Computers Timeline
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Computing History: http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/
IBM History (1952-1957): http://www.thocp.net/timeline/1952.htm
1815 Dec 10, Ada Lovelace (d. Nov 27, 1852), Lord Byron's daughter and the inventor of computer language, was born. In 1998 the sci-fi film, "Conceiving Ada," was directed by Lynn Hershman-Leeson.
(SFC, 1/22/98, p.D7)(SFC, 4/30/98, p.E1)
1852 Nov 27, Ada Lovelace (b.1815), Lord Byron's daughter and the inventor of computer language, was bled to death by physicians at age 36. She had helped Charles Babbage develop his "Analytical Engine," that performed mathematical calculations through the use of punched cards.
(SFC, 1/22/98, p.D7)(SFC, 4/30/98, p.E1)
1871 Oct 18, Charles Babbage (b.1792), English mathematician and inventor of a calculating machine, died. In 2001 Doron Swade authored “The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer."
(www.thocp.net/biographies/babbage_charles.html)(WSJ, 3/7/09, p.W8)
1874 Feb 17, Thomas J. Watson Sr. (d.1956), U.S. industrialist, was born in upstate New York. In 1914 he began running the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Co., a predecessor to IBM. He converted the financially ailing manufacturing business into the international giant IBM.
(WUD, 1994, p.1614)(HN, 2/17/99)(WSJ, 5/15/03, p.A1)
1890 Mar 11, Vannevar Bush was born. He developed the 1st electronic analogue computer.
(MC, 3/12/02)
1890 Jun 1, The U.S. census stood at 62,622,250. The US government used the Jean Baptiste Pacard card punch to tabulate the results of the census. Herman Hollerith designed a system that used a machine with a sorter.
(DTnet, 6/1/97)(SFC, 8/5/97, p.A20)(WSJ, 10/15/01, p.R23)
1914 Thomas J. Watson Sr. (1874-1956) began running the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Co. (CTR), which he would rename International Business Machines in 1924. He instituted the Hundred Percent Club in 1916 to glorify employees who met their sales quotas; started an internal media machine, including a weekly broadsheet and a monthly magazine; published a company songbook; and founded the IBM symphony in 1936. He converted the financially ailing manufacturing business into the international giant IBM.
(WSJ, 5/15/03, p.A1)(http://tinyurl.com/tk3psra)(http://tinyurl.com/r8pfe6f)
1924 Mar 5, Computing-Tabulating-Recording Corp became IBM.
(MC, 3/5/02)
1937 Alan Turing published a paper showing that a universal machine could be designed to perform the functions and do the work of any device designed for problem-solving. More important, his paper showed that a digital computer could theoretically be designed to do the work of any analog computer. He is considered the founder of artificial intelligence.
(V.D.-H.K.p.349)
1937 John Vincent Atanasoff at Iowa State College conceived one of the first electronic digital computing devices. The Atanasoff–Berry Computer (ABC), created in 1939, was not programmable, being designed only to solve systems of linear equations. It was successfully tested in 1942.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atanasoff%E2%80%93Berry_Computer)(SFC, 12/12/01, p.A27)
1939 John Atanasoff created the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC) in the basement of the physics building at Iowa State College, which did not file patents. Physics Prof. John Mauchly took many of his ideas and filed a patent on over 100 ideas revolving around the computer in 1947. The patent, granted in 1964, claimed the Mauchly had invented the computer. This was disproved in 1973, following a 2-year court battle. In 2010 Jane Smiley authored “"The Man Who Invented the Computer: The Biography of John Atanasoff, Digital Pioneer."
(SSFC, 10/24/10, p.F3)
1939 Richard Bloch (21) taught programming to Grace Hopper (43), who later invented COBOL. Bloch (d.2000 at 78), as chief operations officer at Harvard's Computation Laboratory, played a key role in the development of the Mark I digital computer and invented the parity check for automatic error detection. Hopper led the effort to bring together people in 1959 to collaborate on the development of the Cobol computer language, but did not participate in its creation.
(SFC, 5/27/00, p.A26)(SSFC, 6/4/17, p.C10)
1941 Dec, Cecil Green (d.2003 at 102), Eugene McDermott, J. Eric Jonsson and H. Bates Peacock purchased Geophysical Service Inc. in Dallas, Texas. In 1951 the name was changed to Texas Instruments.
(SFC, 4/17/03, p.A22)
1943 British scientists led by Tommy Flowers (1905-1998) developed Colossus, the world's first large electronic valve programmable logic calculator, in order to break the German communication's code. Colossus is considered by many to be the world's first digital, programmable electronic computer. Its existence was only made public in 1989!
(Wired, 10/96, p.78)(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Flowers)
1944 Rear Admiral Grace Hopper (1906-1992) became one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I electro-mechanical computer. She was later credited with popularizing the term "debugging" for fixing computer glitches, inspired by an actual moth removed from a computer.
(SFC, 2/18/14, p.A6)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper)
1945 Sep 9, The 1st "bug" in a computer program was discovered by Grace Hopper. A moth was removed with tweezers from a relay and taped into the log.
(MC, 9/9/01)
1946 Feb 1, A press conference for what is considered the first computer, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator (ENIAC), was held at the University of Pennsylvania. The machine took up an entire room, weighed 30 tons and used more than 18,000 vacuum tubes to perform functions such as counting to 5,000 in one second. ENIAC, costing $450,000, was designed by the U.S. Army during World War II to make artillery calculations. The development of ENIAC paved the way for modern computer technology--but even today's average calculator possesses more computing power than ENIAC did. John Mauchley and John "Pres" Eckert supervised the project. In 1999 Scott McCartney published "ENIAC: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the World's First Computer."
(HN, 2/2/99)(WSJ, 6/30/99, p.A24)(SFEC, 8/29/99, BR p.5)
1946 Feb 15, The ENIAC, Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, had its official unveiling. It was created by John Mauchly and Presper Eckert. The first test problem it solved was concerned with the trajectory of a 155-millimeter shell. The problem was programmed by Jean Bartik and Betty Holberton who were part of an all-woman team that had performed the calculations by hand. The US Army had chosen 6 women, including Frances Holberton (d.2001 at 84), to program Eniac. Ms. Holberton later created the C-10 instruction code for the Univac using keyboard commands rather than dials and switches.
(WSJ, 11/15/96, p.B1)(www.thocp.net/hardware/eniac.htm)(SFC, 12/12/01, p.A27)
1946 John Tukey, statistician at Bell Labs, coined the term "bit "for binary digit..
(SFC, 7/29/00, p.A21)
1946 A patent dispute with the Univ. Pennsylvania drove John Presper Eckert (d.1995) and John Mauchley (d.1980) to move out on their own. The Electronic Control or Eckert-Mauchly computer was developed at 1215 Walnut St. In Philadelphia. By 1952 it was being sold as the Univac with a clock rate of 2.25 megahertz.
(SJM, 5/1/01, p.10C)
1947 Aug 18, The Hewlett-Packard Company was incorporated and reported revenues of $1.5 million. The 111 employees recorded sales of $679,000. In 2007 Michael S. Malone authored “Bill & Dave: How Hewlett and Packard Built the World’s Greatest Company."
(SFC, 3/3/99, p.A11)(SFC, 1/13/01, p.A15)(SSFC, 4/22/07, p.M3)
1947 Dec 16, The point-contact transistor was invented at Bell Labs.
(SFEC,12/14/97, p.A1)
1947 Dec 23, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain of AT&T Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, unveiled what was soon to be called the transistor, short for the electrical property known as trans-resistance, which paved the way to a new era of miniaturized electronics. The device was improved by William Schockley as a junction transistor. All 3 received a Nobel Prize in 1956. The events are described in the 1997 book by Michael Riordan and Lillian Hoddeson: "Crystal Fire: The Birth of the Information Age."
(WSJ, 9/22/95, p.A-7)(SFEC, 8/17/97, BR p.4)(AP, 12/23/97)
1948 Jun 30, Bell Labs introduced the point-contact transistor in the New York Times on p.46 as a replacement for the vacuum tube. Bell Labs had kept it secret for six months. John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley demonstrated their invention, the transistor, for the first time. John Pierce (d.2002) proposed the name. [see Dec 23, 1947]
(SFE, 10/1/95, p.D-5)(SFEC,12/14/97, p.A1)(WSJ, 2/13/98, p.A13)(HNQ, 12/23/99)(HN, 6/30/01)(SFC, 4/9/02, p.A18)(MC, 6/30/02)
1948 Claude Shannon, the father of coding theory, published a paper which showed the maximum theoretical rate at which information can be transmitted without error. By 2004 real codes began approaching Shannon’s theoretical limit.
(Econ, 7/3/04, p.65)
1948 Richard Bolt and Leo Beranek, professors at MIT, established a small acoustics consulting firm and soon added a former student of Bolt’s, Robert Newman. In 1949 BBN won its first major consulting contract, designing the acoustics for the UN General Assembly Hall.
(www.bbn.com/about/timeline/)
1950 Joseph Glickauf, engineer for Arthur Anderson & Co., constructed the "Glickiac" computer, which allowed the firm to help General Electric automate its payroll.
(WSJ, 6/7/02, p.A6)
1950s The Electronic Recording Method of Accounting (ERMA) was created and installed into the banking system under the oversight of Alfred R. Zipf (d.2000 at 82), executive VP for Bank of America.
(SFC, 1/800, p.A19)
1951 May 11, Jay Forrester patented computer core memory.
(MC, 5/11/02)
1951 Jun 14, UNIVAC, the first computer built for commercial purposes, was demonstrated in Philadelphia by Dr. John W. Mauchly and J. Prosper Eckert, Jr. Magnetic tape for data storage was first used on the UNIVAC.
(HN, 6/14/98)(SFC, 6/15/01, p.B3)(Econ, 11/30/13, TQ p.3)
1951 Jun 15, 1st commercial electronic computer was dedicated in Philadelphia. [see Jun 14]
(MC, 6/15/02)
1951 The video game NIM was created for the Festival of Britain. It was played on Nimrod, a computer developed by the Ferranti electronics firm.
(Econ, 12/10/11, SR p.12)
1951 In Britain J. Lyons & Co. used the world's first business computer to calculate payrolls and optimum mixes for tea blending.
(WSJ, 1/11/99, p.R14)
1951 The Harwell Dekatron, also known as the Wolverhampton Instrument for Teaching Computation (WITCH), was built at Harwell, the UK's atomic energy research establishment. In 2012 the supercomputer was restored after a period of three years by experts at England's National Museum of Computing in Bletchley Park.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harwell_computer)
1952 May 21, IBM introduced its 701 Electronic Data Processing System, the first commercially successful computer. It was withdrawn from marketing on October 1, 1954.
(http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/701/701_1415bx01.html)(Econ, 3/10/12, p.97)
1952 Nov 4, Dwight D. Eisenhower (Ike) was elected president the 34th president, defeating Democrat Adlai Stevenson in presidential elections. The Republicans took over for the first time in 20 years. A Univac computer in Philadelphia predicted the results based on early returns.
(TMC, 1994, p.1952)(AP, 11/4/97)(HN, 11/4/98)(SJM, 5/1/01, p.1C)
1952 Stanford asked Prof. John Herriot (d.2003 at 87) to lead a new Computation Center following the acquisition of its 1st computer, an IBM Card Programmed Calculator.
(SFC, 4/14/03, p.A1)
1952 IBM first moved to the Bay Area to take advantage of the engineers graduating from UC and Stanford. It opened the Almaden Research Center.
(SFC, 11/30/98, p.E1)
1953 John von Neumann and a band of engineers at Princeton Univ. created a computer that simulated nuclear explosions by day and modeled artificial life forms, the creations of Nils Barricelli (1912-1993), by night. Barricelli, a Norwegian-Italian mathematician, was wealthy and held an unpaid residency at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) at Princeton, NJ, in 1953, 1954. and 1956. His early computer-assisted experiments in symbiogenesis and evolution are considered pioneering in artificial life research.
(Econ, 3/10/12, p.97)
1953 Remington-Rand developed the 1st high-speed printer for use on the Univac mainframe computer.
(SFC, 7/26/04, p.F4)
1954 Sep 20, The 1st FORTRAN computer program was executed.
(MC, 9/20/01)
1954 The Semiautomatic Ground Environment (SAGE) program was established by the US Air Force. It was an air defense network of the time using the largest computer ever built. SAGE machines contained 55,000 vacuum tubes, weighed 275 tons and occupied half an acre of floorspace.
(WSJ, 10/15/01, p.R23)(Econ, 6/10/06, Survey p.33)
1954 The Arthur Anderson accounting-and-advisory firm helped persuade General Electric to install a Univac 1 computer.
(Econ, 3/14/20, p.53)
1954 IBM rolled out its models 704 and 705 computers.
(http://www.thocp.net/timeline/1952.htm)
1954 The Rand corp. built the Johnniac computer. Bill Gunning (1916-2006), computing pioneer, helped build the device, one of 17 designed around the computing architecture suggested by John von Neumann. Gunning went on to help develop Ethernet (1972) at Xerox’s PARC.
(SFC, 11/8/06, p.B13)
1955 Feb 24, Steven Jobs, co-founder (Apple Computer), was born.
(SFC, 8/25/11, p.A10)
1955 Prof. John Herriot (d.2003 at 87) began teaching Stanford's 1st programming course, Math 139: Theory and Operation of Computing Machines.
(SFC, 4/14/03, p.A1)
1955 William Shockley founded Shockley Semiconductor in Palo Alto.
(SFC, 10/11/00, p.A6)
1956 Sep 13, IBM introduced the Model 305 computer capable of storing 20 megabytes of data. Reynold B. Johnson (d.1998 at 92), IBM lab leader, developed a way to store computer data on a metal disk instead of on tape or drum. The first commercial disk drive, called RAMAC (random access method of accounting and control), was developed by IBM and sold for $50,000. It used 50 disk platters, each 2-feet in diameter. Together they held 5 megabytes of data. His Random Access Method of Accounting Control began the disk drive industry.
(http://tinyurl.com/k3rzf)(SFC, 9/21/98, p.A21)(WSJ, 8/22/06, p.B3)
1956 Walter Brattain, John Bardeen and William Shockley were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for the invention of the transistor. The trio invented the transistor in 1948 at the Bell Laboratories. William Schockley, co-developer of the transistor, founded Schockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Palo Alto. Two of his hires, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, later went on to start Intel Corp. Tim Jackson in 1998 published "Inside Intel."
(SFEC, 8/17/97, BR p.4)(WSJ, 2/13/98, p.A13)(HNQ, 12/23/99)
1956 John McCarthy (1927-2011), computer science pioneer, led the first conference on “artificial intelligence" at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire. He coined the term to attract funding for the conference.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McCarthy_%28computer_scientist%29)(Econ, 11/5/11, p.114)
1956 The Fortran computer language was developed.
(TL, 1988, p.115)
1956 The computer mouse was invented at SRI Int’l. by Doug Engelbart and Bill English. It was patented on Nov 17, 1970. The point-and-click graphical interface was introduced by an MIT group working on the Whirlwind computer. Engelbart was working at the Stanford Research Institute, a think tank sponsored by Stanford University, and originally referred to the mouse as a "X-Y Position Indicator for a Display System."
(Economist, 9/15/12, p.16)(http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch001083.htm)
1956 Thomas J. Watson Sr. (b.1874), founder of IBM, died. In 2003 Kevin Maney authored "The Maverick and His Machine," a biography of Watson.
(TOH, 1982, p.1956)(WSJ, 5/15/03, p.D8)
1957 Sep 19, Eight engineers, who had recently left Shockley Semiconductor, signed papers to form Fairchild Semiconductor in Santa Clara County. Jean A. Hoerni (1925-1997) was one of the "Fairchild Eight." He was credited with building the bridge from the transistor to the integrated circuit. Eugene Kleiner (d.2003), another co-founder, helped found the Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers venture capital firm in 1972. The other engineers included Julius Blank (1925-2011), Jay Last, Victor Grinich (d.2000 at 75), Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce and Sheldon Roberts. NYC bankers Arthur Rock and Bud Coyle helped the engineers start Fairchild Semiconductor.
(SFC, 11/11/00, p.A26)(SFC, 11/26/03, p.D1)(SSFC, 9/30/07, p.F1)(SFC, 9/24/11, p.C3)
1957 Ken Olson, a former MIT engineer, received $70,000 from American Research & Development (ARD) to develop Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC) in return for a 70% stake.
(WSJ, 5/21/08, p.A17)
1957 The Hewlett-Packard Corp. went public and began operating its new site at Stanford Research Park.
(SFC, 3/3/99, p.A11)
1958 Jul 24, Jack Kilby (1923-2005) of Texas Instruments came up with the idea for creating the 1st integrated circuit on a piece of silicon. By September 12 he made a working prototype.
(SFC, 10/11/00, p.A6)(SFC, 6/22/05, p.A5)(Econ, 7/25/05, p.75)
1958 An anti-trust court case forced AT&T to license its non-telephone related technology to anyone who asked.
(Econ, 6/12/04, p.38)
1958 John Tukey (d.2000 at 85), statistician, became the 1st person to define the programs on which electronic calculators ran as "software."
(SFC, 7/29/00, p.A21)
1958 John McCarthy (1927-2011), computer science pioneer, invented the List Processing Language (LISP).
(SFC, 10/29/11, p.C5)(Econ, 11/5/11, p.114)
1959 Feb 1, Texas Instruments requested a patent for the IC (Integrated Circuit).
(MC, 2/1/02)
1959 Jean Sammet (1928-2017) was one of six people who designed the Cobol computer language.
(SSFC, 6/4/17, p.C10)
1959 Robert Noyce (1927-1990) of Fairchild Semiconductor constructed an integrated circuit. Both Texas Instruments and Fairchild claimed independent discovery of the IC. Noyce went on to found Intel Corp. Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments had made a working prototype in 1958.
(WSJ, 9/22/98, p.B3)(SFC, 10/11/00, p.A6)
1959 Bank of America became the first to use computers to automate book-keeping.
(Econ., 12/19/20, p.98)
1960 IBM Pres. Thomas J. Watson committed $5 billion to develop the System/360 new computer line. It became the most profitable series of machines ever made.
(WSJ, 11/5/99, p.A1)(WSJ, 10/15/01, p.R23)
1960 The PDP-1 was the 1st mini-computer built by the Digital Computer Corp. The 1st video game, Space War! Was written for it.
