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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 |
|
1975 |
Bill Gates, Paul G. Allen, and Monte Davidoff write a version of the Basic programming language that runs on the MITS Altair 8800. Called Altair Basic, or in its first iteration MITS 4K Basic, the program is written without access to an Altair computer or even an 8080 CPU. This is the first computer language written for a personal computer, and the first product of "Micro-Soft," which will later be called Microsoft. |
|
Benoit Mandelbrot, a researcher at IBM, conceives fractal geometry in his book, Les objets fractals, forme, hasard et dimension: the concept that seemingly irregular shapes can have identical structure at all scales. This new geometry makes it possible to describe mathematically the kinds of irregularities existing in nature. Fractals later make a great impact on engineering, economics, metallurgy, art and health sciences, and are also applied in computer graphics and animation. |
|
Robert Metcalfe of Xerox PARC invents Ethernet. |
It is estimated that 200,000 computers are operating in the United States. Nearly all of these are mainframes and minicomputers. |
|
|
Byte, one of the first personal computer magaines, begins publication. |
January |
H. Edward Roberts, working in Albuquerque, New Mexico, announces in a Popular Electronicsarticle the MITS (Micro Instrumentation Telemetry Systems) Altair personal computer kit. The first personal computer to be offered for sale, the MITS Altair has an “open architecture.” The basic Altair 8800 sells for $397. |
| The Homebrew Computer Club holds its first meeting at a garage in in Menlo Park, California. At these informal meetings of "tech-type" people Steve Jobs and Stephen Wozniak learn about computing. "The Apple I and II were designed strictly on a hobby, for-fun basis, not to be a product for a company. They were meant to bring down to the club and put on the table during the random access period and demonstrate: Look at this, it uses very few chips. It's got a video screen. You can type stuff on it. Personal computer keyboards and video screens were not well established then. There was a lot of showing off to other members of the club. Schematics of the Apple I were passed around freely, and I'd even go over to people's houses and help them build their own." (Wozniak). | |
| May 19 | The Federal Government’s antitrust suit against IBM goes to trial. The complaint for the case U.S. v. IBM was filed in U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York on January 17, 1969 by the Justice Department. The suit alleged that IBM violated the Section 2 of the Sherman Act by monopolizing or attempting to monopolize the general purpose electronic digital computer system market, specifically computers designed primarily for business. |
September |
IBM introduces the 5100 Portable Computer for corporate users. More luggable than portable, the machine weighs 50 pounds. The price, fully configured, is $19,975. |
1976 |
Steve Jobs and Steve "The Woz" Wozniak found Apple Computer Corporation, and introduce the Apple 1 at the price of $666. |
| At Evans & Sutherland John Warnock and John Gaffney develop "The Design System" a programming language for the creation of "a real-time space shuttle simulator for NASA to help train astronauts in the use of the shuttle's manipulator arm for moving loads in and out of the shuttle cargo bay." This programming language represents the roots of PostScript. | |
| IBM introduces the first commercially available laser printer for use with its mainframes, the IBM 3800. This "room-sized" machine is the first printer to combine laser technology and electrophotography. The technology speeds the printing of bank statements, premium notices, and other high-volume documents. | |
| Dr. Dobbs' Journal of Tiny Basic Calisthenics and Orthodontia is first published with the subtitle, "Running Light without Overbyte." It will evolve into Dr. Dobbs' Software Tools for the Professional Programmer. | |
| February 3 | Bill Gates writes An Open Letter to Hobbyists making the distinction between proprietary and open-source software. |
| March | The World Altair Computer Conference, probably the first personal computer conference, takes place in Albuquerque. |
| April 7 | Venture capitalist Robert A Swanson and biochemist Herbert W. Boyer found the first genetic engineering company, Genentech, to use recombinant DNA methods to make medically important drugs. |
| June | Wang Laboratories introduce the first CRT based word processor, the Wang WPS. |
| July | Robert Metcalf and David Boggs publish the first detailed description of ethernet: Ethernet: Distributed Packet-Switching For Local Computer Networks. |
| July | The first crude demonstration of TCP/IP occurs. It allows almost any two networks to join together. |
|
Altair programmer Michael Shrayer writes The Electric Pencil Word Processor, the first word processing program for a personal computer. |
|
Raymond Kurzweil introduces the Kurzweil Reading Machine, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind. It is the first computer to transform random text into computer-spoken words, enabling blind and visually impaired people to read any printed materials. |
1977 |
Intel introduces the 8086 sixteen-bit microprocessor. |
