“Man of the Year”

Time magazine names the Computer “Man of the Year” in 1982. "Computers were once regarded as distant, ominous abstractions, like Big Brother. In 1982, they truly became personalized, brought down to scale, so that people could hold, prod and play with them."
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Cyberspace

Novelist William Gibson coins the term "cyberspace" in his award winning 1984 science fiction novel "Neuromancer." Gibson describes cyberspace as "a metaphor that allows us to grasp this place where, since about the time of the Second World War, we've increasingly done so many of the things that we think of as civilization."
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IBM

International Business Machines, the largest computer company in the world, starts in New York in 1911 when the Computing Tabulating Recording Company is created by a merger of the Tabulating Machine Company, International Time Recording Company, the Computing Scale Company, and Bundy Manufacturing. Computing Tabulating Recording is renamed International Business Machines in 1924.
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Manchester Mark I

The Manchester Mark I computer is built at the University of Manchester England in 1949. It is historically significant due to its pioneering inclusion of index registers in its architecture, as well as being the platform on which Autocode is developed, one of the first high-level computer languages. The Manchester Mark 1 was used for Riemann hypothesis and calculations in optics.
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Comptometer

Dorr Eugene Felt develops the Comptometer in 1886. The Comptometer is the first practical key-driven calculator with sufficient speed and reliability to bring significant economic benefits to the processing of business data. A largely unheralded pioneer of today's data processing business, many of Felt's machines were still in use some fifty years after his death.
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UNIVAC I

The Universal Automatic Computer (UNIVAC I) is delivered to its first customer, the U.S. Census Bureau, in 1951. Developed by Remington-Rand, the first American computer designed for commercial business use weighs 8 tons and uses 5,000 vacuum tubes. The machine can perform about 1,000 calculations per second. Remington-Rand sells forty-six UNIVAC machines by 1957.
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Opera browser

Two engineers at the Norwegian telecom company Telenor develop the MultiTorg Opera browser in 1994 for the company's intranet. In time, their economical and fast browser becomes a popular alternative to the Internet Explorer and Netscape browsers. The two engineers start the Opera Software Company in late 1995 after Telenor allows the pair to continue development of the browser on their own.
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Nerd

The term "nerd" comes from an original spelling "knurd." The term is originated at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the late 1940s. Students who party and rarely study are called "drunks," while students who are always studying are known as "knurds" (drunks spelled backwards). The TV show Happy Days gives the phrase its national popularity.
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The year the World Wide Web

1993 is the year the World Wide Web makes its prolific debut. In January 1993, there are only fifty web servers in existence. By October 1993, the number of web servers increases to approximately 500. Through the entire year of 1993, web use grows at a 341,634% annual growth traffic rate. The Word Wide Web is here!
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WiFi

The IEEE publishes the 802.11 networking standard in 1997 as an over-the-air interface between a wireless client and an access point. As the standard is worked into computers and peripherals, its use begins to climb, especially as a home networking product. The 802.11-compatible standard is later dubbed "WiFi" which helps further market and popularize the wireless networking technology.
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The first spell checker

In order to cope with a personal shortcoming, Stanford University researcher Les Earnest develops the first automated spell checker in 1966. Stand-alone spell checker programs eventually appear for CP/M computers in the late 1970s, followed by packages for the IBM PC in 1981. By the mid 1980s, the spell checker is a common feature in word processing programs.
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The C language

Bell Labs engineers Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie develop the C language in the early 1970s. Thompson first develops the language "B" based on the Basic Combined Programming Language (BCPL) and is used in UNIX system development. Ritchie builds on B in 1973 to create a new language called "C," which inherits Thompson's taste for concise syntax, high-level functionality, and detailed features.
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The CD

Philips and Sony decide to join forces in 1979 to design a digital audio disc. Over the next year, the Compact Disc is invented collectively by a large group of people working as a team from both companies. The Compact Disc eventually reaches the market in late 1982 and is enthusiastically received, marking a major event in the evolution of digital audio.
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Apache

The Apache web server is established in February 1995 when a small group of webmasters begin coordinating updates and patches to the public domain NCSA Web server program. The first public release of Apache is delivered in April 1995. The Apache Software Foundation is formed and the Apache web server subsequently becomes one of the most widely deployed web server products in the world.
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Simula

Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard develop Simula at the Norwegian Computing Center in the mid 1960s. Simula is designed to process complex and intensive data for ship simulations. It introduces many key concepts of object-oriented programming including objects and classes, inheritance, and virtual functions. Simula is used as the basis for Bjarne Stroustrup's development of the C++ language.
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Usenet

Usenet's roots go back to 1979 when the idea of sharing information and news within a community of computer users is realized by two graduate students. They develop conferencing software and connect computers at Duke and the University of North Carolina. Usenet grows and subsequently turns into a network that connects tens of thousands of sites around the world, from mainframes to PCs.
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The first email messages

Ray Tomlinson sends the first email messages in late 1971. While working on the TENEX timesharing system, Tomlinson modifies the existing SNDMG mail utility and CYPTNET protocol to allow mail transmission from one ARPANET host to another. Tomlinson also devises the ubiquitous @ between the user's name and the host name. Ray Tomlinson is credited with inventing email.
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Spam

The term "spam" is believed to be derived from the Spam sketch on the BBC comedy series Monty Python's Flying Circus. The sketch features a small restaurant in which every item on the menu includes Spam meat. With the commercialization of the Internet, the term was adopted to mean something excessive and undesirable (like the menu in the sketch) in the context of email and user group postings.
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FORTRAN

The FORTRAN programming language is developed at IBM in 1957. FORTRAN represents a major milestone in computing. The language provides a higher-level way to program, replacing machine and assembly code. FORTRAN catches on quickly as complex programming is done in hours instead of weeks. It is adopted by the scientific and military communities and is used extensively in the space program.
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Dbase

Jet Propulsion Laboratory programmer Jeb Long develops Dbase in the late 1970s. Long's file management program is written in FORTRAN and runs on a UNIVAC computer. A few years later, he works with Wayne Ratliff to create a PC version of the program, which they name Dbase. Dbase and subsequent releases become enormously popular, bringing database management to homes and small businesses.
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The Electric Pencil

Michael Shrayer develops a program that allows people to create, edit, store, retrieve and print documents on a personal computer. Completed in late 1976, his yearlong effort results in the first PC word processing program called The Electric Pencil. In 1979, Micropro International releases the first commercial descendent of The Electric Pencil, called WordStar.
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NLS

Douglas C. Engelbart and a group of Stanford Research Institute researchers demonstrate the online system NLS on December 9, 1968. Developing the project since 1962, NLS features such things as hypertext, object addressing and dynamic file linking, and an x-y display coordinate system. Those on hand also see the debut of the computer mouse.
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IBM PC

IBM sells its personal computing division to Lenovo Group on December 8, 2004. The deal makes China-based Lenovo the third-largest PC maker in the world, behind Dell and Hewlett-Packard. For IBM, the deal ends a twenty-five year run in the PC market but gives them a partnership with Lenovo, providing a franchise in the world's fastest, and soon to be largest, information technology market.
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Adobe

John Warnock and Charles Geschke leave Xerox PARC in 1982 in order to further develop and commercialize their PostScript page description language. Their new company is named for the Adobe Creek in nearby Mountain View, California. Adobe's first success is the use of PostScript in the Apple LaserWriter printer product, which plays a significant role in the development of desktop publishing.
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Flight Simulator

