From Cave Paintings to the Internet An Annotated Interactive Timeline on the History of Information and Media 1960 to 1970 Timeline

Reflecting the obsolescence of mathematical tables, Mathematical Tables and Other Aids to Computation (MTAC), the first computing journal, changes its name to Mathematics of Computation.

John Horty at the Health Law Center, University of Pittsburgh, pioneers computer-assisted legal research by having the texts of relevant statutes keyed into punched cards and then transferred to computer tapes where they can be searched and retrieved by “key words in combination” (KWIC)

The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the United States Defense Department increases funding for research on computing.

IBM introduces a transistorized version of its vacuum-tube-logic 709 computer, the 7090. It is the first commercially available general purpose computer with transistor logic. It becomes the most popular large computer of the early 1960s.

Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) introduces its first computer, the PDP (Programmed Data Processor)-1 designed in part by C. Gordon Bell. Selling for $120,000, it is a commercialization of the TX-O and TX-2 computers designed at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratories. On advice from the venture-capital firm that financed the company, DEC does not call it a “computer” but a “programmed data processor” instead. The machine is credited as being the most important in the creation of hacker culture. Some references will identify this machine as the first minicomputer; however DEC will give either the PDP-5 introduced in 1963 or the PDP-8 introduced in 1965 that designation.

Lanston Monotype Machine Company introduces the Monomatic composing machine, a system perpetuating the concept of a separate keyboard and caster interfaced by a 31-channel punched paper tape. “The keyboard consisted of a two-alphabet layout (instead of the customary five or seven) augmented by four shift keys. In the caster, the matrix-case contained 324 characters arranged in 18 ¥ 18 rows. There were no restrictions on unit values within the rows.”

The United States Department of Defense issues a requirement that all computers supplied to it must be capable of compiling the COBOL programming language.

William A. Fetter, a researcher at Boeing, coins the term “computer graphics.”

About six thousand computers are operational in the United States, and perhaps ten thousand worldwide.

Drs. William Chardack and Andrew Gage, and electrical engineer Wilson Greatbatch, report the success of the world’s first successful long-term implant in a human patient of a sel-contained, internally powered artificial pacemaker in their paper entitled A Transistorized, Self-contained, Implantable Pacemaker for the Long-term Correction of Complete Heart Block.

The U.S. Navy launches NAVSAT, also known as TRANSIT. It is the first operational satellite navigation system. Using a constellation of five satellites, the system is primarily used to obtain accurate location information by ballistic missile submarines, and is also used as a general navigation system by the Navy, and in hydrographic and geodetic surveying. Since there is no computer small enough to fit through a submarine’s hatch, a new computer is designed, named the AN/UYK-1. It is built with rounded corners to fit through the hatch, and is about five feet tall, and sealed to be water-proof.

John McCarthy introduces LISP (LISt Processor), the language of choice for AI programming.

PLATO I (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations), the first electronic learning system, developed by Donald Bitzer, operates on the ILLIAC 1 at the University ofi Illinois. It includes a television for a display and a special system to navigate the system's menu. PLATO I services a single user. In 1961 PLATO II will allow two students to operate the system at once.

J. C. R. Licklider publishes Man-Computer Symbiosis, postulating that the computer should become an intimate symbiotic partner in human activity, including communication. (See Reading 10.5.)

The first report on COBOL is published.

The first symposium on bionics (biological electronics) takes place at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. (See Reading 11.7.)

QUOTRON, a computerized stock-quotation system using a Control Data Corporation computer, is introduced. It becomes popular with stockbrokers, signaling the end of ticker tape.

Francis Crick, Sydney Brenner and colleagues propose that DNA code is written in “words” called codons formed of three DNA bases. DNA sequence is built from four different bases, so a total of 64 (4 x 4 x 4) possible codons can be produced. They also propose that a particular set of RNA molecules subsequently called transfer RNAs (tRNAs) act to “decode” the DNA. Francis Crick, L. Barnett, Sydney. Brenner and R. J. Watts-Tobin, “General Nature of the Genetic code for Proteins,” Nature 192 (1961): 122732. “There was an unfortunate thing at the Cold Spring Harbor Symposium that year. I said, ‘We call this messenger RNA’ Because Mercury was the messenger of the gods, you know. And Erwin Chargaff very quickly stood up in the audience and said he wished to point out that Mercury may have been the messenger of the gods, but he was also the god of thieves. Which said a lot for Chargaff at the time! But I don’t think that we stole anything from anybody--except from nature. I think it’s right to steal from nature, however.” (Brenner, My Life, 85).

