ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
1
YearMilestone
2
1823Charles Babbage wrote: “On the Theoretical Principles of the Machinery for Calculating Tables”. This paper can be thought of as the beginning of the field of computer science.

While he was the one who proposed the first mechanical computing device, he is also the one who proposed the use of punch cards to store information.

His first Difference Engine had 25,000 parts. The 2nd Difference Engine had the first computer memory and first printer (stamped results out in metal plates)

Babbages’ Analytical Engine had the basic components of modern computer;

In the 1920s/30s, Vannevar Bush pioneered mechanical computers. He explicitly acknowledged the work of Charles Babbage in his efforts. The electronic computers which were eventually developed were based on models which were explicitly outlined in Babbage’s Analytical Engine.
3
1833Denison Olmsted conducted one of the first instances of crowdsourcing.

One 13 November 1833, one of the greatest astronomical spectacles in recorded history took place - an extreme version of an annual occurrence (now) known as the Leonid Meteor Shower - an uptick in activity with exceptionally heavy meteor showers that happens every 33 years.

He took it upon himself to figure out the mystery. He gathered newspaper clippings and accounts of the event in the weeks following. He found that it was not observed in Europe, so it was not something that was global in nature. He also found that the shooting stars seemed to have originated somewhere in the constellation Leo. By January of 1834, not even two months after the event in question, he sent his findings to the American Journal of Science and Arts. He speculated that the meteors were a cloud of particles in space, and what everyone witnessed was the Earth passing through the cloud.

His paper was the beginning of meteor science.

The word crowdsourcing was coined in 2006.
4
1835Samuel Morse, a professor of painting and sculpture, devised a system of dots and dashes to represent letters and numbers - the first version of Morse code.
5
1837Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail developed the telegraph and (refined) Morse code, revolutionizing long-distance communication by sending electrical signals over wires.

Samuel Morse reportedly decided to invent the telegraph after hearing about the sudden death of his wife while he was away. The news reached him too late for him to say goodbye, inspiring him to develop faster communication methods.

Morse demonstrated his system on 24 May 1844, on a connection between Washington DC and Baltimore, Maryland. Morse was in Washington and Vail was in Baltimore, and Morse famously sent the first message which was “What hath God wrought!”
6
1842While collaborating with Charles Babbage and his Difference Engine, Ada Lovelace was asked to translate an article in French by an Italian engineer named Luigi Menabrea about the Difference Engine.

She spent nine months on the translation. However, she didn’t just translate the article. She did much, much more. She provided her own notes, which served as an appendix to the article, which ended up being three times longer than the article itself. In the notes, she basically set forth what would become computer science over a century later.

In one of the notes she laid out a set of instructions for how the Difference Engine could calculate Bernoulli Numbers. Bernoulli Numbers were challenging to calculate, and her algorithm for how a computational machine could calculate these numbers is considered to be the first computer program.

Her notes were republished by the English Scientist Baron Bertram Bowden in his 1955 book “Faster Than Thought: A Symposium on Digital Computing Machines.”
7
1849George Cayley, considered the world’s first aeronautical engineer, created the world’s first glider that could carry a human. For weight considerations, he hired a small boy to take the first flight.
8
1856In Philadelphia, John Mascher introduced what would become known as the “Decimal” or “Philadelphia System” for street and house numbering.

The system involved numbering blocks from east to west based upon the numerical street they intersected at their eastern ends. Houses on each block would then be given addresses from one to a hundred on Biddle’s odd/even principle.

Numbering houses was not a new idea. It was first done in the 16th century in Venice when buildings in an entire district were numbered. There was no real order to the system as it was done more for tax purposes. London’s municipal authorities ordered the numbering of buildings in 1768. France followed suit three years later.
9
1857Edouard-Léon Scott de Martinville invented sound recording via his phonautograph in 1857. He recorded Jeune Jouvencelle on 17 August 1857. And recorded the French folk song "Au Clair de la Lune" on April 9, 1860. The results were deposited with the Académie des Sciences in 1861. In 2008, Patrick Feaster devised a way to play back these recordings.
10
1858On 29 July 1858, the two ships met in the middle of the Atlantic and laid a cable in opposite directions. On August 4 the cable arrived in Newfoundland, Canada and the next day it arrived in Ireland. It was only a matter of days before messages were being sent back and forth. On 16 August, the first official telegraph message was sent across the Atlantic Ocean.

Way back in 1774, Georges-Louis Le Sage had created a primitive telegraph system that could communicate between rooms in his house in Geneva, Switzerland.
11
1868The typewriter was patented by Christopher Latham Sholes. His first typewriter had only two rows, and the keys were in alphabetical and numeric order. There were no keys for 1 or 0, because it was assumed you could use an uppercase I for 1, and an O for 0. After years of tinkering and adjusting, he finally came up with an arrangement of the keys that worked. The letters on the left side of the top row were Q-W-E-R-T-Y.

The QWERTY keyboard was first put into popular use with the sale of the Remington No. 2 typewriter in 1878.

Why QWERTY? Koichi Yasuoka and Motoko Yasuoka of Kyoto University did the seminal research paper on the subject. They found it was feedback from telegraph operators, based on their transcription of morse code, which led to the QWERTY keyboard. The telegraph operators were the beta testers if you will, of the typewriter.
12
1876Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Watson created the first practical telephone, allowing voice communication over long distances.