Bruce Artwick's newly formed company named subLOGIC releases Flight Simulator for the Apple II in 1979. The first flights featured 2-D line grid landscapes and simple instrument gages. The game is licensed to Microsoft in 1982 and evolves into one of the best-known software programs serving a worldwide community of virtual pilots with add-ons and upgrades.
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RadioShack

Brothers Theodore and Milton Deutschmann open a one-store retail and mail order operation in downtown Boston in 1921. They choose the name RadioShack, which is a term for the small, wooden structure that houses a ship's radio equipment. The Deutschmanns think the name is appropriate for a store that will supply the needs of radio officers aboard ships, as well as ham radio operators.
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Robots

The 1921 play "Rossum's Universal Robots" introduces the word "robot" to the English language. Czech playwright, novelist, and essayist Karel Capek coins the term as derived from the Czech word robota, meaning work or serf. The word robot usually conjures up images of clanking metal contraptions, however the robots in Capek's story are human-like droids.
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MySQL

Finnish programmer Michael Widenius develops the open source database product MySQL in 1996. MySQL becomes a popular alternative to other commercial SQL products due to its open source code and that it can be downloaded for free. Over time, MySQL registers millions of users and records tens of thousands of daily downloads, becoming a serious competitor to commercial database management systems.
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Computer graphics

Boeing Corporation art director William Fetter coins the term "computer graphics" in 1960. Fetter uses the phrase to describe new graphic methods he is pursuing during his aircraft cockpit design. One of the most memorable early computer graphic images from Fetter's project is that of a human figure, often referred to as the "Boeing Man."
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PayPal

Hedge fund manager Peter Thiel and Ukrainian engineer Max Levchin establish PayPal in late 1998. The two create the company with the hopes of providing a secure software system that allows electronic transfer of payments. Their company is backed by Nokia Ventures, Deutche Bank, and Goldman Sachs and soon has 1.5 million account holders generating $2 million of transactions per day.
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Boo.com

The e-commerce website Boo.com is the mother of all dot com disasters. Backed by Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, and the Benetton family, the online fashion store is developed with no project plan, no cost controls, and an enormous marketing budget. It culminates into a late-arriving, critically panned e-commerce website. Boo.com burns through $160 million before its liquidation in May 2000.
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The AS/400

IBM introduces its AS/400 midrange system in 1988. Whereas most other minicomputer vendors are seeing their market eroded by PCs and client/server systems, IBM has reasonable success with its AS/400 series. By 1998, IBM is selling an AS/400 computer system to a customer every 12 minutes in a working day. In 2000, the AS/400 is renamed the iSeries server.
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Linux

Linux is created by Finnish computer scientist Linus Torvalds in 1991. Torvalds decides to rewrite Unix from scratch and give away his work for free. The ability to see the source code, to improve it, and share it with others inspires many programmers to dedicate sleepless nights to work on it. Linux is eventually improved to the point where it becomes more popular than many commercial Unix packages.
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H316 Kitchen Computer

Honeywell releases its H316 Kitchen Computer in 1969. At $10,600, this computer is marketed to the wealthy and savvy housewife. The computer requires about two weeks worth of programming to operate and can be programmed to keep track of various things like golf scores, investments, dinner menus, and membership lists of charity organizations.
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Stanford University

Stanford University creates the Stanford Industrial Park in Palo Alto, California in 1950. The goal is to create a center of high technology close to the university in order to raise money. This is the genesis of Silicon Valley, the world famous technology area that radiates outward from Stanford University and lies between the Santa Cruz Mountains on the west and the Coast Range to the southeast.
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CompuServe

CompuServe is founded in 1969 as a computer time-sharing service. In 1979, CompuServe becomes the first to offer electronic mail capabilities to personal computer users. One year later it becomes the first to offer real-time chat online. By 1982, the company is providing wide-area networking capabilities to corporate clients. Today, Compuserve is owned by America Online.
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CompuServe

CompuServe is founded in 1969 as a computer time-sharing service. In 1979, CompuServe becomes the first to offer electronic mail capabilities to personal computer users. One year later it becomes the first to offer real-time chat online. By 1982, the company is providing wide-area networking capabilities to corporate clients. Today, Compuserve is owned by America Online.
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Booting

Booting is the process that loads the operating system from the disk into the computer's memory. The term booting or bootstrapping is inspired by the legend of the Baron Munchhausen. Munchhausen was an 18th century German Nobleman who told tall tales about himself, including the ability to pull himself out of the sea by his bootstraps.
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The first Internet service provider

The world's first public Internet service provider is established in Brookline, Massachusetts in 1989. Software Tool & Die begins "The World ISP, A Public Information Utility," equipped with a Sun computer, six 2400 bps modems, homemade modem cables, and basic account-creation software. The first online customer logs on in November 1989.
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RFID

Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) was developed during World War II. RFID transponders placed on an aircraft would give the appropriate response to an interrogating signal so that friendly aircraft could be distinguished from enemy aircraft. Today, RFID technology is being used in many applications including meds tracking, people and animal tracking, toll collections, and inventory control.
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BABAR experiment

The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center's BABAR experiment maintains the largest known computer database on record. The experiment is a collaboration of 600 physicists observing collisions between subatomic particles to understand how matter shapes our universe. The experiment generates up to 500 gigabytes of data per day that is sent continuously to the experiment’s custom built database.
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The Lisa Computer

Apple Computer announces the Lisa Computer in 1983. Lisa officially stands for Logical Integrated Software Architecture. The Lisa's significance in computing history is that it is the first commercial computer with a GUI and mouse designed for the mass market. Although critically acclaimed, the Lisa generates relatively low sales numbers due to its $10,000 price tag.
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The History of Computers

A floating-point division bug is discovered in Intel's Pentium chip by University of Kentucky math professor Thomas Nicely in November 1994. The story circulates through the media leading attorney generals in eight states to file liability suits against Intel causing a public relations disaster for the company. Intel's first-ever chip recall results in a $475 million charge against company earnings.
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Computer science

"Computer science is not as old as physics; it lags by a couple of hundred years. However, this does not mean that there is significantly less on the computer scientist's plate than on the physicist's: younger it may be, but it has had a far more intense upbringing!" - Physicist Richard Feynman.
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Spammer files suit

Cyber Promotions files a lawsuit against America Online (AOL) in November 1996. The suit comes about as AOL blocks undeliverable junk e-mail generated by Cyber Promotions. The spammer files suit in U.S. district court and argues that it has a right to send junk e-mail and that AOL had no right to restrict its ability to send junk e-mail. The District Court rules in AOL’s favor in two separate decisions.
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Inkjet printers

IBM invents the first inkjet-based printer in 1976. It takes twenty years of research and incremental developments including Siemens "drop-on-demand" inkjet technology, HP's "thermal" technology, and Epson's "piezo-electric" technology to overcome the challenges of producing a practical and affordable commercial inkjet product. Hewlett Packard releases the first personal inkjet printer in 1988.
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The Cathedral and the Bazaar

Eric S. Raymond publishes his essay "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" in 1997. Based on his observations of the software industry and his own software management experiences, Raymond describes his "Bazaar" model for software development as the basis of Open Source Software. The paper is published as part of a book in 1999 and becomes the manifesto of the Open Source Software movement.
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2001: A Space Odyssey