Edward Zajak at Bell Labs produces the first computer-animated film, entitled Two-Gyro Gravity-Gradient Attitude Control System.

Over seven thousand people belong to the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM).

Fernando José Corbató and colleagues at MIT describe the first working time-sharing system.

Compugraphic engineers recognize that a computer can be programmed to handle repetitious typesetter coding automatically. The firm develops a prototype model of the Directory Tape Processor (DTP) which eliminates all operator decisions and produces a fully coded tape used for typesetting.

One of the first time-sharing operating systems, CTSS (Compatible Time-Sharing System) is developed at MIT..

Wesley A. Clark, a physicist at MIT, starts building the Linc (Laboratory instrument computer). The machine, which some will later call both the first mini-computer and a forerunner of  the personal computer, will be first used in 1962. It has small table-top size, “low cost” ($43,000), keyboard and display, file system and an interactive operating system. It's design is placed in the public domain. Eventually fifty of the machines will be sold by Digital Equipment Corporation.

Leonard Kleinrock submits his MIT thesis proposal, Information Flow in Large Communication Nets. This is the first paper on what will later come to be known as data communications or data networking theory. (See Reading 13.2.)

Texas Instruments delivers the first integrated circuit computer to the U.S. Air Force. “The advanced experimental equipment has a total volume of only 6.3 cubic inches and weighs only 10 ounces. It provides the identical electrical functions of a computer using conventional components which is 150 times its size and 48 times its weight and which also was demonstrated for purposes of comparison. It uses 587 digital circuits (Solid Circuit™ semiconductor net works) each formed within a minute bar of silicon material. The larger computer uses 8500 conventional components and has a volume of 1000 cubic inches and weight of 480 ounces.”

Steve Russell and his team at MIT take about 200 hours to program the first computer game for a commercially available computer on a DEC PDP-1. It is called Spacewar! 

Rachel Carson publishes Silent Spring. This very carefully documented book convincingly proves the disastrous effects of DDT in the environment, and generates a storm of controversy. It will later be credited with founding the environmental movement in the United States.

Marshall McLuhan publishes The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man in which he divides history in four epochs: oral tribe culture, manuscript culture, the Gutenberg galaxy and the electronic age. For the break between the time periods in each case the occurrence of a new medium is responsible. Writing before computing is pervasive, McLuhan is concerned with the influence of radio, television and film on print culture, and on the impact of media, independent of content, upon thinking, and social organization:

"The main concept of McLuhan's argument (later elaborated upon in The Medium is the Massage) is that new technologies (like alphabets, printing presses, and even speech itself) exert a gravitational effect on cognition, which in turn affects social organization: print technology changes our perceptual habits ("visual homogenizing of experience"), which in turn impacts social interactions ("fosters a mentality that gradually resists all but a... specialist outlook"). According to McLuhan, the advent of print technology contributed to and made possible most of the salient trends in the Modern period in the Western world: individualism, democracy, Protestantism, capitalism, and nationalism. For McLuhan, these trends all reverberate with print technology's principle of "segmentation of actions and functions and principle of visual quantification."

The Los Angeles Times newspaper drives Linotype hot metal typesetters with perforated tape created from RCA computers, greatly speeding up typesetting.. The key to this advance is development of a dictionary and method to automate hyphenation and justification of text in columns. These tasks that had taken 40 percent of a manual operator's time.

Inforonics develops and maintains "one of the first data publishing and retrieval systems used by organizations such as the U.S. Library of Congress and the Boston Public Library."

While working as a consulting scientist at General Electric Company in Syracuse, New York, Nick Holonyak Jr. invents the first visible light-emitting-diode (LED). 

Leonard Kleinrock publishes Information Flow in Large Communication Nets in RLE Quarterly Progress Reports. This is the first publication to describe and analyze an algorithm for chopping messages into smaller pieces, later to be known as packets. His MIT doctoral thesis, Message Delay in Communication Nets with Storage, filed in December 1962, will elaborate on the impact of this algorithm on data networks. (See Reading 13.3.)

