From Gutenberg to the Internet: Timeline 1971 to 1974

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.

1971	Intel announces the 4004 four-bit, central processor logic chip designed by Federico Faggin. It is the first microprocessor.
	Gary Starkweather at Xerox PARC invents the laser printer by modifying a Xerox copier.
	IBM’s first operational application of speech recognition enables customer engineers servicing equipment to “talk” to and receive “spoken” answers from a computer that can recognize about 5,000 words.
	IBM introduces the first flexible magnetic storage diskette, or "floppy disk."
	C. Gordon Bell and Allen Newell publish Computer Structures: Readings and Examples, a systematized presentation of the principles governing the design of computer systems.
June	Henri Gouraud of the University of Utah publishes the Gouraud shading method for polygon smoothing, a scheme for continuous shading in computer graphics, in his paper “Computer display of curved surfaces,” in IEEE Transactions in Computers. The effect makes a surface composed of discrete polygons appear to be continuous.
July 4	Michael Hart sends the digitized text of the American Declaration of Independence to everyone on a computer network. This marks the beginning of Project Gutenberg--the first book digitizing venture.
September 17	“A new standard one-chip MOS/LSI calculator logic circuit has been announced by Texas Instruments. This single chip may make full electronic calculators available to everyone at prices that can put a calculator into every kitchen or businessman’s pocket. The chip incorporates all of the logic and memory circuits to perform complete 8-digit 3-register calculator functions, including full precision add, subtract, multiply, and divide operations.” In large quantities the chip is priced less than $20.00.
	ARPANET has 15 nodes (23 hosts).
	Dennis M. Ritchie of Bell Labs writes the C programming language for use in the UNIX operating system.
	Nolan Bushnell , founder of Atari, hires Al Alcorn to program the table tennis game “PONG.” It is the first commercially successful video game.
	Godfrey Hounsfield invents computed tomography (CT), the first application of computers to medical imaging.
	The Universal Product Code (UPC)--the familiar barcode--is accepted by a grocer’s trade association. It was developed by George J. Laurer of IBM.
	Intel announces the 8008 microprocessor.
March	Ray Tomlinson at BBN develops email for ARPANET: SNDMSG and READMAIL, choosing the “@” sign as a key email address component.
July	Lawrence Roberts of ARPA writes the first email management program, RD, to list incoming messages and support forwarding, filing, and responding to them.
1972	An Act of Parliament separates The British Library from the British Museum.
	Marianne McDonald, a graduate student in classics at the University of California, San Diego, proposes and initially funds the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, a computerized databank of Greek literature. Within 30 years the project will be fully realized: "The TLG® Digital Library now contains virtually all Greek texts surviving from the period between Homer (8th century B.C.) and A.D. 600 and the majority of surviving works up the fall of Byzantium in A.D. 1453. The center continues its efforts to include all extant Greek texts from the byzantine and post-byzantine period. TLG® texts have been disseminated in CD ROM format since 1985 and are now available online. "
1972-74	Inexpensive electronic calculators flood the market.
1973	Stanley Cohen, Annie Chang, Robert Helling, and Herbert Boyer demonstrate that if DNA is fragmented with restriction endonucleases and combined with similarly restricted plasmid DNA, the resulting recombinant DNA molecules are biologically active and can replicate in host bacterial cells. Plasmids can thus act as vectors for the propagation of foreign cloned genes. This is the first practical method of cloning a gene and a breakthrough in the development of recombinant DNA technologies and genetic engineering. Cohen, Chang, Boyer and Helling, “Construction of Biologically Functional Bacterial Plasmids in Vitro,” Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. 70 (1973): 324044
	The Alto computer system is operational at Xerox PARC. Conceptually the first personal computer system, it will eventually feature the first WYSYWG (What You See is What You Get) editor, a graphic user interface (GUI), networking through Ethernet, and a mouse.
	Mead Data Central introduces Lexis and NAARS services. "LEXIS provides the full text of Ohio and New York codes and cases, the U.S. code, and some federal case law. NAARS is the National Automated Accounting Research Service, a tax database from the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants."
	Perhaps the world's first online community begins to emerge through online forums, and the message board called PLATO Notes developed by David Woolley, in the PLATO system evolving at the University of Illinois at Urbana.
	Efrem Lipkin, Mark Szpakowski, and Lee Felsenstein establish the first public computerized bulletin board system (BBS) called Community Memory in Berkeley, California. "Community Memory ran off an XDS-940 timesharing computer located in Resource One in San Francisco. The first terminal was an ASR-33 Teletype at the top of the stairs leading to Leopold's Records in Berkeley. You could leave messages and attach keywords to them. Other people could then find messages by those keywords. "The line from San Francisco to Berkeley ran at 110 baud - 10 characters per second. The teletype was noisy, so it was encased in a cardboard box, with a transparent plastic top so you could see what was being printed out, and holes for your hands so you could type. It made for some magic moments with the Allman Brothers' "Blue Sky" playing in the record store. Musicians loved it - they ended up generating a monthly printout of fusion rock bassists seeking raga lead guitars. And out of it also emerged the first net.personality - Benway, as he called himself."