Alexander Graham Bell’s famous first words on the telephone were, "Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you" after accidentally spilling acid on himself and calling for his assistant, Thomas Watson.

Bell came from a family involved with elocution and speech education. His father developed “Visible Speech,” a phonetic system to help the deaf learn to speak. Bell became interested in transmitting speech electrically while teaching deaf students.

Several others had work on transmitting sounds and telephone prototypes including Antonio Meucci, Johann Philipp Reis, Thomas Edison and, most contentiously, Elisha Gray.
13
1884Herman Hollerith, an American statistician, patented a punched card system to process data for the 1890 U.S. Census. His method used punch cards to store data that could be read and tabulated by machines, significantly speeding up data processing.
14
1890The first use of punch cards to store data was as part of the 1890 US census.

However, in 1725 Basile Bouchon, as a French textile worker and inventor, used a perforated paper tape to control the weaving pattern, allowing for the complex designs in textiles.

In 1801 another French weaver, Joseph Marie Jacquard, made the next big advancement. His loom used punch cards instead of paper tape and was designed to be read by a machine rather than used as a guide for a loom operator. The idea of punch cards as a system for storing data for machines caught on after the Jacquard loom.
15
1896Guglielmo Marconi, an Italian physicist, created a wireless telegraph. Significant skepticism remained for several years. But Marconi’s cousin Jameson Davis, a practicing engineer, financed Marconi’s patent and helped in the formation of the Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company, Ltd.

Guglielmo Marconi sent the first transatlantic radio signal in 1901, and some of his contemporaries doubted it because they believed the curvature of the Earth would prevent it. Marconi reportedly responded with a simple, "I do not know how, but it did."
16
1896Tabulating Machine Company was formed and instituted a host of innovations with respect to card reading and manipulation. In 1911, it merged with other companies to become the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company. In 1924, it was renamed to International Business Machines Corporation, or more commonly known as IBM.
17
1903In 1900, 1901, and 1902, the Wright Brothers developed generations of gliders that had progressively longer wingspans. Moreover, they also used very early wind tunnel tests to conduct experiments for optimal wing design, testing over 200 models.

Everything they learned over years of testing and designing gliders was finally put together in the development of the Wright Flyer in 1903.

They had a custom engine built because the engines used in early automobiles were considered to be too heavy.

The first flight was flown by Orville, and it flew for 12 seconds for a total distance of 120 feet.

It took another 4 years before someone else could fly a heavier-than-air machine longer than a minute.
18
1904John Ambrose Fleming invented the first true vacuum tube in 1904 - called the Fleming valve - which acted as a diode and was used to detect radio signals.

During one of his experiments, Fleming wired an old vacuum tube into a radio receiving circuit, and was able to rectify high-frequency oscillations and thus allow detection of the rectified signals by a galvanometer. After the patent was issued, the Fleming valve found immediate utility in detecting messages sent by Morse code.

The vacuum tube is considered one of the most important developments in the history of electronics.
19
1906The first use of amplitude modulation (aka AM radio) was a broadcast by Reginald Fessenden when he sent a message from Ocean Bluff-Brant Rock, Massachusetts to ships at sea. The broadcast was a version of O Holy Night on the violin.
20
1917The first pilotless vehicle (aka drone) was tested in Britain. It was called Aerial Target and was a small radio-controlled aircraft.

It is believed the name ‘drone’ comes from the 1935 radio-controlled DH.82B Queen Bee given the drone bee connection.
21
1920sPulse-code modulation: takes pulses of an analog signal and measures each pulse so the wave can be broken apart and transported. The first systems were designed for facsimile systems that could send simple images over telegraph and telephone lines.
22
1925Bell Labs was created on 1 January.

Its very existence connects back to the prize money Alexander Graham Bell won in 1880 as part of The Volta Prize from the French Government for the invention of the telephone.

They were responsible for A LOT of technological innovation and were issued over 17,000 patents. Such things as (in chrono order):
synching sound with motion pictures

statistical process control (used in Sigma Six)

one-time pad cipher → an uncrackable form of cryptography

long-distant television transmission

radio astronomy

stereo audio recording

stereo radio transmissions

first speech synthesizer

first photovoltaic cell (solar power)

transistor (1947)

first transatlantic telephone cable

theoretical foundations for the creation of the laser

first gas laser

helped design Telstar → the first telecommunications satellite

first version of the UNIX operating system

first charged coupled device (basis for digital cameras)

C and C++ programing languages

first 32-bit microprocessor

CDMA and TDMA which was the basis for all digital cell phone signals before 4G

helped deploy the first transatlantic fiber-optic telephone cable.

first 56k modem

new type of electron lithography for printing computer chips
23
1927John Logie Baird and Philo Farnsworth independently developed technologies that enabled the electronic transmission of moving images, resulting in the invention of television.

Electronic television was first successfully demonstrated in San Francisco in September. The system was designed by Philo Taylor Farnsworth, a 21-year-old inventor who had lived in a house without electricity until he was 14. The first image he transmitted on it was a simple line. Soon he aimed his primitive camera at a dollar sign because an investor had asked, "When are we going to see some dollars in this thing, Farnsworth?"
24
1927Though it is an inescapable part of our modern world, video calls were not immediately popular after their 1927 public debut.

