Power Point Art

David Byrne, the former front man of the musical group Talking Heads, publishes his book "Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information" in August 2003. The book is a collection of essays and artistic imagery created with Microsoft's Power Point software. The work explores emotional and subjective information through the Power Point media producing an array of thought provoking and clever themes.
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Cisco Systems

Stanford computing staff employees Leonard Bosack and Sandra Lerner establish Cisco Systems in 1984. Named for the shortened version of San Francisco, the company markets the first commercially successful network router that allows incompatible computers to communicate. The router was developed by Bosack, Lerner and several individuals at Stanford University.
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Flowcharts

Graduate student Ben Shneiderman envisions the idea of structured flowcharts while attending a 1972 ACM discussion on structured programming. Working with fellow student Isaac Nassi, they put together and refine the sketches leading to the first ideas of sequence, conditionals and iteration. They draft and publish the paper "Flowchart Techniques for Structured Programming" in August 1973.
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The Russian software industry

The Russian software industry dates back to the 1950s. The government controlled the software industry, which dealt mainly with military or industrial applications. One of the first successful software applications was used in the space program. Russia encountered problems over the ensuing decades as it tried to create its own computing hardware and software systems despite worldwide standards.
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Visual Basic

Software designer Allen Cooper conceives Visual Basic in 1986. VB is an environment that provides a palette of Windows controls allowing users to easily create and program forms. After showing his project to Bill Gates, a deal is worked out with Microsoft to purchase Cooper's work. Microsoft integrates Cooper's concept with its QuickBasic language and releases Visual Basic 1.0 in 1991.
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Ebay

Ebay is founded in Pierre Omidyar's San Jose living room on Labor Day 1995. Omidyar poses the question, "What would happen within a marketplace if everyone had equal access to information and tools?" Joined by co-founder Jeff Skoll, and three years later by Meg Whitman, the company charts an enormously successful business model based on a world-wide community of online buyers and sellers.
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C++

Bell Labs engineer Bjarne Stroustrup begins the development of the C++ language in 1980. Stroustrup comes up with the idea of adding class structures to the C language by using elements of the object-oriented language Simula. He calls the newly developed language "C with Classes." The language is later renamed C++ and goes on to become a highly popular applications programming language.
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DBMS

IBM researchers develop the database management system concept and the SQL standard in the early 1970s. The first commercially available relational database system is later developed by Honeywell Information Systems Inc. Their Multics Relational Data Store (MRDS) is released in June 1976 and is based on the database management system concepts developed at IBM.
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PDP-8

Digital Equipment Corporation unveils the PDP-8 computer in 1965. The first commercially successful minicomputer is small enough to sit on a desktop and sells for $18,000. The combination of speed, size, and cost puts the PDP-8 in thousands of manufacturing plants, offices, and scientific laboratories. By late 1973, the PDP-8 family is the best selling computer in the world.
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The Newton Message Pad

Apple announces its first Personal Digital Assistant product, the Newton Message Pad, in August 1993. It features an address book, calendar, notes, faxing and email, as well as handwriting recognition. Unfortunately, the initial product has problems with its handwriting recognition. Even worse, these problems are widely reported, including digs by the Doonesbury comic strip and the Simpsons TV show.
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Research in Motion

Research in Motion Ltd. is founded by University of Waterloo student Mike Lazaridis and University of Windsor student Douglas Fregin in 1984. The Canadian company creates many innovative products, most notably, the Blackberry introduced in 1998. The award winning hand held email device is a huge commercial success and becomes a "must-have" for people who want constant contact.
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BitTorrent

Bram Cohen demonstrates his newest peer-to-peer programming project at the Defcon Convention in Las Vegas in 2001. The project, later named BitTorrent, provides an easy to use protocol for downloading large files and file sets. BitTorrent users get their files from the original server and from anyone else who is downloading the same file, making the entire file transfer significantly faster.
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Zhongguancun

China's version of the Silicon Valley is located in Beijing's Zhongguancun district. The area is home to thousands of high-tech companies ranging from local firms to international companies such as Microsoft, Sun, Siemens and NEC. The region features two esteemed universities, Peking and Tsinghua, and has become the center for engineers and technology entrepreneurs in China.
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Virtual reality

The term "virtual reality" is coined by computer scientist and philosopher Jaron Lanier in 1980. The phrase is an adaptation of the phrase "Virtual World" originated by Suzanne Langer in the 1950s to describe what one sees as real through a computer-generated world. Lanier established the Virtual Programming Language (VPL) in the early 1980s.
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HyperCard

Bill Atkinson of Apple Computers introduces HyperCard in 1987. Apple bundles the application free with all Macintosh machines and soon Hypercard becomes the most widely used hypertext system. Many believe HyperCard to be the application that contributed the most to the popularization of the hypertext model.
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VoIP

VocalTec develops the first Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone application in 1995. The idea is to compress the voice signal and translate it into IP packets for transmission over the Internet. VocalTec's Internet phone is a remarkable breakthrough. However, delays, disconnections, and incompatibility problems prevent it from becoming a popular product.
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The iMac