J.C.R. Licklider publishes “Online Man-Computer Communication,” calling for time-sharing of computers, and illustrating available graphic displays of information, and the need for an improved graphical interface. (See Reading 10.6.)

A Delta rocket from Cape Canaveral launches the AT&T TELSTAR 1 satellite. It is the first privately owned active communications satellite. It transmits the first direct television pictures from the United States to Europe, becoming the first satellite to relay signals from the earth to a satellite and back.

A bug in the flight software for the Mariner I space probe causes the rocket to divert from its intended path on launch. Mission control destroys the rocket over the Atlantic Ocean. "The investigation into the accident discovers that a formula written on paper in pencil was improperly transcribed into computer code, causing the computer to miscalculate the rocket's trajectory." In 2005 Wired Magazine will characterize this bug as the first of the "ten greatest software bugs of all time."

Douglas Engelbart of the Stanford Research Institute completes his report, Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework, for the Director of Information Sciences, Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

J.C. R. Licklider is appointed Director of the Pentagon’s Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), a division of ARPA (the Advanced Research Projects Agency).His initial budget is $10,000,000 per year. He eventually initiates the sequence of events leading to ARPANET .

Demonstration of DAC-1 (Design Augmented by Computers), a joint development effort between General Motors and IBM begun in 1959. This is the first computer-assisted design (CAD) program.

The ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) standard is promulgated, specifying the pattern of seven bits to represent letters, numbers, punctuation, and control signals in computers.

Digital Equipment Corporation introduces the PDP-5, DEC’s first 12 bit computer. This will be called “the world’s first commercially produced mini computer.” (The PDP-8 introduced in 1965 will also be given this designation.)

Allen M. Cormack shows that changes in tissue density can be computed from x-ray data. No machine is constructed at this time because of limitations in computing power. This is a key discovery, leading in 1972 to the invention of computed tomography (CT).

Ivan Sutherland, a student at MIT working on the experimental TX- 2 computer, creates the first graphical user interface, or first interactive graphics program, in his Ph.D. thesis, Sketchpad: A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System. (See Reading 10.7.)

Compugraphic introduces the Linasec I and II, the first general typesetting computers. These automated tapeprocessors produce justified tapes to drive the Linotype machines used in the newspaper industry. "The net production of the Linasec-in excess of 3,600 lines per hour compared to the manually-set 600 lines per hour, break open the market by enabling newspapers to carry more detailed, late breaking news stories."

J.C.R. Licklider sends a memo to members and affiliates of what he jokingly calls the "Intergalactic Computer Network, "outlining a key part of his strategy to connect all their individual computers and time-sharing systems into a single computer network spanning the continent.” (Waldrop)

The Printing and the Mind of Man exhibition takes place. The lengthy and complex title of its catalogue reads: Catalogue of a display of printing mechanisms and printed materials arranged to illustrate the history of Western civilization and the means of the multiplication of literary texts since the XV century, organised in connection with the eleventh International Printing Machinery and Allied Trades Exhibition, under the title Printing and the Mind of Man, assembled at the British Museum and at Earls Court, London, 16-27 July 1963. This will be followed in 1967 by a cloth-bound edition edition with more detailed annotations, and without discussion of "printing mechanisms," entitled Printing and the Mind of Man. A Descriptive Catalogue Illustrating the Impact of Print on the Evolution of Western Civilization, compiled and edited by John Carter and Percy H. Muir, assisted by Nicholas Barker, H.A. Feisenberger, Howard Nixon and S.H. Steinberg. At this time the only references to computing in the exhibition and its catalogues are to Napier on logarithms, and to Leibnitz's stepped-drum calculator. There are references to the invention of radio and films, but not to television. Taking place at the dawn of online searching and the ARPANET, and twenty years before the development of the personal computer, this exhibition and its catalogues may record the peak of the print-centric view of information before the development of electronic information technology leading to the Internet.

Touch-tone telephone dialing is introduced, enabling calls to be switched digitally.