The first one way video call was publicly demonstrated in New York City in 07 April 1927 between Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover and American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T). From Washington D.C., Hoover told spectators in NYC that “human genius has now destroyed the impediment of distance in a new respect, and in a manner hitherto unknown.”

Ultimately the technology flopped. It was expensive and impractical compared to a normal telephone call. It wasn’t until the invention of the webcam that allowed for video calls to be conducted online that the technology started to take off.
25
1928The IBM Card is introduced. Based on earlier punched cards, IBM changes the format of punched cards allowing for storage of larger amounts of data.

At the turn of the twentieth century, punched cards had been used to record the US 1890 census and proved to be a successful way to record and store large amounts of data. By the 1920s the public began demanding a way to store even larger amounts of data on each card.

IBM tasked two top inventors to innovate the punched card. Inventor Clarice Lake proposed changing the shape of the holes from circles to rectangles, allowing for more holes per card, effectively doubling the amount of data stored on one card. Each hole represented a piece of data and was known as a “bit,” meaning each card could hold up to 960 bits of data.
26
1932Magnetic Drum Memory was developed in Austria by Gustav Tauschek. Magnetic Drum Memory was a common method of storing data for computers in the 1950s and 1960s. During this time, punch cards didn’t die out. In fact, they increased in popularity due to the increased use of computers.
27
1933Edwin Armstrong developed frequency modulation (aka FM radio). Instead of increasing amplitude, it would vary the frequency of the signal. This proved to be a far better way to transmit sound than AM. It also allowed for multiplexing signals, which allowed for music to be broadcast in stereo.

FM radio only passed AM radio in terms of total listeners, in the United States, in 1978. Part of that reason was because, in the late 1960s, album-oriented rock became popular.
28
1935What is meant by “computer” begins to change. Before 1935, a computer was a person who performs arithmetic calculations. Between 1935 and 1945 the definition referred to a machine, rather than a person.

The first known written reference to the word computer was actually in 1613. A computer was nothing more than a person who computes, in the same way, that a baker is someone who bakes and a cleaner is someone who cleans.

Being a computer was often an introductory position that someone would take before becoming a full-blown scientist. Industry started using women as they could get more “computing power” for less money. In the second half of the 19th century, computing was not a physically demanding job, and women tended to command lower wages than men at the time. By hiring women, companies could get more computing done for the same amount of money.

Women eventually became some of the earliest programmers as they used electronic computers to do calculations. They built algorithms!
29
1937Pulse-code modulation was used for the first time on voice signals by a British engineer named Alec Reeves. Even though he received patents for his invention, there was no real practical use for it at the time. This was the first time sound was made digital.
30
1939The US Navy began using the term RADAR as an acronym for “RAdio Detection And Ranging.

Fun fact: In 1945, Percy Spencer, an employee of the Raytheon Corporation, was working on a radar installation and was standing in front of a magnetron (the heart of a radar system) - which converts electricity to electromagnetic radio waves - and noticed the chocolate bar in his pocket had melted. He immediately tested popcorn and it popped all over the place. He the focused the waves coming out of the magnetron into a metal box. Voila, the first microwave oven. For all his efforts for creating one of the most popular cooking appliances in the world, Percy Spencer received a $2 from Raytheon.
31
1939Skunkworks. The United States Army came to Lockheed and asked them if they could develop a jet aircraft that could counter the threat of the German jet fighters.
An engineer named Clarence “Kelly” Johnson took a team of hand-picked engineers and separated themselves from the rest of the company and went to work. They were working in a rented circus tent because there was no space elsewhere in the Lockheed facilities.

In just 143 days, they had completely designed and built the first versions of the XP-80 Shooting Star. They did almost all of the project without a contract, on a handshake deal with the government.


Skunkwork name: There was an engineer working on the XP-80 team named Irv Culver. He was a fan of the Lil’ Abner comic strip.
In the comic, there was a hidden place deep in the woods called the “skonk works” which was where they brewed a strong alcoholic beverage.

During the program, it was so secret that everyone was careful how they answered the phone. Culver would answer the phone by saying, “Skonk Works, inside man Culver speaking.”

Soon, everyone began using the name “skonk works” to describe where they worked and overtime “skonk works” simply became “skunkworks”.
32
1943The United States Postal Service introduced postal zone codes. The top 124 urban areas in the United States were given postal codes for zones of the city. For example, if you were sending a letter to New York, you would use “New York 16” to delineate which zone in New York, and to which post office the letter should be sent.
33
1944Harvard Mark 1- Also known as the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC), it was the first mainframe computer and was completed through a collaboration between Harvard University and IBM. Howard Aiken started drafting the concept for his dream of a machine that could handle a large amount of complex math in a short amount of time with reliable results in 1937. The project was completed by IBM in 1943 and shipped to Harvard in February 1944.
34
1945Theorizing satellite communication: the British science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke had been a proponent of the idea of space travel since the 1930s. In 1945 he wrote an article for Wireless World magazine titled “Extra-Terrestrial Relays – Can Rocket Stations Give World-Wide Radio Coverage?”
35
1945In his paper "As We May Think”, Vannevar Bush laid out a vision of a personal knowledge machine that he called “Memex” - a desk-sized device for filing, linking, and retrieving one’s own documents using associative “trails.” While he did not describe a microprocessor or a GUI, he did hit-the-mark on the idea of a privately owned interactive information appliance that augments an individual’s memory and creativity.

