|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
From Gutenberg to the Internet Timeline An Annotated Chronology of the History of Information from about 30,000 B.C.E. to the present, by Jeremy M. Norman. |
| 1920194019501960 |
|
1969 |
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. |
|
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. |
|
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. | |
| April 7 | 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. |
May 1 |
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is founded by Jerry Sanders and seven others from Fairchild Semiconductor. It begins operations as a producer of logic chips. |
July 21 |
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. |
September 2 |
The first ARPANET node is installed at the UCLA Network Measurement Center. Kleinrock establishes the first network connection between a network switch and a time-shared host computer. ARPANET, sponsored by the U.S. Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), will eventually link computers across the country, and around the world. It will evolve into the Internet. (See Reading 13.7.) |
October 29 |
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.” |
| Circa 1970 | During the 1970s The National Archives of Great Britain measures the extent of its holdings by shelf length. It holds about 80 miles of physical information, and acquires new material at the rate of about 1 mile per year. 80 miles of physical information, and acquires new material at the rate of about 1 mile per year. |
1970 |
DEC introduces the PDP-11 minicomputer, which popularizes the notion of a “bus” (i.e.“Unibus” ) onto which a variety of additional circuit boards or peripheral products can be placed. 20,000 units will be sold by 1975. |
|
Xerox opens the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). It will become the incubator of the Graphical User Interface (GUI), the mouse, the WYSIWYG text editor, the laser printer, the desktop computer, the Smalltalk programming language and integrated development environment, Interpress (a resolution-independent graphical page description language and the precursor to PostScript), and Ethernet. |
| Intel announces the Intel 1103, the world's first commercially available DRAM chip (1K bit PMOS dynamic RAM ICs). | |
| Norm Abramson at the University of Hawaii builds ALOHAnet, the first wireless packet-switched data network, using packet radio. Unlike the ARPANET where each node can only talk to a node on the other end, ALOHA uses a shared medium for transmission and reveals the need for contention management schemes. ALOHA's situation is similar to issues that will later be faced by Ethernet (non-switched) and Wi-Fi networks. | |
|
IBM announces the System/ 370, an upgrade for the 360, using semiconductor memory in place of magnetic cores. |
|
The first automatic teller machine (ATM) is installed. Dates conflict as to whether this was in 1969 or slightly later. The first machine installed at Chemical Bank in New York may have been only a cash dispenser. |
February |
The Rand Corporation publishes the classified report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Computer Security, Security Controls for Computer Systems. This is the first systematic review of computer security problems. |
March |
ARPANET establishes a node at Bolt Beranek and Newman in Cambridge, thereby spanning the U.S. |
June |
Edgar F. Codd publishes A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks. Codd’s model becomes widely accepted as the definitive model for relational database management systems. Codd suggests that data be stored independently from hardware and that a programmer use a nonprocedural language for accessing data. The crux of Codd's solution is that data, rather than being stored in a hierarchical structure, be stored in simple tables composed of rows and columns in which columns of like data would relate tables to one another. A database user or application, in Codd's way of thinking, would not need to know the structure of the data in order to query that data. |
December |
Gilbert Hyatt files a patent application entitled Single Chip Integrated Circuit Computer Architecture based on work begun in 1968. This is the first general patent on the microprocessor. Twenty years later in 1990, the U.S. Patent Office will award the patent, but it will be overturned in 1995. |
|
| 1920194019501960 |
(This page was last revised on
March 17, 2006. Please report errors
and broken links to jnorman@jnorman.com.) |
Home | About this Book | Timeline ©2005-2006 | historyofscience.com | normanpublishing.com Site design and development by tikibobpublishing.com |