(WSJ, 10/15/01, p.R23)
1960 Bob Bemer, programmer at IBM, created the software "escape sequence" that allowed computers to break from one alphabet to another. He later led efforts to establish the universal character set called ASCII, named the COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language) programming language, and helped develop the standard for the 8 bit byte.
(WSJ, 6/20/97, p.B1)
1960 Hans Freudenthal, Dutch mathematician, designed the Lincos artificial language. It was designed to communicate with aliens.
(Wired, 8/96, p.88)
1960 James Cooke Brown designed Loglan, an artificial language to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that language influences the thoughts of the speaker. The Lojban language later grew out of Loglan for the purpose of studying artificial intelligence. It used the same grammar but a completely different vocabulary.
(Wired, 8/96, p.88)
1960 Quotron allowed stock market quotes to be shown on a screen. Citicorp bought Quotron in 1986.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotron)(Econ., 12/19/20, p.98)
1961 Apr 25, Robert Noyce patented the integrated circuit.
(SS, 4/25/02)
1961 Dana Ulery (b.1938) became the first female engineer at the NASA Jet Propulsion laboratory in Pasadena.
(SFC, 2/18/14, p.A6)
1962 Aug, The first recorded description of the social interactions that could be enabled through networking was a series of memos written by J.C.R. Licklider of MIT discussing his "Galactic Network" concept. He envisioned a globally interconnected set of computers through which everyone could quickly access data and programs from any site. In spirit, the concept was very much like the Internet of today. Licklider was the first head of the computer research program at DARPA, 4 starting in October 1962. While at DARPA he convinced his successors at DARPA, Ivan Sutherland, Bob Taylor, and MIT researcher Lawrence G. Roberts, of the importance of this networking concept.
(SFEC, 3/16/97, Z1 p.3)(www.isoc.org/internet/history/brief.shtml#Origins)
1962 Charles Molnar (1935-1996) and Wesley A. Clark led a team that developed a machine widely considered as the first personal computer. They made the Laboratory Instrument Computer (LINC) intended for doctors and medical researchers. It was self-contained with a simple operating system. It has a small display and used magnetic tape for storing programs.
(SFC, 12/16/96, p.A24)
1962 Ross Perot founded Electronic Data Systems (EDS). The company pioneered the business of outsourced data management. In 1984 Perot sold the firm to General Motors. GM spun it off in 1996. In 2008 Hewlett-Packard acquired EDS for $13.9 billion.
(Econ, 5/17/08, p.78)
1962 Steve Russell at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology created "Spacewar!", one of the earliest video games for a digital computer.
(AFP, 10/20/06)
1962 Janet Sammet, American computer scientist, directed the development of the FORMAC programming language at IBM.
(SFC, 2/18/14, p.A6)
1964 Apr 7, IBM introduced its innovative System/360, the company's first line of compatible mainframe computers that gave customers the option of upgrading from lower-cost models to more powerful, expensive ones.
(AP, 4/7/04)
1964 May 1, The 1st BASIC program ran on a computer at Dartmouth.
(MC, 5/1/02)
1964 The Ford Research Laboratory developed the superconducting quantum interference device, an exquisitely sensitive magnetic field sensor.
(Econ, 3/11/17, TQ p.11)
1965 Feb 15, Raymond Kurzweil, a diffident but self-possessed high school student, appeared as a guest on a game show called I've Got a Secret. He was introduced by the host, Steve Allen, and then played a short musical composition on a piano that was composed by a computer that he had built. By 2011 Kurzweil believed that we're approaching a moment when computers will become intelligent, and not just intelligent but more intelligent than humans. He believed that this moment was not only inevitable but imminent. According to his calculations, the end of human civilization as we know it would take place about 2045.
(AP, 2/11/11)
1965 Apr 19, An article in Electronics magazine by Gordon Moore, later Intel Chairman, noted that chips seem to double in power every 18 months. Thus was born Moore's Law. Moore later asserted that his claim was that the number of components that can be packed on a computer chip doubles every 2 years. In 2005 Intel offered $10,000 for a pristine copy of the magazine.
(SFEC, 12/21/97, p.A2)(SFC, 10/11/00, p.A6)(SFC, 4/12/05, p.A1)(SFC, 4/18/05, p.E1)
1965 Mar, In this issue of American Scientist Henry David Block showed how easy it was to build a computer that learns using just dixie cups and cardboard. Block called his computer G-1 (G is for Golem, the robot slave of Jewish legend). He used the game of Nim to illustrate his subject.
(NOHY, 3/90, p.204)
1965 Mary Ann Wilkes, American computer programmer, became by most accounts the first person to use a home computer, a machine she built herself.
(SFC, 2/18/14, p.A6)
1966 Charles Rosen (d.2002) helped create and directed the Artificial Intelligence Center at Stanford Research Institute (SRI).
(SFC, 12/20/02, p.A33)
1966 Phil Stone (1936-2006) authored "The General Inquirer: A Computer Approach to Content Analysis." This followed a 1962 paper titled: "The general inquirer: A computer system for content analysis and retrieval based on the sentence as a unit of information."
(https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/general-inquirer)
1966 Joseph Weizenbaum of MIT published a comparatively simple program called ELIZA, named after the ingenue in George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, which performed natural language processing. It was driven by a script named DOCTOR and was capable of engaging humans in a conversation which bore a striking resemblance to one with an empathic psychologist.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Weizenbaum)
1966 Texas Instruments introduced its 1st hand-held calculator based on the integrated circuit developed by Jack Kilby in 1958.
(Econ, 7/25/05, p.75)
1966 Hewlett-Packard introduced its first computer, the HP 2116A. The 9,000 person company had sales of around $200 million.
(SFC, 3/3/99, p.A11)
1966 In South Korea the Korean Productivity Center purchased the country’s first computer.
(LSA, Spring, 2009, p.17)
1967 Jan 12, HAL, the Heuristically Programmed Algorithmic Computer, from the 1968 Arthur C. Clark and Stanley Kubrick movie/book, became operational at the HAL plant in Urbana, Illinois. The book "HAL's Legacy: 2001's Computer as Dream and Reality" was published in 1997 by MIT Press. The birthday in the movie was 1/12/92.
(SFEC, 1/12/97, p.C14)(SFC, 1/25/97, p.E1)(SFEC, 3/16/97, Par p.31)(WSJ, 10/3/97, p.A8)
1967 IBM opened a plant in Austin, Texas, to make Selectric typewriters. The plant moved on to make mainframe circuit boards, terminals and eventually personal computers.
(Econ, 9/23/06, p.74)
1967 Syukuro Manabe and Richard Wetherald of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab. in Princeton, New Jersey, performed one of the first serious computer analysis of the climate using computers. Later GCMs (global circulation models) reached wide use.
(NOHY, 3/90, p.59)
1967 Simon Sze and Dawon Kahng, researchers at Bell Labs in New Jersey, devised a new semiconductor memory device in which information could be stored and updated, and which was non-volatile. It retained its contents even after it was turned off.
(Econ, 3/11/06, Survey p.26)
1968 Jul 15, Intel was founded. Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore had left Fairchild Semiconductor to form NM Electronics in Mountain View, Ca. In 1997 Tim Jackson published "Inside Intel: Andrew Grove and the Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Chip Company." Grove joined Intel in this year and became its president in 1979. They bought the rights to the name Intel from Intelco fro $15,000.
(SFEC,10/26/97, BR p.3)(SFEC,12/21/97, p.A2)(SFC, 10/11/00, p.A6)(SFC, 7/16/03, p.B1)
1968 Jul 18, Intel incorporated. [see Jul 15]
(MC, 7/18/02)
1968 Dec 9, Doug Engelbart and researchers at Stanford Research Institute first demonstrated in SF the computer mouse along with a graphical user interface (gui), display editing, integrated text and graphics, hyper documents and 2-way video-conferencing with shared work spaces. In 2001 Thierry Bardini authored "Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing."
(SFC, 12/4/98, p.B2)(SSFC, 1/21/01, BR p.6)(SFC, 12/8/08, p.A1)
1968 Dec, The Cambridge company Bolt Beranek and Newman won a Dept. of Defense ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) contract to develop packet switches called Interface Message Processors (IMP). The project was led by Frank Heart and Robert Kahn. The first internode was to installed at the Univ. of California at Los Angeles.
(SFEC, 3/16/97, z1 p.3)(SFC,10/24/97, p.E5)
1968 Jul 15, Intel was founded. Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore had left Fairchild Semiconductor to form NM Electronics in Mountain View, Ca. In 1997 Tim Jackson published "Inside Intel: Andrew Grove and the Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Chip Company." Grove (1936-2016) joined Intel in this year as its first employee and became its president in 1979. They bought the rights to the name Intel from Intelco for $15,000.
(SFEC, 10/26/97, BR p.3)(SFEC, 12/21/97, p.A2)(SFC, 10/11/00, p.A6)(SFC, 7/16/03, p.B1)(Econ, 3/26/15, p.75)
1968 Jul 18, Intel was incorporated as N M Electronics (the letters standing for Noyce and Moore), but quickly changed its name to Intel, formed from the first syllables of the words integrated and electronics.
(http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_gx5202/is_2004/ai_n19123399)
1968 Dec 9, Doug Engelbart and researchers at Stanford Research Institute first demonstrated in SF the computer mouse along with a graphical user interface (gui), display editing, integrated text and graphics, hyper documents and 2-way video-conferencing with shared work spaces. In 2001 Thierry Bardini authored "Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing." William English (1929-2020) helped build the mouse and orchestrated its elaborate demonstration.
(SFC, 12/4/98, p.B2)(SSFC, 1/21/01, BR p.6)(SFC, 12/8/08, p.A1)(SSFC, 8/2/20, p.C10)
1968 Barbara Liskov received a doctorate from Stanford Univ. in computer science, the first such degree ever awarded to a woman in the US. In 2009 she won the $250,000 Turing computing award from the Association for Computing Machinery for her work in organizing complex programs and efforts to make software more resistant to errors and hacking.
(SFC, 3/13/09, p.C3)
1969 Sep 2, The first Internet message was a packet switch delivered to UCLA from BBN Corp. (Bolt Beranek and Newman). The 1st 2 machines of ARPANET were connected at Prof. Len Kleinrock's lab at UCLA. The US Dept. of Defense’s Advanced Research and Projects Agency (ARPANET) launched a self-healing computer network with TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol). By the early 1980’s the military component became a separate network and the true birth of today’s Internet is marked. By 2007 some university researchers with the federal government's blessing want to scrap the Internet and start over.
(http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070414/ap_on_hi_te/rebuilding_the_internet_8)(SFEC, 3/16/97, z1 p.3)(CompuServe Mag., 6/95, p.18)(SFC, 8/30/99, p.C10)(SFC, 9/3/99, p.C1)
1969 Jean Sammet (1928-2017) authored “Programming Languages: History and Fundamentals." She was one of six people who designed the Cobol computer language in 1959.
(SSFC, 6/4/17, p.C10)
1969 Frank Heart (1929-2018) oversaw the first routing computer for the Arpanet. He led a Bolt Beranek and Newman team to build the Interface Message Processor (IMP) to switch data among Arpanet computers.
(SFC, 6/27/18, p.D5)
1969 Ken Thompson (b.1943), computer scientist at Bell Labs, wrote the first version of the UNIX operating system on a PDP-7, a $72,000 closet sized DEC computer that arranged memory in 8,192 18-bit words. UNIX programming language was created by Bell labs in 1970. Dennis Ritchie (1941-2011) and others helped develop Unix. Ritchie later invented the C programming language (1969-1973. Dr. Thompson wrote C’s predecessor, known as B.
(www.bell-labs.com/history/unix/thompsonbio.html)(SFEC, 1/12/97, p.B6)(Econ, 6/12/04, p.37)(SFC, 10/14/11, p.D4)
1969 Intel's 1st product was a random access memory chip. Marcian Hoff Jr., Stanley Mazor and Federico Faggin of Intel developed the 4004 chip for a Japanese customer, Busicom, a calculator manufacturer. Intel acquired the rights to the chip for $60,000. The 3 men were later inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Akron, Ohio, in Sept. 1996. The 4004 packed 2300 transistors onto a single silicon chip.
(SJSVB, 7/8/96, p.12)(TAR, 1996, p.19)(WSJ, 9/22/98, p.B3)(SFC, 7/16/03, p.B1)
1969 Instinet was founded and later became owned by Reuters PLC. It became the biggest of the electronic trading systems for institutional traders.
(Wired, 2/98, p.96)
1969 Honeywell marketed its kitchen computer for $10,600 in a Niemann-Marcus catalog. Units were sold to universities as the Honeywell 316.
(WSJ, 10/15/01, p.R23)
1969 Manugistics was founded as a mainframe time-sharing company. In the 1980s it emerged as leader in software for managing factories and inventory.
(WSJ, 1/10/00, p.B6)
1969 Max Palevsky (d.2010 at 85) sold Scientific Data Systems, founded in 1961, to Xerox for $1 billion. He used the money to fund then-startup chip maker Intel becoming a director in the company.
(SFC, 5/8/10, p.C4)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Data_Systems)
1970 Jun 30, IBM announced the System 370 computer.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_370)
1970 Aug, The first all-computer championship was held in New York and won by CHESS 3.0 (CDC 6400), a program written by Slate, Atkin and Gorlen at Northwestern University. Six programs had entered the first Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) North American Computer Championships. The event was organized by Monty Newborn. The other programs were DALY CP, J Brit, COKO III, SCHACH, and the Marsland CP.
(http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lab/7378/comphis.htm)
1970 Oct 19, Amdahl Corp., a manufacturer of IBM mainframe compatible products, was formed at Sunnyvale, California by Dr. Gene Amdahl, a former IBM employee. In 1997 it became a wholly owned subsidiary of Fujitsu.
(www.wordiq.com/definition/Amdahl)
1970 The Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) of Xerox opened on the outskirts of Palo Alto. George Pake (1924-2004) ran the center until 1978. It was founded by Dr. Jacob Goldman.
(www.mit-forum.org.il/2000events/tenyears_eng.htm)(SFC, 10/25/00, p.D1)(SFC, 3/11/04, p.C5)
1970 Intel Corp. brought out the 1103 DRAM, the world's first commercially produced memory chip and launched the personal-computer revolution.
(SFEC,10/26/97, BR p.3)(http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa100898.htm)
1970 The first electronic editing terminals were used by newspapers.
(SFC, 1/29/00, p.E3)
1970-1980 CAT Scan (Computer Assisted Tomography) technology was developed.
(MT, 10/94, D. Swanbrow, p.9)
1970s The Dynabook was a CD-ROM based electronic book. Alan Kay suggested elements of the dynabook in his 1969 doctoral dissertation at Utah Univ.
(WSJ, 6/15/99, p.A16)(SFC, 10/25/00, p.D1)
1971 Jan, Intel Corp. created the first microprocessor. The 4004, the world's first microprocessor, is signed with the initials F.F., for Federico Faggin, its designer. The 4004 was released in 16-pin CERDIP packaging on November 15, 1971.
(www.intel4004.com/)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_4004)
1971 Nov 15, Intel first advertised its 4004 microprocessor in Electronic News. It contained 2,300 transistors, each the size of a red blood cell.
(www.intel.com/museum/archives/4004.htm)(Econ, 3/12/15, p.11)
1971 Jun, T. Vincent Learson (1912-1996) became CEO of IBM. He had helped develop the IBM System/360, one of the first commercially available business computers.
(SFC, 11/5/96, p.A22)
1971 Alan Kay led a team working on smalltalk, a pioneering object-oriented language at PARC.
(SFC, 10/25/00, p.D1)
1971 The 1st laser printer was made at Xerox PARC in Palo Alto, Ca.
(SFC, 7/26/04, p.F4)
1971 Ray Tomlinson, computer engineer, put the @ sign into the first e-mail message sent from one machine to another at BBN, a computer consulting firm, tomlinson@bbn-tenexa.
(SFC, 10/23/96, p.B1)(WSJ, 11/16/99, p.A1)
1972 Feb 1, Hewlett-Packard introduced the 1st scientific hand-held calculator, the HP-35, for $395.
(www.hp-collection.org/calculators/35a.html)(SFC, 8/31/09, p.D1)
1972 Jul, Robert Metcalf at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) combined packet switching from the Arpanet and single wire broadcasting to lay the foundations for computer networks. This system was called Ethernet and marked the first Internet message. The IEEE committee 802.3 later defined the ethernet standard.
(WSJ,11/14/94, p.R26)(SFEC, 3/28/99, Z1 p.8)(Econ, 6/12/04, p.26)
1972 Hubert L. Dreyfus (1929-2017), UC Berkeley Prof. of Philosophy, authored “What Computers Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason" (1972).
(http://tinyurl.com/l2efld9)(SFC, 5/4/17, p.D5)
1972 The term hypervisor originated in IBM's CP-370 reimplementation of CP-67 for the System/370, released this year as VM/370. The term hypervisor call referred to the paravirtualization interface, by which a "guest" operating system could access services directly from the (higher-level) control program – analogous to making a "supervisor call" to the (same level) operating system.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypervisor)
1972 Atari was founded by Nolan Bushnell, 2 years after he built the first videogame, Computer Space. He conceived Pong and it was built by Al Alcorn.
(Wired, 10/96, p.168)
1972 Vinton Cerf, hearing-impaired since birth, developed e-mail-like text messaging protocols for the Arpanet.
(SFC, 7/26/00, p.D3)
1972 Gary Starkweather at PARC completed a prototype of the 1st laser printer.
(SFC, 10/25/00, p.D1)
1972 Seymour Cray left Control Data Corp. and co-founded Cray Research Inc. There he built the Cray-1 and Cray-2 supercomputers. They were used to help the defense system create sophisticated weapons systems and the oil industry to construct geologic models for predicting mineral deposits.
(SFC, 9/24/96, p.A6)
1972 Hewlett-Packard introduced the first scientific handheld calculator, the HP-35, which made the slide-rule obsolete.
(SFC, 3/3/99, p.A11)
1972 Intel Corp. brought out the 8008 microprocessor, the first to use 8-bit addressing. it had 3,500 transistors.
(TAR, 1996, p.21)
1972 SAP, a German business software company based in Walldorf, Baden-Wurttemberg, was founded by Hasso Plattner and 4 other dissidents from IBM.
(Econ, 5/20/06, p.73)(Econ, 10/28/06, p.78)
1972-1994 A computer error miscalculated payments to 695,000 Social Security recipients to a total of $850 million in retirement benefits over this period.