Douglas Engelbart, drawing inspiration from Bush’s paper, pioneered a vision for a personal computer connected to an electronic visual display and a mouse pointing device (see 1962 and 1969).
36
1946ENIAC- Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer (ENIAC) is first introduced to the public. Though its status as the first computer is debated, its impact on the computing industry is indisputable. While it was initially built to calculate artillery trajectories, it was also the first programmable general use computer, allowing it to have a wide range of applications. It had a power of approximately 500 FLOPS.

This innovation led directly to the first computer meant for commercial use, the UNIVAC (UNIVersal Automatic Computer). UNIVAC was built by the same inventors of ENIAC with business application in mind. It was commercially available beginning in 1951. The last UNIVAC machine was in operation until 1970.

ENIAC and UNIVAC had their limitations. They were not practical. One computer weighed 30 tons, required its own air conditioning to avoid bringing the room's temperature up to 50C, and potentially took days to program.

This could be why at the end of the decade there were still only a few devices. Early in the decade IBM’s president, Thomas J. Watson, had allegedly (and notoriously) said, “I think there is a world market for about five computers.” Despite these limitations, it was an integral part of computing history.
37
1946Lin Yutang patented the MingKwai typewriter.

At the time, typing Chinese was a monumental challenge. Chinese has no alphabet. Instead, it uses tens of thousands of pictographs. When Lin started his work, there was no standardized version of Mandarin Chinese. Instead, people spoke hundreds of dialects and languages, meaning there was no singular phonetic spelling of the sound of each word.

The typewriter's ingenuity comes from the way Lin decided to break down Chinese pictographs: by their shapes, not sounds. The typist can search for certain combinations of shapes by pressing down on the ergonomic keyboard. Then, a small screen above the keyboard (Lin called it his "magic eye") offers the typist up to eight possible characters that might match. In this way, the typewriter boasts the ability to retrieve up to 90,000 characters.

The concepts used in the MingKwai typewriter underlie how we type Chinese, Japanese and Korean today

Only one known prototype was ever crafted. It was created by Mergenthaler Linotype.
38
1946The first true car telephone - a mobile radio telephone - was developed by Bell System and first used in St. Louis, Missouri on 17 June 1946. When officially launched in Chicago in October, there were only three radio frequencies available and the service quickly reached capacity.

The technology required a handset, a transmitter and sometimes an external antenna to work. The original equipment weighed 80 pounds (36 kg).

Urban legend claims that, in 1910, Lars Magnus Ericsson, the founder of the Ericsson company, built a phone into his car that was used by parking his car and connecting it to phone lines with tall poles with hooks. The Ericsson company has formally denied this story. Axel Boström, the CEO succeeding Lars, did carry a phone and a stick that he could use to connect to a phone line. His stick is preserved at the Technical Museum in Stockholm.
39
1947The term debugging originated when engineers working on the Harvard Mark II computer found a moth stuck in a relay, causing a malfunction. The team logged the incident labeling it as the "first actual case of bug being found." and even taped the insect in the logbook . The team is also credited with the term debugging.
40
1947Bell Labs created the first point-contact transistor when they were investigating semiconductors in search of a replacement for vacuum tubes.

They placed two gold contacts very close together on a germanium crystal, with the crystal mounted on a metal base. When they applied voltage to one contact, they discovered they could control a much larger current flowing between the other contact and the base.

The first commercial transistor applications appeared in hearing aids around 1952.
41
1949Norman Woodland came up with the modern barcode while drawing lines in the sand at Miami Beach. He had been at Drexel University, in Philadelphia, when Bernard Silver overheard the president of a chain of grocery stores talking to one of the deans at the college about developing a system to read product information at checkout (1948). They tried to come up with a solution, but nothing worked. Woodland later moved to Miami to live in his Grandfather’s apartment.

Woodland’s pattern was circular in nature. He later worked on the IBM team which came up with the rectangular pattern (1973) we know today.
42
1949The inspiration for credit cards happened at the Majors Cabin Grill in New York.

Frank McNamara was having dinner at the Majors Cabin Grill where he was entertaining clients. He had forgotten his wallet, so his wife paid the bill. He thought that a multipurpose charge card that would be accepted at any merchant, would solve this problem. He talked about it with the restaurant owner and with his lawyer, Ralph Schneider. One year later they had another meal at the Majors Cabin Grill and this time paid for it with a paper card and a signature. This became known as “The First Supper” and it was the beginning of the first multipurpose card: Diners Club. It was a charge card (paid in full each month) versus a credit card.
43
1950The first game on an electronic computer was Birdie the Brain. Its sole purpose was to play Tic-tac-toe.