The first use of the term "hacker" in the context of computing appears in the MIT student newspaper, The Tech:

"Many telephone services have been curtailed because of so-called hackers, according to Prof. Carlton Tucker, administrator of the Institute phone system. … The hackers have accomplished such things as tying up all the tie-lines between Harvard and MIT, or making long-distance calls by charging them to a local radar installation. One method involved connecting the PDP-1 computer to the phone system to search the lines until a dial tone, indicating an outside line, was found. … Because of the 'hacking,' the majority of the MIT phones are 'trapped.'

Leonard Kleinrock publishes his 1962 PhD thesis in book form as Communication Nets: Stochastic Message Flow and Delay, providing a technology and mathematical theory of data communications. (See Reading 13.4.)

Paul Baran writes On Distributed Communications, describing the use of redundant routing and message blocks to send information across a decentralized network topology.

RCA announces the Spectra series of computers, which can run the same software as IBM’s 360 machines. The Spectra computers are the first commercial computers to use integrated circuits.

SABRE (Semi-Automatic Business-Related Environment), an online airline reservation system developed by American Airlines and IBM, becomes operational. It works over telephone lines in “real time” to handle seat inventory and passenger records from terminals in more than 50 cities.

Installations of the IBM System/360s begin. All IBM 360s will run the same operating system- OS/360. Previously each computer model typically required a different operating system.

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) begins using social security numbers as tax ID numbers.

Thomas E. Kurtz and John G. Kemeny invent BASIC (Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) at Dartmouth.

Systems Development Corporation develops the first computerized encyclopedia.

Eugene Garfield publishes the first Science Citation Index in five printed volumes, indexing 613 journals and 1.4 million citations. Two years later, Science Citation Index will become available on magnetic tape.

William Fetter at Boeing produces the first computer model of a human figure for use in the study of cockpit design. It is called the “First Man.”

IBM introduces the Magnetic Tape/Selectric Typewriter (MT/ST). "With this, for the first time, typed material could be edited without having to retype the whole text or chop up a coded copy. On the tape, information could be stored, replayed (that is, retyped automatically from the stored information), corrected, reprinted as many times as needed, and then erased and reused for other projects.

"This development marked the beginning of word processing as it is known today. It also introduced word processing as a definite idea and concept. The term was first used in IBM's marketing of the MT/ST as a 'word processing' machine. It was a translation of the German word textverabeitung, coined in the late 1950s by Ulrich Steinhilper, an IBM engineer. He used it as a more precise term for what was done by the act of typing. IBM redefined it 'to describe electronic ways of handling a standard set of office activities -- composing, revising, printing, and filing written documents.' "

Donald Bitzer,, H. Gene Slottow, and Robert Willson at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign invent the first plasma video display for the PLATO Computer System. The display is monochrome neon orange and incorporates both memory and bitmapped graphics. Built by Owens-Illinois glass, the flat panels are marketed under the name "digivue."

The National Library of Medicine has the Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System (MEDLARS) operational. It is the first large scale, computer based, retrospective search service available to the general public.

Eckert and Mauchly receive patent no. 3,120,606 for the ENIAC, a general patent on the stored-program electronic computer. Sperry Rand Univac, owner of the patent, charges a 1.5 percent royalty for all electronic computers sold by all companies except IBM, with which it had previously cross-licensed patents.

Texas Instruments in partnership with Zenith Radio introduces the first consumer product containing an integrated circuit--a hearing aid.

IBM announces the System/360 family of compatible machines. These are the first IBM computers capable of both commercial and scientific applications that are offered at what is considered a “reasonable price.” Microprogramming is adopted in their design.

The Central Intelligence Bureau of the Chinese People's Liberation Army issues in Beijing or Tianjin Mao Zedong, Mao Zhu XI Yu Lu (Quotations of Chairman Mao.) This "probably still holds the world record for most copies printed of a single work in under four years (720 million books by the end of 1967)."

Robert Moog creates the first substractive synthesizer to utilize a keyboard as a controller, and demonstrates it at the at the Audio Engineering Society convention. The Moog synthesizer will become one of the first widely used electronic musical instruments. It is a member of the quintephone family of musical instruments, which generate sounds "informatically."

The Homestead Meeting between J.C.R. Licklider and Lawrence G. Roberts sparks Roberts to undertake the creation of the ARPANET.