(SFC, 10/4/96, p.A3)
1973 May 22, Robert Metcalf (b.1946), at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), circulated a memo about his Ethernet ideas to PARC colleagues. He later fixed this day as the birthdate of Ethernet. Metcalf had combined packet switching from the Arpanet and single wire broadcasting to lay the foundations for computer networks. Bob Metcalf described ethernet for the 1st time in a patent memo.
(Econ, 12/12/09, TQ p.23)(SFC, 10/25/00, p.A16)
1973 Nick Sheridan, a researcher at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) created the first electronic letter in history: an X, for Xerox.
(WSJ, 1/4/00, p.B1)
1973 Alto, the 1st complete computer with a graphical interphase, mouse and ethernet networking, went live at PARC.
(SFC, 10/25/00, p.D1)
1974 Ted Nelson authored his manifesto “Computer Lib / Dream Machines," in which he announced that computing should be available to all without complication or human servility being required.
(SSFC, 4/23/05, p.B4)
1974 Josef Raviv (d.1999 at 65) co-authored the paper: "Optimal Decoding of Linear Codes for Minimizing Symbol Error Rate." This was the basis for the algorithm known as backward/forward algorithm, which helped computers understand a human's natural language.
(SFC, 10/30/99, p.C2)
1974 Intel Corp. introduced the 8080 microprocessor. It became the heart of the first microcomputer, the 1975 MITS Altair.
(TAR, 1996, p.21)(WSJ, 11/16/98, p.R10)
1974 Intel's Israel Development Center opened in the northern port city of Haifa. This was the company's first design and development center outside the United States.
(AFP, 5/1/14)
1974 Motorola helped launch the smartcard market by building the first smartcard chip with Groupe Bull of France.
(FT, 3/4/98, p.21)
1974 Tandem Computers was founded.
(SFEM,11/2/97, p.15)
1974 Ronald Aurel Lesea (1940-2004), violinist and inventor, developed the 1st hand-held translator. It turned 9 foreign languages into English. His inventions also included the 1st call-forwarding device for a telephone.
(SFC, 12/6/04, p.B3)
1974 Charles Simonyi at PARC completed Bravo, the 1st WYSIWYG word processor for Alto.
(SFC, 10/25/00, p.D1)
1975 Mar 5, The Homebrew Computer Club, founded by peace activist Fred Moore, held its first meeting in Menlo Park, Ca. It was an outgrowth of the store-front based People’s Computer Co. The meeting inspired Steve Wozniak (24) to design and build the first Apple computer.
(SSFC, 4/23/05, p.B1)(Reuters, 9/27/06)
1975 Sep, Byte Magazine began publishing with the birth of the PC. It was regarded as the most technically minded of the new computer magazines. Publication was suspended in 1998.
(WSJ, 5/28/98, p.B4)(www.vintage-computer.com/byte.shtml)
1975 Fred Brooks authored "The Mythical Man Month: Essays on Software Engineering."
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month)
1975 Gary Kildall, working as a consultant to Intel, was asked to design and develop a language called PL/M for the 8080 chip. He wrote a primitive operating system for it which he called CP/M.
(http://museum.sysun.com/museum/cpmhist.html)
1975 Paul Allen and Bill Gates began working on the first computer language for personal computers. Allen became a minority owner with a 35% stake.
(WSJ, 4/4/00, p.A16)(WSJ, 1/22/04, p.A1)
1975 Kurzweil Computer Products created the Kurzweil Reading machine and the 1st multifont optical character recognition (OCR) technology.
(SFC, 7/26/00, p.D3)
1975 Dr. Henry Edward Roberts (1941-2010), American engineer and medical doctor, developed and introduced the MITS Altair 8800. His Micro Instrumentation & Telemetry Systems of Albuquerque, N.M., sold the build-it-yourself kit by mail-order. Bill Gates and Paul Allen developed the first software program for it.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Roberts_%28computers%29)(WSJ, 11/16/98, p.R10)(SFC, 4/2/10, p.C7)
1975 PARC engineers demonstrated an improved user interface using icons and the 1st use of pop-up menus.
(SFC, 10/25/00, p.D1)
1976 Apr 1, Stephen Wozniak, Ronald Wayne and Steven Jobs founded Apple Computer. They incorporated Jan 3, 1977. Wayne soon sold his share of Apple for $800 US dollars, and later accepted $1,500 to forfeit any claims against Apple. From 1976 to 1977 Jobs and Wozniak built 200 Apple-1 computers selling them for about $666 each.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Wayne)(Econ, 1/30/15, p.56)(SFC, 8/27/18, p.A4)
1976 Joseph Weizenbaum (1923-2008) wrote "Computer Power and Human Reason." He described here his program called ELIZA that demonstrated a conversation between a patient and a computer posing as a psychiatrist.
(I&I, Penzias, p.144)( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Weizenbaum)
1976 Computer Associates was founded as a maker of business programs for mainframe computers. In 2018 CA Technologies agreed to be acquired by Broadcom for nearly $19 billion.
(SFC, 7/13/18, p.C5)
1976 Jim Goodnight co-founded software-maker SAS on the campus of the Univ. of North Carolina. By 2007 the company was a leader in business intelligence software and the world’s largest privately owned software maker.
(Econ, 12/1/07, p.84)
1976 Intel Corp. began construction of a plant in Hillsboro, Oregon.
(SFC, 3/12/02, p.B10)
1976 The 6502 microprocessor by MOS Technologies was introduced and later used in the Apple II personal computer.
(TAR, 1996, p.22)
1976 Gary Kildall separated out the parts of CP/M version 1 that addressed the specific format of the diskettes, and placed them in a separate module he called the BIOS, for Basic Input/Output System. That way, the system could easily be adapted to new hardware without having to rewrite or even revise the complex heart of the software.
(http://museum.sysun.com/museum/cpmhist.html)
1976 The 1st CRAY-1 supercomputer was installed at Los Alamos Laboratories in New Mexico for a 6-month trial.
(www.cisl.ucar.edu/computers/gallery/cray/cray1.jsp)(WSJ, 3/2/00, p.B8)
1977 Jan 3, Apple Computers incorporated under Steven Jobs and Steve Wozniak. In March Apple produced the Apple II, the first pre-assembled, mass-produced PC.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer)(WSJ, 1/11/99, p.R42)
1977 Apr 14, Computer enthusiasts gathered for the 1st West Coast Computer Faire at the SF Civic Auditorium. An estimated 20-30 thousand American homes had computers.
(SFC, 4/12/02, p.G6)
1977 Apr 16, Jim Warren (1936-2021) and Bob Reiling staged the first West Coast Computer Faire. The 2-day event, where the Commodore Pet and Apple II were introduce, drew nearly 13,000 people to the San Francisco Civic Auditiorium.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Coast_Computer_Faire)(SSFC, 12/5/21, p.F1)
1977 May, Larry Ellison and Robert Miner founded Oracle Corp. in Belmont, Ca., after they persuaded the CIA to let them pick up a lapsed contract for a special database program.
(SFC, 5/20/02, p.A13)
1977 Jun 5, The first Apple II personal computers went on sale.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II)
1977 Jun 10, Apple Computer shipped its 1st Apple II.
(MC, 6/10/02)
1977 Jul 11, The CRAY 1-A was delivered to the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). This was Cray Research's first official customer, paying US$8.86 million ($7.9 million plus $1 million for the disks).
(www.cisl.ucar.edu/computers/gallery/cray/cray1.jsp)
1977 Aug 3, Radio Shack issued a press release introducing the TRS-80 computer. 25 existed and within weeks thousands were ordered.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80)
1977 CP/M version 2.2 added expanded disk formatting tables which could allow access to up to 8 (eight) megabytes per drive in up to 8 (eight) total drives. It was version 2.2 that became the megahit that dominated microcomputing almost from its outset.
(http://museum.sysun.com/museum/cpmhist.html)
1977 Microsoft was formed as a partnership.
(WSJ, 4/4/00, p.A16)
1977 John Young succeeded William Hewlett as President and became CEO in 1978.
(SFC, 3/3/99, p.A11)
1977 Innovations made on the NASDAQ stock exchange were incorporated into Canada's CATS, Computer Assisted Trading System. After Canada electronic trading moved to the Paris Bourse and other exchanges such as Brussels and Madrid.
(Hem, 8/95, p.78)
1977 The RSA standard for cryptography was introduced. RSA stands for Riverst, Shamir, and Adelman, three Israelis at MIT who played a fundamental role in developing the PKI infrastructure. They founded RSA Data Security in 1982.
(Econ, 5/25/13, p.79)(http://tinyurl.com/7mdfone)
1977 Xerox PARC in Palo Alto held a "Futures Day" and demonstrated their Alto personal computer and mouse.
(WSJ, 3/16/99, p.A24)
1977 Xerox launched its laser printer.
(WSJ, 3/16/99, p.A24)
1978 Feb 14, G. W. Boone and M.J. Cochran of Texas Instruments received a patent for their Variable Function Programmed Calculator.
(www.patents4technologies.com/Historical.htm)
1978 Feb 16, The 1st Computer Bulletin Board System was Ward & Randy's CBBS in Chicago.
(www.historyoftheinternet.com/chap3.html)
1978 Late Feb, Computers made the cover of Time.
(TMC, 1994, p.1978)
1978 Jun, Intel introduced the 8086 16-bit HMOS chip.
(SFC, 7/16/03, p.B1)
1978 The "Space Invaders" computer game became the first video game mega-hit and spurred sales of the Atari 2600.
(SFC, 7/5/97, p.E1)
1978 Micron Technology was founded in Boise, Idaho, by 4 engineers: Ward Parkinson, Joe Parkinson, Dennis Wilson and Doug Pitman. Startup funding to produce memory chips was provided by Idaho billionaire J.R. Simplot.
(www.micron.com)
1978 Microsoft annual sales topped $1 million.
(WSJ, 4/4/00, p.A16)
1978 Robert Miner of Oracle Corp. developed the world's 1st relational database program using IBM's Structured Query Language.
(SFC, 5/20/02, p.A13)
1979 May 8, Radio Shack released TRSDOS 2.3.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-DOS)
1979 Sep 24, CompuServe began operation as the 1st computer information service.
(www.businesshistorybooks.com/Computers.htm)
1979 Nov, The first annual COMDEX trade show opened in Las Vegas at the MGM Grand. It was a trade show for business related computer hardware and software. The acronym used to stand for Computer Dealer Expo, but since 1984, the D has stood for Distribution.
(Hem, Nov.'95, p.138)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COMDEX)
1979 Gwen Bell founded the Computer Museum in Boston. It originally used space in Marlborough, Mass., and moved to Boston in 1982 when it became a public, nonprofit educational foundation.
(SFC, 10/18/96, C9)
1979 Jim Ellis (d.2001 at 45) and Tom Truscott, Duke graduate students, linked computers to share information and created the Usenet electronic bulletin board.
(SFC, 6/29/01, p.D5)
1979 Steve Jobs and team of Apple staff visited PARC. They incorporated many of the ideas they saw into their Lisa and Macintosh computers.
(SFC, 10/25/00, p.D1)
1979 Robert Metcalf of Xerox Corp. started 3Com Corp. The company specialized in connecting computers using the Ethernet system, which he helped develop. The early Ethernet adapters sold for $5000. In 1994 they sold for $100.
(WSJ,11/14/94, p.R26)
1979 Samuel Maslak founded Acuson Corp. The company was based on the use of ultrasound, which shoots sound waves into the body, and then converts the echoes to visible images.
(WSJ, 5/13/96, p.B-3)
1979 Sue Rugge established Information on Demand in Berkeley, a pioneering full service information company. It was later acquired by Robert Maxwell and managed through Pergamon Press. She later authored "The Information Broker's Handbook."
(SFC, 6/16/99, p.B4)
1979 Carol Shaw became the first female video game designer with the release of her Atari game, 3D Tic-Tac-Toe.
(SFC, 2/18/14, p.A6)
1979 IBM Corp. adopted the Intel 8088 microprocessor for its new personal computer (PC), which launched in 1981. DOS, Lotus 1-2-3, and other new software were based on the 8088.
(TAR, 1996, p.25)
1979 The Motorola 68000 microprocessor made its debut. It was chosen to be used in the Macintosh Computer, which introduced the first graphical user interface.
(TAR, 1996, p.26)
1979 Seagate Corp., a manufacturer of disk drives, was founded by Alan Shugart and Finis Conner. Shugart was credited with leading an IBM team that invented the floppy disk.
(SFC, 11/15/99, p.A6)
1979 Teradata, a software company, was founded to develop and sell relational database management system with the same name.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teradata)
1979 Roy Trubshow and Richard Bartle, Univ. of Essex students, created the 1st text-only MUD (Multi-User Dungeon).
(NW, 11/25/02, p.48)
1979 VisiCalc (for "visible calculator") became the first spreadsheet computer program for personal computers. It was originally released for Apple II by VisiCorp.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisiCalc)
1980 Apr, Commodore president Jack Tramiel ordered the development of a computer that could sell for under $300 US. What had been an oversupply of parts became the VIC-20.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_VIC-20)
1980 May 22, The computer game Pac-Man was first released in Japan. Pac-Man, with its characters: Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde, epitomized the arcade games of the 1980s.
(SFC, 7/5/97, p.E1)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pac-Man)
1980 Jun 25, The Associated Press chose 11 major newspapers to launch a cooperative experiment to deliver news electronically to computer-equipped homes.
(SFC, 6/24/05, p.F2)
1980 Jul, Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products completed version 0.10 of QDOS.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Paterson)
1980 Oct 9, 1st consumer use of home banking by computer at Knoxville, Ten.
(MC, 10/9/01)
1980 Oct, Hambrecht & Quist took public Apple and Genentech Corp.
(SFC, 6/22/96, p.D1)
1980 Dec 1, IBM delivered its 1st prototype PC to Microsoft. IBM selected Microsoft to create MS-DOS, the operating system for its first PC. Steve Ballmer arrived from Proctor & Gamble as an assistant to Gates. Paul Allen bought the QDOS operating system (Quick and Dirty Operating System) from a rival company for $50,000. It was renamed MS-DOS and licensed to IBM. The IBM 5150 PC standardized the marketplace.
(WSJ, 4/4/00, p.A16)(SFEC, 4/16/00, p.B1)
1980 Dec 11, Massachusetts Sec. of State Michael Connolly banned the sale of Apple Computer stock arguing that the $22 price per share was too high.
(SFC, 12/9/05, p.F6)
1980 Dec 12, US copyright law was amended to include computer programs.
(MC, 12/12/01)
1980 Dec 12, Hambrecht & Quist took Apple Corp. public with 4.6 million shares at $22 per share, which closed at $29 per share.
(www.macworld.com/2006/03/features/30timeline/index.php)(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
1980 Dec, Microsoft bought a QDOS license. The "Microsoft Disk Operating System" or MS-DOS was based on QDOS, the "Quick and Dirty Operating System" written by Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products, for their prototype Intel 8086 based computer. QDOS was based on Gary Kildall's CP/M. Paterson had bought a CP/M manual and used it as the basis to write his operating system in six weeks. QDOS was different enough from CP/M to be considered legal. Microsoft bought the rights to QDOS for $50,000, keeping the IBM deal a secret from Seattle Computer Products.
(WSJ, 4/4/00, p.A16)(WSJ, 1/22/04, p.A1)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QDOS)
1980 Hewlett-Packard introduced its first personal computer, the HP-85. Company sales topped $3 billion and employees numbered 57,000.
(SFC, 3/3/99, p.A11)
1980 IBM went to Digital Research to license the ubiquitous CP/M for the new IBM-PC, but failed to reach an agreement with Gary Kildall. IBM soon struck a deal with Microsoft.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QDOS#Reasons_for_QDOS)
1980 The Ctrl-Alt-Delete reboot command was created by David Bradley, an IBM engineer.
(SFC, 9/7/01, p.B3)
1980 Informix was founded by Roger Sippl. It was taken over by Phil White in 1989. The company suffered accounting fraud and illegal insider trading charges in 1997 following problems with a new multimedia database product.
(SFC, 11/16/99, p.A5)
1980 Iomega, was founded. It designed and manufactured computer memory storage devices. The company became public in 1983.
(WSJ, 6/17/96, p.B6)
1980 Tim Paterson wrote QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System), a 16-bit operating system for an Intel 8086-based computer kit sold by Seattle Computer Products.
(http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa033099.htm)
1980 J.R. Simplot, Idaho potato tycoon, began serving on the board of startup Micron Technology. He invested several million dollars into the company, which made memory chips.
(WSJ, 10/7/04, p.A12)(www.micron.com)
1980 United Telecommunications under Paul Henson (d. 1997 at 71) began laying the 23,000 mile, first optical fiber communications network.
(SFC, 4/16/97, p.A21)
1980 Xerox with Intel and Digital Equipment licensed Ethernet for a nominal fee. It became and remained an industry standard.
(SFC, 10/25/00, p.D1)
1980 Dr. Fujio Masuoka, a researcher at Toshiba, filed a patent for a variation on floating-gate memory. His invention was dubbed flash memory because it allowed entire sections of memory to be erased quickly.
(Econ, 3/11/06, Survey p.28)
1980s Herwart Holland-Moritz (d.2001) and other early hackers formed the Chaos Computer Club (CCC).
(SFC, 8/2/01, p.C2)
1981 Apr 24, The IBM Personal Computer was introduced. IBM had developed a personal computer with a technical specification other manufacturers could copy. The operating system was licensed from Microsoft and the microprocessor circuitry from Intel.
(HN, 4/24/98)(WSJ, 11/16/98, p.R10)(WSJ, 1/11/99, p.R42)
1981 Apr, Osborne Computer Corp., founded by Adam Osborne (1939-2003), launched the 24-pound portable Osborne 1 for $1,795.
(SFC, 3/28/03, p.A16)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Osborne)
1981 Apr, Tim Paterson, who wrote QDOS in 1980, quit Seattle Computer Products and began working at Microsoft in May. He became best known as the original author of the popular MS-DOS operating system (1981).
(http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa033099.htm)
1981 Aug 12, IBM introduced the IBM 5150, better known as the PC, along with PC-DOS version 1.0. The beige box with 16 kilobytes of memory was priced at $1,565.
(http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa033099.htm)(Econ, 7/29/06, p.57)
1981 Tracy Kidder published "The Soul of a New Machine."
(WSJ, 3/4/99, p.A12)
1981 LSI Logic of Milpitas, Ca., helped create the market for custom chips used for specific chores.
(WSJ, 9/4/02, p.B9)
1981 In San Jose, Ca., water supply wells were found to be contaminated due to leaks from Fairchild and IBM storage tanks used for toxic solvents.
