From Cave Paintings to the Internet A Chronological and Thematic Database on the History of Information and Media 1970 to 1980 Timeline

During the 1970s The National Archives of Great Britain measured the extent of its holdings by shelf length. It held about 80 miles of physical information, and acquired new material at the rate of about 1 mile per year.

DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) 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.

DEC sold 20,000 PDP-11s by 1975.

Xerox opens the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).

PARC became 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 Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) chip (1K bit pMOS dynamic RAM ICs).

Norman Abramson at the University of Hawaii builds ALOHAnet, the first wireless packet-switched data network, using packet radio.

Unlike the ARPANET where each node could talk to a node on the other end, ALOHA used a shared medium for transmission and revealed the need for contention management schemes. ALOHA’s situation was similar to issues that were later faced by Ethernet (non-switched) and Wi-Fi networks.

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.

Robert D. Maurer and his team, working for Corning Glass, obtain the crucial attenuation level of 20 dB required for optical fiber telecommunications.

The group demonstrated a fiber with 17 dB optic attenuation per kilometer by doping silica glass with titanium. A few years later they produced a fiber with only 4 dB/km using germanium dioxide as the core dopant. Such low attenuations improved optical fiber telecommunications and enabled the Internet.

Books on Tape Corporation starts rental plans for audio books distribution.

Architect and computer scientist Nicholas Negroponte of MIT publishes The Architecture Machine.

Negroponte's pioneering and forward-looking book described early research on computer-aided design, and in so doing covered early work on human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence, and computer graphics. It contained a large number of illustrations.

"Most of the machines that I will be discussing do not exist at this time. The chapters are primarily extrapolations into the future derived from experiences with various computer-aided design systems. . . .

"There are three possible ways in which machines can assist the design process: (1) current procedures can be automated, thus speeding up and reducing the cost of existing practices; (2) existing methods can be altered to fit within the specifications and constitution of a machine, where only those issues are considered that are supposedly machine-compatible; (3) the design process, considered as evolutionary, can be presented to a machine, also considered as evolutionary, and a mutal training, resilience, and growth can be developed" (From Negroponte's "Preface to a Preface," p. [6]).

This book has been called the first book on the personal computer. On that I do not agree. The book contains only vague discussions of the possiblity of eventual personal computers. Most specifically it says, as caption to its second illustration, a cartoon relating to a home computer, "The computer at home is not a fanciful concept. As the cost of computation lowers, the computer utility will become a consumer item, and every child should have one." Instead The Architecture Machine may be the first book on human-computer interaction, and on the possibilities of computer-aided design.

Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) introduces the LA30, a 30 character/second dot matrix printer.

"It printed 80 columns of uppercase-only 5x7 dot matrix characters across a unique-sized paper. The printhead was driven by a stepper motor and the paper was advanced by a somewhat-unreliable and definitely noisy solenoid ratchet drive. The LA30 was available with both a parallel interface and a serial interface; however, the serial LA30 required the use of fill characters during the carriage-return operation.

"The LA30 was followed in 1974 by the LA36, which achieved far greater commercial success, becoming for a time the standard dot matrix computer terminal. The LA36 used the same print head as the LA30 but could print on forms of any width up to 132 columns of mixed-case output on standard green bar fanfold paper. The carriage was moved by a much-more-capable servo drive using a dc motor and an optical encoder/tachometer. The paper was moved by a stepper motor. The LA36 was only available with a serial interface but unlike the earlier LA30, no fill characters were required. This was possible because, while the printer never communicated at faster than 30 characters per second, the mechanism was actually capable of printing at 60 characters per second. During the carriage return period, characters were buffered for subsequent printing at full speed during a catch-up period. The two-tone buzz produced by 60 character-per-second catch-up printing followed by 30 character-per-second ordinary printing was a distinctive feature of the LA36" (Wikipedia article on Dot matrix printer, accessed 12-16-2009).

Centronics Data Computer Corporation also introduced a dot matrix printer in 1970: the Centronics 101. This printer used a print head incorporating an innovative seven-wire solenoid impact system, and Centronics claimed that it was the first dot matrix impact printer.

Centronics concentrated on the low-end line printer market. In the process they designed the parallel electrical interface, or parallel port, that became standard on most most printers until it began to be replaced by the Universal Serial Bus (USB) in the late 1990s.

The first test of magnetic stripe transaction card technology developed by IBM takes place at the American Airlines terminal at Chicago's O'Hare Airport with the Automatic Ticket Vendor.

Reference: Computer History Museum, Jerome Svigals donation, "Automatic Ticket Vendor Press Kit", October 30, 1969. X3951.2007.

Though the test at O'Hare Airport was successful the airline did not implement the technology because of a recession. IBM patented the technology but did not announce its availability until 1973.

The Rand Corporation publishes the classified report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Computer Security, Security Controls for Computer Systems.

Security Controls for Computer Systems was the first systematic review of computer security problems.

ARPANET establishes a node at Bolt Beranek and Newman in Cambridge, thereby spanning the U.S.

Edgar F. Codd of IBM publishes "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks" in Communications of the ACM, 13 (6):377–387.

Codd’s model became widely accepted as the definitive model for relational database management systems. Codd postulated that data should be stored independently from hardware and that a programmer should use a nonprocedural language for accessing data. The crux of Codd’s solution was that data, rather than being stored in a hierarchical structure, would 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.

IBM announces the System/370, an upgrade for the 360, using semiconductor memory in place of magnetic cores.

Gilbert Hyatt files a patent application entitled Single Chip Integrated Circuit Computer Architecture based on work begun in 1968.

Hyatt's patent was the first general patent on the microprocessor. Twenty years later, in 1990, the U.S. Patent Office awarded the patent, but was overturned in 1995.

Intel announces the first microprocessor: the 4004 four-bit central processor logic chip designed by Federico Faggin. 

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.

The ARPANET has 15 nodes (23 hosts).

Dennis M. Ritchie of Bell Labs writes the C programming language for use in the UNIX operating system.

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, the first 8-bit microprocessor.

"The 8086 was originally intended as a temporary substitute for the ambitious iAPX 432 project in an attempt to draw attention from the less-delayed 16 and 32-bit processors of other manufacturers (such as Motorola, Zilog, and National Semiconductor) and at the same time to top the successful Z80 (designed by former Intel employees). Both the architecture and the physical chip were therefore developed quickly (in a little more than two years, using the same basic microarchitecture elements and physical implementation techniques as employed by the older 8085, and for which it also functioned as its continuation. Marketed as source compatible, it was designed so that assembly language for the 8085, 8080, or 8008 could be automatically converted into equivalent (sub-optimal) 8086 source code, with little or no hand-editing. This was possible because the programming model and instruction set was (loosely) based on the 8080. However, the 8086 design was expanded to support full 16-bit processing, instead of the fairly basic 16-bit capabilities of the 8080/8085. New kinds of instructions were added as well; self-repeating operations and instructions to better support nested ALGOL-family languages such as Pascal, among others.

