. First purpose built aircraft carrier debuts one month before end of the war. H.M.S. Argus. First all-metal civilian aircraft, the Junkers F13. First daily regular scheduled air service for passengers Deutsche Luft Reederei flying between Berlin, Leipzig and Weimar 22 Feb. First international service starts between London and Paris. 25 Aug. By Aircraft Transport & Travel Ltd. founded in 1916 by G. Holt Thomas who later formed the International Air Traffic Association, the ancestor to I.A.T.A. |
Prohibition begins in the U.S. Treaty of Versailles ends World War I. |
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Influenza Epidemic. Russian Czar Nicholas II and His Family are Killed. |
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Independent air action with long range bombers developed. Experiments with deck-landing airplanes started. |
First Pulitzer Prizes Awarded. Mata Hari Executed for Being a Spy. Russian Revolution. U.S. Enters World War I. |
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Battle of the Somme. Battle of Verdun. Easter Rising in Ireland. |
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Germans Use Poison Gas as a Weapon. Lusitania Sunk by German U-Boat. First aircraft to torpedo a ship. British Short 184 seaplane 12 Aug. |
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First Traffic Light. Panama Canal Officially Opened. About 5,000 aircraft built before WW I starts. |
Archduke Ferdinand Assassinated. Charlie Chaplin First Appeared as the Little Tramp. World War I Begins. |
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Parachutes Invented. SOS accepted as Universal Distress Signal. |
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Roald Amundsen reaches the South Pole. Ernest Rutherford discovers the structure of an Atom. |
Greenwich Mean Time Adopted. The Incan City of Machu Picchu Discovered. Mona Lisa is Stolen. Standard Oil Company Broken Up. |
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Plastic is Invented. Robert Peary becomes the first to reach the North Pole. Practical aircraft built, such as the Henri Farma III. Bleriot crosses English Channel in monoplane. |
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Ford Introduces the Model-T. Henry Ford develops the assembly line method of automobile manufacturing Wright Flyer demonstrated in public. |
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First Electric Washing Machine. Picasso Introduces Cubism. Helicopter first test successful, though able to hover, not really controllable nor stable. First commercial transatlantic radio telegraph cable opened by Marconi Company. |
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The Dreadnought Launched. Finland First European Country to Give Women the Right to Vote. |
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Einstein Proposes his Theory of Relativity. Freud Publishes his Theory of Sexuality. Third Wright Flyer more practical flight; 24 miles in 38 minutes. |
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First Popular American Film. Ground Broken on Panama Canal. New York City Subway Opens. Trans-Siberian Railway Completed. |
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First Flight at Kitty Hawk; the Wright Flyer. First Message to Travel Around the World. First Silent Movie, The Great Train Robbery. |
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The Teddy Bear is Introduced. U.S. Passes the Chinese Exclusion Act. |
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First Nobel Prizes Awarded. Queen Victoria Dies. U.S. President McKinley Assassinated. |
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Kodak Introduces $1 Brownie Cameras. Max Planck formulates Quantum Theory Sigmund Freud Publishes The Interpretation of Dreams. Around this time Marconi sells wireless telegraphy to battleships. The batteries needed were pretty big. |
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The first phone was developed by Alexander Graham Bell. Movable type invented in Korea a long time before Gutenberg. |
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Selected Sources.
For Apple history http://www.apple-history.com
For Xerox Parc history http://www.parc.xerox.com
On the Internet: Hobbes' Internet Timeline http://info.isoc.org/guest/zakon/Internet/History/HIT.html
Technology history: http://www.islandnet.com/~kpolsson/comphist/