The epic drama of adventure and exploration "2001: A Space Odyssey" is released in 1968. Directed by Stanley Kubrick, the story depicts a space crew that sets off on a spaceship controlled by HAL 9000, a revolutionary computer system. HAL endangers the crew's lives for the sake of the programmed mission and must be overcome by the crew.
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Hypertext

Ted Nelson coins the term "Hypertext" in 1965. He foresees a future where millions of people will be publishing hypertext on a worldwide network at a time when few people understand the concept. His writings describe a system that would allow users to aggregate meaning in snippets, in the order of their choosing rather than to a pre-established structure fixed by the author.
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Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems is established in 1982 by Stanford University students Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy, Bill Joy and Andy Bechtolsheim. The company derives its name from "Stanford University Network" and delivers its first UNIX workstation design while the group is still attending Stanford. Sun quickly becomes a recognized vendor of technical workstations.
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Sydney J. Harris

"The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers." - Sydney J. Harris, American journalist.
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Computer Associates

Charles B. Wang starts Computer Associates International, Inc. (CA) in 1976. CA's first product is called CA-SORT, which delivers full-function sort, merge and copy capabilities for the OS/390 market. CA develops a successful strategy of providing multi-platform software products for its customers. After going public in 1981, CA grows into a worldwide leader in technology products and services.
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The PCjr

IBM announces the PCjr in November 1983. Following the success of the IBM PC, IBM attempts to capture the home market with the IBM PCjr. The $1,300 computer has an 8088 processor, comes with a CGA monitor, and a single 5-1/4 inch floppy disk drive. Predicted to be a huge success, the computer fails to compete with other portables coming onto the market. The PCjr is discontinued in 1985.
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The 4004 CPU

Intel releases the 4004 CPU in November 1971. The 4004 is the first computer on a chip and ushers in the era of the microprocessor. The combination of memory and processor on a single chip dramatically reduces size and cost while increasing computer speed. This event is the latest in the evolution of the vacuum tube to the transistor to the integrated circuit.
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Internet radio

The first Internet radio station is developed by Carl Malamud in 1993. Malamud's station uses an experimental technology called MBONE (Multicast Backbone) to multicast its radio program to Internet listeners. On November 7, 1994, WXYC 89.3 FM Chapel Hill, North Carolina and WREK 91.1 FM Atlanta, Georgia become the first existing radio stations to broadcast on the Internet.
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Spacewar

The world's first computerized video game, Spacewar, is developed by Steve Russell on a DEC PDP-1 computer at MIT in 1962. Spacewar is a multiplayer space-combat simulation inspired by Doc Smith's "Lensman" science fiction novels. The game has been essentially under constant development since 1962 and is still played today.
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Identity theft

In November 2002, Federal investigators charge three men in the largest case of identity theft in U.S. history. The case involves a massive identity theft scheme with more than 30,000 victims and and over $2.7 million in losses. The thefts take place within Teledata Communications, a Long Island, New York company that provides computer access to consumer credit reports.
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Election results

CBS Television is the first to use a computer to predict election results during the 1952 Presidential contest. By 8:30 election night, a UNIVAC computer predicts an electoral vote of 438 for Dwight D. Eisenhower and 93 for Adlai Stevenson. These numbers appear dubious to the CBS news staff and are not reported to viewers. The official electoral vote: 442 for Eisenhower, 89 for Stevenson.
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UNIX Programmer's Manual

The first edition of the UNIX Programmer's Manual is released on November 3, 1971. Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie compile the manual two years after the two Bell Telephone Labs programmers develop the original UNIX operating system. The manual is divided into seven sections and includes over sixty commands.
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NET Act

A twenty-two-year old senior at the University of Oregon is the first person to be convicted under the No Internet Theft Act (NET Act) in November 1999. The student is sentenced to two years of probation for making copies of software available for download from a university web site. A related 1999 study estimates that software piracy will account for nearly $12 billion in lost revenue for the software industry.
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Dr. Dobb's

Dennis Allison and Bob Albrecht publish the "Dr. Dobb's Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia" in late 1975. The name "Dobb's" comes from an attempt to put together Allison and Albrecht's first names. Shortened to Dr. Dobb's Journal, the newsletter evolves into the highly popular monthly publication for computer programmers and developers.
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Computer Fraud and Abuse Act

The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 is the first comprehensive legislation in the U.S. to identify and provide for the prosecution of crimes committed through and against computer systems. In 1989, a Cornell University student becomes the first person prosecuted under the 1986 law for deploying a virus that shuts down computers at NASA, Purdue University and Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
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The Mark 1

The Mark 1 computer is developed by Harvard graduate Howard H. Aiken at IBM in the early 1940s. Officially known as the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC), the machine can add or subtract two numbers in three-tenths of a second, multiply them in four seconds, and divide them in ten seconds. The computer is 50 feet long, 8 feet tall, and weighs approximately 5 tons.
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The Internet

The Internet is born on October 29, 1969. UCLA computer science professor Leonard Kleinrock leads a team of engineers in sending the first message from one remote computer to another on ARPANET. The actual message sent from UCLA to the Stanford Research Institute is the text "lo."
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Computer science

Purdue University establishes the first formal computer science department and degree program in October 1962. Computer science had been taught at many universities prior to 1962, but students received degrees in other disciplines, usually mathematics or electrical engineering. The first computer science related courses were offered by Harvard University in the late 1940s.
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Computer generated film

Bell Telephone scientist Edward Zajac creates the first computer generated film in 1963. The film "Simulation of a two-giro gravity attitude control system" shows how the path of a satellite could be altered as it orbits the Earth. The animation is created on an IBM 7090 mainframe computer. Soon after, other scientific researchers begin to develop computer generated films to graphically describe their activities.
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The laser printer

Xerox researcher Gary Starkweather invents the laser printer in 1969. Starkweather uses a laser beam with the xerography process to create a laser printer method. Remarkably, Xerox shows little initial interest in his invention. Starkweather persists and continues to refine the laser printer technology. He completes the first working laser printer in 1971.
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The VAX

Digital Equipment Corporation's VAX computer is released on October 25, 1977 at the company's annual meeting of shareholders. VAX is an acronym for Virtual Address eXtension. It is the first commercially available 32 bit machine and a major milestone in computer history. The Vax is built from the ground-up along with its highly successful Virtual Memory System (VMS) operating system.
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CICS

Customer Information Control System (CICS), one of IBM's most durable and long-lasting products, is released in 1968. The architecture for the product allows it to be incorporated into new platforms over the ensuing years. Recent reports found that over 90% of U.S. Fortune 500 companies, and most state and national governments, rely on CICS for their core business functions.
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WordPerfect

The WordPerfect word processing program is written for Data General minicomputers in 1982 by Satellite Software International. The program is ported to the IBM PC as the company renames itself WordPerfect Corporation. The program's popularity takes off with WordPerfect 4.2 in 1986, and becomes the de facto standard word processor until the mid 1990s, when it is eclipsed by Microsoft Word.
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Sketchpad

Ph.D. student Ivan Sutherland uses the TX-2 computer at MIT to develop the Sketchpad computer program in 1963. Sketchpad is the first computer program to utilize a complete graphical user interface. It uses an x-y point display as well as a light pen. The program also pioneers the use of objects and instances, shedding light onto object oriented programming.
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White House website