"The 8086 was sequenced using a mix of random logic and microcode and was implemented using depletion load nMOS circuitry with approximately 20,000 active transistors (29,000 counting all ROM and PLA sites). It was soon moved to a new refined nMOS manufacturing process called HMOS (for High performance MOS) that Intel originally developed for manufacturing of fast static RAM products. This was followed by HMOS-II, HMOS-III versions, and, eventually, a fully static version designed in CMOS and manufactured in CHMOS. The original chip measured 33 mm² and minimum feature size was 3.2 μm.

"The architecture was defined by Stephen P. Morse and Bruce Ravenel. Jim McKevitt and John Bayliss were the lead engineers of the development team and William Pohlman the manager. While less known than the 8088 chip, the legacy of the 8086 is enduring; references to it can still be found on most modern computers in the form of the Vendor ID entry for all Intel devices, which is 8086H (hexadecimal). It also lent its last two digits to Intel's later extended versions of the design, such as the 286 and the 386, all of which eventually became known as the x86 family" (Wikipedia article on Intel 8086, accessed 02-06-2010).

Steve "Woz" Wozniak and Steve Jobs read an article about phreaking by Ron Rosenbaum entitled "Secrets of the Little Blue Box" in the October 1971 issue of Esquire magazine, and become active in the phreaker culture, with its legendary character "Captain Crunch." 

Wozniak's "blue box" used for phreaking in 1972 is preserved in the Computer History Museum.

Though on a much smaller scale, the phreaker underground telephone system culture was an analogous precursor of the hacker culture that later evolved around computers and the Internet.

The Creeper worm,  an experimental self-replicating program written by Bob Thomas at BBN Technologies (originally Bolt, Beranek and Newman),  is generally accepted to be the first computer virus.

"Creeper infected DEC PDP-10 computers running the TENEX operating system. Creeper gained access via the ARPANET and copied itself to the remote system where the message, "I'm the creeper, catch me if you can!" was displayed. The Reaper program was created to delete Creeper" (Wikipedia article on Creeper virus, accessed 01-18-2010).

Ray Tomlinson at BBN develops email for ARPANET: SNDMSG and READMAIL, choosing the “@” sign as a key email address component.

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.

Lawrence Roberts of ARPA writes the first email management program, RD, to list incoming messages and support forwarding, filing, and responding to them.

Michael S. 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 digital library.

The earliest known coin-operated computer or video game, Galaxy Game, was installed at the Tresidder Union at Stanford University in September, 1971, two months before the release of Computer Space, the first mass-produced video game. Only one unit was built initially, although the game later included several consoles allowing users to play against each other.

"The game was programmed by Bill Pitts and Hugh Tuck. Like Computer Space, it was a version of the existing Spacewar!, which had been created in the early 1960s on the PDP-1 and ported to a variety of platforms since then. The coin-operated game console incorporated a Digital PDP-11/20 with vector displays. The hardware cost around $20,000, and a game cost 10 cents or three games for 25 cents. In June 1972 the hardware was improved to allow the processor to power four to eight consoles. The game remained popular on campus, with wait times for players as much as one hour, until it was removed in May 1979 due to damaged screens.

"The unit was restored in 1997 and now resides in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California" (Wikipedia article on Computer Space, accessed 08-26-2009).

Lowood, "Videogames in Computer Space: The Complex History of Pong, " IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 31 (2009) #3, 5-19.

“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 was priced less than $20.00.

Medline (Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online), a literature database of life sciences and biomedical information, is operational at the National Library of Medicine. It was initially a database production of the printed Index Medicus.

By 2008 Medline  ontained "more than 18 million" records from approximately 5,000 selected publications covering biomedicine and health from 1950 to the present.

Nutting Associates release the video arcade game Computer Space, created by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney. It was an adaptation of Spacewar (1962).

Computer Space was the first commercially sold coin-operated video game, predating the Magnavox Odyssey by six months, and Atari's Pong by one year.

The British Library Act of 1972 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 digital library of Greek literature. Within 30 years the project was 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."

Inexpensive electronic calculators flood the market.

One of the first touchscreens in a working computer application was in the terminal of the Plato IV system at the University of Illinois.

"In 1972 a new system named PLATO IV was ready for operation. The PLATO IV terminal was a major innovation. It included Bitzer's orange plasma display invention which incorporated both memory and bitmapped graphics into one display. This plasma display included fast vector line drawing capability and ran at 1260 baud, rendering 60 lines or 180 characters per second. The display was a 512x512 bitmap, with both character and vector plotting done by hardwired logic. Users could provide their own characters to support rudimentary bitmap graphics. Compressed air powered a piston-driven microfiche image selector that permitted colored images to be projected on the back of the screen under program control. The PLATO IV display also included a 16-by-16 grid infrared touch panel allowing students to answer questions by touching anywhere on the screen" (Wikipedia article on Plato (computer system), accessed 12-30-2009).

Raymond V. Damadian files a patent for "An Apparatus and Method for Detecting Cancer in Tissue."

Damadian's patent 3,789,832 was granted on February 5, 1974. This was the first patent filed on the use of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance for scanning the human body, but it did not not describe a method for generating pictures from such a scan or precisely how such a scan might be achieved.

The first home video game console, the Magavox Odyssey, which used a television screen as a display, was first demonstrated on May 24, 1972 and released in August of that year, predating the Atari Pong home consoles by three years. The Odyssey was designed by Ralph Baer, who began development around 1966 and had a working prototype finished by 1968.

This prototype, known as the Brown Box, is preserved in the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.

Nolan Bushnell  and Ted Dabney found  Atari and hire Al Alcorn to program the table tennis (ping-pong) game “PONG.”

Pong was the first commercially successful video game (videogame).

Lowood, "Videogames in Computer Space: The Complex History of Pong," IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 31, #3 (2009) 5-19.

Stewart Brand publishes "SPACEWAR: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums" in Rolling Stone magazine.

"The first 'Intergalactic Spacewar Olympics' will be held here, Wednesday 19 October, 2000 hours. First prize will be a year's subscription to 'Rolling Stone'. The gala event will be reported by Stone Sports reporter Stewart Brand & photograhed by Annie Liebowitz. Free Beer!

"Ready or not, computers are coming to the people.  