The 13 foot tall machine was built in Toronto by Josef Kates for the 1950 Canadian National Exhibition. The main purpose was to show off new type vacuum tubes and it was taken apart after 2 weeks.
44
1951The world’s first videotape demonstration was given on November 11, 1951, by Bing Crosby Enterprises, the company owned by singer Bing Crosby.
45
1951Jay Forrester applied for a patent on three-dimensional magnetic-core memory (granted 1956). It is the the predominant form of random-access computer memory (RAM) as part of Project WhirlWind at MIT
46
1953Ted Fujita, aka “Mister Tornado”, pioneered the technique of using aerial overflights after tornadoes to assess damage while at the University of Chicago.
47
1955Douglas Engelbart coined the term augmented intelligence. [Need to find source]
48
1955The SHARE user group was formed in 1955 as one of the first computer user groups in history. It was established by a collection of IBM mainframe customers who were using IBM’s 704 scientific computing system.

SHARE’s name was not an acronym, but rather reflected its core purpose: to share information, software, and resources among its members. At a time when computers were enormously expensive and software was not viewed as a separate commercial product, SHARE provided a formal structure for collaboration.

The SHARE user group still exists today.
49
1955U2 plane had its first test flight
50
1956The first commercial videotape recorder, that was good enough to replace a kinescope, was sold by the AMPEX corporation out of Chicago in April 1956.

In the early days of television, recordings of broadcasts were made on a device known as a kinescope, which literally was a film camera pointed at a video screen.
51
1956The first Artificial Intelligence conference - simply called Dartmouth Workshop - was held at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire

The conference came about from a 1955 proposal entitled A Proposal For The Dartmouth Summer Research Project On Artificial Intelligence by:
J. McCarthy, Dartmouth College

M. L. Minsky, Harvard University

N. Rochester, I.B.M. Corporation, and

C.E. Shannon, Bell Telephone Laboratories
52
1956The first hard disk drives were introduced by IBM in 1956. The first hard disk drive was the IBM RAMAC (Random Access Method of Accounting and Control) 350 disk storage unit. The 350 was the size of multiple large filing cabinets and could store 3.75 MB of data.

It had 50 24” disks spinning at 1,200 RPM holding 5 million characters (about 3.75 MB) of information.
53
1957A black and white photo of a baby became the first digital image in 1957. The baby that launched a thousand images, became the computer science icon he is because his father Robert Kirsch asked a simple question, “what if computers could read images?” He created a rotating drum scanner and program that allowed images to be fed into a computer. The first digital image was of his 3 month old son and was only 176 pixels on one side. This breakthrough lead to satellite imaging, barcodes, CAT scans, digital photograph, and a long list of other digital image technology.
54
1958The vacuum tubes of the first computers made them incredibly large and cumbersome. Early on, it became clear to engineers that transistors could replace the burden of the vacuum tube. While transistors had been around since at least 1947, it wasn’t until the planar transistor of 1958 that important steps towards the first integrated circuit were taken.

This revolutionary transistor, though not used in most modern technology, was produced by Fairchild Semiconductor. Originally it sold for $150 USD per transistor. Today, transistors are produced in tens of trillions per second at billionths of a dollar per transistor. This gives it the title of the fastest and most extensive proliferation in history.
55
1958The first thing that could even be called a communications satellite was the SCORE satellite, launched in December. SCORE stood for Signal Communications by Orbiting Relay Equipment. All it was was a tape recorder that could receive, record, and transmit voice messages. It was the largest object put into orbit at the time - 24 meters long. It was only in orbit for a month.
56
1958The first real video game - Tennis for Two - was created by William Higinbotham at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. What made it special and the first?

It was built for two players, was on a type of video monitor (oscilloscope which had a cathode ray tube), and two custom controllers.
57
1958American Express, a 100-year-old company that was in the business of issuing money orders and traveler’s checks, offered their own charge card (AMEX). It was so popular that a quarter-million cards were requested before the card actually launched.
58
1958Bank of America launched the first credit card - BankAmericard - tying a card to a revolving line of credit that could be widely accepted. No credit checks were required.

On 18 September, the bank mailed 60,000 Fresno residents a BankAmericard. There was no application process. The card simply arrived in the mailbox, ready to use. It became known as the Fresno Drop. Within 10 months, over a million cards had been mailed out.

The launch was a disaster. But they were making money by 1961.

The card eventually became known as VISA.
59
1960PLATO, Programmed Logic for Automated Teaching Operations, was launched by Don Bitzer at the University of Illinois and had a massive and long-lasting effect on education. The features used today, like discussion boards or forums and blogs started with PLATO. Most of the social networking to today actually started as an educational tool.

The concept was inspired by B.F. Skinner’s operant conditioning experiments where animals learned that pushing a lever would provide food. Believing humans would respond similarly, PLATO would be a “book with feedback.”

The PLATO team invented a more usable, cheaper plasma display allowing the project to grow exponentially. “Notes,” was an email-like and newsgroup system that linked up an online community directly influencing a future Lotus Notes.

“Empire,” a Star Trek-themed PLATO game is considered one of the first networked multiplayer games. Such games led to the app “Talkomatic,” which functioned as a chatroom for students across the country.

Gaming really helped drive the popularity of PLATO. Alongside students doing research and students taking quizzes for a required class, gamers could be found from BYU to UCLA. The compromise was that games were shut down for peak learning hours and students were free to play on nights and weekends.