The first White House website is launched by the Clinton administration on October 21, 1994. The site's home page features a large image of the White House, the President's message, the Vice President's message, and a guest book. Two years later, President Clinton orders all federal agencies to fully utilize information technology to make the information of their agency easily accessible to the public.
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Red Hat Linux

Red Hat Linux is released in October 1994. In need of new open source software products to sell, the ACC Corporation agrees to market and distribute Marc Ewing's Red Hat Linux product. As sales take off, the ACC Corp changes its name to Red Hat Software, Inc. Red Hat subsequently becomes the most popular brand of Linux in the world.
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Black Monday

On October 19, 1987, the S&P 500 loses 20.5%, the Dow Jones loses 22.6% and the NASDAQ goes down 11.3%, marking the largest one-day decline in stock market history. One of the major causes of the crash is the use of automated computer program trading. During the rapid decline, the markets are found to be controlled more by computers rather than by investor decisions.
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Google

Google transitions from a search engine into a multi-faceted information services company in 2002. Having increased its search engine capability to three billion web documents, the company sets a new course. In 2002, Google launches an enterprise search appliance application, Google News, an advertising key word program, and Froogle, a shopping search engine.
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Web banner ads

The inevitable occurs in October 1994: the first banner ad appears on a World Wide Web page. HotWired, an early and prolific website content creator, is credited with inventing the banner ad motif. The first banner ad is a 320 by 40 pixel graphic stating "Have you ever clicked your mouse here?" The ad appears on HotWired.com and is linked to the AT&T website.
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MP3s

Eiger Labs sells the world's first MP3 player in the summer of 1998 for $165. The 32 MB portable holds up to 32 minutes of near CD-quality audio or 64 minutes of FM stereo-quality audio. The player is very basic and is not user expandable, though owners can upgrade the memory to 64 MB by sending the player back to Eiger Labs.
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IBM 5100 Portable Computer

IBM unveils the IBM 5100 Portable Computer in 1975. Code named Project Mercury during its development, the portable is a briefcase-sized minicomputer with 64 KB of RAM, a tape storage drive, a keyboard, and a built-in 5-inch screen. The machine weighs 55 pounds and starts at $9,000. The 5100 is IBM's first personal computer.
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Tim Berners-Lee

Tim Berners-Lee begins work on a hypertext GUI browser and editor in October 1990. One month later he produces the first web server and web page. The first web server is nxoc01.cern.ch, later called info.cern.ch. The first web page is http://nxoc01.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html. Tim Berners-Lee is credited with inventing the World Wide Web.
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Tron

One of the first computer generated movies, "Tron," is released in 1982. A hacker is split into molecules and is transported into a computer where he teams with a book keeping program and his girlfriend as they try to replace the enemy Master Control program with Tron, a heroic independent security program.
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3340 Winchester sealed hard disk

In 1973, IBM ships the model 3340 Winchester sealed hard disk drive, the predecessor of all current hard disk drives. Nearly two decades earlier, IBM had developed the first computer with a hard disk drive, the IBM 305. The 305's disk drive came with fifty 24-inch platters and a total capacity of five million characters.
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ISDN and DSL

Bellcore researcher Joseph Lechleider originates broadband technologies in the late 1980s. He demonstrates the feasibility of sending broadband signals via telephone lines, which starts the movement of analog to digital. This research effort eventually spawns new transmission technologies such as Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) and Digital Subscriber Line (DSL).
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GO TO statements

Computer Science professor Edsger W. Dijkstra writes his classic programming paper "Go To Statement Considered Harmful" in the Communications of the ACM in March 1968. This paper outlines Dijkstra's observation that the quality of programmers is a decreasing function of the density of GO TO statements in the programs they produce.
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NeXT computer

Steve Jobs resigns from Apple Computer in 1985 to start a company called NeXT. The NeXT computer is intended to be an affordable supercomputer aimed at the academic market. Unfortunately, the computer fails in the marketplace as NeXT churns through $250 million in capital. The failure is due to its $6,000 price tag and the fact that there is no useful software for it.
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Grid Compass 1101

The first true laptop computer is designed in 1979 by British engineer William Moggridge for Grid Systems Corporation. The $10,000 Grid Compass 1101 features a clamshell design and is one-fifth the weight of comparable computers. The computer runs from batteries, has 384-KB of bubble memory, and is equipped with a 320 by 200-pixel plasma display.
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Longest Internet domain name

What is the longest Internet domain name in the world? According to the domain registrars, the longest legal domain name is 63 characters starting with a letter or number. The longest domain name in the world reportedly belongs to the official homepage of a Welsh, United Kingdom village called Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.
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Cray Research

Computer designer Seymour Cray founds Cray Research in 1972. After several years of development, Cray Research's first product, the Cray-1 Supercomputer, is released in 1976. Faced with several costly development projects, the company runs out of money and files for bankruptcy in 1995. Cray dies of injuries suffered in a car accident on October 5, 1996 at age 71.
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The IBM 1401

The IBM 1401 Data Processing System is released in October 1959. Priced at $2,500 per month, this is IBM's first affordable general-purpose computer for business. The 1401 is host to one of the earliest high-level business-oriented programming languages, Report Program Generator (RPG), which increases its usability and popularity. The IBM 1401 is the first computer to sell 10,000 units.
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The 386 microprocessor

Intel Corporation introduces the 80386 microprocessor chip in October 1985. The 386 is a 32-bit microprocessor containing over 275,000 transistors on a single chip, capable of four million operations per second. This gives PCs as much speed and power as older mainframes and minicomputers and makes graphical operating environments like Windows and OS/2 practical.
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The PowerPC

Apple, IBM, and Motorola announce an alliance to create the PowerPC on October 2, 1991. The PowerPC is based on IBM's Power microprocessor, one of the first superscalar RISC implementations. The alliance creates two other companies: Taligent to develop an object-oriented operating system for the PowerPC, and Kaleida Labs to develop multimedia software, tools and scripting languages.
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Stanford University

California Governor Leland Stanford purchases 650 acres of land in 1876. He later buys adjoining properties to bring his farm to more than 8,000 acres. This land is the future site of Stanford University, which opens its doors on October 1, 1891. Through the 20th century, Stanford University establishes itself as a world-class engineering and technology institution at the center of Silicon Valley.
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Liquid Crystal Display

American chemist Glenn Brown sparks a resurgence in liquid crystal research in 1958. Ten years later, the first operational liquid crystal display (LCD) is introduced by a group headed by George Heilmeier at RCA laboratories in Princeton, New Jersey. Today, LCD devices are used in a wide range of electronic equipment from palm-sized mobile phones to large-size TV screens and computer monitors.
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Geographic Information Systems

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is the combination of relational databases with digitized maps. This includes computer programs for capturing, storing, checking, integrating, analyzing and displaying data about the earth that is spatially referenced. GIS systems are used primarily by governments, research institutes or any other body to handle processing large amounts of geographical data.
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Atari 2600

The Atari 2600 game system is released in 1977. This is the first successful video game console to use plug-in cartridges instead of built-in games. It is bundled with two joystick controllers, a conjoined pair of paddle controllers, and a cartridge game. The Atari 2600 introduces the hobby called video gaming to a new segment of users.
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The Intel 4004 chip

Intel scientist Ted Hoff designs the "computer-on-a-chip microprocessor" in 1968. His idea of a universal processor instead of custom-designed circuits is developed while working with an Intel client on calculator chip designs. His new chip is called the Intel 4004 and released in 1971. This microprocessor invention is credited as the start of the microcomputer industry.
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Computer viruses