"That’s good news, maybe the best since psychedelics. It’s way off the track of the “Computers — Threat or menace?” school of liberal criticism but surprisingly in line with the romantic fantasies of the forefathers of the science such as Norbert Wiener, Warren McCulloch, J.C.R. Licklider, John von Neumann and Vannevar Bush. The trend owes its health to an odd array of influences: The youthful fervor and firm dis-Establishmentarianism of the freaks who design computer science; an astonishingly enlightened research program from the very top of the Defense Department; an unexpected market-Banking movement by the manufacturers of small calculating machines, and an irrepressible midnight phenomenon known as Spacewar.

"Reliably, at any nighttime moment (i.e. non-business hours) in North America hundreds of computer technicians are effectively out of their bodies, locked in life-or-Death space combat computer-projected onto cathode ray tube display screens, for hours at a time, ruining their eyes, numbing their fingers in frenzied mashing of control buttons, joyously slaying their friend and wasting their employers' valuable computer time. Something basic is going on.  

"Rudimentary Spacewar consists of two humans, two sets of control buttons or joysticks, one TV-like display and one computer. Two spaceships are displayed in motion on the screen, controllable for thrust, yaw, pitch and the firing of torpedoes. Whenever a spaceship and torpedo meet, they disappear in an attractive explosion. That’s the original version invented in 1962 at MIT by Steve Russell. (More on him in a moment.)  

"October, 1972, 8 PM, at Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) Laboratory, moonlit and remote in the foothills above Palo Alto, California. Two dozen of us are jammed in a semi-dark console room just off the main hall containing AI’s PDP-10 computer. AI’s Head System Programmer and most avid Spacewar nut, Ralph Gorin, faces a display screen which says only:  

"THIS CONSOLE AVAILABLE. . . ."

(http://downlode.org/Etext/Spacewar/, accessed 02-25-2010).

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 was 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): 3240-3244

The Alto computer system is operational at Xerox PARC.

Conceptually the first personal computer system, the Alto eventually featured the first WYSYWG (What You See is What You Get) editor, a graphic user interface (GUI), networking through Ethernet, and a mouse. When offered for sale the system was priced $32,000.

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."

Probably 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 IV 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 used hard-wired terminals in neighborhoods as distinct from the first public dial-up CBBS noticed on February 16, 1978 in this database.

"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 featured "Atex Messaging" which is widely believed to be the forerunner of both email and instant messenger applications. Atex publishing systems were "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."

Vinton G. Cerf and Robert E. Kahn invent the word Internet about this time as an abbreviation for the "inter-networking of networks" (Segaller, Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the Internet [1998] 111).

Paul Lauterbur develops a way to generate the first Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI), in 2D and 3D, using gradients.

Lauterbur described an imaging technique that removed the usual resolution limits due to the wavelength of the imaging field. He used "two fields: one interacting with the object under investigation, the other restricting this interaction to a small region. Rotation of the fields relative to the object produces a series of one-dimensional projections of the interacting regions, from which two- or three-dimensional images of their spatial distribution can be reconstructed" (http://www.nature.com/physics/looking-back/lauterbur/index.html, accessed 11-23-2008).

This was the beginning of magnetic reasonance imaging.

Lauterbur, Image Formation by Induced Local Interactions: Examples Employing Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, Nature 242 (1973), 190–191.

Lauterbur's Nobel Lecture is available from the Nobel website. You can also watch a 65 minute video of Lauterbur delivering the lecture from this link.

The science fiction /thriller film Westworld, written and directed by Michael Crichton, is the first major film to incorporate 2D computer generated images (CGI). It starred Yul Brynner, Richard Benjamin, and James Brolin.

American information scientist Henry G. Small of the Institute for Scientific Information publishes "Co-Citation in the Scientific Literature; A New Measure of the Relationship between Two Documents," Journal of the American Society for Information Science 24 (1973) 265-9.

Small's paper first described what he called "citation mapping," which enabled the use of citation data to create maps visualizing the structure of scientific activity. Citation mapping was co-discovered by Irina Marshakova in Moscow.

Maze War (also known as The Maze Game, Maze Wars or simply Maze) was the first networked, 3D multi-user first person shooter game.

"Maze first brought us the concept of online players as eyeball "avatars" chasing each other around in a maze). From its humble 1973-1974 origins on the Imlacs PDS-1 at the NASA Ames Research Center in California, to its life in project MAC at MIT, on Xerox Altos and "D* Machines" running on early ethernet, to versions ported to Mac, NeXT and PalmOS, Maze started it all. Today's massively multiuser 3D games owe a great debt to Maze and those who created and kept on porting it to new systems for the past 30 years. Maze is the reason why nobody can claim ownership of the rights to the invention of a multi-user 3D Cyberspace and is another of the major gifts to innovation made by early net pioneers" (Digibarn Computer Museum, accessed 04-15-2009)

Robert S. Ledley at Georgetown University develops the ACTA (Automatic Computerized Traverse Axial)— the first whole-body computerized tomography scanner. 

"This machine had 30 photomultiplier tubes as detectors and completed a scan in only 9 translate/rotate cycles, much faster than the EMI-scanner. It used a DEC PDP11/34 minicomputer both to operate the servo-mechanisms and to acquire and process the images. The Pfizer drug company acquired the prototype from the university, along with rights to manufacture it. Pfizer then began making copies of the prototype, calling it the "200FS" (FS meaning Fast Scan), which were selling as fast as they could make them. This unit produced images in a 256x256 matrix, with much better definition than the EMI-Scanner's 80" (Wikipedia article on Computed Tomography, accessed 04-15-2009).

Ledley RS, Di Chiro G, Luessenhop AJ, Twigg HL. "Computerized transaxial x-ray tomography of the human body," Science 186, No. 4160 (1974) 207-212.

Gary Kildall, one of the first people to see microprocessors as full-featured computers rather than equipment controllers, develops the operating system, CP/M (Control Program for Microcomputers). 

". . .Kildall originally developed CP/M during 1973-74, as an operating system to run on an Intel Intellec-8 development system, equipped with an Shugart Associates 8-inch floppy disk drive interfaced via a custom floppy disk controller. It was written in Kildall's own PL/M (Programming Language for Microcomputers). Various aspects of CP/M were influenced by the TOPS-10 operating system of the DECsystem-10 [PDP-10] mainframe computer, which Kildall had used as a development environment" (Wikipedia article on CP/M, accessed 02-06-2010).

"By 1981, at the peak of its popularity, CP/M ran on 3,000 different computer models and DRI had $5.4 million in yearly revenues" (Wikipedia article on Gary Kildall, accessed 02-06-2010).

Records, Computers, and the Rights of Citizens is published. This was 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 explored the impact of computerized record keeping on individuals, and recommended 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."

Pres Eckert and John Mauchly’s ENIAC patent — a patent on the stored-program electronic digital computer — is ruled invalid in the case of Honeywell Inc. v. Sperry Rand Corporation et al. (See Reading 8.12.)

President Richard Nixon signs the Endangered Species Act  of 1973, designed to protect critically imperiled species from extinction as a:

"consequence of economic growth and development untempered by adequate concern and conservation."