In the 1970s students enjoyed the communal computer gaming experience so much, they found a way to block other users of the system who were using it for classwork or research so they could be free to play. It became such a problem that the Urbana Police Department had to approach Professor Don Bitzer, to institute a 9 p.m. curfew for users under 16.
60
1961One of the first televised use of weather radar occurred in 1961 when a young local Texas reporter by the name of Dan Rather went to a weather radar facility in Galveston, Texas to cover Hurricane Carla.

He got permission to broadcast live from the site and got the managers of the facility to draw a rough outline of the Gulf of Mexico on a transparent sheet of plastic. He then held the sheet over the radar display to show viewers the size and location of the storm.

Thanks to his efforts in displaying the scope of the storm to viewers, hundreds of thousands fled, and there were only 35 deaths, compared to the 12,000 dead from a similar hurricane in 1900.
61
1962Douglas Engelbart published “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework” with a central theme that computers are not to replace the brain, but be leveraged by our brains for their processing abilities. One of the big themes of the paper was using networked computers to allow humans to work on collaborative problem-solving.

Most of the innovations/ideas associated with what we think of as a personal computer were developed by one man and the researchers at his laboratory: Douglas Engelbart. He set up the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) within the Stanford Research Institute. He and his team began work on what he called the oNLine System or NLS.
62
1962Usually considered the first true communications satellite was Telstar which was created by Bell Labs. Several things made Telstar different from previous satellites - it was solar-powered with the ability to produce 14 watts of power and it contained a new electronic device called a transponder.
63
1962Groups at General Electric, IBM, and MIT all, almost simultaneously, developed a semiconductor laser, which is a type that is used in many electronics.
LASER: Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation
64
1962The first open-source video game - SpaceWar! game - was created by computer scientist Steve Russell at MIT. It was the first video game that was designed to run as software on any PDP-1 minicomputer. It was not hardwired to a single device.
65
1963Hypertext was named by Ted Nelson in 1963 as part of his (never realized) project called Xanadu which aimed to have all pieces of information be published with two-way hypertext links to and from related information.

Ted Nelson named his hypertextual idea “Project Xanadu” after the poem by Coleridge, because he believed that Xanadu was “a magical place where memories are never forgotten.”
66
1963Joseph Licklider joined ARPRA and wrote a paper on something he called the Intergalactic Computer Network.

It was a visionary concept, imagining a globally interconnected set of computers through which anyone, anywhere, could quickly access data and programs from any site. Licklider envisioned a network that would allow widespread information sharing, collaboration among distant researchers, and even real-time communication—in essence, an early sketch of what would later become the Internet. He outlined the concept in a memo addressed to the “Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network”

The network ideas of Licklider and the packet-switching ideas of Paul Baran (packets) were combined in an actual proposal known as ARPAnet.
67
1963The first home Video Tape Recorder (VTR) system was called Telcan, short for Television in a Can. It was released in 1963 by the Nottingham Electronic Valve Company in the UK. The device was incredibly expensive, costing over £30,000 inflation-adjusted pounds.
68
1963The US Postal Service instituted the Zoning Improvement Plan or ZIP.

The ZIP divided the entire country into zones with each zone having a five-digit code. These ZIP codes would be assigned to every address to greatly ease mail delivery.
69
1963The first satellite to be put into geosynchronous orbit was Syncom 2.
70
1963GIS (Geographic Information System) has a long history. The father of GIS is thought to be Roger Tomlinson who directed the Canadian Geographic System (CGIS). Tomilson had the idea of digitizing geographical information to better analyze Canada’s massive land resources. While this project started in 1963, it was not fully operational until 1971.

The term geo-information system or Geo-IS first appears in the 1967 paper by Tomlinson entitled An Introduction to the Geo-Information System of The Canada Land Inventory

Meanwhile, in 1965, The Harvard Laboratory began work on SYSMAP. Howard Fisher had a vision of a computer mapping software that could be compatible with any machine. The work at “The Lab” gave way to a company named ESRI, who released the first commercially available GIS in 1981 with ARC/INFO.
71
1964Syncom 3 became the first satellite to be put into geostationary orbit.
72
1964The first version of BASIC, aka Dartmouth BASIC, was released. It was created by John G. Kemeney and Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth College.

The two started working for quite some time to create a simplified programming language. Their first effort ended up with the Darsimco or Dartmouth Simplified Code which did not attract much interest. Their second attempt was the Dartmouth Oversimplified Programming Experiment but it got even less attention. Nevertheless, they kept working and it eventually resulted in the Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code (BASIC).