Computer virus predecessors began showing up in the 1960s, the first being a memory saturating program called Core Wars. A program called Elk Cloner, written for Apple II systems in 1982, is believed to be the first computer-spreading type of virus. The first IBM-PC virus called the Brain appears in 1986.
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Motorola

In September 1928, brothers Paul and Joseph Galvin purchase a battery business in Chicago and start the Galvin Manufacturing Corporation. In 1930, they create the brand name Motorola for the company's new car radio, linking "motor" with the suffix "ola" (sound). The company sells its first television in 1947 and also changes its name from Galvin Manufacturing to Motorola, Inc.
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George Boole

Mathematician George Boole develops the foundation for binary algebra and logic in the late 1830s. He proposes logical expressions as equations, multiplication by the word "and" and addition by the word "or". This provides the basis for validation of statements that may be either true or false. Years later, Boole's two valued logic becomes the basis for electronic circuits and computer design.
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The first commercial modem

The first commercial modem is manufactured in 1962. The Bell 103 by AT&T is the first modem with full-duplex transmission and frequency-shift keying. It has a speed of 300 bits per second. AT&T has the modem market all to itself up until 1968 when the Federal Communications Commission establishes competitive policies for modem use.
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Eliza Artificial Intelligence program

MIT scientist Joseph Weizenbaum creates one of the best known Artificial Intelligence programs in the world in 1966. The 200 line program called Eliza replicates the conversation between a psychoanalyst and a patient by applying pattern matching rules to dialog to figure out its replies. Weizenbaum is shocked that his program is taken seriously by many users, who open their hearts to it.
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Internet Explorer

In response to growing public interest in the Internet, Microsoft creates an add-on to the Windows 95 operating system called Internet Explorer in September 1995. The Internet Explorer 1.0 web browser is developed from a licensed copy of the Spyglass Mosaic browser. At the time of Internet Explorer's release, Microsoft's browser competitor Netscape has almost 80% of the entire web browser market.
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Prodigy

Sears and IBM launch a national online service called Prodigy on September 20, 1988. Prodigy is an online videotext service costing $9.95 per month. Prodigy becomes one of the three leading online services before it loses ground to the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s. The company is bought out by its management in 1996 and becomes an Internet service provider.
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WebTV

WebTV Networks, Inc introduces the first WebTV set-top boxes in September 1996. Web TV is described as a pioneering Internet appliance based on the premise that a consumer will enjoy email and web browsing without having to own or operate a PC. In August 1997, Microsoft buys WebTV Networks and begins offering television-based software products and associated network services.
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X-Windows

The X-Windows graphical user interface system is conceived at MIT in 1984. The X-Windows name is derived from the W-Windows system developed previously at Stanford University. X-Windows is designed as a true client-server system, one part on the client machine, the other on a network server. X-Windows subsequently becomes the standard toolkit for building graphical applications on UNIX platforms.
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Computer keypunch operators

The demand for computer keypunch operators reaches its historic peak during the 1950s and 1960s. Employing a staff of keypunch operators is essential for mainframe computer systems during this period. The job entails entering program instructions and data using a card keypunch machine, verifying and correcting results with card verifier machines, and operating a card sorting machine.
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Chief Technology Officer

The emergence of the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) takes place during the 1980s. The CTO is a business-focused extension of the R&D lab with the goal of increasing profits yielded from research projects. The CTO proliferates further during the mid 1990s to oversee the use of the multitude of emerging technologies coming from the growth of Internet and web-related technologies.
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Extreme Programming

Kent Beck introduces the concept of Extreme Programming in March 1996. Extreme Programming is a conceptual software engineering framework that attempts to meet perceived rapid changes in business. The concept is later formalized by Beck, Ward Cunningham and Ron Jeffries, and is the subject of several professional and technical publications during the late 1990s and early 2000s.
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WYSIWYG

In Fall of 1974, Charles Simonyi, a young Stanford Ph.D from Hungary, refines a program that allows a user to view a graphical display of how a document will appear exactly as printed out. The document is shown with underlining, bold face, italics, and fonts of various styles and sizes. This capability is dubbed as "What You See Is What You Get" - WYSIWYG.
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Artificial intelligence

Prominent computer scientist John McCarthy coins the phrase "artificial intelligence" in 1955 at a Dartmouth University conference devoted to the subject. Five years later, McCarthy invents the Lisp programming language, the preeminent computer language of Artificial Intelligence.
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Jack Kilby's microchip

Texas Instruments scientist Jack Kilby demonstrates the first simple microchip on September 12, 1958. Working with borrowed and improvised equipment, he builds the first electronic circuit in which all of the components are fabricated on a single piece of semiconductor material half the size of a paper clip. Later, Kilby co-invents the hand-held calculator and the thermal printer.
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Control Data Corporation

The newly formed Control Data Corporation introduces the 1604 in 1957. The company becomes widely respected for its high-speed computers used in government and scientific installations. For the next 30 years, Control Data uses the CYBER trade name and produces a complete product line from workstations to mainframes. In 1999, Control Data is acquired by British Telecom's Syntegra subsidiary.
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EISA bus

Compaq and nine other PC competitors work together to develop the Enhanced Industry Standard Architecture (EISA) bus in September 1988. EISA is developed as an alternative to IBM's microchannel bus, and is more compatible with the earlier ISA bus. The primary reason for its development is to avoid paying a fee to IBM for its microchannel bus technology, which was introduced a year earlier.
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TCP/IP

Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf present a paper in 1973 that describes a new protocol they call the Transmission-Control Protocol. In 1978, the TCP protocol is split into two parts: One part for processing messages and detecting errors and the other part for routing and delivery of data. The protocol is renamed TCP/IP and subsequently becomes the standard for all Internet communication.
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Microsoft Excel

Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet program is released for the Apple Macintosh in September 1985. The program is one of the first to use a graphical user interface with pull down menus and a mouse-pointing device. Many people purchase Macintosh computers just for the Excel spreadsheet program. When Microsoft releases its Windows operating system in 1987, Excel is one of the first products released for it.
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EDS

Ross Perot establishes Electronic Data Systems (EDS) on June 27, 1962 by incorporating the company in the state of Texas for $1,000. EDS signs an agreement to buy unused time on Southwestern Life Insurance’s IBM 7070 mainframe computer. Two months and 78 sales calls later, Collins Radio in Cedar Rapids, Iowa becomes EDS’ first customer.
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J.C.R. Licklider

"It seems reasonable to envision a 'thinking center' that will incorporate the functions of present-day libraries. With the anticipated advances in information storage and retrieval, the picture readily enlarges itself into a network of such centers, connected to one another and to individual users by wide-band communication lines." J.C.R. Licklider, 1960.
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FCC

The Federal Communications Commission is created by U.S. Congress in June 1934. A month later, the FCC begins merging regulations from the Federal Radio Commission, the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Postmaster General into one agency. Today, the agency has extensive oversight of new communications technologies, such as satellite, microwave, and private radio communications.
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Lee De Forest's vacuum tube

American inventor and physicist Lee De Forest develops the vacuum tube triode in 1906. The triode is a three terminal device that allows him to develop an amplifier for audio signals, making AM radio possible. The vacuum tube triode also helps push the development of computers forward as the tubes are used in several computer designs in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
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SETI@home