(SFC, 1/30/04, p.E6)
1981 In India N.R. Narayana Murthy co-founded Infosys Technologies with 6 other software writers including S. Gopalakrishnan with some 10,000 rupees (about $1000) pooled from household money. In 1999 it became the first Indian company to list its shares in the US. Chairman Murthy retired in 2006 with Infosys employing 58,000 people. His 5.9% stake was valued at $1.2 billion.
(WSJ, 8/21/06, p.B7)(Econ, 10/7/06, Survey p.9)(SSFC, 6/29/08, p.C1)
1981 In Japan Masayoshi Son (b.1957), US educated entrepreneur, set up Softbank as a software distributor.
(Econ, 11/27/10, p.71)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masayoshi_Son)
1982 Jul, The Timex Sinclair 1000 (TS1000), the first computer produced by Timex Sinclair, a joint-venture between Timex Corporation and Sinclair Research, was launched.
(http://oldcomputers.net/ts1000.html)
1982 Aug, Commodore Business Machines (CBM) released the Commodore 64 for $595.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64)
1982 Sep, 3Com under Robert Metcalf started shipping EtherLink adaptor cards for IBM’s new personal computer.
(Econ, 12/12/09, TQ p.24)
1982 Dec 26, TIME magazine's Man of the Year was a computer.
(MC, 12/26/01)
1982 John Walker founded Autodesk. His AutoCAD computer aided design software was introduced and shipped.
(http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=3235534)
1982 John Warnock and Charles Geschke founded Adobe Corp., a software company that developed tools for desktop publishing. In 1993 Adobe introduce the Acrobat software that allowed documents to appear on computer screen exactly as you would see them on paper.
(SFC, 5/16/96, p.B1)(Econ, 4/16/05, p.58)
1982 Commodore’s VIC-20, criticized in print as being underpowered, became the first computer to sell more than 1 million units and was the best-selling computer of 1982.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_VIC-20)
1982 Compaq Computer was founded by Rod Canion, Jim Harris and Bill Murto. They designed the company's product at a local House of Pies.
(SSFC, 10/6/02, p.G1)
1982 Control Video Corp. was founded as an online video game company. It transformed to Quantum Computer Services, a private online service for Apple and IBM, and then became America Online (AOL) in 1989. In 1998 Kara Swisher wrote "aol.com: How Steve Case beat Bill Gates, Nailed the Netheads, and Made Millions in the War for the Web.
(SFEC, 8/2/98, BR p.1,8)
1982 Intel introduced the 286 microprocessor, the first to support general protection and virtual memory. It ran at speeds of 8-12 Mhz and was 6 times more powerful than the 8086. IBM used the 286 in its fledgling PC and bought a 12%, $250 million stake in Intel to keep it afloat.
(TAR, 1996, p.26)(SFC, 7/18/08, p.C1)
1982 Microsoft was a company in one building with about 100 employees.
(WSJ, 12/12/95, p.A16)
1982 Silicon Graphics was founded by Stanford engineering professor James Clark. It made sophisticated computers for modeling. Its first product, the IRIS graphics terminal ,was released in 1983. The company went public in 1986. Clark left the company in 1994 to start Netscape. In 2006 the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. In 2009 the company again filed for Bankruptcy and sold itself to Rackable systems from $25 million.
(Econ, 7/29/06, p.58)(WSJ, 4/2/09, p.B7)(WSJ, 4/2/09, p.B7)
1982 Sun Microsystems was founded by tech whiz Andreas Bechtolsheim, CEO Scott McNeally, entrepreneur Vinod Khosla, and software inventor Bill Joy. The Sun slogan was "the network is the computer." Khosla later made a fortune as a partner at the Kleiner Perkins venture capital firm.
(WSJ, 8/11/95, p.B-10)(WSJ, 3/19/97, p.B1)(Econ, 3/25/06, p.72)
1982 John Hopfield, Bell Labs physicist, reawakened scientific interest in neural networks by finding a resemblance between their neighbor-pulling-neighbor structure and the behavior of magnetized atoms in some kinds of crystals..
(I&I, Penzias, p.107)
1982 The computer game "Raiders of the Lost Arc" was designed for the Atari 2600 platform.
(SFC, 3/11/03, p.D5)
1982 The computer game "Donkey Kong" by Nintendo became a hit in America. Nintendo also introduced the overweight plumber named "Mario."
(SFC, 7/5/97, p.E1)
1982 Flight Simulator 1.0 hit the market from Microsoft. It was the first flight simulator game.
(USAT, 3/24/99, p.10E)
1982 Rich Skrenta (b.1967), a freshman in Pennsylvania, developed Elk Cloner as a practical joke. It was the 1st virus to hit computers worldwide and later became known as a "boot sector" virus. When it boots, or starts up, an infected disk places a copy of the virus in the computer's memory. Whenever someone inserts a clean disk into the machine and types the command "catalog" for a list of files, a copy gets written onto that disk as well. The newly infected disk is passed on to other people, other machines and other locations.
(AP, 9/1/07)(SFC, 9/3/07, p.C3)
1983 Jan 1, TCP/IP became the standard for Internet protocol.
(SFC, 8/30/99, p.C10)
1983 Jan 19, Apple’s Lisa computer went on sale for $1400. It was pulled from the market after 2 years.
(SFC, 8/25/11, p.A10)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lisa)
1983 Feb 18, Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, left the company but kept his stake in the business. Allen was forced to resign from Microsoft after being diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease which was successfully treated by several months of radiation therapy.
(http://tinyurl.com/62v8hh9)(Econ, 4/30/11, p.90)(www.thocp.net/biographies/allen_paul.htm)
1983 Mar 8, IBM released PC DOS version 2.0.
(http://www.e-articles.info/e/a/title/DOS-Versions/)
1983 Oct 20, IBM-PC DOS Version 2.1 was released.
(www.e-articles.info/e/a/title/DOS-Versions/)
1983 Nov 30, Radio Shack announced the Tandy Model 2000 computer (80186 chip).
(www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lakes/6757/t2kfaq.txt)
1983 Jim and Marie Petcoff founded the Computer Museum of America at La Mesa in San Diego County. It was later relocated to Coleman College.
(SFC, 8/5/97, p.A20)
1983 Betty Holberton led a committee to establish standards for COBOL, the Common Business Oriented Language for computers.
(WSJ, 11/22/96, p.A12)
1983 Compaq unveiled its 1st portable computer.
(WSJ, 1/9/02, p.B1)
1983 IBM unveiled its PCJr home computer.
(WSJ, 1/9/02, p.B1)
1983 The Windows operating system was first introduced.
(NW, 8/6/01, p.8)
1983 Richard Stallman of MIT launched the GNU Project (GNU's Not Unix) to create a free version of the UNIX operating system.
(SFEC, 8/13/00, p.D4)
1983 Optical fibers began to replace copper cables for transmitting information.
(WSJ, 8/1/97, p.A9C)
1983 John Sculley was recruited from Pepsico to reorganize Apple Computer Corp.
(I&I, Penzias, p.183)
1983 Fred Cohen, graduate student, released (in a controlled experiment) the world's first computer virus. Cohen is generally credited with having coined the term "computer virus." He later became the security guru at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, Ca.
(Wired, 8/95, p.117)(SSFC, 2/10/02, p.A4)
1983 Mitch Kapor’s Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet lured non-techies buy personal computers.
(WSJ, 1/13/06, p.P8)
1983 Paul Mochapetris, an Internet address system researcher, grouped computers into groups. "Thus .edu signified a university, .gov indicated a government agency. Corporations got .com."
(WSJ, 10/11/99, p.B1)
1984 Jan 24, Apple Computer Inc unveiled its Macintosh personal computer. It included sound-sampling technology that could play recorded sounds. The CPU had a speed of 8 MHz and 128k of RAM. It sold for $2,495.
(WSJ,11/14/94, p.R26)(WSJ, 3/4/97, p.B1)(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
1984 Apr 1, Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant launched the Well (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) in Sausalito. In La Jolla, Ca., Larry Brilliant, physician and head of Network Technologies Int'l. in Michigan, pitched the idea for a public computer conferencing system to Stewart Brand, publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog. Their meeting led to the 1985 founding of "The Well" online service that operated as a collection of conferences. It used the PicoSpan conferencing software. In 2001 Katie Hafner authored "The Well: A Story of Love, Death and Real Life in the Seminal Online Community."
(Wired, 5/97, p.100)(SSFC, 5/27/01, DB p.69)
1984 Apr 24, Apple leaders Steve Jobs. Steve Wozniak and John Scully introduced the new $1295 Apple IIc personal computer at San Francisco’s Moscone Center.
(SFC, 3/25/17, p.C1)
1984 Aug 14, IBM released PC DOS version 3.0.
(www.islandnet.com/~kpolsson/today/814.htm)
1984 Jeremy Bernstein wrote a book on Bell Labs titled: "Three Degrees Above Zero." Here he described the computerized chess program know as Belle.
(I&I, Penzias, p.151)
1984 Michael Moritz authored “The Little Kingdom: The Private Story of Apple Computer."
(SSFC, 5/22/05, p.F1)
1984 Tim Berners-Lee, a researcher at CERN, envisioned a computer system for researchers to share documents and databases. This grew to become the World Wide Web.
(WSJ, 10/1/99, p.W6)
1984 Cisco Systems was founded by Sandy Lerner and her husband Len Bosack. It was one of the first companies to connect networks of computers to other networks.
(SFC, 5/30/12, p.E1)(http://newsroom.cisco.com/overview)
1984 Doug Lenat founded Cycorp to develop the Cyc database in an effort to teach a computer common sense. In 2002 a web link was established to gather data from the public: www.cyc.com.
(SFC, 6/10/02, p.E1)
1984 Crazy Eddie Inc. went public. The retail electronics chain grew rapidly and then burned out in 1989 in a scandal of missing inventory, stolen cash and bogus merchandise bookings. In 1990 assets were frozen and founder Eddie Antar disappeared under charges of bilking investors out of $74 mil. He was nabbed in Israel in 1992 and sent to a US prison.
(WSJ, 6/13/96, p.A1,8)
1984 The Dallas Semiconductor Corp. began operations under Vin Prothro (d.2000 at 58).
(SFC, 11/18/00, p.A24)
1984 Michael Dell (19), a student at the Univ. of Texas, founded Dell Computer in Austin, Texas.
(SFEC, 3/7/99, p.B9)(SSFC, 4/13/03, p.I1)
1984 John Lasseter left his animation job at Disney to join George Lucas’ special effects computer group. The division was purchased in 1986 by Steve Jobs and became Pixar.
(SFC, 1/25/06, p.C1)
1984 Ray Ozzie left Lotus Development and founded Iris Associates, which created Lotus Notes, a collaborative software program. Iris was acquired by Lotus in 1994 and Lotus was acquired by IBM in 1995. In 2006 Bill Gates named Ozzie to succeed him as Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Ozzie)
1984 Ted Waitt started Gateway Computer at his grandmother’s Iowa farmhouse.
(SFC, 5/20/05, p.C2)
1984 Hewlett-Packard introduced the HP Laser-Jet printer. Company sales passed $6 billion and the number of workers approached 85,000. HP also introduced a printer using its ground-breaking thermal inkjet printing technology.
(SFC, 3/3/99, p.A11)(SFC, 2/22/06, p.C1)
1984 Prodigy was founded as a joint venture of CBS, IBM and Sears. CBS dropped out in 1986, two years before the first service called Trintex went online. Its name was changed to Prodigy in 1989 and went national in 1990. In 1996 it was sold for less than $200 million to its management, a private group with backing by the Mexican firm Grupo Carso.
(SFC, 5/13/96, p.A4)(WSJ, 1/22/98, p.B14)
1984 China’s Lenovo computer firm was founded by 11 engineers, including Liu Chuanzhi, with a $25,000 loan from the Chinese Academy of Sciences to help commercialize government-funded technologies. Until 2004 it was known as Legend Computer. By 2012 Lenovo’s revenues reached $15 billion.
(Econ, 8/4/12, p.61)(Econ, 1/12/12, p.55)(Econ, 6/20/15, p.60)
1984 In Russia Alexander Pajitnov, a computer programmer at the Moscow Academy of Science, invented the game "Tetris" on an old Electronica 60 computer. He gave up the rights to the game to the State for ten years. In 1985 it was introduced on the IBM and Commodore 64 and ported to handheld devices in 1989. In 1996 rights for the game reverted back to Pajitnov. He and Henk Rogers soon founded Blue Planet Software to manage the Tetris rights.
(SFC, 7/7/96, C5)(SFC, 6/3/09, p.C5)(SFC, 6/6/14, p.E3)
1985 Feb 21, The first 3-day Macworld Expo opened at Brooks Hall in San Francisco.
(SSFC, 1/30/21, p.F2)
1985 Feb, Steve Wozniak left Apple Corp. to start his own company making home video products.
(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
1985 Mar, The Well online conferencing service went live from Sausalito, Ca., with a VAX computer, 6 modems and 6 phone lines.
(WSJ, 8/5/96, p.B5)(Wired, 5/97, p.106)
1985 Sep, Steven Jobs left Apple Computer Corp. after losing control over the Macintosh division to Jean-Louis Gasee, appointed by John Sculley. Jobs went on to start NeXt.
(I&I, Penzias, p.185)(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
1985 Oct 16, Intel introduced its 32-bit 80386 microcomputer chip.
(www.islandnet.com/~kpolsson/micropro/proc1980.htm)
1985 Dec, IBM-PC DOS Version 3.2 was released.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-DOS)
1985 Autodesk went public. The IPO of 1.6 million shares was at $11.00 per share.
(http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=3235534)
1985 Raymond Portwood Jr. (d.2000 at 66) co-created the Carmen Sandiego computer game for learning academic subjects.
(SFEC, 7/30/00, p.C12)
1985 The multi-media Amiga computer was introduced. Commodore sold some 5 million before it filed for bankruptcy in 1994. A German PC maker bought the company and went bankrupt. Gateway acquired it in 1997 and sold it in 1999.
(WSJ, 1/3/00, p.A12)
1985 Ted Waitt co-founded Gateway Computer in an Iowa farmhouse.
(WSJ, 3/1/00, p.A1)
1985 IBM pulled its PCJr computer from the market.
(WSJ, 1/9/02, p.B1)
1985 Navigation Technologies (NavTech) was started by Russell Shields. It grew to become one of the premier suppliers of digital-map databases in the world.
(Wired, Dec., '95, p.96)
1985 Nintendo Co. of Japan launched its first home video game console: the Nintendo Entertainment System with “Super Mario Bros." included. In Japan it was known as the Family Computer or Famicom.
(Hem, 4/96, p.29)(Econ, 12/24/16, p.68)
1985 Parametric Technology, an industrial design software firm, was founded by Samuel Geisberg, a former mathematics professor at Leningrad State Univ.
(WSJ, 5/27/97, pB6)
1985 Steve Case founded Quantum Computer Services, the predecessor to America Online (AOL).
(WSJ, 1/11/00, p.B1)
1985 Radia Perlman, software designer and network engineer, earned the name “Mother of the Internet" for her invention of the Spanning Tree Protocol, a fundamental function to the operation of network bridges.
(SFC, 2/18/14, p.A6)
1986 Jan, The first PC virus, called Brain, was discovered in the wild. Though it achieved fame because it was the first of its type, the virus was not widespread as it could only travel by hitching a ride on floppy disks swapped between users. The first virus to hit computers running a Microsoft Corp.'s operating system (DOS) came when two brothers in Pakistan wrote a boot sector program now dubbed "Brain," purportedly to punish people who spread pirated software.
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4630910.stm)(AP, 9/1/07)
1986 Mar 13, Microsoft Corp., an 11-year-old company, went public with 2.5 million shares and rose from $21 to $28 on opening day. Its revenues for the year were $197 million and it employed 1,153 people.
(Wired, 12/98, p.196)(WSJ, 4/4/00, p.A16)
1986 Mar, Oracle Corp. sold 1 million shares in its 1st public stock offering. Sales this year reached $55.4 million.
(SFC, 5/20/02, p.A13)
1986 The US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act was created. Under the act the release of a computer virus was illegal, but the construction of such viruses was not.
(WSJ, 3/31/05, p.B1)
1986 Beny Alagem, a former Israeli tank driver, founded Packard Bell Electronics, a small computer manufacturer. He bought the old Packard Bell name and marketed his computers under the old name.
(WSJ, 3/26/96, p.A-1)
1986 Finis Connor left Seagate and founded Connor Peripherals.
(WSJ, 1/20/02, p.B4)
1986 Phillip W. Katz (d.2000 at 37) founded PKWare, a maker of compression software later known as PKZip.
(WSJ, 6/19/00, p.A1)
1986 Steve Jobs founded NeXT Inc. and purchased the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm for $10 million and started his own company called Pixar.
(SFC, 1/25/06, p.C1)(SFC, 8/25/11, p.A10)
1986 Dr. Nathan Myhrvold, founder and president of Dynamical Systems, sold his software firm to Microsoft and joined Microsoft, where he spent the next 14 years.
(Econ, 10/22/05, Survey p.9)
1986 Microsoft, and Novell Corporations went public. At its debut Microsoft was worth $519 mil. with just over $85 mil. in revenue for the prior six months.
(WSJ, 8/9/95, p.C-1)
1987 Mar 2, The Macintosh II computer was introduced. The 1st color Mac had a CPU speed of 16 MHz and sold for $3,898.
(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)(www.applematters.com/index.php/section/history/2006/03/02/)
1987 Apr 2, IBM announced the upcoming release of the PS/2 and OS/2 computers featuring the Microsoft MS OS/2 and Windows 2.0 computer operating systems.
(Wired, 12/98, p.196)(http://pages.prodigy.net/michaln/history/pr/87apr_m3592.html)
1987 Apr 17, President Reagan slapped $300 million in punitive duties on imported Japanese computers, television sets and power tools, in retaliation for Japan's alleged violation of a computer chip trade agreement.
(AP, 4/17/97)
1987 Apr, PeopleSoft Corp., a personnel-management software firm, was founded by David A. Duffield and 7 former employees of Integral Systems, which Duffield had founded in 1972. PeopleSoft went public in 1992. In 1995 it established its headquarters in Pleasanton. CEO Craig Conway was fired in 2004 and a takeover by Oracle seemed imminent.