DEC introduces the PDP-8, the first “production model minicomputer.” “Small in physical size, selling in minimum configuration for under $20,000.”

William Fetter publishes the first book on computer graphics: Computer Graphics in Communication. Fetter coined the term “computer graphics” in 1960.

J.C.R. Licklider publishes Libraries of the Future, a study of what libraries may be at the end of the twentieth century. The book reviews systems for information storage, organization, and retrieval; use of computers in libraries, and library question-answering systems.

Honeywell attempts to open the home computer market with its Kitchen Computer. The H316 is the first under-$10,000 16-bit machine from a major computer manufacturer. It is the smallest addition to the Honeywell "Series 16" line. The H316 is available in three versions: table-top, rack-mountable, and self-standing pedestal. The pedestal version, complete with cutting board, is marketed by Neimann Marcus as "The Kitchen Computer.” It comes with some built-in recipes, two weeks' worth of programming, a cook book, and an apron. There is no evidence that any examples were sold.

Though its exact history is murky, email begins as a way for users on time-sharing mainframe computers to communicate. Among the first systems to have this facility are System Development Corporation (SDC) (Q32) and MIT (CTSS).

Hearings are held by the House of Representatives Special Subcommittee on Invasion of Privacy by computers.

Self-styled "systems humanist" Ted Nelson coins the terms “hypertext” and “hyperlink” to refer to features of a computerized information system.

The U. S. Postal Sevice introduces OCR software to sort mail.

Charles K. Kao and George A. Hockham of the British company Standard Telephones and Cables (STC)  promote the idea that the attenuation in optical fibers may be reduced below 20 dB per kilometer, allowing fibers to be a practical medium for communication.They propose that the attenuation in fibers available at the time is caused by impurities, which may be removed, rather than fundamental physical effects such as scattering.

Paul Tenczar develops the TUTOR programming language for use in developing electronic learning programs called "lessons" for the PLATO system at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It has "powerful answer-parsing and answer-judging commands, graphics and features to stimulate handling student records and statistics by instructors." This will also make it suitable for the creation of many non-educational lessons—that is, games—including flight simulators, war games, role-playing, such as Dungeons and Dragons (dnd), card games, word games, and Medical lesson games.

The first documentation of the TUTOR language, under this name, appears to be The TUTOR Manual, CERL Report X-4, by R. A. Avner and P. Tenczar, Jan. 1969.

J. A. Robinson publishes his resolution principle, a standard of logical deduction in AI applications.

James Cooley and John Tukey publish the Cooley-Tukey FFT algorithm, the most common fast Fourier transform algorithm .

Maurice Wilkes introduces memory caching.

Gordon Moore observes the exponential growth in the number of transistors per integrated circuit and predicts that this trend will continue. The press calls this “Moore’s Law.” (See Reading 8.10.)

Lawrence Roberts does the first actual network experiment, tying MIT Lincoln Labs’ TX-2 to SDC’s Q32. This is the first time that two computers talk to each other and the first time that packets are used to communicate between computers.

The New York Stock Exchange completes automation of its basic trading functions.

Semiconductor memory begins to replace magnetic-core memory.

The IRS completes computerization of income-tax processing, with a central facility in Martinsburg, West Virginia, and satellite locations around the United States.

Robert H. Dennard of IBM invents Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) cells, one-transistor memory cells that store each single bit of information as an electrical charge in an electronic circuit. The technology permits major increases in memory density.

Aaron Klug formulates a method for digital image processing of two-dimensional images. A. Klug and D. J. de Rosier, “Optical filtering of electron micrographs: Reconstruction of one-sided images,” Nature 212 (1966): 2932.

Stephen B. Gray, computers editor for Electronics magazine, founds The Amateur Computer Society, possibly the first personal computer club.

Richard Gering's Data Corporation contracts with the U.S. Air Force to develop a computer-assisted, full-text system to keep track of procurement contracts and equipment inventory.

Roger K. Summit has the DIALOG online information retrieval system operational for Lockheed Aircraft.

The Second Vatican Council under Pope Paul VI abolishes the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, founded in 1557.

Using the Project MAC, an early time-sharing system at MIT, Cyrus Levinthal builds the first system for the interactive display of molecular structures. 