SETI@home is introduced to the public on June 8, 1998. SETI@home is a scientific experiment that uses Internet-connected computers in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Users participate by downloading and running a free software screen saver program that provides unused CPU cycles from their computers for the project. SETI@home is based in Berkeley, California.
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Bill Gates

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates becomes the wealthiest person in the world in 1997. At the age of 41, William H. Gates III tops everyone with an estimated net worth of nearly forty billion dollars. His fantastic run begins with the development of a BASIC language interpreter for the Altair microcomputer in 1975.
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The Osborne 1

The Osborne 1 is released in 1981 and is considered to be the first portable computer. The computer features a 5-inch display, 64K of memory, a modem, and two 5 1/4-inch floppy disk drives. The twenty-four pound machine sells for $1,795 and comes with the CPM operating system, SuperCalc spreadsheet application and WordStar word processing application.
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Xerox

The Haloid Company is founded in 1906 to manufacture and sell photographic paper. Haloid acquires Chester Carlson's Xerography license in 1947 and sells the first xerographic copier in 1950. In 1958, the company changes its name to Haloid Xerox, and three years later, to Xerox Corporation.
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Mobile telephone service

The first commercial mobile telephone service begins in June 1946. A driver in St. Louis, Missouri uses a handset from under his car's dashboard to place the world's first mobile telephone call. A team from Bell Labs works for more than a decade to develop the service. By 1948, mobile telephone service is available in almost 100 cities and 30,000 calls are being made each week.
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Biggest computer hacker

Gary McKinnon, described as the world's biggest computer hacker, is arrested in June 2005. The unemployed computer engineer is accused of causing $1 billion in damage by breaking into the most secure computers at the Pentagon and NASA. McKinnon allegedly breaks into the networks from his home computer to try to prove his theory that the United States is covering up the existence of UFO's.
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Open Directory Project

Rich Skrenta sets out in spring of 1998 to create the web's most comprehensive directory. By late June, there are 200 editors, 27,000 sites, and 2,000 categories on what is dubbed the "GnuHoo" directory. Netscape acquires GnuHoo in 1998 and subsequently renames it the Open Directory Project. Today, this directory is the largest directory on the web and is used by more than twenty major search engines.
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The Z3 computer

The Z3 computer is presented by German engineer Konrad Zuse in May 1941 to an audience of scientists in Berlin. The Z3 is credited as the world's first electronic programmable calculator and is used by the German aircraft industry to solve complex systems of simultaneous equations. The original Z3 computer was destroyed during bombing raids of World War II.
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The iPod

Apple Computer hires Tony Fadell in early 2001 and assigns him a team of designers, programmers and hardware engineers to develop a new music player called the iPod. Fadell's idea is to take an MP3 player, build a music sale service to complement it, and build a company around it. Apple CEO Steve Jobs is highly involved with the project since its inception and molds the device's shape, feel and design.
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Ada

The modern programming language Ada is named in 1979 to honor the first known computer programmer Augusta Ada Byron. Born in 1815, Augusta Ada Byron developed a computer program to run on Charles Babbage's Analytical Machine computer. The program was designed to compute the mathematical sequence known as Bernoulli numbers.
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Charles Babbage

British mathematician Charles Babbage conceives the ideas for the Difference Machine and the Analytical Machine in the 1820s. The Difference Machine would automatically calculate mathematical tables. The Analytical Machine is intended to use loops to make decisions based on previous computations. These machines are the first to be considered as computers in the modern sense of the word.
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Charles Geschke is kidnapped

On the morning of May 26, 1992, Adobe Systems co-founder and President Charles Geschke is kidnapped at gunpoint in broad day light from the Adobe parking lot in Mountain View, California. He is held for $650,000 ransom for four days while the FBI searches for him. He is located in Hollister, California, freed, and returned to his family. The two kidnappers are sentenced to life terms in prison.
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Turing Machine

British mathematician Alan Turing conceptualizes the idea of computer software in the 1930s. His revolutionary concept, dubbed the "Turing Machine," describes how a computer can perform a particular task by breaking the job down into a series of simple instructions. This concept earns Turing the title of "Father" of modern computer science.
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MULTICS

Bell Labs and General Electric scientists work together in 1965 in an attempt to develop a convenient, interactive computer system that can support many users. Their effort, called the Multiplexed Information and Computing Service timesharing system (MULTICS), ends in relative failure. However, the legacy of this effort will lead directly to the development of the UNIX operating system at Bell Labs.
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Ethernet LAN

The first Ethernet LAN data packet is transmitted at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center on May 23, 1973. Bob Metcalf and David Boggs are the inventors of the networking technology that will eventually be used on the vast majority of local area networks in the world. For three years they work to refine and improve their invention. By 1976, their experimental network is connecting 100 devices.
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Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows 3.0 is released on May 22, 1990. Independent software vendors begin developing Windows applications with vigor in response to its increased memory addressing and a more powerful user interface. The powerful new applications help Microsoft sell more than 10 million copies of Windows, making it the best-selling graphical user interface in the history of computing.
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GNU

"GNU's Not Unix" (GNU) is announced in 1983 by Richard Stallman. The goal of GNU is to create a free, UNIX-compatible operating system, called the GNU system. The GNU component libraries, compilers, text editors, and shell are integrated with LINUX in the early 1990s making the GNU operating system complete.
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Software Engineering

The discipline of Software Engineering enters its first stages during the late 1950s. Software workers rewrite all their programs to run on new machines every couple of years. Programs are run by putting punched cards into machine readers and waiting for results to come back on a printer. For the most part, academia does not yet teach the principles of computer science.
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The first working ATM

Docutel Vice President Don Wetzel conceptualizes the idea for the automated teller machine (ATM) while waiting in line at a Dallas bank in the late 1960s. After a five million dollar investment, a working prototype of the ATM is delivered in 1969. The first working ATM is installed in New York at Chemical Bank. Docutel is issued a patent for the ATM in 1973.
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"Silicon Alley"

New York City's "Silicon Alley" nickname originates during the late 1990s from a cluster of Internet and multimedia companies extending from Manhattan's Flatiron district to TriBeCa. The growth of Internet, new media, advertising, and dot com companies during this period gives New York City its first new growth industry in nearly two decades.
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RPG

The Report Program Generator (RPG) language is developed by IBM for its popular 1401 computer in 1964. The reporting tool is created to run matching records and sub-total reports from data. Since then, RPG has been ported to many IBM platforms such as System/390, System 32/34/36, the AS400 series, and the Websphere platform. RPG's remarkable longevity as a business tool ranks with BASIC and COBOL.
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Rapid Application Development

James Martin develops the Rapid Application Development software method during the 1980s at IBM. RAD involves iterative development, the construction of prototypes, and the use of computer-aided engineering tools. The method comes in response to methodologies where applications development takes so long that requirements change before the system is complete, often resulting in unusable systems.
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Computer worm

The term "worm" is derived from a 1970s science fiction novel by John Brunner entitled "The Shockwave Rider." The book describes programs known as "tapeworms" which spread through a network for the purpose of deleting data. The term is first used in computer science by researchers in the study of distributed computing.
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"Let's Talk Computers"

"Let's Talk Computers" goes on the air in 1989. The radio show is hosted by Alan and Sandra Ashendorf, and features insider conversations covering the latest hardware, software, and computer innovations. The weekly show is based in Nashville, Tennessee and ranks as one of the longest running radio computer talk shows.
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Desk Set

The comedy movie "Desk Set" is released in 1957. Richard Sumner has been tasked with the computerization of the research department of a big television network. Research department head Bunny Watson's fear of losing her job is pitted against her attraction to Sumner.
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SAGE project

The first demonstrations of computer time-sharing systems are performed in the summer of 1962 by the U.S. Air Force's SAGE project at MIT. A time sharing operating system permits each user of a computer to behave as though he were in sole control of the computer. The primary developers of timesharing are MIT Professor Fernando Corbato and researchers John McCarthy and Ed Fredkin.
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Thomas Watson

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." - Thomas Watson, Chairman of IBM, 1943.
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Bluetooth

Swedish company Ericsson initiates the Bluetooth Technology movement in 1994. Bluetooth is a wireless radio standard designed for low power, short-wave device communication. In February 1998, five major companies found the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG). Today, many devices such as cell phones, PDAs, computers, and hands-free devices include integrated BlueTooth technology.
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Thomas J. Watson, Jr.