"The stated purpose of the Endangered Species Act is to protect species and also "the ecosystems upon which they depend." It encompasses plants and invertebrates as well as vertebrates. It does not expressly include fungi, which were widely considered to be plants in 1973, [but which are now considered more closely related to animals than plants.]

"ESA is administered by two federal agencies, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) (which includes the National Marine Fisheries Service, or NMFS). NOAA handles marine species, and the FWS has responsibility over freshwater fish and all other species. Species that occur in both habitats (e.g. sea turtles and Atlantic sturgeon) are jointly managed."

"Few species have become extinct while listed under the Endangered Species Act, and 93% in the northeastern US have had their population sizes increase or remain stable since being listed as threatened or endangered. As of August, 28, 2008, there are 1,327 species on the threatened and endangered lists. However, many species have become extinct while on the candidate list or otherwise under consideration for listing" (Wikipedia article on Endangered Species Act, accessed 06-13-2009).

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 was 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 Edgar F. Codd’s model of relational databases. SEQUEL later became SQL, presumably because trademark conflicts caused IBM to switch from the original name.

Chamberlin & Boyce's original paper on SEQUEL may be downloaded at http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/people/chamberlin/sequel-1974.pdf, accessed 02-06-2010).

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 simplified the instructions given to run computers, making them faster and more powerful. It was implemented in the experimental IBM 801 minicomputer. The goal of the 801 was to execute one instruction per cycle.

In 1987 John Cocke received 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."

Gerald J. Popek and Robert P. Goldberg publish Formal Requirements for Virtualizable Third Generation Architectures, a set of conditions sufficient to support system virtualization efficiently in computer architecure. 

"Even though the requirements are derived under simplifying assumptions, they still represent a convenient way of determining whether a computer architecture supports efficient virtualization and provide guidelines for the design of virtualized computer architectures."

Gary Whisenhunt and Ray Wood at Southern Illinois University write the first computer role-playing game in the TUTOR programming language for the PLATO system. It is called Dungeons & Dragons (dnd).

Raymond Kurzweil founds Kurzweil Computer Products, Inc. and develops the first omni-font optical character recognition system--a computer program capable of recognizing text printed in any normal font.

Ted Nelson self-publishes the book, Computer Lib, sub-titled You can and must understand computers NOW. Nelson issued this together with: Dream Machines: New freedoms through computer screens—a minority report. In his book Tools for Thought: The History and Future  of Mind-Expanding Technology Howard Rheingold called Computer Lib "the best-selling underground manifesto of the microcomputer revolution."

in 1987 Nelson's book was reissued by Microsoft Press with an introduction by Stewart Brand, of the Whole Earth Catalog.

Both the 1974 and 1987 editions have a highly unconventional layout, with two front covers (one for Computer Lib and the other for Dream Machines) and the division between the two books marked by text (for the other side) rotated 180°. The text itself is broken up into many sections, with simulated pull-quotes, comics, side bars, etc., similar to a magazine layout.

Working at IBM, Charles F. Goldfarb develops the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML).

SGML became an ISO accepted standard on October 15, 1986.  

Intel announces the 8080 eight-bit microprocessor.

The 8080 powered the MITS Altair 8800 designed by H. Edward Roberts, the first truly inexpensive personal computer. Within a year the 8800 was designed into hundreds of different products.

As a result of the Report of the Advisory Committee on Automated Personal Data Systems (July 1973), Congress passes the Privacy Act of 1974.

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.)

The U.S. Department of Justice files an antitrust suit for the breakup of American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T), alleging anticompetitive behavior.

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 was written without access to an Altair computer or even an 8080 CPU.

Altair Basic was 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, develops fractal geometry in his book, Les objets fractals, forme, hasard et dimension, building on the concept that seemingly irregular shapes can have identical structure at all scales.

Mandelbrot's new geometry made it possible to describe mathematically the kinds of irregularities existing in nature.

Robert Metcalfe of Xerox PARC invents Ethernet.

Initially the speed of Ethernet was three megabits per second. Ethernet evolved "into the most widely implemented physical and link layer protocol."

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.

At Evans & Sutherland John Warnock and John Gaffney develop the "The Evans and Sutherland Design System" for producing 3-dimensional graphical databases both for the Evans & Sutherland CAD/CAM Picture System and for custom-built simulation machines. 

These graphics systems used a graphics model, developed by Ivan Sutherland and others, based on coordinate system transformations and line drawing.

"John Warnock joined Xerox PARC in 1978 to work for Charles "Chuck" Geschke. There he teamed up with Martin Newell in producing an interpreted graphics system called JAM. "JAM" stands for "John And Martin". JAM had the same postfix execution semantics as Gaffney's Design System, and was based on the Evans and Sutherland imaging model, but augmented the E&S imaging model by providing a much more extensive set of graphics primitives. Like the later versions of the Design System, JAM was "token based" rather than "command line based", which means that the JAM interpreter reads a stream of input tokens and processes each token completely before moving to the next. Newell and Warnock implemented JAM on various Xerox workstations; by 1981 JAM was available at Stanford on the Xerox Alto computers, where I first saw it.  

"In the meantime, various people at Xerox were building a series of experimental raster printers. The first of these was called XGP, the Xerox Graphics Printer, and had a resolution of 192 dots to the inch. Xerox made XGP's available to certain universities, and by 1972 they were in use at Carnegie-Mellon, Stanford, MIT, Caltech, and the University of Toronto. Each of those organizations produced its own hardware and software interfaces. The XGP is historically interesting only because it is the first raster printer to gain substantial use by computer scientists, and was the arena in which a lot of mistakes were made and a lot of lessons learned.  

"To replace the XGP, Xerox PARC developed a new printer called EARS, and then another newer printer called Dover. After the agony of converting software from XGP to EARS, various Xerox people realized that applications programs generating files for the XGP or for EARS should not be tied to the device properties of the printer itself. Bob Sproull and William Newman, of Xerox PARC, developed a relatively device-independent page image description scheme, called "Press format", which was used to instruct raster printers what to print.  

"As part of an extensive grant program to selected universities, Xerox donated Dover printers and made documentation of the Press format available under a nondisclosure agreement. As far as I know, that nondisclosure agreement has never been lifted, though information about Press format has been widely enough distributed that by 1982 researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) at Lausanne had given conference papers about their own independent implementation of Press format.  

"Press format was a smashing success; it revolutionized laser printing technology in the academic and research communities, and stimulated a large number of people to think about issues of device-independent print graphics. Nevertheless, Press format had its limitations, and various people felt the need to revise the basic design.  