They did not patent nor protect their invention in any way as they said they wanted their language to be in the public domain. This made possible the growth and differentiation of BASIC.
73
1964The first computer to be called a supercomputer was released by the Control Data Corporation - the CDC 6600. It had a computing power of 3 MEGA FLOPS

The supercomputer used in the Apollo Program was the Apollo Guidance Computer and had a total computing power of 85 KILO FLOPS. The first Apple iPhone, released in 2007, had a power of 5 MEGA FLOPS. The Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max has a computing power of 2.15 TERA FLOPS. So, yes, your smartphone has more computing power than the computer used to land people on the moon!
74
1965The first commercial communications satellite - INTELSAT 1 - was built by Hughes Aircraft Corporation and launched by NASA.
75
1965James Russell conceptualized and patented an idea for a digital optical storage system that encoded information in microscopic pits on a disc and used a laser beam to read the data without physical contact. He got patents in 1966 and 1969. He had a working version by 1973. He pitched his idea to over 100 companies including Sony and Phillips.
See 1978 laserdisc for first commercial usage
76
1966British physicist George Kao and his team determined how to send information via laser across fiber optic cables. He was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize for his work on fiber optic communications.
77
1967Japan’s national broadcasting company, NHK, developed the first pulse-code modulation (PCM) recorder - a 30 kHz, 12-bit device that could encode an audio signal and store it on videotape. It sampled a sound wave 30,000 times a second and saved each sample as a number with 12 1’s and 0’s.

The work was led by Dr. Heitaro Nakajima who later left to join Sony where he lead the development of Sony's first PCM digital audio recorder, the X-12DTC.
78
1968The Federal Communications Commission, in what was known as the Carterfone case, ruled that non-Bell equipment could be attached to the telephone system.
This ruling enabled the development and use of modems in personal computers
79
1968In December 1968, Douglas Engelbart delivered a 90-minute keynote presentation at the annual computer science conference of the Association for Computing Machinery and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. It is referred to as the Mother of All Demos.
He demonstrated the first graphical user interface. He showed working hyperlinks. He demonstrated the concept of a floating window.

He showed the world’s first word processor and the ability to edit and delete text in real-time. He showed how he could copy and paste text and move it around on the screen.

He and a colleague back in Menlo Park jointly worked on a single document in different locations on the same computer.

He was able to move around on the screen because of a device he and his team created which allowed you to manipulate objects on a screen with your hand. They called it a mouse. The first model was made from mahogany

The idea for the mouse came to him while he was day dreaming at a conference in October 1961. His team had tested all the other screen interaction devices, but were looking for a better solution

He also announced that in a few months (1969), SRI was going to become the second node in a new network called ARPANet.
80
1969ARPANET made its first permanent connection in late 1969. It established many of the protocols used by modern computer networks today and is considered the forerunner to the internet*.

The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) came about as part of an overlapping desire from academia and the US military to share information remotely even if portions of a network were removed or if a connection was unstable. Computers of the age were large and complicated machines. They were expensive, only available at a few select locations, and required a dedicated terminal in order to use them.

The US military wanted a way for computer terminals to communicate remotely with each other, even if part of a network was unavailable due to a nuclear strike. Universities wanted a stable way of remote information sharing that was more fault tolerant over unreliable connections.

Development of a network to meet these requirements started in 1966. ARPANET was coined in October 1967 by Larry Roberts at an ARPA conference (to discuss ARPANET).

The first message sent over ARPANET was supposed to be "LOGIN," but the system crashed after sending just "LO." So, the first successful message was an accidental "LO."

Packets: Roger Scantlebury presented a paper to that same conference describing the work of his boss - Donald Davies. It was a method of breaking messages into small units called “packets” - everyone was interested and they discussed it in the bar late into the night.


Network Control Program handled communication between hosts and could support first commands, Telnet and File Transfer Protocol (FTP). Interface Message Processor was developed to pass messages between hosts. It is considered the first packet gateway or router. Modems were designed and sent out to participants. The first message was sent over ARPANET in October 1969 by a student at UCLA. It crashed on the first attempt, but worked later that day.

* The internet was originally called the internetwork. In 1974, Vint Cerf at Stanford University and Bob Kahn at DARPA published a proposal for "A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication". They used the term internet as a shorthand for internetwork and the shortened name caught on.
81
1969Digital display: Hewlett Packard introduced the HP5082-7000. It was a series of LED lights connected to an integrated circuit and could display simple letters or numbers. It was the world’s first digital display.
82
1971Kubak 1- Regarded as the first stored program personal computer (PC), the Kubak 1 was designed by John Blakenbaker in 1971. It was completed before the microprocessor was available and clocked in at 1 MHZ. It was designed with the idea that it would be good for education, however it did not do well commercially. Only 40 were ever sold, mainly to schools, and it was discontinued in 1973.
83
1971Intel released the 4004 - the first microprocessor - which contained approximately 2,300 transistors on a single chip.

This device could perform the same calculations as room-sized computers from the 1940s.
84
1971As a side project developed by a desire to ‘send messages to people’ instead of computers, Ray Tomlinson, an MIT engineer, sent the first email ever in 1971. While working for ARPANET, Tomilson wanted to send messages to people, not mailboxes. Electronic communication was possible, but it wasn’t possible to simply ‘leave’ a message for someone. Mail had to be sent to numbered mailboxes where it would then be printed out and accessible to whoever needed to pick it up. Using the format we’re all familiar with today, user @host email address, it became a quick way to message other researchers. It raised the usefulness of a computer to a new level and was shortly released to the public. He did this with a program called SNDMSG and an experimental file transfer program called CPYNET.
85
1971UNIX is officially launched by Bell Labs. Development had started two years earlier.

AT&T (Bell Labs) was prohibited from entering the computer business by a 1956 consent decree. This led them to license UNIX to universities for minimal fees, including source code.