(SFC, 11/18/99, p.A14)(SFC, 10/2/04, p.C1)
1987 Jul 30, Microsoft acquired Forethought, the developer of PowerPoint, for $14 million. Microsoft created its own version 3 years later. Robert Gaskins had engaged Dennis Austin to do the initial programming for PowerPoint 1.0 for Macs.
(Wired, 12/98, p.196)(WSJ, 6/20/07, p.B1)
1987 Sep 8, Microsoft shipped its first CD ROM application, MS Bookshelf.
(Wired, 12/98, p.196)
1987 Oct 6, Microsoft announced its first Windows application, Excel.
(Wired, 12/98, p.196)
1987 Oct, NEC contacted all its customers about a potential problem in a disk controller that occurred during multitasking. Potential consequences included loss of data.
(WSJ, 11/5/99, p.B5)
1987 M.I.T. Press published "A Few Good Men from Univac." It was a history of the computer.
(WSJ, 11/22/96, p.A12)
1987 Dr. Fujio Masuoka, a researcher at Toshiba, invented another type of flash memory that could be produced more cheaply and in denser arrays. This came to be called NAND flash.
(Econ, 3/11/06, Survey p.28)
1987 Tera Computer was founded by Jim Rottsolk and Burton Smith.
(WSJ, 3/2/00, p.B8)
1988 Mar 17, Apple filed suit against Microsoft, alleging copyright infringement in the Windows GUI.
(Wired, 12/98, p.196)
1988 Apr, Microsoft surpassed Lotus to become the number one computer software vendor.
(Wired, 12/98, p.196)
1988 Nov 2, A computer worm, named Morris, unleashed by a Cornell University graduate student began replicating, clogging thousands of computers around the country, but causing no real damage. The virus infected an estimated 6,000 university and military computers over the Internet.
(AP, 11/2/98)(SFC, 9/3/07, p.C3)
1988 Microsoft revenues rose to $590 million with 2,793 employees.
(Wired, 12/98, p.197)
1988 In Canada Claude Comair, a Lebanese-born, computer animation specialist, founded the DigiPen Institute of Technology in Vancouver. It taught students fundamentals of video game development and in 1996 moved to Seattle.
(WSJ, 10/13/98, p.A1)
1988 Linksys was founded to provide networking for homes and small offices. It was purchased by Cisco in 2003.
(WSJ, 1/21/02, p.A1)
1988 Nintendo of Japan launched its Nintendo Power magazine aimed at boys 8-15 years old. It claims a subscription based circulation of 1 million.
(Hem, 4/96, p.30)
1988 Mauritius formed a National Computer Board to spur technology.
(SFC, 10/28/02, p.E6)
1989 Mar, The first versions of HTML that launched the Web appeared. Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web.
(SFEC, 3/15/98, p.W26)(SFEC, 5/30/99, Z1 p.4)
1989 Jun 5, Microsoft created its Multimedia Division.
(Wired, 12/98, p.197)
1989 Sep 18, The NeXT computer with NeXTSTEP 1.0 software was released. The computer was priced at $6,500.
(SFC, 8/25/11, p.A10)
1989 Nov 6, Word Perfect 5.1 was released.
(www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/chronology.html)
1989 Nov 13, IBM and Microsoft expanded their partnership and agreed to develop software for MS-DOS, MS OS/2, and MS LAN.
(Wired, 12/98, p.197)
1989 Cliff Stoll authored “The Cuckoo’s Egg," an account of a computer break-in at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
(SSFC, 10/23/11, p.F1)
1989 The National Computer Security Association (NCSA) was founded.
(Wired, 10/96, p.88)
1989 Seymour Cray formed a new supercomputer company, Cray Computer Corp.
(WSJ, 3/2/00, p.B8)
1989 Creative Labs introduced the SoundBlaster sound card that became a standard in personal computers. Sim Wong Hoo was the founder of Creative Tech. He later authored "Chaotic Thoughts from the Old Millennium."
(WSJ, 3/4/97, p.B1)(WSJ, 3/6/00, p.B1)
1989 Jeff Hawkins developed software for the GridPad, the first computer was a pen-based interface.
(Econ, 3/8/08, TQ p.31)
1989 Hewlett-Packard acquired Apollo Computer and moved into the workstation market.
(SFC, 3/3/99, p.A11)
1989 Intel shipped the first 486 microprocessor, an enhanced version of the 386. It held more than 1 million transistors and included a built-in floating point unit and 8K of internal RAM.
(TAR, 1996, p.28)
1989 John McAfee, an engineer for Lockheed, posted his VirusScan software on an Internet bulletin board as freeware. He earned $5 million in the first year and founded McAfee Associates. The company merged with Network General in 1997.
(SFC, 11/13/12, p.A8)
1989 Nintendo Co. of Japan launched its Game Boy product, a portable, hand-held game system with interchangeable game packs. The game was designed by Gunpei Yokoi (d.1997 at 56).
(Hem, 4/96, p.29)(SFC, 10/11/97, p.A19)
1989 Ralph Merkle, computer scientist at Xerox PARC, evaluated intellectual processing power 3 different ways. An average of his methods indicated that the brain runs about 1 quadrillion operations per second. With computing power doubling every 18 months, he reasoned that hardware would catch up with brainpower around 2020.
(Wired, 8/96, p.204)
1989 Jack Jewell at Bell Labs figured out how to make vertical cavity surface emitting lasers practical. They were first described by Prof. Kenichi Iga at the Tokyo Institute of Tech. in the late 1970s. They became fabricated like computer chips were capable of transmitting data at 6 Gbps.
(Wired, 2/98, p.77)
1989 The Univ. of Phoenix enrolled 8 students in the world's first online campus. (http://www.uopphx.edu/online).
(LT, 9/30/96, p.76)
1989 IBM scientists used 35 xenon atoms to spell out the company name on a nickel surface. This demonstrated the possibility of the positional control of atoms and the future road of nanotechnology.
(SFC, 7/19/99, p.A8)
1989 In Israel Dov Moran founded M-Systems, the original maker of USB flash drives (1999). He sold the business to SanDisk in 2006 for $1.6 billion.
(www.twst.com/notes/articles/lzt068.html)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Systems)
1990 May 22, Microsoft released Windows 3.0.
(www.guidebookgallery.org/guis/windows/win30)
1990 Jun 3, Robert Noyce (b.1927), co-inventor of the integrated circuit, co-founder and 1st CEO of Intel Corp. (1968), died at age 62. In 2005 Leslie Berlin authored “The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley.
(www.ieee.org/organizations/history_center/legacies/noyce.html)(SSFC, 7/10/05, p.E1)
1990 Jun, The FTC launched a probe into possible collusion between Microsoft and IBM.
(Wired, 12/98, p.197)
1990 Oct, At the 13th National Computer Security Conference in Washington, DC, Dorothy Demming presented her paper "Concerning Hackers Who Break into Computers." In 1995 she published a postscript denounced the group.
(Wired, 9/96, p.221)
1990 John Hennessey, the founder of MIPS Computer Systems, authored the textbook "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach."
(SFC, 4/4/00, p.A13)
1990 The Joshi computer virus began forcing users of infected machines to type "Happy Birthday Joshi" to recapture control of their machines.
(Sp., 5/96, p.70)
1990 Lawrence G. Lawler (d.1997 at 56) was awarded the President's Award for Outstanding Service to the US. He was an FBI agent and helped create the National Crime Information Center, a computer system that linked law enforcement agencies.
(SFC, 3/26/97, p.C3)
1990 Fore Systems Inc. of Warrendale, Pa. introduced the first ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) hardware for computer networks. It allowed data to be transferred at 2.5 billion bits per second. It was already being adopted by the phone companies and cable-TV operators. It was founded by 4 teachers and researchers and went public in 1994.
(WSJ,11/14/94, p.R27)(WSJ, 5/14/97, p.A1)
1990 Microsoft revenues hit $1.183 billion with 5,635 employees.
(Wired, 12/98, p.197)
1990 Prof. David Patterson began writing about IRAM, intelligent random access memory, the possibility of including memory into the design of microprocessors. He originated the concept of RISC, reduced instruction set computing.
(WSJ, 8/28/98, p.B1)
1990 Computers used to store files for the World Wide Web were given the prefix "www."
(WSJ, 10/11/99, p.B1)
1990 A digital method for transmitting TV pictures was invented.
(WSJ, 4/10/00, p.B2)
1990 Hugh Loebner agreed with The Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies to underwrite a contest designed to implement the Turing Test. Dr. Loebner pledged a Grand Prize of $100,000 and a Gold Medal for the first computer whose responses were indistinguishable from a human's. Robert Epstein co-founded the prize with Hugh Loebner. The first competition was held in November, 1991.
(http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/loebner-prize.html)(Econ, 5/7/11, p.92)
1990 ARM Holdings PLC, a multinational semiconductor and software company, was founded. It is headquartered in Cambridge, United Kingdom. The acronym ARM, first used in 1983, originally stood for "Acorn RISC Machine." However, when the company was incorporated in 1990, the acronym was changed to stand for "Advanced RISC Machines" in the company name "Advanced RISC Machines Holdings." Then, at the time of the IPO in 1998, the company name was changed to "ARM Holdings"
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_Holdings)
c1990 Paul Mockapetris created the domain-name system of the Web.
(WSJ, 1/08/00, p.B1)
1990s In the early 1990s truckloads of foreign waste computer equipment began to be trucked in to Guiyu, China. Salvaging operations soon caused fish to disappear and the drinking water to go foul.
(SFC, 3/1/02, p.B3)
1991 Jan 9, Microsoft announced Excel 3.0
(Wired, 12/98, p.197)
1991 Feb 28, NCR Corporation acquired the Ohio-based Teradata Company specializing in data warehousing and analytic applications.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teradata)
1991 Apr 22, Intel released 486SX chip.
(MC, 4/22/02)
1991 May 13, Apple released Macintosh System 7.0.
(SS, Internet, 5/13/97)
1991 Jun 11, Microsoft released MS DOS 5.0.
(http://tinyurl.com/rkbnf)
1991 Jul 3, Former corporate enemies Apple Computer and IBM publicly joined forces in a broad pact to swap technologies and develop new machines. Plans eventually led to the PowerPC processors.
(AP, 7/3/01)(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
1991 Aug 25, Linus Torvalds (b.1969), Finnish software engineer, asked other software developers to comment on a computer operating system he had written, which became known as Linux.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds)(Econ, 8/27/16, p.46)
1991 Aug, James Gossling developed his new computer language called Oak. It was to be the progenitor of the new Java software for the Internet by Sun Microsystems.
(Wired, Dec. '95, p.238)
1991 Aug, The World Wide Web was launched by Tim Berners Lee of CERN.
(Economist, 9/1/12, TQ p.11)
1991 Gordon Bell, architect of DEC's VAX minicomputer, authored "High Tech Ventures: The Guide to Entrepreneurial Success."
(SFC, 9/10/98, p.B3)
1991 John Detwiler, brokerage executive, founded Computers for Schools in San Diego.
(SFC, 11/14/96, p.B1)
1991 Al Gore as US Senator held hearings that led to the passage of the National High-Performance Computer Technology Act. It boosted federal support of the Internet by about $1 billion a year.
(Wired, Dec. '95, p.154)
1991 The FTC began to investigate claims that Microsoft had monopolized the market for PC operating systems.
(WSJ, 4/4/00, p.A16)
1991 Cambridge Univ. scientists set up a video to monitor their coffee pot in the Trojan Room and spawned the Web cam revolution. In 2001 Spiegel Online paid $4,750 for the $70 coffee pot.
(SFC, 8/15/01, p.B3)
1991 Bruce Katz, the founder of Rockport Shoes, bought half of the Sausalito online community called the Well.
(SFC, 4/8/99, p.B1)
1991 The computer game character Sonic, the hedgehog, was introduced by Sega.
(SFC, 7/5/97, p.E1)
1991 Microsoft introduced its Windows 3.1 operating system.
(WSJ, 11/16/98, p.R10)
1991 Quantum Computer Services changed its name to America Online.
(WSJ, 1/11/00, p.B1)
1991 Digital Lightwave was founded by MIT researcher Brian Zwan. The company went public in 1997.
(WSJ, 1/10/00, p.A14)
1991 The first AI-based fraud detection was developed.
(Econ., 12/19/20, p.98)
1992 Jan 12, HAL, the Heuristically Programmed Algorithmic Computer, from the 1968 Arthur C. Clark and Stanley Kubrick movie and book, “became operational" at the HAL plant in Urbana, Illinois. [1997 article claimed 1/12/97 as birthdate] The book "HAL’s Legacy: 2001’s Computer as Dream and Reality" was published in 1997 by MIT Press. The birthday in the movie was 1/12/92.
1992 Mar 6, Personal computer users braced for a virus known as "Michelangelo," set to trigger on March 6, but only scattered cases of lost files were reported. The Michelangelo computer virus threatened computer systems around the world. It was designed to lodge itself into a corner of the system and infect any floppies put into the system, and to eventually mangle the hard drive.
(Sp., 5/96, p.68)(AP, 3/6/02)
1992 Apr 6, Microsoft released Windows 3.1.
(www.microsoft.com/presspass/legal/poole.mspx)
1992 Apr 15, Court threw out Apple's lawsuit against Microsoft.
(www.abo.fi/~adeheer/students/itlekt1e.)
1992 David Gelernter, computer professor at Yale, authored “Mirror Worlds: or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox...How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean." Today's small scale software programs are about to be joined by vast public software works that will revolutionize computing and transform society as a whole.
(Econ, 11/6/10, SR p.3)(http://tinyurl.com/26tnnfb)
1992 Neal Stephenson published "Snow Crash." It focused on new technology and depicted a virtual bar for Avatars and an all-knowing Librarian that answers all spoken questions with educated, plain-English answers.
(WSJ, 11/16/98, p.R12)
1992 Carol Bartz (48) became chairwoman of the board and CEO of Autodesk, a company that pioneered the market for computer-aided design.
(Econ, 6/3/06, p.64)(www.thetech.org/revolutionaries/bartz/)
1992 Network Solutions won a government contract to be the exclusive registrar of Internet addresses.
(WSJ, 11/5/99, p.B5)
1992 Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky launched a company to produce a hand-held computer they called the Palm, which began sales in 1996.
(WSJ, 8/8/00, p.A1)
1992 Lewis Platt was named president and CEO of Hewlett-Packard.
(SFC, 3/3/99, p.A11)
1992 America Online (AOL), a popular Internet company, went public.
(WSJ, 5/24/99, p.R8)
1992 The Moving Picture Experts Group finalized a standard for squeezing audio into relatively small computer files. It was called MPEG-1 Layer 3 and became known as MP3.
(WSJ, 6/20/00, p.B1)
1993 Jan 19, IBM announced a $4.97 billion loss for 1992, which was at that time the largest single-year corporate loss in United States history.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibm)
1993 Jan, Wired Magazine in SF published its first issue under Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalf as a bimonthly with 12 employees. The 1st issue featured a cover story on the military's use of computer war simulations and sold 100,000 copies. In 1998 the monthly magazine was sold to S.I. Newhouse's Advance Publications for $90 million. Before the end of the year it became a monthly. In 2003 Gary Wolf authored "Wired: A Romance," the story of Wired and its 1996 IPO.
(SFEC, 1/18/98, p.C1)(SFEC, 5/10/98, p.B1)(SFC, 6/7/99, p.E1)(WSJ, 7/9/03, p.D8)
1993 Feb, Apple shipped its 10 millionth Mac computer.
(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
1993 Apr, Louis Gerstner became the CEO of IBM. In 2001 Gerstner received British knighthood (K.B.E.), Knight of the British Empire.
(SFC, 9/7/01, p.B1)
1993 Mar 22, Intel introduced its Pentium processor (80586): 64 bits-60 MHz-100+ MIPS.
(www.intel.com/pressroom/kits/quickreffam.htm#pentium)
1993 Mar 22, Microsoft began shipping its Encarta encyclopedia on CD-ROM. It had licensed content from Funk & Wagnalls after being rebuffed by Britannica.
(Wired, 12/98, p.198)(WSJ, 3/18/09, p.A13)
1993 May 24, Microsoft launched Windows NT.
(Wired, 12/98, p.198)
1993 Jun, Michael Spindler replaced John Sculley as CEO of Apple Comp.
(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
1993 Aug 21, The US Justice Dept. took over the FTC investigation into the business practices of Microsoft Corp.
(WSJ, 11/8/99, p.A30)
1993 Sep 30, MS Dos 6.2 was released.
(MC, 9/30/01)
1993 Oct, John Sculley left Apple Corp. A.C. Markkula became chairman.
(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
1993 John Hennessey, the founder of MIPS Computer Systems, authored the textbook "Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware/Software Interface."
(SFC, 4/4/00, p.A13)
1993 Guillermo Gaede, an Intel engineer, used his computer to tap into plans for the Pentium & 486 chip manufacturing process and video taped the information. He sent the info his former employer Advanced Micro Devices who notified federal authorities. He claimed to have been double-crossed by the FBI and also to have passed info from AMD to Cuba, China, North Korea and Iran. He was arrested in Phoenix on Sep 23, 1995.
(SFC, 6/25/96, p.A23)
1993 The computer game "Mortal Combat" sparked a controversy in Congress over video game violence.
(SFC, 7/5/97, p.E1)
1993 The computer game "Myst" swept the US with its eerie puzzle plot.
(SFC, 7/5/97, p.E1)
1993 Mark Weiser (d.1999 at 46) performed as a drummer with the band "Severe Tire Damage." The group was made up of computer researchers and the band was the first to perform live over the Internet. Weiser was called "the father of ubiquitous computing" for spreading his belief that computer technology could be incorporated unobtrusively into all facets of everyday life.
(SFC, 5/1/99, p.A17)
1993 Microsoft Windows users topped 25 million.
(WSJ, 4/4/00, p.A16)
1993 Apple Chairman John Sculley introduced the Newton MessagePad, the first personal digital assistant. The device was terminated in 1998.
(SFC, 2/28/98, p.D1)
1993 The graphics chip company nVidea (Nvidia) was founded in Santa Clara, Ca.
(WSJ, 3/17/03, p.B1)(SFC, 12/2/06, p.C2)
1993 Arthur Hair received a patent titled "Method for Transmitting a Desired Digital Video or Audio Signal." He and Scott Sander then launched Sightsound.com to build a market for transmitting music and video over the internet.