"Sproull left Xerox in 1978 to become a professor of computer science at CMU. Newman returned home to England to become an independent consultant. Martin Newell left Xerox to join Cadlinc Corp. Warnock and Geschke remained at Xerox.  

"While at CMU, Sproull began making plans for a new version of Press that would combine the graphics model of JAM with the page image description properties of Press. Sproull returned to Xerox for a sabbatical leave in 1982, and enlisted the help of Butler Lampson in the creation of the new page image description language that Warnock dubbed "Interpress". The name caught on.  

"While it is difficult to separate the contributions made by Sproull and Lampson, it is not incorrect to say that Lampson and Warnock produced the execution model of Interpress while Sproull and Warnock produced the imaging model. It is also approximately correct to characterize this first version of Interpress as being derived from the graphics model and execution model of JAM with additional protection and security mechanisms derived from experience with programming languages like Euclid and Cedar, and a careful silence on the issue of fonts. The trio worked under Geschke's direction, and Geschke was responsible for refereeing disagreements and for making certain that the resulting design was acceptable to the rest of Xerox" (Brian Reid, http://groups.google.com/group/fa.laser-lovers/msg/5d0df32a0e91f1fa?rnum=2&pli=1, accessed 01-07-2009).

Programmer at Bolt Beranek and Newman, and spelunker William Crowther writes the first computer text adventure game, Adventure.

Adventure was originally called ADVENT because a filename could only be six characters long in its operating system.  The game was renamed Colossal Cave Adventure, as it was based on part of the Mammoth Cave system in Kentucky.

"Crowther had explored the Mammoth Cave in the early 1970s, and created a vector map based on surveys of parts of the real cave, but the text game is a completely separate entity, created during the 1975-76 academic year and featuring fantasy elements such as an axe-throwing dwarf and a magic bridge."

"Crowther's original game consisted of about 700 lines of Fortran code, with about another 700 lines of data, written for BBN's PDP-10. (See the original source code) The program required about 60K words (nearly 300KB) of core memory in order to run, which was a significant amount for PDP-10/KA systems running with only 128K words." (Wikipedia article on Colossal Cave Adventure, accessed 04-14-2009).

"In early 1977, Adventure spread across ARPAnet,  and has survived on the Internet to this day. The game has since been ported to many other operating systems, and was included with the floppy-disk distribution of Microsoft's MS-DOS 5.0 OS. The popularity of Adventure led to the wide success of interactive fiction during the late 1970s and the 1980s, when home computers had little, if any, graphics capability. Many elements of the original game have survived into the present, such as the command 'xyzzy', which is now included as an Easter Egg in games such as Minesweeper" (Wikipedia article on Interactive fiction, accessed 04-15-2009).

The Warez scene, often referred to as The Scene—a "community" specializing in the distribution of pirated content—started emerging around this time. It was used by predecessors of software cracking and reverse engineering groups who made their work public on privately run BBS systems.

"The first BBSes were located in the USA, but similar boards started appearing in the UK, Australia and mainland Europe. At the time setting up a machine capable of distributing data was not a trivial matter and required a certain amount of technical skill. The reason it was usually done was for the technical challenge. The BBS systems typically hosted several megabytes of material. The best boards had multiple phone lines and up to one hundred megabytes of storage space, which was very expensive at the time. Releases were mostly games and later applications" (Wikipedia article on the Warez scene, accessed 07-20-2009).

Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. publishes The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, a book on software engineering and project management.

Brooks's book described what became known in software development as Brooks's Law: "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later".

"According to Brooks himself, the law is an 'outrageous oversimplification', but it captures the general rule. Brooks points to two main factors that explain why it works this way:

"1. It takes some time for the people added to a project to become productive. Brooks calls this the "ramp up" time. Software projects are complex engineering endeavors, and new workers on the project must first become educated about the work that has preceded them; this education requires diverting resources already working on the project, temporarily diminishing their productivity while the new workers are not yet contributing meaningfully. Each new worker also needs to integrate with a team composed of multiple engineers who must educate the new worker in their area of expertise in the code base, day by day. In addition to reducing the contribution of experienced workers (because of the need to train), new workers may even have negative contributions – for example, if they introduce bugs that move the project further from completion. 

"2. Communication overheads increase as the number of people increase. The number of different communication channels increases along with the square of the number of people; doubling the number of people results in four times as many different conversations. Everyone working on the same task needs to keep in sync, so as more people are added they spend more time trying to find out what everyone else is doing."

"Compared with traditional software development, open source projects follow a different methodology. Large scale open source projects leverage the power of vast amount of participants which take care of coding and QA, using cheap communication channels (such as email) to coordinate the work. Such projects scale well, despite Brooks's Law, due to several reasons:

* Management concepts such as "manpower," "team size" and "delivery schedule" are not analogous in open source and internal corporate projects; applying Brooks's Law to both is thus misleading.

* Large scale open source projects have the ability to leverage the large number of testers to find bugs faster (also known as Linus's Law);

* Testers can read and analyze the source code, helping developers to track down bugs more efficiently;

* Efficient parallelization of work, reducing the communication overhead;

* A social context where the contributors are voluntary, associated with a leadership style that does not use coercion;

* Less reliance on traditional management methods to reduce duplication efforts.

* A more efficient allocation of labor to tasks . . .

"Some of these reasons, such as the parallelization of work could theoretically apply to both open source and closed projects" (Wikipedia article on Brooks's Law, accessed 08-08-2009).

Atari releases the Home Pong video game console through the Sears catalogue.

Home Pong used a television as a monitor. The success of this product resulted in a patent infringement lawsuit from the manufacturers of the Magnavox Odyssey video game console.

The Barnes & Noble bookstore chain, purchased by Leonard Riggio in 1971,  becomes the first bookseller in America to discount books, by selling New York Times best-selling titles at 40% off the publishers’ list price.

Computer graphics researcher at the University of Utah, Martin Newell, creates the Utah Teapot or Newell teapot, a mathematical model of an ordinary teapot of fairly simple shape which became a standard reference object and something of an "in-joke" in the computer graphics community.

"Versions of the teapot model, or sample scenes containing it, are distributed with or freely available for nearly every current rendering and modelling program and even many graphic API, including AutoCAD, Houdini, Lightwave 3D, modo, POV-Ray, 3D Studio Max, and the APIs OpenGL and Direct3D. Some RenderMan-compliant renderers support the teapot as a built-in geometry by calling RiGeometry("teapot", RI_NULL). Along with the expected cubes and spheres, the GLUT library even provides the function glutSolidTeapot() as a graphics primitive, as does its Direct3D counterpart D3DX (D3DXCreateTeapot()). Mac OS X Tiger and Leopard also include the teapot as part of Quartz Composer, Leopard's teapot supports bump mapping. BeOS included a small demo of a rotating 3D teapot, intended to show off the platform's multimedia facilities. Teapot scenes are commonly used for renderer self-tests and benchmarks. In particular, the Teapot in a stadium benchmark and problem concern the difficulty of rendering a scene with drastically different geometrical density and scale of data in various parts of the scene.