Apple begins shipping the iMac on August 15, 1998. Aesthetically, the iMac is different from other computers. It is made of translucent blue plastic and is egg-shaped around a 15 inch CRT. The iMac project is started one day after Steve Jobs returns as CEO in 1997 to help the beleaguered company return from obscurity. The new computer is a huge success and is the top selling model for most of 1998.
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Henry Gantt

Industrial engineer Henry Gantt invents the Gantt chart in 1917. The Gantt chart is an innovative horizontal bar chart used for coordinating and scheduling tasks. It is considered revolutionary in that it is based on time rather than quantity. Gantt is also noted in management history for recognizing the importance of motivation as a psychological phenomenon in the work place.
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The Matrix

The sci-fi action thriller film "The Matrix" is released in 1999. A computer hacker discovers that all life on Earth may be nothing more than an elaborate virtual world created by a malevolent cyber-intelligence for the purpose of using humans to fuel a campaign of domination in the "real" world.
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The IBM PC

The IBM PC is released on August 12, 1981. Priced at $1,565, the personal computer has a 4.77 MHz Intel 8088 microprocessor and comes with a 160-KB floppy disk drive, an optional color monitor, and IBM's Disk Operating System. The development team at IBM develops and announces the IBM PC in 12 months, at that time, faster than any other hardware product in IBM's history.
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Amdahl

After 18 years at IBM, Dr. Gene Amdahl partners with Fujitsu to establish the Amdahl Corporation in 1970. The company releases its first computer, the Amdahl 470 V6 in 1975. The highly successful machine allows customers to run IBM S/360 applications without buying higher priced IBM hardware. By 1979, Amdahl Corporation reaches one billion in revenue and has over 6,000 employees worldwide.
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Microsoft Certification

Arfa Karim Randhawa is believed to be the youngest Microsoft Certified Professional in the world. Arfa is from Faisalabad, Pakistan and received her certification at the age of nine. Microsoft Certification is earned by taking a series of exams that prove your knowledge of Microsoft products and programming. Achieving this certification also earned Arfa a chance to meet with Microsoft's Bill Gates.
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COBOL

Grace Murray Hopper initiates a project in 1952 that will eventually lead to the development of the COBOL programming language. The initial specifications for Common Business Oriented Language are presented in a report of the executive committee of CODASYL in April 1960. The language is designed to be business oriented, machine independent, and capable of continuous change and development.
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MS DOS

IBM contracts the small PC software company Microsoft to develop a new personal computer operating system in October 1980. Microsoft creates MS DOS by purchasing the rights to 86-DOS for $50,000 from Seattle Computer Products. IBM allows Microsoft to market MS DOS to other PC makers and consumers thus providing Microsoft a growing presence in the emerging PC software market.
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Blaise Pascal

In 1642, French mathematician, physicist, and theologian Blaise Pascal begins developing a device to help his father add and subtract sums of money. His Arithmetic Machine is introduced a few years later. It is cited by many as the first mechanical calculator, of which the basic design principle is still used today in water meters and modern-day odometers.
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Windows 95

Microsoft releases its landmark Windows 95 operating system in August 1995 with a $300 million launch campaign. Windows 95, originally code-named Chicago, is Microsoft's first 32-bit operating system for PC consumers. Among its biggest draws is its large virtual memory and the new Internet Explorer web browser. Windows 95 sales reach one million copies two months after its launch.
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The Computer History Museum

The Computer History Museum is established in Mountain View, California in 1996. The mission of the museum is to preserve the artifacts of the information age and celebrate computing history. The Museum is home to one of the largest collection of computing artifacts in the world, comprised of over 4,000 items, 10,000 images, 4,000 feet of cataloged documentation and several gigabytes of software.
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SHARE

The IBM User Group SHARE celebrates its 50th year of existence in 2005. The SHARE user group holds its first meeting at the Rand Corporation on August 15, 1955 in Santa Monica, Calif. The first meeting is called to help scientific users grapple with the problems of IBM’s first major commercial mainframe, the 704.
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Denial of service

On August 3, 2000, Canadian federal prosecutors charge a fifteen-year-old boy with fifty-four counts of illegal access to computers, plus ten counts of mischief to data for his attacks on Amazon.com, eBay, Dell Computer, and Yahoo. During the month of February, the boy carries out several "denial of service" attacks on these websites causing service interruptions and some of the websites to go down.
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Borland

Borland Software opens for business in Ireland with three employees in August 1981. Borland incorporates in California in May 1982 under the leadership of Philip Kahn. Through the 1980s and 1990s, Borland develops and releases highly regarded software products such as SideKick, Paradox, QuatroPro, Turbo Pascal, and Delphi.
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Windows

IBM and Microsoft agree in August 1985 to produce the OS/2 operating system for IBM's PS/2 PC. Meanwhile, Microsoft continues working on its Windows product and releases Windows 3.0 in 1990. Windows' ensuing popularity over OS/2 prompts Microsoft to end the OS/2 agreement with IBM. OS/2 eventually fades away. IBM announces that sales of OS/2 will officially end on December 23, 2005.
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