	The first ARPANET international connections are established to University College, London and NORSAR (Norway).
	Harris introduces editing terminals for newspapers, which are quickly followed by terminals from Raytheon, Atex, Digital Equipment Corporation and others. The terminals output strips of type on film from phototypesetters.
	Atex works with the Minneapolis Star newspaper to develop the first electronic pagination system that allows the creation and output of full editorial pages, eliminating the need for manual paste-up of strips of film. The Atex system features "Atex Messaging" which is widely believed to be the forerunner of both e-mail and instant messenger applications. Atex publishing systems are "based on highly modified Dec PDP-11 minicomputers, designed to produce news sections of newspapers. The systems included clustered CPUs, a distributed file system and dumb terminals that displayed memory-mapped video and featured keyboards with up to 140 keys: Distinctively, the cursor keys were on the left-hand side. A custom operating system tied everything together."
July	Records, Computers, and the Rights of Citizens is published. This is the report of the Advisory Committee on Automated Personal Data Systems appointed by Elliot L. Richardson, secretary of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. The report explores the impact of computerized record keeping on individuals, and recommends a Code of Fair Information Prractice, consisting of five basic principles: 1."There must be no data record-keeping systems whose very existence is secret." 2."There must be a way for an individual to find out what information about him is in a record and how it is used." 3."There must be a way for an individual to prevent information about him obtained for one purpose from being used or made available for other purposes without his consent." 4. "There must be a way for an individual to correct or amend a record of identifiable information about him." 5. "Any organization creating, maintaining, using or disseminating records of identifiable personal data must assure the reliability of the data for their intended use and must take reasonable precautions to prevent misuse of the data."
October 19	Eckert and Mauchly’s ENIAC patent is ruled invalid in the case of Honeywell Inc. v. Sperry Rand Corporation et al. (See Reading 8.12.)
1974	The first of the three Cohen-Boyer recombinant DNA cloning patents is granted, leading to the foundation of the biotechnology industry.
	IBM announces Systems Network Architecture (SNA), a networking protocol for computing systems. SNA is a uniform set of rules and procedures for computer communications to free computer users from the technical complexities of communicating through local, national, and international computer networks.
	Donald D. Chamberlin and Raymond F. Boyce of IBM develop a Structured English Query Language (“SEQUEL”) to apply Codd’s model of relational databases. SEQUEL later becomes SQL, presumably because trademark conflicts cause IBM to switch from the original name.
	The term “mainframe” is first used in a Scientific American article to distinguish the main computer in a laboratory from other computers.
	IBM builds the first prototype computer employing RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) architecture. Based on an invention by John Cocke, the RISC concept simplifies the instructions given to run computers, making them faster and more powerful. It will be implemented in the experimental IBM 801 minicomputer. The goal of the 801 is to execute one instruction per cycle. (In 1987 John Cocke will receive the A. M. Turing Award for significant contributions in the design and theory of compilers, the architecture of large systems and the development of reduced instruction set computers (RISC); for discovering and systematizing many fundamental transformations now used in optimizing compilers including reduction of operator strength, elimination of common subexpressions, register allocation, constant propagation, and dead code elimination.)
	The New York Public Library and Columbia, Harvard, and Yale universities found RLG (Research Libraries Group). The New York Times calls this "a sweeping and controversial program of combined operations."
March	Intel announces the 8080 eight-bit microprocessor. It will power the MITS Altair 8800 designed by H. Edward Roberts, the first truly inexpensive personal computer. Within a year the 8800 will be designed into hundreds of different products.
May	As a result of the Report of the Advisory Committee on Automated Personal Data Systems (July 1973), Congress passes the Privacy Act of 1974.
May	Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn publish “A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication” in which they describe the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). (See Reading 13.8.)
November 20	The U.S. Department of Justice files an antitrust suit for the breakup of American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T), alleging anticompetitive behavior.

(This page was last revised on April 27, 2008 . Please report errors and broken links to jnorman@jnorman.com.)

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