"With the advent first of computer generated short films, and then of full length feature films, it has become something of an in-joke to hide a Utah teapot somewhere in one of the film's scenes. For example, in the movie Toy Story the Utah teapot appears in a short tea-party scene. The Utah teapot sometimes appears in the "Pipes" screensaver shipped with Microsoft Windows, but only in versions prior to Windows XP, and has been included in the "polyhedra" Xscreensaver hack since 2008. The teapot also appears in The Simpsons episode Treehouse of Horror VI in which Homer discovers the "third dimension".

"One famous ray-traced image (by Jim Arvo and Dave Kirk, from their 1987 SIGGRAPH paper "Fast Ray Tracing by Ray Classification") shows six stone columns, five of which are surmounted by the platonic solids (tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron, icosahedron) – and the sixth column has a teapot[7]. The image is titled "The Six Platonic Solids" – which has led some people to call the teapot a "Teapotahedron". This image appeared on the covers of several books and journals. Jim Blinn (in one of his "Project Mathematics!" videos) proves an amusing (but trivial) version of the Pythagorean theorem: Construct a (2D) teapot on each side of a right triangle and the area of the teapot on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the areas of the teapots on the other two sides" (Wikipedia article on Utah teapot, accessed 01-07-2010).

H. Edward Roberts, working in Albuquerque, New Mexico, announces the MITS (Micro Instrumentation Telemetry Systems) Altair personal computer kit in an article in Popular Electronics magazine.

The first personal computer to be offered for sale, the MITS Altair had an “open architecture.”

The basic Altair 8800 sold for $397.

The Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA Molecules, organized by Paul Berg, Maxine Singer, and Richard Roblin occurs in Asilomar, California.

"In addition to an international group of 150 scientists, the participants included lawyers (including Daniel Singer, Maxine Singer's husband) to help consider legal and ethical issues, and 16 journalists to cover the four-day event. A primary aim of the group was to consider whether to lift the voluntary moratorium [on recombinant DNA (rDNA) research] and if so, under what conditions research could proceed safely. The participants concluded (though not unanimously) that rDNA research should proceed but under strict guidelines. Their recommendations went to a National Institutes of Health committee chaired by NIH director Donald Fredrickson and charged with formulating those guidelines, which were issued in July 1976" (http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/CD/Views/Exhibit/narrative/dna.html, accessed 07-25-2009).

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 learned 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).

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.

IBM introduces the 5100 Portable Computer for corporate users.

More luggable than portable, the machine weighed 50 pounds. The price, fully configured, was $19,975.

Stephen J. Sasson of the Eastman Kodak Company invents the digital camera.

"He [Sasson] set about constructing the digital circuitry from scratch, using oscilloscope measurements as a guide. There were no images to look at until the entire prototype — an 8-pound (3.6-kilogram), toaster-size contraption — was assembled. In December 1975, Sasson and his chief technician persuaded a lab assistant to pose for them. The black-and-white image, captured at a resolution of .01 megapixels (10,000 pixels), took 23 seconds to record onto a digital cassette tape and another 23 seconds to read off a playback unit onto a television. Then it popped up on the screen.

" 'You could see the silhouette of her hair,' Sasson said. But her face was a blur of static. She was less than happy with the photograph and left, saying 'You need work,' he said. But Sasson already knew the solution: reversing a set of wires, the assistant's face was restored" (Wikipedia article Stephen J. Sasson, accessed 04-22-2009).

In 1978, Sasson and his supervisor Gareth A. Lloyd were issued United States Patent 4,131,919 for their digital camera.

There is an image of Sasson's digital camera at this link.

Steve Jobs and Steve "The Woz" Wozniak found Apple Computer Corporation, and introduce the Apple 1 at the price of $666.

IBM introduces the IBM 3800, the first commercially available laser printer for use with its mainframes.

This "room-sized" machine was the first printer to combine laser technology and electrophotography. The technology speeded the printing of bank statements, premium notices, and other high-volume documents.

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 practical application of OCR technology.

The Kurzweil Reading Machine combined omni-font OCR, a flat-bed scanner, and text-to-speech synthesis to create the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind. It was the first computer to transform random text into computer-spoken words, enabling blind and visually impaired people to read any printed materials. 

Phillips and Sony develop the compact disc (CD).

"Philips publicly demonstrated a prototype of an optical digital audio disc at a press conference called "Philips Introduce Compact Disc" in Eindhoven, The Netherlands on March 8, 1979. Three years earlier, Sony first publicly demonstrated an optical digital audio disc in September 1976. In September 1978, they demonstrated an optical digital audio disc with a 150 minute playing time, and with specifications of 44,056 Hz sampling rate, 16-bit linear resolution, cross-interleaved error correction code, that were similar to those of the Compact Disc introduced in 1982. Technical details of Sony's digital audio disc were presented during the 62nd AES Convention, held on March 13-16, 1979 in Brussels.

"The first test CD was pressed in Hannover, Germany by the Polydor Pressing Operations plant in 1981. The disc contained a recording of Richard Strauss's Eine Alpensinfonie, played by the Berlin Philharmonic and conducted by Herbert von Karajan. The first public demonstration was on the BBC TV show Tomorrow's World when The Bee Gees' 1981 album Living Eyes was played. In August 1982 the real pressing was ready to begin in the new factory, not far from the place where Emil Berliner had produced his first gramophone record 93 years earlier. By now, Deutsche Grammophon, Berliner's company and the publisher of the Strauss recording, had become a part of PolyGram. The first CD to be manufactured at the new factory was The Visitors by ABBA. The first album to be released on CD was Billy Joel's 52nd Street, that reached the market alongside Sony's CD player CDP-101 on October 1, 1982 in Japan. Early the following year on March 2, 1983 CD players and discs (16 titles from CBS Records) were released in the United States and other markets. This event is often seen as the "Big Bang" of the digital audio revolution. The new audio disc was enthusiastically received, especially in the early-adopting classical music and audiophile communities and its handling quality received particular praise. As the price of players sank rapidly, the CD began to gain popularity in the larger popular and rock music markets. The first artist to sell a million copies on CD was Dire Straits, with its 1985 album Brothers in Arms. The first major artist to have his entire catalogue converted to CD was David Bowie, whose 15 studio albums were made available by RCA Records in February 1985, along with four Greatest Hits albums. In 1988, 400 million CDs were manufactured by 50 pressing plants around the world. To date, the biggest selling CD (as opposed to the biggest selling title) is Beatles "1", released in November 2000, with worldwide sales of 30 million discs" I(Wikipedia article on Compact Disc, assessed 01-17-2010).