Thomas J. Watson, Jr. becomes CEO of IBM in May 1956. Over the next 15 years, Watson will transition IBM from the age of mechanical office equipment into the computer era during its most explosive period of growth. When Watson becomes CEO, IBM employs 72,500 people and has revenue of $892 million. When he steps down in 1971, there are more than 270,000 employees and revenue is $8.3 billion.
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The Network Computer

Oracle Corporation CEO Larry Ellison announces in 1997 his intention to replace the PC with a low-cost device called the Network Computer (NC). The NC is billed as being as simple as turning on a TV or answering a telephone. Due to incompatibility perceptions, the interest in the NC unit never comes to fruition. Sales come up about 99 million units short of Ellison's 100 million unit projection.
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Sony

Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita establish Sony on May 7, 1946. The company begins modestly as a maker of a rice boiler. The Sony name is derived as a mix of the Latin word sonus, the English word "sunny," and from the word "Sonny-boys" which is Japanese slang for "whiz kids."
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GIF

Online bulletin board company CompuServe introduces the Graphics Interchange Format in 1987. Developed by Terry Welch of Sperry Corporation in 1984, GIF format allows large images to be downloaded in a reasonable amount of time, even with very slow modems. With the advent of the Internet, GIF format becomes the most widely used image format on the web.
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"I Love You"

The "I Love You" computer virus is released in spring of 2000 and affects millions of computers. Users are infected via e-mail, Internet chat systems, and through shared file systems. The virus is a program attached to an e-mail with the subject line, "I LOVE YOU." The destructive virus overwrites several types of files, including .gif and .jpg files, modifies the Internet Explorer start page, and changes registry keys.
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BASIC

The BASIC programming language runs for the first time on a General Electric 225 mainframe computer at Dartmouth College in spring of 1964. BASIC is an acronym for Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. Professors John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz develop the language. It is intended to be a stepping-stone for students to learn one of the more powerful languages such as FORTRAN and ALGOL.
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EDSAC

Maurice Wilkes and his team at Cambridge University complete the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Computer (EDSAC) in May 1949. EDSAC is the first full-scale operational stored-program computer. The clock speed is 500 kHz and most instructions take about 1,500 milliseconds to execute.
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Steve Jobs

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs is demoted by Apple's board of directors and resigns in May 1985. This event climaxes an internal power struggle between Jobs and CEO John Sculley. Ironically, Sculley joined the company in 1983 at Jobs' urging. Sculley remains the CEO until 1993. In 1997, Steve Jobs is back as Apple CEO, after the board of directors lose confidence in CEO Gil Amelio.
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Crazy Frog Axel F

The mobile phone ring tone "Crazy Frog Axel F" tops Britain's singles music charts in May 2005. Jamster's ring tone song, inspired by the 1980s movie theme from "Beverly Hills Cop," is the first song created specifically for mobile phones to crossover onto the mainstream pop music charts. The ring tone single registers 150,000 downloads in just one week.
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"Computer"

The term computer commonly refers to a multi-purpose, solid-state machine. Up through the 1940s, the term "computer" referred to a job description to describe the array of activities performed by people in calculating numerical answers by the use of tables and primitive calculators.
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Commodore

Commodore files for liquidation in April 1994, concluding a long, rich history that begins when Holocaust survivor Jack Tramiel starts a typewriter repair business in New York in 1954. By 1962, Commodore is selling adding machines and later electronic calculators. During the 1980s, Commodore produces several well-received PCs including the Vic-20, Commodore 64 and the Commodore PC.
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Gottfried von Leibniz

"It is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labor of calculation, which could be safely relegated to anyone else if machines were used." - Gottfried von Leibniz.
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First high-speed printer

Remington-Rand develops the first high-speed printer for use on the Univac computer in 1953. The high-speed printer is comprised of four cabinets: a power supply, the printing machine, a control and checking device, and a tape reader. The tape fed printer produces six hundred lines of type per minute.
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Robert N. Noyce

Robert N. Noyce of Intel Corp receives the National Medal of Technology in 1987. He is credited for his semiconductor inventions and for his leadership in the research and development of the microprocessor, which has led to wider use of more powerful computers. These accomplishments are cited as having profound consequences both in the United States and throughout the world.
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SABRE System

The Semi-Automatic Business Research Environment (SABRE) system goes online in 1960 to serve the travel industry. The system was created by American Airlines and IBM in the 1950s and features the debut of online transaction processing. By 1964, SABRE is the largest private data processing system in the world. Today, Travelocity serves as the web front-end interface to the system.
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Huffman Coding

MIT student David Huffman conceptualizes the idea of using a frequency-sorted binary tree algorithm for loss-less data compression in 1951. Huffman comes up with the idea in response to his professor's term paper assignment. Today, "Huffman Coding" is used within several notable data compression products such as PKZIP, as well as the JPEG and MP3 file coding formats.
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Lenovo

The New Technology Developer begins in China in 1984. The organization later becomes The Legend Group. After six years of importing computer products, the company begins selling its Legend PC. By 1999, Legend becomes the top PC vendor in Asia. In 2003, Legend is renamed Lenovo on the heels of an agreement by which it will acquire IBM’s Personal Computing Division.
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Classical computer science

Stanford University computer scientist Donald E. Knuth publishes his classic computer science volumes titled "The Art of Computer Programming Volumes 1-3" in 1998. The three volumes are widely recognized as the definitive description of classical computer science. In 1999, American Scientist named these books among the best physical science monographs of the 20th century.
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Generalized Markup Language

IBM researcher Charles Goldfarb develops the Generalized Markup Language in 1969. This language consists of a set of tags and is used as a means for allowing subsystems to share documents. Goldfarb follows up this work with the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) in 1974, which forms the foundation for the web's HTML and XML language sets.
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"Software engineering"

Computer scientist Friedrich Ludwig Bauer coins the term "software engineering" during a presentation at the 1968 NATO Software Conference. "The whole trouble comes from the fact that there is so much tinkering with software. It is not made in a clean fabrication process, which it should be. What we need is software engineering." - F.L. Bauer, 1968.
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Solitaire

Microsoft adds the Solitaire game to Microsoft Windows in 1990. The Klondike Solitaire game is developed by Wes Cherry, an intern for Microsoft, as a means to help users learn Windows. Shipped with millions of Windows installations, the computer game may be the most played in the world. Since Cherry develops the program for free, he never receives any compensation or royalties.
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Natural Keyboard