|
AT&T and Bell Labs construct a prototype cellular telephone system. The following year the first public trials will occur in Chicago with 2000 users. |
| Xerox introduces the first personal laser printer along with its expensive, but advanced, Star 8010 Information System. | |
|
Lawrence Ellison founds Software Development Laboratories. Renamed Relational Software in 1979, the company will introduce its first Relational Database Management System (RDBMS), Oracle V2. To give the impression of reliability there will be no version 1. |
|
Apple introduces the Apple II, the first personal computer sold as a fully assembled product, and the first with color graphics. |
|
Walter Gilbert and Allan M. Maxam devise a technique for sequencing DNA. “The Gilbert-Maxam method involved multiplying, dividing, and carefully fragmenting DNA. A stretch of DNA would be multiplied a millionfold in bacteria. Each strand was radioactively labeled at one end. Nested into four groups, chemical reagents were applied to selectively cleave the DNA strand along its bases--adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C) and thymine (T). Carefully dosed, the reagents would break the DNA into a large number of smaller fragments of varying length. In gel electrophoresis, as a function of DNA’s negative charge, the strands would separate according to length, revealing, via the terminal points of breakage, the position of each base.” |
|
Frederick Sanger and colleagues independently develop the methods for the rapid sequencing of long sections of DNA molecules. Sanger’s method, and that developed by Gilbert and Maxam, make it possible to read the nucleotide sequence for entire genes that run from 1000 to 30,000 bases long. Sanger, F., Nicklen, S., and Coulson, A.R. DNA Sequencing with Chain-Terminating Inhibitors. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. (USA) 74 (1977) 546367. |
|
Bill Gates and Paul Allen officially found Microsoft in Albuquerque, New Mexico. |
|
Wang introduces its VS minicomputer system, which becomes one of the most popular office systems, inaugurating the concept of office automation. |
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Xerox donates fifty Alto computer systems to various American universities. They are small minicomputers with bitmapped displays, networking through Ethernet, and a mouse. Everything fits on the desktop except the disk storage and CPU which are the size of small refrigerators. Each system costs $32,000. |
Nolan Bushnell introduces the Atari Video Computer System ( VCS) Later known as the Atari 2600, it is the first successful video game console to use plug-in cartridges instead of having one or more games built in. It is "typically bundled with two joystick constrollers, a conjoined pair of paddle controllers, and a cartridge game." |
|
| The first multi-user or multi-player computer games, or MUDs begin to evolve on the PLATO system. They run on a bulletin board system or Internet server and combine "elements of role-playing games, hack and slash style computer games, and social chat rooms." | |
| February | The U.S. Department of Defence launches the first experimental Block-I GPS satellite. It will become part of the NAVSTAR GPS (Navigation Signal Timing and Ranging Global Positioning System)--the first GPS system. |
May 1 |
A DEC sales representative attempts to send the first intentional commercial spam to every Arpanet address on the West Coast. The sender, Gary Thuerk, thinks that Arpanet users will find it cool that DEC has integrated ARPANET protocol support directly into the new DEC-20 and TOPS-20 OS. |
June 11 |
Texas Instruments announces a speech synthesis monolithic integrated circuit. For the first time the human vocal tract is electronically duplicated on a single chip of silicon. |
| 1978 | F. W. Lancaster , a professor of information science, publishes a book printed on paper entitled Toward Paperless Information Systems. |
| Starr Roxanne Hiltz, a sociologist, and Murray Turoff, a professor of computer science, show how "computer-mediated communication" could develop social networking in their book The Network Nation: Human Communication via Computer. | |
1979 |
Compuserve offers personal computer users email communication and online technical support. It is the first online service to do so. The following year it will offer real-time chat online with its CB simulator. |
|
Phillips and Sony develop the compact disc. |
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Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston write Visicalc, the first spreadsheet program, for the Apple II. It helps dispel the notion that the Apple II is only a toy for hobbyists. |
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The first single-chip digital signal processor (DSP) is developed at Bell Labs, making small portable digital telephones possible. |
| May | During restoration work, the monks of St. Catherine's monastery at Sinai discover a room under the St. George chapel which contains many parchment fragments. Among these fragments are thirteen missing pages from the 4th century Codex Sinaiticus. |
|
| 1920194019501960 |
(This page was last revised on
December 8, 2007
. Please report errors
and broken links to jnorman@jnorman.com.) |
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