Cryptologists Bailey Whitfield 'Whit' Diffie  and Martin E. Hellman publish "New Directions in Cryptography," IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, IT-22, 6,  644–654.

This paper suggested public key cryptography and presented the Diffie-Hellman key exchange.

The science fiction film Futureworld, a sequel to Westworld, is the first major feature film to incorporate 3D computer generated images (CGI).

Futureworld featured a computer-generated hand and face created by University of Utah graduate students Edwin Catmull and Fred Parke. "The animated hand was a digitized version of Edwin Catmull's left hand. The movie also used 2D digital compositing to materialize characters over a background" (Wikipedia article on Futureworld, accessed 03-13-2009).

Dr. Dobbs' Journal of Tiny Basic Calisthenics and Orthodontia is first published with the orthodontic subtitle, "Running Light without Overbyte."

As irrelevant as the title might have been, Dr. Dobbs' Journal was the first journal focused on software for personal computers. It evolved into the non-orthodontic Dr. Dobbs' Software Tools for the Professional Programmer.

William Henry Gates III (Bill Gates), in his role as "General Partner Micro-Soft", writes An Open Letter to Hobbyists making the distinction between proprietary and open-source software.

The grandly named World Altair Computer Conference, probably the first personal computer conference, takes place in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

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.

Wang Laboratories introduce the first CRT based word processor, the Wang WPS.

At a conference jointly sponsored by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and the British Library held in London planning begins for the "Eighteenth Century Short Title Catalogue."

The aim of the original project was to create a machine-readable union catalogue of books, pamphlets and other ephemeral material printed in English-speaking countries from 1701 to 1800.

"An ESTC team was established at the British Library in 1977, under the direction of Robin Alston, and began work on the Library's extensive holdings of in-scope material. By 1978, when Robin Alston and Mervyn Jannetta published Bibliography, Machine-Readable Cataloguing and the ESTC, there were already more than fifty contributors to the file including Göttingen State & University Library (Germany). In 1978, Henry Snyder was appointed to direct the ESTC project in North America. An American cataloguing team was established in 1979, and the North American Imprints Project (NAIP) began at the American Antiquarian Society in 1980. The International Committee of the ESTC (IESTC) was established in 1980, with a membership drawn from the UK and the USA, chaired by the British Library. The ESTC file was soon available online, from 1980 via the British Library BLAISE system and from 1981 in the US Research Libraries Group RLIN system. The file was published on microfiche in 1983, and the first CD-ROM edition appeared in 1996.

"In 1987, with the agreement of the Bibliographical Society and the Modern Language Association of America, the International Committee approved the extension of the database to cover the period from the beginning of printing in the British Isles (ca. 1472) to 1700. The file changed its name to the 'English Short Title Catalogue', thereby keeping its well-known acronym. The USA team began cataloguing pre-1701 material in 1989, joined in the mid-1990s by the British Library team, and the resulting records were made available in the RLIN file from 1994. These records were also included in the CD-ROM 2nd edition (1998) and 3rd edition (2003).

"In 1992, IESTC approved a further extension of the file to include serial publications. The USA team began work in 1994 on the cataloguing of serials within the scope of ESTC"

Robert Metcalf and David Boggs publish the first detailed description of ethernet: Ethernet: Distributed Packet-Switching For Local Computer Networks.

The first crude demonstration of the Internet Protocol Suite, TCP/IP occurs. It allows almost any two networks to join together.

Intel introduces the 8086 sixteen-bit microprocessor.

AT&T and Bell Labs construct a prototype analog cellular telephone system. The following year the first public trials will occur in Chicago with 2000 users.

Lawrence Ellison founds Software Development Laboratories. Renamed Relational Software in 1979, the company introduced its first Relational Database Management System (RDBMS), Oracle V2. To give the impression of reliability there was 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, made 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) 546-67.

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."

Nolan Bushnell introduces the Atari Video Computer System ( VCS).

Later known as the Atari 2600, VCS was the first successful video game console to use plug-in cartridges instead of having one or more games built in. It was "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.

The PLATO MUDs ran on a bulletin board system or Internet server and combined "elements of role-playing games, hack and slash style computer games, and social chat rooms."

Physicist Peter Mansfield develops a mathematical technique that will allow NMR scans to take seconds rather than hours and produce clearer images than Lauterbur.

Mansfield showed how gradients in the magnetic field could be mathematically analysed, which made it possible to develop a useful nuclear magnetic resonance imaging technique. Mansfield also showed how extremely fast imaging could be achievable. This became technically possible a decade later.

P Mansfield and A A Maudsley, Medical imaging by NMR, Brit. J. Radiol. 50 (1977) 188.
P Mansfield, Multi-planar imaging formation using NMR spin echoes J. Physics C. Solid State Phys. 10 (1977) L55–L58.

References from Mansfield's Nobel Lecture. You can also watch a 64 minute video of Mansfield delivering his lecture at this link.

Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling at MIT write the interactive fiction text adventure game Zork in the MDL programming language on a DEC PDP-10.

"Zork" was originally MIT hacker jargon for an unfinished program. The implementors named the completed game Dungeon, but by that time the name Zork had already stuck.

Zork was the first text adventure game to see widespread commercial release.

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.

A DEC sales representative attempts to send the first intentional commercial spam to every Arpanet address on the West Coast.

The sender, Gary Thuerk, thought that Arpanet users would find it cool that DEC had integrated ARPANET protocol support directly into the new DECSYSTEM-20 and TOPS-20 OS.

Texas Instruments announces a speech synthesis monolithic integrated circuit.

For the first time the human vocal tract was electronically duplicated on a single chip of silicon.

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.

C. Wayne Ratliff, working as a contractor at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, writes a database program he calls "Vulcan" (after Mr. Spock of Star Trek) to help him win the office football pool.

Written for his kit-built IMSAI 8080 microcomputer running PTDOS, Ratliff based the program on JPLDIS (Jet Propulsion Laboratory Display Information System), a mainframe (Univac 1108) database product. 

In early 1980, Ratliff and George Tate entered into a marketing agreement.

"Ratliff had given up trying to sell copies of the software for $50 each. Tate thought the product would sell better at $695, so they made a deal and dBASE II was the result. The program was renamed dBASE II because of a belief that a product called "version one" wouldn't sell. The software originally ran on a CP/M computer and then was ported to the IBM PC. In mid-1983 Ashton-Tate purchased the dBASE II technology and copyright from Ratliff, and he joined Ashton-Tate as vice president of new technology."

dBase II became the first best-selling database program for the PC.

Researchers at Xerox PARC write a computer worm program that searches out other computer hosts, then copies itself and self destructs after a programmed interval.