Microsoft introduces its Natural Keyboard in 1995. The keyboard is split with each half separated and tilted inwards towards the center of the keyboard. This key arrangement is ergonomically designed to prevent Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and other repetitive strain injuries associated with typing for long periods of time.
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Vaporware

Technology consultant Esther Dyson et. al. coin the phrase "Vaporware" in 1984. Vaporware is defined as software that is announced by a company in advance of its actual release, but never materializes. The term comes in response to the grand product announcement for Ovation, an integrated software package for MS-DOS, which is never developed.
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Hungarian notation

Charles Simonyi invents Hungarian notation in the mid 1970s. Hungarian notation is a computer programming variable naming convention in which the name of an object indicates its data type and intended use. The notation's first major use is with the BCPL programming language. The Hungarian name comes from Simonyi's nation of origin.
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Micro-soft

In late 1974, Paul Allen and Bill Gates begin work on their BASIC language interpreter. Eight weeks later, they enter the program into the Altair and it works perfectly. MITS arranges a deal with Gates and Allen to buy the rights to their BASIC language. Bill Gates and Paul Allen are convinced of an emerging software market. Within the ensuing year, "Micro-soft" will be founded.
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Epson

The Epson Company begins in 1961 as a subsidiary of the Seiko watch company. The company is awarded a contract to make precision timers for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics as well as work to build a printer. Epson's EP-101, released in 1968, is one of the first printers for electronic calculators. Epson's first dot matrix printer, the TX-80, is introduced in 1978.
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First floppy disk drive

IBM engineers develop the first commercial floppy disk drive system in the late 1960s. The read-only 8-inch disk and drive, called the 23FD, debuts in IBM’s System 370 computer in 1971. IBM soon realizes that a read- and write-capable disk drive can replace punch cards as a data entry device. This leads to the 33FD, a 243-kilobyte, 8-inch disk drive that is sold in 1973.
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William Oughtred

English clergyman and scholar William Oughtred invents the slide rule in 1622. The slide rule is a portable device consisting of three interlocking calibrated strips and a sliding cursor used to record intermediate results. This practical invention will be used for the next 350 years until it is made obsolete for most purposes by electronic calculators.
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Dr. Jay Forrester

Dr. Jay Forrester holds the patent for magnetic core memory, which for many years is the standard memory device for digital computers. Dr. Forrester developed the idea of magnetic core memory while working on the Memory Test Computer project at MIT in the 1950s. Dr. Forrester is also credited as the founder of the field of System Dynamics.
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TI-99/4

Texas Instruments introduces its first personal computer in 1979. The TI-99/4 has a 3 MHz TMS9900 processor, 16K of memory, a ROM cartridge slot for loading software, a cassette tape input for loading programs and data, and joystick ports. Two years later, an improved version, the TI-99/4A, with a full-size keyboard and better graphics is produced.
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Hewlett-Packard

William Hewlett and David Packard make their first commercial sale to Walt Disney Studios in 1939. Disney purchases eight oscillators for use in making the animated film Fantasia. Eight years later, Hewlett-Packard incorporates as a company with 111 employees on its payroll and annual sales of $679,000.
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Traf-O-Data

Bill Gates and Paul Allen start the Traf-O-Data Company in 1972. The two young aspiring computer programmers develop an 8008-based computer hardware/software system for recording automobile traffic flow on a highway, earning them $20,000. Although Traf-O-Data is not a big success, it does lead to a job offer to work with a software development group at TRW.
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System/360

Considered by many to be the biggest business gamble of all time, IBM launches System/360 on April 7, 1964. At the height of IBM's success, CEO Thomas J. Watson, Jr. invests $5 billion in a family of six mutually compatible computers that would help revolutionize modern organizations. Within two years, orders for the System/360 reach 1,000 per month.
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SAP

Five former IBM employees establish Systemanalyse und Programmentwicklung (SAP) in Mannheim, Germany in April 1972. The organization's vision is to develop and market standard enterprise software to integrate all business processes. The idea comes to the group when they notice that client after client is developing the same, or very similar, enterprise computer programs.
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Microsoft Word

The development of Microsoft Word begins in April 1983. Richard Brodie, Microsoft's 77th employee, develops the program while Microsoft Windows is being developed. Word is completed in 1985. To market the new word processor, Microsoft distributes 450,000 demo disks in the November issue of PC World magazine.
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HyperCard

Apple introduces HyperCard in 1987. Created by Bill Atkinson, HyperCard allows programmers to store graphical and textual information in a series of cards. HyperCard is interactive and is geared toward the construction of user interfaces rather than the processing of data. Apple bundles the program free with Macintosh computers until 1992.
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AutoCAD

Autodesk is founded in April 1982 in California. The company's goal is to create a Computer Aided Design (CAD) program that runs on a PC and sells for $1,000. The initial product release is called AutoCAD and is a big commercial success. Through subsequent product releases, AutoCAD is established as the de-facto standard for computer aided design on PCs.
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ICQ

The first version of the interpersonal chat program ICQ is introduced by Israel-based Mirabilis in November 1996. The instant messaging application is enthusiastically received by hundreds of thousands of users. ICQ achieves one of the largest download rates for a start-up company in the history of the Internet. America Online acquired Mirabilis in June 1998.
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Apple

The Apple Computer Company is born on April 1, 1975. Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs design the first Apple computer in Jobs' home. Jobs is able to convince a local electronic retailer to order 25 Apple I computers. In order to raise the money to make these machines, Jobs sells his Volkswagen microbus and Wozniak sells his HP scientific calculator, enabling them to raise $1,300.
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JavaScript

Netscape Communications programmer Brendan Eich invents LiveScript in 1995. After a partnership is established between Netscape and Sun, LiveScript is renamed JavaScript, to match Sun's Java language. The object-oriented scripting language becomes an international standard allowing web developers to produce dynamic HTML that works on almost all web browsers.
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Bob

A few months after its highly successful release of Windows 95, Microsoft releases Bob, a suite of user-friendly programs intended to work with Windows 95. Bob's cartoonish appearance and pseudo-friendliness become the worst flop in Microsoft's history. The company reportedly destroys all copies of the software and attempts to erase the entire episode from its public record.
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REXX

The first specification for the REXX programming language is published in March 1979. REXX is a powerful macro language developed by Mike Cowlishaw of IBM. It grows out of the basic scripting statements used with IBM’s Virtual Machine/370 operating system. The popularity of Cowlishaw's macro language compels IBM to begin shipping it as a commercial product in 1982.
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Kings Quest

Kings Quest is released in 1984. The game is the first to support the EGA graphics color card and is touted as one of the greatest adventure games in the computer industry. So good that IBM selects the game as a showpiece for its PCjr. The game's object: you are sent on a quest by the King of Daventry to return three lost treasures in return for the throne.
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Atari

Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney form Atari in 1972 and begin work on a video game called Pong. Based on the tabletop ping-pong game, the home version of Pong becomes a huge success in 1974. Three years later, the company introduces its video game console, the Atari 2600, and scores another huge success. Atari is subsequently sold to Warner Communications in 1976.
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"Blue screen of death"

The "blue screen of death" is the popular phrase for the screen displayed by Microsoft's Windows operating system when it cannot recover from a system error. The phrase is an extension of the "black screen of death" which occurred during the early 1990s on Windows 3.1 systems when a DOS application failed to execute properly.
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