(WSJ, 5/7/99, p.B1)
1993 Joseph Paul Jernigan, a convicted murderer, was executed in Huntsville, Texas. He donated his body to medical research and it was quick frozen, sliced, photographed and computer enhanced and used to make the 1997 CD Body Voyage.
(SFEC, 3/30/97, BR. p.9)
1994 Feb, Python, a formal language comprising a set of instructions that produce various kinds of output, was introduced. It later became the dominant financial programming language.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_(programming_language))(Econ., 12/19/20, p.98)
1994 Mar, Apple Corp. introduced the Power Macintosh. It used the PowerPC chip co-developed with IBM. It was able to run both Apple and Microsoft software.
(Hem, Mar. 95, p.89)(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
1994 Apr 4, Jim Clark and Marc Andreeson founded Mosaic Communications Corp., the predecessor of Netscape Communications.
(WSJ, 11/25/98, p.B1)
1994 Apr, Charles H. Ferguson started Vermeer Technologies. It developed Front Page, the first software program to allow people to develop a Web site without mastering a programming language. He sold the company to Microsoft after 20 months for $133 million.
(WSJ, 12/15/99, p.A20)
1994 Spring, David Filo and Jerry Yang, graduates students of Stanford Univ., started a guide to their favorite sites on the Internet: Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web." They later named the site Yahoo: "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle."
(WSJ, 3/6/00, p.B1)(SFC, 7/18/00, p.A8)
1994 Jul 11, Gary Kildall (52), pioneer software writer, died in Monterey, Ca.
(www.maxframe.com/kildallr.htm)
1994 Jul 15, Microsoft Corp. reached a settlement with the Justice Department, promising to end practices it used to corner the market for personal computer software programs. In a consent decree with the Justice Dept. Microsoft agreed to change contracts with PC makers and other software companies ending the government's antitrust investigation.
(AP, 7/15/99)(WSJ, 4/4/00, p.A16)
1994 Aug 31, In the London Intel Speed Chess Grand Prix a Pentium computer beat world chess champ Gari Kasparov.
(www.correspondencechess.com/campbell/apctcol/c9411.htm)
1994 Sep, Apple Corp. announced that it would allow other companies clone the Mac.
(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
1994 Nov 28, Mosaic changed its name to Netscape Communications.
(WSJ, 4/21/99, A1)
1994 Dec 12, IBM stopped shipments of personal computers with Intel's flawed Pentium chip, saying the processor's problems were worse than earlier believed.
(AP, 12/12/99)
1994 Dec 20, Intel announced it would replace all flawed Pentium computer chips.
(AP, 12/20/04)
1994 Dec, Power Computer of Milpitas, Ca., announced plans to build Mac clones.
(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
1994 Rob Glaser, a former Microsoft executive, founded RealNetworks.
(SFC, 10/12/05, p.C2)
1994 Richard Lipton, Princeton computer scientist, published a paper on molecular computing titled: "Speeding to Computation via Molecular Biology."
(Wired, 8/95, p.166)
1994 Marvin Minsky wrote in a Scientific American article that: "In the end we will find ways to replace every part of the body and brain and thus repair all the defects and injuries that make our lives so brief."
(Hem., 2/96, p.95)
1994 Vincent Connare designed the Comic Sans typeface while working for Microsoft, which included it in the Miscosoft Windows operating system.
(WSJ, 4/16/09, p.A10)
1994 Lou Montulli, computer programmer at Netscape, invented "cookies" to help enable purchasing products from a Web site.
(WSJ, 2/28/00, p.B1)
1994 Scientists at Carnegie Mellon Univ. created a search engine. Rights were bought by CMGI Inc., an Internet venture fund, and Lycos was formed in 1995.
(SFC, 3/29/00, p.D3)
1994 The first Internet stock trade was completed by K. Aufhauser & Co., later part of Ameritrade Holding Corp.
(WSJ, 6/2/99, p.C1)
1994 Compaq became No. 1 in PC sales.
(WSJ, 1/9/02, p.B1)
1994 Bruce Katz, the founder of Rockport Shoes, bought the 2nd half of the Sausalito online community called the Well for a reported $1 million.
(SFC, 4/8/99, p.B1)
1994 The Timex Datalink watch was introduced. It was the first watch capable of wirelessly downloading information from a computer.
(Econ., 3/28/15, p.24)
1994 The first useful quantum algorithm was discovered at Bell Labs.
(Econ., 9/26/20, p.18)
1994 Britannica posted a web site for its reference work.
(WSJ, 4/22/99, A1)
1995 Jan, Jed Katz and Phil Marcus founded Rent Net, a computerized listing of available rental units across the US. Its web address was:
http://www.rentfacts.com
(SFC, 5/12/96, p.E-6)
1995 Apr 1, Aaron, a computer-driven robot will begin painting a new 25 sq. ft canvas on a daily basis. It is designed and programmed by Harold Cohen, a San Diego computer scientist. The event is scheduled to start in Boston at 300 Congress St. and go to May 29.
(WSJ, 3/28/95, p.A-24)
1995 Apr, Progressive Networks unveiled RealAudio software to stream music bit by bit over the WWW.
(WSJ, 6/20/00, p.B1)
1995 Aug 9, Netscape Communications went public and was valued at $2.2 billion. In 1999 Jim Clark and Owen Edwards authored "Netscape Time: The Making of the Billion-Dollar Start-Up That Took on Microsoft."
(WSJ, 11/25/98, p.B1)(SFEC, 6/27/99, BR p.6)
1995 Aug 24, Microsoft Corporation began selling its highly publicized Windows 95 personal computer software. The Windows 95 operating system was priced at $89 for an upgrade.
(WSJ, 4/4/00, p.A16)(AP, 8/24/00)
1995 Sep 13, The FBI made at least a dozen arrests, capping a nationwide two-year investigation of pedophiles and pornographers using the America Online computer network.
(AP, 9/13/00)
1995 Sep 23, Guillermo Gaede, an Intel engineer, was arrested in Phoenix. He had used his computer to tap into plans for the Pentium & 486 chip manufacturing process and video taped the information in May 1993. He sent the info to his former employer Advanced Micro Devices who notified federal authorities. He claimed to have been double-crossed by the FBI and also to have passed info from AMD to Cuba, China, North Korea and Iran.
(SFC, 6/25/96, p.A23)
1995 Sep, The US government came up with a new proposal security in computer communications, dubbed by critics as Clipper II.
(Wired, 9/96, p.224)
1995 Nov 20, Salon produced its 1st online issue. Salon.com was founded in SF as an online publisher by former staffers of the SF Examiner. The company purchased the Sausalito online community Well in 1999 from Bruce Katz, the founder of Rockport Shoes. In June 1999 it became a public corporation with an IPO at $10/share.
(SFC, 4/8/99, p.B1)(SFEC, 6/27/99, p.B1)(SFC, 7/28/00, p.A19)
1995 Nov, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 3.0 and gave it away for free in a challenge to Netscape's Navigator browser.
(WSJ, 4/4/00, p.A16)
1995 Dec 7, Bill Gates announced Microsoft's Internet counterattack [on Netscape and the browser market].
(WSJ, 11/25/98, p.B1)
1995 Bill Gates, head of Microsoft Corp., authored “The Road Ahead."
(Econ, 6/28/08, p.78)
1995 David Packard authored his treatisse "The HP Way."
(SFC, 3/3/99, p.A11)
1995 The first Electronic Entertainment Expo for the computer and video game industry was held.
(SFC, 6/18/97, p.B1)
1995 The Knowledge Universe company, a conglomerate of educational companies, was founded in Menlo Park with some $750 million from investment banker Michael Milken, his brother Lowell and Larry Ellison of Oracle Corp.
(SSFC, 8/5/01, p.E1)
1995 Pierre Omidyar founded eBay as a site for auctioning items. It also helped his fiancée trade her Pez dispensers. In 2002 Adam Cohen authored "The Perfect Store," a chronicle of the rise of eBay.
(WSJ, 6/25/02, p.D9)
1995 Michael Wood of Orinda founded Leapfrog Enterprises. In 1997 it came under the wing of Knowledge Universe.
(SSFC, 8/5/01, p.E1)
1995 Cray Computer filed for Chapter 11.
(WSJ, 3/2/00, p.B8)
1995 IBM acquired Lotus and its corporate groupware for $3.5 billion.
(SFC, 11/30/98, p.E3)
1995 Intel unveiled the universal serial bus (USB) technology.
(SFC, 12/13/99, p.B3)
1995 Samsung bought AST. They sold it for a loss in 1999.
(WSJ, 12/6/04, p.B1)
1995 US Robotics bought Palm Inc.
(WSJ, 6/5/03, p.B1)
1995 The first quantum computations, using the quantum effects of physics, were done in a lab environment.
(Econ, 2/25/12, p.91)
1995 VocalTec, an Israeli company, was the first company to release commercial PC-to-PC calling software, which it called Internet Phone. However, many competitors soon followed. In 2010 VocalTec merged with YMax Corp, maker of magicJack, an Internet phone gadget.
(AP, 8/14/10)
1995-1997 In Brazil Rodrigo Baggio organized efforts to provide computer education to the children of Rio's slums. He formed the Committee for Computer Science Democratization, which had opened schools in 32 Rio slums over the last 2 years.
(SFC, 7/7/97, p.A8)
1996 Feb 2, Gil Amelio (b.1943), CEO of National Semiconductor from 27 May 1991 to 2 February 1996, took over as chairman and CEO of Apple Computer. Markkula became vice-chairman and Michael Spindler left the company. Amelio lasted until 1997 when Steve Jobs came back to the company. In 1998 Amelio published "On the Firing Line: My 500 Days at Apple," written with William L. Simon.
(WSJ, 7/2/98, p.A20)(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gil_Amelio)
1996 Feb 10, World chess champion Garry Kasparov lost the first game of a match in Philadelphia against an I-B-M computer dubbed "Deep Blue."
(AP, 2/10/01)
1996 Feb 17, World chess champion Garry Kasparov beat IBM supercomputer "Deep Blue," winning a six-game match in Philadelphia.
(AP, 2/17/98)
1996 Feb, Kevin Mitnick, 33-year-old computer wizard, was arrested in Raleigh, N.C. with the help of computer security expert Tsutomu Shimomura. Mitnick was accused of breaking into the systems of software companies and attacking the computers of Internet service providers (ISPs). In 1999 he admitted breaking in to computer systems at Sun Microsystems and Motorola where he stole software and installed programs that caused millions of dollars in damage. He was ordered to pay token restitution of $4,125 and was prohibited from any access to computers and the Internet for 3 years following his release.
(SFC, 9/28/96, p.A3)(SFC, 8/10/99, p.A3)
1996 Mar 26, David Packard, co-founder of Hewlett-Packard Co., died. In a 1988 letter to his children he declared that the David & Lucille Packard Foundation's highest priority must be to reduce world-wide population growth.
(WSJ, 3/27/96, p.A-1)(WSJ, 3/6/98, p.)
1996 Spring, Yahoo went public at $13 per share and quickly rose to $33 in its 1st day of trading.
(WSJ, 3/6/00, p.B1)
1996 Apr, The web site DJ.com launched RealAudio's technology to broadcast 24 channels of music over the web. The site was later renamed Spinner.com.
(WSJ, 6/20/00, p.B1)
1996 May 25, In the US Pastors for Peace called off a hunger strike after reaching a deal with the Treasury Dept over 395 impounded old computers that were destined for medical clinics in Cuba. The computers were given over to the General Board of Church and Society of the United Methodist Church. The board agreed not to ship the computers without a license, and that if no license could be issued to donate the computers for charitable purposes in the US.
(SFC, 5/26/96, p.A-10)
1996 May, The government released a draft proposal on computer security that was dubbed Clipper III.
(Wired, 9/96, p.226)
1996 Jun 10, Intel released its 200 Mhz Pentium chip.
(www.intel.com/pressroom/kits/quickreffam.htm)
1996 Jul 4, Hot Mail, a free internet E-mail service began.
(Maggio)
1996 Aug 13, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 3.0.
(http://docs.yahoo.com/docs/pr/release33.html)
1996 Aug 20, In Germany officials arrested 2 businessmen suspected of smuggling computer technology to Libya that could be used to make lethal nerve gas.
(WSJ, 8/20/96, p.A1)
1996 Sep 5, Computer scientists found the largest known prime number while testing a Cray T94 computer system. It has 378,632 digits and can be expressed as two to the 1,257,787th power minus 1.
(WSJ, 9/5/96, p.A6)
1996 Dec 13, Trade ministers from 28 countries meeting in Singapore endorsed a U.S.-crafted trade pact to abolish import duties on computers, software and other high-tech products.
(AP internet 12/13/97)
1996 Dec 16, Intel announced the world's fastest computer capable of 1 trillion operations per second.
(SFC, 12/17/96, p.C1)
1996 Dec, Apple Comp. hired co-founder Steve Jobs as a consultant and purchased his NeXt Software Inc. for $430 million.
(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
1996 Andy Grove, head of Intel Corp., authored "Only the Paranoid Survive."
(www.amazon.com/Only-Paranoid-Survive-Andrew-Grove/dp/0385482582)
1996 Super Mario 64 showed the capabilities of the new Nintendo 64 computer game machine.
(SFC, 7/5/97, p.E3)
1996 The $1.6 billion FLAG project (Fiber-Optic Link Around the Globe) was completed for transmission of data from Europe to the Far East. Neil Tagare pushed the project with financial assistance from Nynex.
(SFC, 3/15/99, p.B7)
1996 David Warthen founded Ask Jeeves Inc., a company devoted to scouring the Net for data based on simple questions. www.ask.com
(WSJ, 4/8/99, p.B9)
1996 NEC bought Packard Bell. It later exited the US retail PC market.
(WSJ, 12/6/04, p.B1)
1996 Toshiba Corp. invested $3 million in Lexar Media under the premise of supplying flash cards for Lexar’s high-speed controller.
(SSFC, 4/3/05, p.B3)
1997 Mar 2, Saudi Arab billionaire Prince al-Waleed bin Talal acquired 5% of Apple.
(SC, 3/2/02)
1997 Mar, Apple Corp. announced it would lay off 4,100 workers.
(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
1997 Apr 8, Microsoft Corp released Internet Explorer 4.0.
(http://tinyurl.com/dax6p)
1997 Jul, Apple released its newest Mac operating system, OS 8.
(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
1997 Aug 6, Ending years of impassioned rivalry, Apple Computer and Microsoft agreed to share technology in a deal giving Microsoft a stake in Apple's survival. Microsoft announced that it would buy $150 million in non-voting Apple stock.
(SFC, 8/7/97, p.A1)(AP, 8/6/98)
1997 Sep, IBM announced copper connections on silicon transistors instead of aluminum.
(SFC, 11/30/98, p.E3)
1997 Sep, Steve Jobs was named interim CEO of Apple Corp. Jobs dropped the term interim in 2000.
(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)(Econ, 6/9/07, p.80)
1997 Oct 20, The US government alleged that Microsoft's bundling of its browser into the operating system violates a 1995 consent decree.
(WSJ, 11/25/98, p.B1)
1997 Nov 20, It was reported that Lucent Tech.'s Bell Labs has developed a new tiny transistor that is 5 times faster and 1/4th the size of commercially available transistors.
(WSJ, 11/20/97, p.B4)
1997 Dec 11, A US federal judge ordered Microsoft not to bundle IE4 in Windows.
(MC, 12/11/01)
1997 Dec 31, Intel cut the price of Pentium II-233 MHz from $401 to $268.
(MC, 12/31/01)
1997 Dec 31, Microsoft bought the Hotmail E-mail service.
(MC, 12/31/01)
1997 Dec, Michael Robertson launched a web site called MP3.com as a repository for music in the MP3 format.
(WSJ, 6/20/00, p.B1)
1997 Scott Kurnit founded About.com, a web site for information originally known as the Mining Company.
(WSJ, 7/7/99, p.A23)
1997 Acer bought the PC unit of Texas Instruments. It later exited the US retail PC market.
(WSJ, 12/6/04, p.B1)
1997 Silicon Graphics bought Cray Research.
(WSJ, 3/2/00, p.B8)
1997 3Com bought US Robotics.
(WSJ, 6/5/03, p.B1)
1997 Seymour Cray (71) died from injuries from a car accident.
(WSJ, 3/2/00, p.B8)
1997 In Taiwan the High Tech Computer company was founded as a designer and manufacturer of products sold under other brand names. The company was later renamed HPC and created its own brand name. In 2007 it launched the HTC Touch, a touch screen device whose sales were boosted by the appearance of Apple’s first iPhone.
(Econ, 4/7/12, p.73)
1998 Jan 22, Microsoft under court pressure signed an agreement giving PC makers the freedom to install Windows 95 without an Internet Explorer icon.
(WSJ, 11/8/99, p.A30)
1998 Mar 19-25, CeBIT, the world's largest exhibition for information and communications, was held in Hanover, Germany. 600,000 visitors were expected.
(FT, 3/4/98, p.IT4)
1998 May, Federal and state regulators filed an antitrust suit against Microsoft accusing it of using illegal actions to destroy competition.
(WSJ, 4/4/00, p.A16)
1998 May, Apple Corp. introduced the iMac. The $1,300 computer housed in translucent plastic had a 233 MHz G3 processor.
(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
1998 Jun, An appeals court panel ruled in favor of Microsoft and considered Internet Explorer and Windows and integrated product.
(WSJ, 4/4/00, p.A16)
1998 Jun, Microsoft released Windows 98 with an upgrade price of $109.
(WSJ, 4/4/00, p.A16)
1998 Aug 23, Retailers began marketing computers with the new 450 MHz Intel Pentium II.
(SFC, 8/25/98, p.D3)
1998 Aug, F. Thomson Leighton and Daniel Lewin founded Akamai based on technology they had developed at MIT in 1995. Their main product, FreeFlow - a system that routed Internet traffic - began selling in April 1999. Lewin (31) was aboard AA Flight 11 on Sep 11, 2001, and died when hijackers crashed the plane into the WTC.
(WSJ, 12/8/99, p.C28)(SFC, 9/14/01, p.A29)
1998 Sep, Diamond Multimedia introduced the Rio, a Walkman-like portable player for MP3 files.
(WSJ, 6/20/00, p.B1)
1998 Oct, The US Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in an effort to protect writers and artists from piracy in the free-for-all world of Net music.
(WSJ, 6/20/00, p.B1)(SFC, 8/13/01, p.D1)
1998 Oct, The board of directors for ICANN was seated. The Clinton administration created ICANN, the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers. It had been run by Jon Postel (d.1998), director of the Computer Networks Division at Information Sciences Institute at the Univ. of Southern Calif.