Academic institutions, particularly the University of California, Berkeley, received, studied, and modified the code. Computer science students learned programming by reading actual production code.

This created a generation of programmers who expected to be able to see and modify source code, establishing a culture that valued openness and knowledge sharing.
86
1971The first commercial digital audio recording was Nippon Columbia NCB-7003, "Something" by Steve Marcus. It was released in January 1971.

In the late 1970s, Sony and 3M created prototype digital recording systems and released the first commercial Pulse-code modulation system.
87
1971The first commercial video game was released by Nutting Associates. It was an arcade game called Computer Space and was based on SpaceWar!
88
1971ALOHAnet - developed at the University of Hawaii under the leadership of Dr. Norman Abramson and Dr. Franklin Kuo - began providing inter-island access to computing facilities in June 1971 using large-scale packet radio.

This system was the first to demonstrate that a shared communication channel could be effectively used by multiple computers via a "random access protocol". The ALOHA protocol became a foundational concept that later influenced the design of Ethernet and other networking technologies.

All wireless communications today - including mobile, satellite, cellular, and WiFi - utilize the ALOHA protocol to establish an initial link.
89
1972The first home video cassette system was called Cartrivision. Their devices were entire televisions with a tape player built into the TV.
90
1972The first floppy disks - 8 inches in diameter - Although originally called the Type 1 Diskette, the term floppy was used almost immediately. They were created by IBM.

The United States Air Force was using these 8-inch floppy drives to manage its nuclear arsenal up until 2019.
91
1972The first barcode prototype solution was developed by RCA and tested in Kroger foods in Cincinnati.
92
1973In collaboration with Motorola, Martin Cooper used his hand made cellphone to make the first mobile cell phone call in April 1973 on the streets of New York City. He used the phone to call their competitors, AT&T, right before a press conference famously saying "I'm calling you from a real cellular telephone - a handheld unit."

However, the cell phone was not ready for mass production yet. It would be another 10 years, in September 1983, when the Dyna Tac 8000 would be commercially available at the price of 4,000 USD.
93
1973"Community Memory," the First Public Computerized Bulletin Board System was launched by Efrem Lipkin, Mark Szpakowski, and Lee Felsenstein in Berkeley, California at the top of the stairs leading to Leopold's Records.

The first terminal was a Teletype Model 33 connected to the SDS 940 computer by telephone, using a 10 character per second acoustic coupled modem. It was located right next to a busy conventional bulletin board. The Teletype machine was noisy, so it was encased in a cardboard box, with a transparent plastic top so what was being printed out could be seen, and with holes for one's hands while typing.

This was the first time many individuals who were not studying a scientific subject had the opportunity to be able to use a computer.
94
1973The Pennywhistle modem was designed by Lee Felsenstein. It was only commercialized in 1976
95
1973In March, Xerox released the first computer designed with a graphical user interface: The Xerox Alto. It could be considered the world’s first personal computer. It was built from a concept Alan Kay had conceived that he called Dynabook. He called the Xerox Alto “the interim Dynabook”.
96
1973Building on ALOHAnet (1971), the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) initiated the Packet Radio Network (PRNET) project.

This research aimed to create a mobile ad-hoc data network as well as to see if they could get packet radio to work with ARPANET. The experiment was successful and marked one of the first successful examples of “internetworking”.

PRNET was one of the key networks (along with ARPANET and SATNET) used in the first successful public demonstration of internetworking in 1977. Its node was in a silver van.
97
1974On a computer at Stanford, Elizabeth Feinler maintained a master list of every Internet-connected computer in a text file called HOSTS.TXT which mapped host names with all entries in the Assigned Numbers List. This was a direct precursor to DNS (see 1983)

It was Feinler and her team that developed the idea of domains. She believed in associating computers with the type of organization they were located in. At the time, this would have mostly been done by educational institutions, government agencies, and research organizations.
98
1974The first purchase using a UPC code and a (laser) barcode scanner was conducted at Marsh’s Supermarket in Troy, Ohio. The purchase was a 10-pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit gum. Both the gum and the receipt are on display at the Smithsonian Institute.

A packet of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit gum was deliberately chosen to demonstrate that barcodes could be printed on small items.
99
1975Altair 8800 - the first real, working personal computer for home consumers was launched in January 1975. It used an Intel 8080 CPU running at about 2 MHz, with a base memory of 256 bytes expandable up to 64 KB. It had no keyboard, no screen, and came as a kit requiring assembly. Users programmed it by flipping switches on the front panel and received output through blinking lights.

As MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems, Inc.) were rushing the article in Popular Electronics, they still did not have a name. Les Solomon’s daughter, a Star Trek junkie, suggested it be named after the star that the spaceship Enterprise was visiting that night, Altair.

Bill Gates and Paul Allen developed a version of the BASIC programming language for the machine. This marked the beginning of their company, which they named after the microcomputer software: Microsoft.
100
1975Steve Wozniak sketched out what would become the Apple I, in the evening, after the first meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club in March 1975.

Working in the evenings at his office at HP, Steve Wozniak designed the first keyboard & monitors that were integrated with a personal computer for hobbyists - 29 June 1975.