Funded by ARPA, The Aspen Movie Map, an early hypermedia project produced at the Architecture Machine Group (ARC MAC) at MIT under the direction of Andrew Lippman, allows the user to take a virtual tour through the city of Aspen, Colorado.

"ARPA funding during the late 1970s was subject to the military application requirements of the notorious Mansfield Amendment introduced by Mike Mansfield (which had severely limited funding for hypertext researchers like Douglas Engelbart).

"The Aspen Movie Map's military application was to solve the problem of quickly familiarizing soldiers with new territory. The Department of Defense had been deeply impressed by the success of Operation Entebbe in 1976, where the Israeli commandos had quickly built a crude replica of the airport and practiced in it before attacking the real thing. DOD hoped that the Movie Map would show the way to a future where computers could instantly create a three-dimensional simulation of a hostile environment at much lower cost and in less time (see virtual reality).

"While the Movie Map has been referred to as an early example of interactive video, it is perhaps more accurate to describe it as a pioneering example of interactive computing. Video, audio, still images, and metadata were retrieved from a database and assembled on the fly by the computer (an Interdata minicomputer running the MagicSix operating system) redirecting its actions based upon user input; video was the principle, but not sole affordance of the interaction" (Wikipedia article on Aspen Movie Map, accessed 04-16-2009).

Intel introduces the 8086 microprocessor, which would give rise to the x86 architecture.

Ward Christensen founds the Computerized Bulletin Board System (CBBS), the first dial-up bulletin board system (BBS) ever brought online, as a program to allow Christensen and other hobbyists to exchange information. This was distinct from Community Memory, a BBS established in Berkeley in 1973, that used hard-wired terminals placed around the town.

"In January 1978, Chicago was hit by the Great Blizzard of 1978, which dumped record amounts of snow throughout the midwest. Among those caught in it were Christensen and Randy Suess, who were members of CACHE, the Chicago Area Computer Hobbyists' Exchange. They had met at that computer club in the mid 1970s and become friends.

"Christensen had created a file transfer protocol for sending binary computer files through modem connections, which was called, simply, MODEM. Later improvements to the program motivated a name change into the now familiar XMODEM. The success of this project encouraged further experiments. Christensen and Suess became enamored of the idea of creating a computerized answering machine and message center, which would allow members to call in with their then-new modems and leave announcements for upcoming meetings.

"However, they needed some quiet time to set aside for such a project, and the blizzard gave them that time. Christensen worked on the software and Suess cobbled together an S-100 computer to put the program on. They had a working version within two weeks, but claimed soon afterwards that it had taken four so that it wouldn't seem like a "rushed" project. Time and tradition have settled that date to be February 16, 1978.

"Because the Internet was still small and not available to most computer users, users had to dial CBBS directly using a modem. Also because the CBBS hardware and software supported only a single modem for most of its existence, users had to take turns accessing the system, each hanging up when done to let someone else have access. Despite these limitations, the system was seen as very useful, and ran for many years and inspired the creation of many other bulletin board systems.

"Ward & Randy would often watch the users while they were online and comment or go into chat if the subject warranted. Sometime online users wondered if Ward & Randy actually existed.

"The program had many forward thinking ideas, now accepted as canon in the creation of message bases or "forums" (Wikipedia article on CBBS, accessed 04-27-2009).

Compuserve becomes the first online service to offer personal computer users email communication and online technical support. The following year it will offer real-time chat online with its CB simulator.

Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston write Visicalc, the first spreadsheet program, for the Apple II. It helped dispel the notion that the Apple II was only a toy for hobbyists. The PC version of Visicalc was called "the first killer app" for the PC.

The first single-chip digital signal processor (DSP) is developed at Bell Labs, making small portable digital telephones possible.

Robert Metcalf, inventor of Ethernet, founds 3Com.

Metcalf convinced DEC, Intel, and Xerox

"to work together to promote Ethernet as a standard, the so-called 'DIX' standard, for 'Digital/Intel/Xerox'; it standardized the 10 megabits/second Ethernet, with 48-bit destination and source addresses and a global 16-bit type field. The standard was first published on September 30, 1980. It competed with two largely proprietary systems, token ring and ARCNET, but those soon found themselves buried under a tidal wave of Ethernet products."

Andrew Economos founds Radio Computing Services.

RCS's first product was Selector, a music scheduling system.

"The original Selector was developed on a PDP-11/03 under RT-11 and was programmed in Fortran and FMS-11. The goal of Selector is to help music directors of radio stations to handle day-to-day operations such as daily schedule generation, maintenance of music library and format hours" (Wikipedia article on Radio Computing Services).

Elizabeth L. Eisenstein publishes The Printing Press as an Angent of Change. Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe.

Quoting from the Wikipedia, from its perspective of digital information and the Internet, an evaluation of the impact of this printed book on book history:

"In this work she [Eisenstein] focuses on the printing press's functions of dissemination, standardization, and preservation and the way these functions aided the progress of the Protestant Reformation, the Renaissance, and the Scientific Revolution. Eisenstein's work brought historical method, rigor, and clarity to earlier ideas of Marshall McLuhan and others, about the general social effects of such media transitions. This work provoked debate in the academic community from the moment it was published and is still inspiring conversation and new research today. Her work also influenced later thinking about the subsequent development of digital media. Her work on the transition from manuscript to print influenced thought about new transitions of print text to digital formats, including multimedia and new ideas about the definition of text."

Roberta and Ken Williams write Mystery House for the Apple II. Containing 70 simple two-dimensional drawings by Roberta Williams,  Mystery House was the first computer adventure game with graphics.

The game was also eventually released into the public domain.

♦ In the iTunes Store for iPhone and iPod Touch you could buy version 1.0.2 of the program at this link (accessed 12-30-2009):

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=307511510&mt=8

The American Association for Artificial Intelligence is founded.

In 2007 the organization changed its name to the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. In 2009 it had over 6,000 members worldwide.

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 were thirteen missing pages from the 4th century Codex Sinaiticus.

"The concepts of frequency reuse and handoff as well as a number of other concepts that formed the basis of modern cell phone technology are first described in U.S. Patent 4,152,647 , issued May 1, 1979 to Charles A. Gladden and Martin H. Parelman, both of Las Vegas, Nevada and assigned by them to the United States Government.

"This is the first embodiment of all the concepts that formed the basis of the next major step in mobile telephony, the Analog cellular telephone. Concepts covered in this patent (cited in at least 34 other patents) also were later extended to several satellite communication systems. Later updating of the cellular system to a digital system credits this patent" (Wikipedia article on Mobil phone, accessed 04-11-2009).

Intel introduces the 8088 microprocessor, a low-cost version of the 8086 using an eight-bit external bus.

Gordon and Gwen Bell, with the assistance Digital Equipment Corporation, found the Digital Computer Museum. This evolved into the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.