(WSJ, 11/5/99, p.B5)(SFEC, 7/30/00, p.B6)
1998 Nov 13, The globe.com, founded by Tod Krizelman and Stephen Paternot, went public and leaped from $9 to $97 a share. In 2001 Paternot authored "A Very Public Offering."
(WSJ, 5/2/01, p.A17)(WSJ, 8/27/01, p.A13)
1998 Nov 21, Isao Okawa, chairman of CSK Corp., and Sega Enterprises, donated $27 million to MIT for the creation of a center for children founded on the belief that new digital technology will drive fundamental changes in education.
(SFC, 11/23/98, p.A5)
1998 Nov 23, Nintendo began distributing its video game "Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time." It was designed for the new 64-bit Nintendo player and quickly sold out.
(SFC, 11/23/98, p.E1)(WSJ, 12/3/98, p.B1)
1998 Nov 23, It was reported that American Online planned to purchase Netscape Communication for about $4 billion in stock.
(SFC, 11/23/98, p.A1)
1998 Nov, IBM unveiled a disk drive capable of holding 25 gigabytes of data.
(SFC, 11/30/98, p.E1)
1998 Dec 3, Digital MP3 file-squishing technology was reported as a threat to recording industry.
(SFC, 12/3/98, p.A1)
1998 Dec 3, In Vienna 33 nations signed the Wassenaar Arrangement limiting arms exports. The agreement included export controls on the most powerful data-scrambling technologies.
(SFC, 12/4/98, p.B2)
1998 Dec 4, The first PC for the car, made by Clarion Co., went on sale for $1,299. It use a Microsoft operating system and responded to voice commands to change radio stations and CDs, check e-mail, and use global positioning.
(SFC, 12/5/98, p.D1)
1998 Dec 7, South Carolina ended its participation in the antitrust case against Microsoft.
(SFC, 11/6/99, p.A3)
1998 Dec 18, The new electronic Rocket Book by NuvoMedia weighed 22 ounces and stored 10 books.
(WSJ, 12/18/98, p.W15)
1998 Sergey Brin, a Russian immigrant, and Larry Page of Stanford Univ. raised $1 million and launched the Google search engine in Menlo Park, Ca. By 2003 over 200 million searches were logged daily. In 2004 Google filed for IPO. Google's core search technology patent, owned by Stanford, was set to expire in 2011.
(SSFC, 11/9/03, p.I1)(WSJ, 4/30/04, p.A1)
1998 Michael Dell (33) of the Dell Computer Company recorded personal holdings of $7.22 billion.
(SFEC, 3/7/99, p.B9)
1998 Jeff Hawkins, Donna Dubinsky and Ed Colligan left Palm, a unit of 3Com, to create Handspring.
(WSJ, 6/5/03, p.B1)
1998 VMware was founded by Mendel Rosenblum with assistance by his wife Diane Greene, who later became chief executive. The company developed computer virtualization software that allowed multiple servers to be consolidated into a single machine. It accomplished this be developing a small program called a hypervisor, which controls how access to a computer’s processors and memory is shared. In 2004 it was later acquired by EMC.
(Econ, 1/19/08, p.74)(www.vmware.com/company/)(Econ, 7/5/08, p.78)
1998 A brain implant let a paralyzed stroke victim move a cursor on a computer screen to point out simple phrases. [see Apr 13, 2004]
(SFC, 4/14/04, p.C8)
1998 Cybernetics Prof. Kevin Warwick had a chip implanted into his arm for 9 days to monitor his body's electrical signals and transmit results to a computer. He followed up with a more sophisticated chip in 2000.
(SFC, 4/3/00, p.E16)
1999 Jan, Shawn Fanning (18), a computer science student at Boston's Northeastern Univ., wrote Napster, a software program to share music files over the Internet.
(SFC, 3/3/00, p.A7)
1999 Feb 22, IBM planned to unveil a new microchip that included both logic functions and memory functions.
(SFC, 2/22/99, p.B2)
1999 Feb 22, 3Com planned to unveil 2 new PalmPilot devices. The Palm V weighed in at 4 oz, and the Palm IIIx personal display assistant (PDA) was a upgrade to the Palm III with more memory and better display.
(SFC, 2/22/99, p.B3)
1999 Feb 25, The FCC ruled that connecting to the internet constitutes a long-distance call.
(WSJ, 2/26/99, p.B3)
1999 Feb 26, Intel's new Pentium III began appearing in low priced PCs.
(WSJ, 2/26/99, p.B3)
1999 Mar 18, The 3rd annual Webbies was held at the Herbst Theater under the direction of Tiffany Schlain (28).
(SFC, 3/13/99, p.A17)
1999 Mar 29, The Melissa computer virus, first reported Mar 26, was spreading and infecting E-mail in tens of thousands of computers. In Dec. David L. Smith, a New Jersey programmer, pleaded guilty to creating the virus and spreading it through a sex Web site. It was reported to have caused $80 million in damage.
(SFC, 3/29/99, p.A3)(SFC, 12/10/99, p.B1)
1999 Mar, Pokemon Blue and Pokemon Red from Nintendo of America were the top selling video games.
(USAT, 3/24/99, p.10E)
1999 Apr, The film "Pi" became the first film sold by download from Sightsound.com.
(WSJ, 5/7/99, p.B1)
1999 May 6, A US appeals court ruled that government restrictions on the export of encryption software violated free speech.
(WSJ, 5/7/99, p.A1)
1999 Jun 6, The Worm.Explore.Zip virus was first detected in Israel. The virus was disguised a an e-mail attachment and destroyed files when opened.
(SFEC, 6/13/99, p.A6)
1999 Jun 11, The FBI was seeking the creator of Worm.Explore.Zip, a file-destroying computer virus which had hit some of the nation's biggest corporations.
(AP, 6/11/00)
1999 Jun 15, The US Senate passed legislation protecting companies from lawsuits stemming from Year 2000 computer problems.
(SFC, 6/16/99, p.A1)
1999 Jun 23, House Republicans unveiled their "e-Contract," a pitch to the high-tech community that included a promise to keep the Internet free.
(SFC, 6/24/99, p.A1)
1999 Jun, Microsoft annual revenues hit $19.75 billion.
(WSJ, 4/4/00, p.A16)
1999 Jul 19, Carleton "Carly" Fiorina (44) was named the new president and CEO of Hewlett Packard Co. She was brought over from Lucent Tech. and became the 3rd woman running a Fortune 500 company. In 2003 George Anders authored "Perfect Enough," a look at HP and Fiorina's efforts. In 2003 Peter Burrows authored "Backfire," a look at Fiorina's past work.
(SFC, 7/20/99, p.A1)(WSJ, 2/7/03, p.W12)
1999 Jul, Apple corp. introduced a mobile Macintosh, the iBook. The laptop was priced at $1,599 and had a 233 MHz G3 processor.
(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
1999 Aug 18, Ramos Horta of Indonesia, 1996 Nobel Prize winner, warned the government that computer hackers would wreak electronic mayhem on the country if voting in the East Timor referendum is hampered.
(SFC, 8/18/99, p.D10)
1999 Sep 16, The White House said it would allow US firms to export computer encryption technology.
(SFC, 9/17/99, p.A1)
1999 Oct 6, SanDisk issued a press release announcing plans to jointly manufacture flash memory chips with Toshiba Corp.
(SSFC, 4/3/05, p.B3)
1999 Oct 6, Jon Lech Johansen (15) of Norway released DeCSS, a program that allows users to copy DVDs onto computer hard disks.
(WSJ, 10/13/05, p.A8)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS)
1999 Oct 25, Intel introduced its code-named Coppermine chip as the new Pentium III with speeds up to 500 megahertz. The internal circuitry was squeezed to .18 micron.
(SFC, 10/25/99, p.B1)
1999 Nov 5, US Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson ruled in a finding of fact that Microsoft Corp. is a monopoly and has wielded its power to stifle competition.
(SFC, 11/6/99, p.A1)
1999 Nov 11, The computer virus dubbed Bubbleboy was reported to spread through electronic mail without attachments.
(WSJ, 11/11/99, p.A1)
1999 Oct 21, Organizers called for a "Jam Echelon Day," an effort to overload US National Security Agency (NSA) supercomputers with e-mail containing words such as "bomb." Echelon was a worldwide surveillance network run by the NSA and partners in Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
(SFEC, 11/14/99, p.A7)
1999 Nov 29, A company called C3D planned to demonstrate discs holding 140 gigabytes of data, over 200 times the capacity of a CD-ROM.
(SFC, 11/29/99, p.C1)
1999 Nov 30, It was reported that the EU passed the Electronic Signature Directive, a law that gave legal status to digital signatures.
(WSJ, 12/1/99, p.A24B15)
1999 Dec 6, AT&T agreed in principle to give competing Internet providers access to its high-speed cable lines.
(SFC, 12/6/99, p.A3)
1999 Dec, The recording industry filed a copyright infringement suit against Napster.
(WSJ, 6/20/00, p.B1)
1999 Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, authored "Weaving the Web."
(WSJ, 10/1/99, p. W6)
1999 Po Bronson authored "The Nudist on the Late Shift: and Other True Tales of Silicon Valley."
(SFC, 7/2/99, p.C1)
1999 The book "Dealers of Lightning: Xerox Park and the Dawn of the Computer Age" by Michael Hiltzik was about the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.
(WSJ, 3/16/99, p.A24)(SFEC, 8/1/99, BR p.9)
1999 David A. Kaplan authored "The Silicon Boys," a history of the companies and characters who began Silicon Valley.
(WSJ, 7/1/99, p.A21)
1999 Michael Lewis authored "The New New Thing," a book about Silicon Valley as well as a character study of Jim Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics, Netscape and Healtheon.
(SFC, 10/27/99, p.B1)
1999 Michael S. Malone authored "Infinite Loop: How Apple, the World's Most Insanely Great Computer Company Went Insane."
(SFEC, 4/18/99, BR p.9)
1999 The book "The Visionary Position" by Fred Moody" was about the development of virtual reality in Seattle in the mid 1990s. It focused on the Human Interface Technology Laboratory (HIT) founded by Tom Furness.
(WSJ, 3/4/99, p.A12)
1999 Anthony B. and Michael C. Perkins authored "The Internet Bubble." The founding editors of Red Herring and Red Herring Online believed that Internet stocks were overvalued.
(WSJ, 11/1/99, p.A52)
1999 Gary Rivlin authored "The Plot To Get Bill Gates: An Irreverent Investigation of the World's Richest Man… and the People Who Hate Him."
(SFEC, 8/15/99, BR p.6)
1999 Jerre Stead, CEO of Ingram Micro, authored "Soaring with the Phoenix: Renewing the Vision, Reviving the Spirit and RE-Creating the Success of Your Company." Ingram was the largest distributor of computer products and services and a new CEO was sought to replace Stead later in the year.
(WSJ, 9/9/99, p.A1)
1999 William Bennett, former US education secretary under Pres. Reagan, began opening cyber charter schools.
(SSFC, 8/31/03, p.A23)
1999 CollabNet launched Subversion, a collaborative platform for programmers.
(Econ, 3/8/08, TQ p.19)
1999 IBM abandoned the retail PC business.
(WSJ, 1/9/02, p.B1)
1999 Nokia, Matsushita, Motorola and Psion PLC formed a joint venture named Symbian to devise a new operating system called Epoc to run on cellular phones. Microsoft countered with a joint venture with Ericsson of Sweden.
(WSJ, 12/9/99, p.A3)
1999 Pyra software company released Blogger for free. It allowed users to set up a Weblog, a simple personal web site program. By 2002 some 500,000 weblogs were on the Internet.
(NW, 8/26/02, p.42)
1999 Advanced RISC Machines Ltd, a British chip manufacturer, changed its name to ARM Ltd. The company was founded in 1990 as Advanced RISC Machines, ARM, a joint venture between Acorn Computers, Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.) and VLSI Technology.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_Holdings)
1999 In Russia legislation was passed that created SORM-2, a Russian acronym for the system of Operative and Investigative procedures. It required every Internet service provider to install monitoring equipment that allowed access by Russian security agencies.
(SFC, 3/11/00, p.A1)
1999 South Korea initiated OPEN (Online Procedures Enhancement for Civil Applications), an Internet-based anti-graft program.
(SFC, 11/23/01, p.D6)
2000 Jan 1, In California the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act became law. It validated all transactions formed, transmitted and recorded electronically, with certain exemptions.
(SFEC, 1/2/00, p.B1)
2000 Jan 7, Pres. Clinton announced a $91 million program to protect computer security as part of the 2001 fiscal budget.
(SFC, 1/800, p.A1)
2000 Jan 13, Bill Gates stepped down as CEO of Microsoft and handed the leadership over to Steve Ballmer.
(SFC, 1/14/00, p.A1)
2000 Jan 19, Transmeta Corp. leaders unveiled a pair of new microprocessors named Crusoe designed for hand-held Internet-access devices.
(SFC, 1/20/00, p.B2)
2000 Jan 20, It was reported that the number of Internet users in China had more than doubled over the last 6 months from 4 to 8.9 million, most of them young single men.
(SFC, 1/20/00, p.C16)
2000 Jan 24, A torrent of data to the US National Security Agency brought the system to a crashing halt that lasted 3˝ days.
(Econ, 2/27/10, p.18)(http://intellit.muskingum.edu/nsa_folder/nsa00.html)
2000 Jan 26, In China the State Bureau of Secrecy issued a 20-article circular that banned discussion of state secrets on the Internet, in e-mail, and in chat rooms or bulletin boards. Content and service providers were also required to undergo a "security certification" prior to operation.
(SFC, 1/27/00, p.A1)
2000 Feb 3, The Ford Motor Co. said it would provide new PCs and a printer with Internet access to its 300,000 employees at $5 per month over 3 years.
(SFC, 2/5/00, p.A1)
2000 Feb 4, Delta Air Lines said it would provide new PCs and Internet access to its 72,000 employees at $12 per month over 3 years.
(SFC, 2/5/00, p.A1)
2000 Feb 4, The Sims, a new game from SimCity creator Will Wright, was released to retail sales.
(SFC, 2/5/00, p.B1)
2000 Feb 7, An apparent team of computer hackers shut the Yahoo web site down with a "denial-of-service" attack that mimicked millions of phantom users.
(SFC, 2/8/00, p.A1)
2000 Feb 8, Net hackers shut down at least 4 popular Web sites including Amazon.com, eBay, CNN.com and buy.com with "denial of service attacks."
(SFC, 2/9/00, p.A1)(AP, 2/8/01)
2000 Mar 2, Gov. Angus King announced that he would like to give every 7th grader in Maine (17,000 students) a laptop computer, regardless of whether they have a computer at home.
(SFC, 3/3/00, p.A2)
2000 Mar 3, It was reported that student use of Napster software to download music files from the Internet was clogging up university networks and causing officials to block or limit access to the site.
(SFC, 3/3/00, p.A1)
2000 Mar 27, Cisco Systems passed Microsoft as the most valuable company in the world.
(SFC, 3/28/00, p.A1)
2000 Mar, Palm separated from 3Com with an IPO offering.
(WSJ, 6/5/03, p.B1)
2000 Mar, Tera Computer bought the Cray Research business from Silicon Graphics and changed its name to Cray Inc.
(WSJ, 3/2/00, p.B8)
2000 Apr 3, It was reported that 6 prestigious int'l. universities and cultural institutions planned to sell knowledge and education over the Internet via the Fathom Web site.
(SFC, 4/3/00, p.A5)
2000 Apr 3, Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson ruled that Microsoft violated the Sherman Act by tying its Internet browser to its operating system. The Nasdaq plunged 349 points while the Dow rose 300.
(SFC, 4/4/00, p.A1)
2000 Apr 5, The Netscape 6 browser was introduced.
(WSJ, 4/5/00, p.B1)
2000 Apr 14, Phillip W. Katz, founder of compression software PKWare, died at age 37 from chronic alcoholism.
(WSJ, 6/19/00, p.A1)
2000 Apr 28, The US Justice Dept. and 17 states filed to split Microsoft Corp. into 2 corporations.
(SFC, 4/29/00, p.A1)
2000 May 4, The e-mail virus "I Love You" bug hit millions of computers around the world. It was considered the most virulent, most damaging ($2.6 bil), most costly and most rapidly spread virus to date.
(SFC, 5/5/00, p.A1)(SFC, 5/6/00, p.A1)
2000 May 18, Another computer virus, described as a complex polymorph, began to spread around the world.
(SFC, 5/19/00, p.A1)
2000 May 26, The "Killer Resume" computer virus began to circulate.
(SFC, 5/27/00, p.A1)
2000 May 28, Donald W. Davies, who helped pioneer packet switching, died in London at age 75.
(WSJ, 6/1/00, p.A1)
2000 Jun 4, It was reported that IBM planned to build the "Blue Gene" computer over the next five years to model the way human proteins fold into shapes that give them unique biological properties.
(SFEC, 6/4/00, p.A12)
2000 Jun 5, Computer rebels planned to launch a data haven, an independent colony in cyberspace, based on the island of Sealand, a WW II military fortress 6 miles off the coast of England.
(SFEC, 6/4/00, p.A4)
2000 Jun 9, The FBI began discussions on the "Serbian Badman Trojan: computer virus disguised as a movie clip and embedded in some 2000 commercial and home computers.
(SFC, 6/9/00, p.A7)
2000 Jun 10, The single-elimination contest for battling robots, Battlebots San Francisco, was held at the Festival Pavilion of Fort Mason in SF.
(SFEC, 6/11/00, p.D1)
2000 Jun 16, The US Senate passed a bill to allow e-signatures for online contracts. Pres. Clinton said he would sign the bill.
(SFC, 6/17/00, p.A3)
2000 Jun 30, Pres. Clinton signed legislation for "digital signatures."
(WSJ, 7/3/00, p.A1)
2000 Jun, Handspring went public.
(WSJ, 6/5/03, p.B1)
2000 Jul 21, It was reported that computers at Los Alamos simulated a nuclear blast in 3 dimensions for the 1st time.
(WSJ, 7/21/00, p.A1)
2000 Jul 26, Napster Inc. was hit with a preliminary injunction to halt all illegal song swapping over the Internet.
(SFC, 7/27/00, p.A1)
2000 Oct 10, The Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments, co-inventor of the computer chip, Herbert Kroemer (72) of UC Santa Barbara and Zhores Alferov (70) of Russia for work in high-speed transistors and tiny lasers.