"This program allowed the study of short-range interaction between atoms and the "online manipulation" of molecular structures. The display terminal (nicknamed Kluge) was a monochrome oscilloscope (figures 1 and 2), showing the structures in wireframe fashion (figures 3 and 4). Three-dimensional effect was achieved by having the structure rotate constantly on the screen. To compensate for any ambiguity as to the actual sense of the rotation, the rate of rotation could be controlled by globe-shaped device on which the user rested his/her hand (an ancestor of today's trackball). Technical details of this system were published in 1968 (Levinthal et al.). What could be the full potential of such a set-up was not completely settled at the time, but there was no doubt that it was paving the way for the future. Thus, this is the conclusion of Cyrus Levinthal's description of the system in Scientific American (p. 52):

It is too early to evaluate the usefulness of the man-computer combination in solving real problems of molecular biology. It does seems likely, however, that only with this combination can the investigator use his "chemical insight" in an effective way. We already know that we can use the computer to build and display models of large molecules and that this procedure can be very useful in helping us to understand how such molecules function. But it may still be a few years before we have learned just how useful it is for the investigator to be able to interact with the computer while the molecular model is being constructed.

"Shortly before his death in 1990, Cyrus Levinthal penned a short biographical account of his early work in molecular graphics. The text of this account can be found here."

You can watch a six minute film produced with the interactive molecular graphics and modeling system devised by Cyrus Levinthal and his collaborators in the mid-1960s at this link.

Lawrence Roberts writes Towards a Cooperative Network of Time-Shared Computers, describing networking research at MIT.

Lawrence Roberts becomes ARPA IPTO (Advanced Research Projects Agency Information Processing Technology Office) Chief Scientist and begins the design of the ARPANET. The ARPANET program as proposed to Congress by Roberts will explore computer resource sharing and packet switching communications to ensure reliability.

National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in Middlesex, England develops the NPL Data Network under Donald Watts Davies. This is an experiment in packet switching.

Data Corporation contracts with the Ohio Bar Automated Research Corporation to create a full-text, interactive research service for Ohio statutes.

Ted Nelson, Andries van Dam, and students at Brown University collaborate on the first hypertext editing system based on Nelson's concept of hypertext. They develop the project on an IBM 360/50 mainframe.

The Colleges and universities in the state of Ohio found the Ohio College Library Center (OCLC) to develop a computerized system in which the libraries of Ohio academic institutions can share resources and reduce costs. After the database expands far beyond the state of Ohio it will be renamed Online Computer Library Center.

Texas Instruments files the patent for the first hand-held electronic calculator, invented by Jack S. Kilby, Jerry Merryman, and Jim Van Tassel. The patent (Number 3,819,921) will be awarded on June 25, 1974. This miniature calculator employs a large-scale integrated semiconductor array containing the equivalent of thousands of discrete semiconductor devices.

Directors of fifteen New York-area museums form the Museum Computer Network to create a prototype system for a shared museum data-bank. The project recruits curators and registrars to develop a data dictionary that will accommodate the diverse methods used to describe museum collections. The resulting tagged record format allows for the description of individual objects with separate records for artist biographical information and reference citations. Jack Heller's GRIPHOS (General Retrieval and Information Processor for Humanities Oriented Studies) system provides the information storage, search, and retrieval infrastructures for the records.

The United States Senate holds hearings on computer privacy.

At the ARPANET Design Session held by Roberts at the ARPA IPTO PI meeting in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Wesley Clark suggests the use of mini-computers for network packet switches instead of using the main frame computers themselves for switching. These machines will be called Interface Message Processors.

Department of Defense requests Director of Advanced Research Planning Agency (ARPA) to form a Task Force “to study and recommend hardware and software safeguards that would satisfactorily protect classified information in multi-access, resource-sharing computer systems.” Their report will be published in 1970.

Douglas C. Engelbart files a patent for an X-Y Position Indicator for a Display System. This device will become known as The Mouse.

Donald Davies introduces the use of the term “packet” to describe discrete blocks of data sent over networks in his paper “A digital communications network for computers.”

Lawrence Roberts publishes the first paper on the design of the ARPANET: “Multiple computer networks and intercomputer communication.” (See Reading 13.5)

J.C.R. Licklider and Robert Taylor publish The Computer as a Communication Device in which they describe features of the future ARPANET. (See Reading 13.6.)

The first manned Apollo flights occur, including Apollo 8, which circumnavigates the moon on Christmas Eve.

Mead Corporation purchases Data Corporation.

Ivan Sutherland at the University of Utah, with the help of his student Bob Sproull, creates the first Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) head mounted display system. The head mounted display is so heavy that it has to be suspended from the ceiling, and the formidable appearance of the device inspires its name--the Sword of Damocles. The system is primitive both in terms of user interface and realism, and the graphics comprising the virtual environment are simple wireframe rooms.

Ivan Sutherland and David Evans, both professors at the University of Utah, found Evans & Sutherland to commercialize the use of computers as simulators for training purposes.

Jasia Reichardt publishes Cybernetic Serendipity: The Computer and the Arts, based on an exhibition in London. This is the first serious exhibition of computer art.

Hewlett Packard introduces the desk calculator, HP 9100A.

Mansell begins publication of The National Union Catalog, Pre-1956 Imprints: a Cumulative Author List Representing Library of Congress Printed Cards and Titles Reported by other American Libraries. One of the largest sets of printed volumes ever published, it will be completed in 1981 in 754 folio volumes, containing a total of over 12,000,000 entries on 528,000 pages.

Stanley Kubrick, in his film 2001: A Space Odyssey, captures imaginations with the idea of a computer that can see, speak, hear, and “think.”

Philip K. Dick publishes his science fiction novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? It tells of the moral crisis of Rick Deckard, a bounty hunter who stalks androids-- robots visually identifical to people--in a fall-out clouded, dystopic, partially deserted San Francisco. In 1982 the novel will be brought to the screen as Blade Runner, with its location changed to Los Angeles.

IBM adopts a new marketing policy that charges separately for most systems engineering activities, future computer programs, and customer education courses. This “unbundling” will give rise to the software and services industry.

Aaron Klug describes techniques for the reconstruction of three-dimensional structures from electron micrographs, thus founding the processing of three-dimensional digital images. D. J. de Rosier and A. Klug, “Reconstruction of three dimensional structures from electron micrographs,” Nature 217 (1968) 13034.

The Museum Computer Network and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with funding from IBM, organize the first U.S. conference on museum computing.

Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore and Andrew Grove found Intel. The company is originally incorporated under the name of NM Electronics.

The term “software engineering” is coined at a NATO conference, in response to the perception that computer programming has not kept up with advances in computer hardware.

Douglas Engelbart of the Stanford Research Institute demonstrates at the San Francisco Convention Center an “oNLine System” (NLS), the features of which include hypertext, text editing, screen windowing, and email. To make this system operate, Engelbart uses the mouse which he had invented the previous year.

Kenneth Thompson and Dennis Ritchie develop the UNIX operating system at Bell Labs. This is the first operating system designed to run on computers of all sizes, making open systems possible. UNIX will become the foundation for the Internet.

In this year 32,393 books are produced in the United Kingdom.

Compuserve is founded as a way to generate income from Golden United mainframe computers during non-business hours. It becomes the first commercial online service in the United States.

The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is founded. It is the successor to National Educational Television (NET).

Working at Bell Labs, Willard Boyle and George Smith invent the charge-coupled device (CCD), a sensor for recording images.

in Network Working Group Request for Comment: 1 Steve Crocker at UCLA embodies peer to peer architecture (P2P) as one of the key concepts of the ARPANET.

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is founded by Jerry Sanders and seven others from Fairchild Semiconductor. It begins operations as a producer of logic chips.

Neil Armstrong, commander of the Apollo II lunar landing mission, and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, lunar module pilot, become the first human beings to walk on the moon.

Their landing is almost canceled in the final seconds because of an overload of the Apollo Guidance Computer’s memory, but on advice from Earth, they ignore the warnings and land safely. The Apollo Guidance Computer is the first recognizably modern embedded system used in real-time by astronaut pilots.

The first ARPANET node is installed at the UCLA Network Measurement Center. Leonard Kleinrock establishes the first network connection between a network switch and a time-shared host computer. (See Reading 13.7.)

The first message is sent over ARPANET from Kleinrock’s UCLA computer to the second node at Stanford Research Institute’s computer. The message is simply “Lo.”