(SFC, 10/11/00, p.A1,6)
2000 Nov 20, Intel planned to introduce the Pentium 4 microprocessor with speeds of 1.4 and 1.5 GHz.
(SFC, 11/18/00, p.D1)
2000 Dec 8, Richard Clarke, top cyberspace official of the US National Security Council, warned that several nations had already created information-warfare units for disrupting computer networks.
(SFC, 12/9/00, p.A3)
2000 Luis von Ahn, computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon, together with Manuel Blum, Nicholas J. Hopper and John Langford coined the term CAPTCHA (completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart) in a joint paper. This led to the use of mangled text to verify human users of computer software over the Internet. The Recaptcha system was launched in 2007 and used words that machines could not read.
(Econ, 9/5/09, TQ p.16)
2000 Peter Wayner authored "Free For All: How Linux and the Free Software Movement Undercut the High-Tech Titans."
(WSJ, 7/26/00, p.A24)
2000 Data centers consumed .6% of the world’s electricity. By 2005 this reached 1%.
(Econ, 5/24/08, p.19)
2000 The government of Estonia decided to go paperless and conduct as much business as possible online.
(NW, 5/13/02, p.72)
2001 Jan 8, Advanced Micro Devices announced its new 850 MHz Duron chip.
(WSJ, 1/09/01, p.B7)
2001 Mar 19, Palm unveiled its m500 line but wasn't able to ship in volume until May.
(WSJ, 9/7/01, p.A1)
2001 Mar, Apple Corp. introduced the Mac OS X.
(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
2001 May 29, Intel unveiled its new 64-bit processor, the Itanium, previously known under the code name Merced. A 2nd generation of the chip, code-named McKinley, was planned for 2002. The project was a joint venture with HP.
(WSJ, 5/29/01, p.A1)(Econ, 2/28/04, p.63)
2001 May 31, Microsoft released its new Office XP for Windows software.
(SFC, 5/31/01, p.C1)
2001 May, Apple Corp. announced plans to open 25 retail stores.
(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
2001 Jun 11, It was reported that Intel researchers had developed tiny silicon transistors that would allow production of chips with 1 billion transistors by 2007.
(SFC, 6/11/01, p.D1)
2001 Jun 28, A US federal appeals court reversed the order to breakup Microsoft Corp. into two parts.
(SFC, 6/29/01, p.A1)
2001 Jul 19, The Code Red computer worm began hitting Internet-connected computers, exploiting a flaw in Microsoft software. This was among the first network worms to spread rapidly because it required only a network connection, not a human opening an attachment.
(SFC, 7/30/01, p.D1)(SFC, 9/3/07, p.C3)
2001 Jul 23, The US Pentagon shut down public access to its web sites due to a computer worm called the Code Red worm. It defaced web sites with the words "Hacked by Chinese."
(SFC, 7/24/01, p.A2)
2001 Jul 30, Intel rolled out its new Pentium III-M processor based on .13 micron chip technology.
(SFC, 7/31/01, p.E3)
2001 Aug 2, Houston launched SimHouston, a program to provide each of its 1.8 million residents with free e-mail accounts and access to word processing software.
(SFC, 8/21/01, p.C1)
2001 Aug 26, IBM computer scientists reported that they had constructed a working logic circuit within a single molecule of carbon fiber known as a carbon nanotube.
(SSFC, 8/26/01, p.A20)(SFC, 8/27/01, p.D1)
2001 Aug 27, Intel unveiled a 2-GHz Pentium 4 chip.
(SFC, 8/27/01, p.D1)
2001 Aug 27, Michael Dertouzos, MIT computer scientist, died at age 64. His books included ""The Unfinished Revolution: Human Centered Computers and What They Can Do For Us." He also helped drive the creation of the WWW Consortium to ensure uniformity on the Web.
(SFC, 8/31/01, p.A24)
2001 Aug 28, Gateway, the nation's No. 4 manufacturer of personal computers, said it was laying off 4,700 employees, 25% of its global work force, because of an increasingly bleak market.
(AP, 8/28/02)
2001 Sep 3, Hewlett-Packard announced plans to buy Compaq Computer in a $25 billion stock swap. The bid was expected to eliminate as many as 15,000 jobs.
(SFC, 9/4/01, p.A1)(SFC, 9/5/01, p.A1)
2001 Sep 6, The US Justice Dept. and 18 states dropped efforts to breakup Microsoft Corp.
(SFC, 9/7/01, p.A1)
2001 Sep 18, The new computer worm, W32.Nimda, struck the Internet.
(SFC, 9/19/01, p.D1)
2001 Sep, Larry Ellison of Oracle Corp. advocated a national ID card system and said Oracle software could be used.
(SFC, 5/20/02, p.A13)
2001 Oct 3, Apple introduced the iPod, a breakthrough MP3 music player that packs up to 1,000 CD-quality songs into an ultra-portable, 6.5 ounce design that fits in your pocket, at a cost of $399.
(www.apple.com/pr/library/2001/oct/23ipod.html)(Econ, 10/4/08, p.14)
2001 Oct 9, Pres. Bush appointed Richard Clarke as special adviser for cyberspace security.
(SFC, 10/10/01, p.A4)
2001 Oct 17, Researchers at Lucent's Bell Labs reported the development of a tiny new transistor made of a simple cluster of organic molecules.
(SFC, 10/18/01, p.D2)
2001 Oct 25, Microsoft introduced its new Windows XP operating system.
(SFC, 10/26/01, p.B1)
2001 Nov 8, Scientists from Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs issued a report on "nanotransistors," so tiny that 10 million could fit on the head of a pin.
(SFC, 11/9/01, p.A19)
2001 Nov 14, The Microsoft Xbox, a video game player, went on sale for $299.
(SFC, 11/14/01, p.D1)
2001 Nov, The US and some 2 dozen other nations signed a broad accord known as the Convention on Cybercrime developed by the Council of Europe.
(WSJ, 12/3/01, p.B1)
2001 Dec 4, The "Goner" computer worm was reported spreading worldwide disguised as a screen saver.
(SFC, 12/5/01, p.B1)
2001 Dec 8, Israeli police arrested 3 teenagers for creating and spreading the "Goner" computer worm.
(SSFC, 12/9/01, p.A18)
2001 Dec 11, US Federal agents carried out dozens of raids and seized computers in some 27 cities and 21 states suspected of pirating software over the Internet. The "Warez" network of software pirates was targeted.
(SFC, 12/12/01, p.A3)
2001 Marc Prensky authored “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants," in which he argued that students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.
(Econ, 3/6/10, TQ p.10)
2001 M. Mitchell Waldrop authored "The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal," a history of the personal computer.
(SSFC, 8/26/01, DB p.78)
2001 Citadel Securities, a high-frequency market maker, was founded by Kenneth Griffin.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citadel_LLC)(Econ., 12/19/20, p.98)
2001 Jimmy Wales (35), a retired futures and options trader, founded Wikipedia, an Internet encyclopedia.
(SFC, 12/6/05, p.A10)
2002 Jan 28, Palm Inc. introduced its $449 i705 handheld computer with wireless e-mail and message service.
(SFC, 1/28/02, p.E1)
2002 Jan, Apple Corp. introduced a line of iMacs with a swiveling flat screen on a circular base containing an 800 MHz G4 processor. It was priced at $1,799.
(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
2002 Mar 14, It was reported that scientists had developed a brain implant that allowed monkeys to control a computer cursor by thought alone.
(SFC, 3/14/02, p.A2)
2002 Mar 19, Carly Fiorina, head of Hewlett-Packard, claimed victory by a slim margin in a proxy battle to buy Compaq Computer. Some $180 million was reportedly spent in the effort to win votes.
(SFC, 3/20/02, p.A1,21)
2002 Jun, Computer hackers from around the world gathered in Odessa, Ukraine, for summit on trading tips and setting up rules for bilking targets.
(SSFC, 10/23/11, p.F2)
2002 Nov 19, The US Dept. of Energy awarded IBM a contract to develop a 100 teraflop computer (ASCI Purple), the estimated speed of the human brain. This followed the recent development of a Japanese NEC computer that was clocked at 36.5 teraflops, trillions of floating point operations a second, more than 4 times the fastest US computer. Completion was expected in 2004.
(WSJ, 11/19/02, p.B1)
2002 Lou Gerstner (60), former CEO of IBM, authored, "Who Says Elephants Can't Dance," an account of his leadership at IBM.
(SFC, 11/18/02, p.E1)
2002 David Sheff authored "China Dawn," a close-up look at the young men building Internet infrastructure in China.
(WSJ, 3/12/02, p.A24)
2002 IBM stopped making desktop computers and sold manufacturing operations to a contract manufacturer.
(WSJ, 1/8/02, p.AB1)
2003 Jan 16, Microsoft announced its 1st dividend along with a stock split.
(SFC, 1/17/03, p.A1)
2003 May, Munich, Germany, ousted Microsoft from 14,000 government computers in favor of Linux.
(Econ, 9/13/03, p.59)
2003 Jun 2, PeopleSoft announced an agreement to buy J.D. Edwards for $1.7 billion.
(SFC, 12/14/04, p.D1)
2003 Apr, Apple Corp. launched its iTunes music store to provide downloadable music for its iPod. Downloads were offered at 99 cents per track.
(Econ, 7/8/06, p.70)(Econ, 11/14/09, p.18)
2003 Jun 4, Palm Inc. said it would buy rival Handspring in a stock deal valued at $195 mil.
(SFC, 6/5/03, p.B1)(WSJ, 6/5/03, p.B1)
2003 Jun 6, Oracle issued a $5.1 billion hostile takeover bid for PeopleSoft at $16 per share.
(SFC, 12/14/04, p.D1)
2003 Jun 23, Apple Computer Inc. introduced new Macintosh computers that use its "G5" microprocessor, a design by IBM Corp. that can handle twice as much data at once as traditional PC microchips.
(Reuters, 6/23/03)
2003 Sep 12, A climate prediction experiment, expected to involve two million people around the world, was launched. The program, downloaded from (www.climateprediction.net) and ran on an ordinary desktop or laptop computer.
(Reuters, 9/11/03)
2003 Sep 23, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) introduced 64-bit computing for PC users. The 1st new chip is the AMD Athalon 64 Processor 3200+, which runs at 2 GHz.
(SFC, 9/23/03, p.B1)
2003 Oct, Apple Corp. introduced a Windows version of the Mac music jukebox software, iTunes.
(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
2003 Nov 9, Endpcnoise.com (http://www.endpcnoise.com), a Vancouver, Washington-based custom outlet, was reported to specialize in creating nearly silent PCs. These PCs can drop their noise levels to 25 or 26 decibels, while a human's lowest hearing threshold is generally considered to be about 20 decibels. A busy road is about 80 decibels and a quiet bedroom at night is about 30 decibels.
(Reuters, 11/9/03)
2003 Nov 20, Advanced Micro Devices said it would build $2.4 billion chip factory in Germany to produce microprocessors on 300-mm silicon wafers.
(SFC, 11/21/03, p.B1)
2003 Dec 18, RealNetworks filed a federal anti-trust suit against Microsoft, alleging it has tried to use it monopoly power in PC operating systems to unlawfully dominate the digital media market. A settlement was reached in 2005.
(SFC, 10/12/05, p.C2)
2003 David Kushner authored "Masters of Doom," an account of how John Carmack and John Romero created the computer games "Doom" and "Quake."
(WSJ, 5/6/03, p.D5)
2004 Feb 9, Culturecom Holdings Ltd. of Hong Kong unveiled a DVD player and word-processing device built with chips developed by Chinese computer scientist Chu Bong-foo. Chu found a way to put Asia characters in position to command binary code.
(WSJ, 2/9/04, p.A1)
2004 Mar 16, Japan's Toshiba Corp said that Guinness World Records had certified its stamp-sized hard disk drives (HDDs) as the smallest in the world. The 0.85-inch HDDs, unveiled in January, have storage capacity of up to four gigabytes and will be used in products such as cellphones and digital camcorders.
(AP, 3/16/04)
2004 Mar 24, EU regulators slapped a $613 million anti-trust fine against Microsoft.
(WSJ, 3/23/04, p.A3)(SFC, 3/25/04, p.C1)
2004 Apr 2, Sun Microsystems announced that Microsoft would pay it nearly $2 billion to settle a legal dispute. Sun also announced layoffs of 3,300 and a business partnership with Microsoft.
(SFC, 4/3/04, p.A1)
2004 Apr 3, Techies organized a flash mob to create a supercomputer at UCSF's Koret Gym. 669 computers were hooked together, but the fastest speed, 180 gigaflops, was achieved with just 256. The world's fastest computer was Japan's $400 million Earth Simulator running at 35 teraflops, or 35,000 gigaflops.
(SSFC, 4/4/04, p.B1)
2004 Apr 12. Microsoft reported that it agreed to pay $440 million to settle a broad patent suit with InterTrust. It covered the protection of digital content against unauthorized copying.
(WSJ, 4/12/04, p.A3)
2004 Apr 13, The FDA approved a clinical trial by Cyberkinetics on implants in humans for a brain-computer interface.
(SFC, 4/14/04, p.C8)
2004 Jun 22, Microsoft received patent #6,754,472 for “a method and apparatus for transmitting power and data using the human body."
(Econ, 7/3/04, p.66)
2004 Sep 28, IBM Corp. claimed unofficial bragging rights as owner of the world's fastest supercomputer. IBM said its still-unfinished BlueGene/L System, named for its ability to model the folding of human proteins, can sustain speeds of 360 teraflops. A teraflop is 1 trillion calculations per second. BlueGene/L reached full capacity in 2005
(AP, 9/29/04)(SFC, 9/29/04, p.C1)(SFC, 8/29/05, p.E1)
2004 Oct 14, Google Inc. introduced a program that quickly scours hard drives for documents, e-mails, instant messages and past Web searches.
(AP, 10/14/04)
2004 Dec 7, IBM and China’s Lenovo Group planned a joint PC venture. Lenovo was expected to pay some $2 billion for a majority share of IBM’s PC business. Lenovo announced a $1.75 billion cash and stock deal to acquire a majority interest in IBM’s PC business.
(WSJ, 12/7/04, p.A3)(SFC, 12/8/04, p.A1)
2004 Dec 13, Google announced plans to digitally scan the book collections of 5 major libraries, including the Univ. Michigan, Stanford, Harvard, NY Public Library and Oxford, which agreed to books published before 1900.
(SFC, 12/14/04, p.A1)
2004 Dec 13, Oracle Corp. raised its takeover bid for bitter rival PeopleSoft Inc. by 10 percent and sealed a $10.3 billion deal that will create the world's second largest maker of business applications software.
(AP, 12/13/04)(SFC, 12/14/04, p.A1)
2004 Dec 16, Symantec agreed to acquire Veritas Software.
(SFC, 12/17/04, p.D1)
2004 A system named Red Storm was scheduled for completion using AMD chips in a $90 million Cray supercomputer for Sandia National Labs.
(SFC, 10/22/02, p.D1)
2004 Mark Shuttleworth of South Africa began funding the Ubuntu project, which made a user-friendly version of Linux, an open source operating system.
(Econ, 6/9/07, TQ p.33)
2005 Jan 1, A new California law took effect levying a surcharge on computer sales to defray recycling costs.
(Econ, 1/29/05, p.60)
2005 Jan 11, LeapFrog Enterprises displayed a $99 digital pen that talks, corrects spelling and answers math problems. Sales were to begin in the Fall.
(WSJ, 1/12/05, p.B1)
2005 Feb 1, HP researchers introduced groundbreaking nanotechnology that could replace traditional transistors on computer chips.
(SFC, 2/1/05, p.A1)
2005 Feb 1, Sun Microsystems began selling information technology on a pay-per-use basis offering customers access to computing power for $1 per hour.
(SFC, 2/1/05, p.A1)
2005 Feb 7, IBM, Toshiba and Sony disclosed the architectural design of a new, jointly developed, multi-core processor called the Cell.
(Econ, 2/12/05, p.77)(www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS2972427392.html)
2005 Feb 14, The annual RSA Conference opened in SF. RSA stands for Riverst, Shamir, and Adelman -- three Israelis who played a fundamental role in developing the PKI infrastructure. The RSA show remains a fundamental gathering for the cryptographic community.
(IHub, 2/14/05)
2005 Feb 17, ChoicePoint Inc., a national provider of identification and credential verification services, said it will send an additional 110,000 statements to people informing them of possible identity theft after a group of well-organized criminals was able to obtain personal information on almost 140,000 consumers through the company. In 2006 ChoicePoint agreed to pay $15 million to settle FTC charges that consumer privacy rights were violated in the DB theft.
(http://money.cnn.com/2005/02/17/technology/personaltech/choicepoint/)(SFC, 1/27/06, p.D3)
2005 Feb 26, Jef Raskin (61), computer pioneer, died in Pacifica, Ca. he led the shift to a graphical interface with Apple’s Macintosh.
(WSJ, 3/1/05, p.A1)
2005 Mar 9, Information broker LexisNexis reported that thieves hacked into records and stole personal data on some 310,000 US individuals.
(SFC, 4/13/05, p.A4)
2005 Mar 24, A California jury ordered Toshiba Corp. to pay an additional $84 million in punitive damages to Lexar Media, Inc. one day after a 381 million award for breach of fiduciary duty. The total damages of $465 million was the largest IP verdict in California history.
(SSFC, 4/3/05, p.B1)
2005 Apr 29, Apple began selling the Tiger operating system, OS X version 10.4, for the Mac computer.
(SFC, 4/30/05, p.C1)
2005 May 31, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) introduced its 1st PC microprocessors with a dual-core chip design, the Athlon 64 X2.
(SFC, 5/31/05, p.C4)
2005 Jun 8, Seagate introduced a disk drive for notebook computers that stores 160 gigabytes of data. It used new technology called perpendicular recording.
(WSJ, 6/9/05, p.B7)
2005 Jun 6, IBM and Ecole Polytechnique of Lausanne, Switz., announced a partnership to begin building a computer model of the human brain.
(Econ, 6/11/05, p.75)
2005 Jun 11, It was reported that the latest flash drives can store 4 gigabytes of data.
(Econ, 6/11/05, TQ p.13)
2005 Jun 22, The IBM BlueGene/L System at Lawrence Livermore National Lab., a computer with 62,000 microprocessors, was crowned king among supercomputers at a conference in Germany.
(SFC, 6/22/05, p.C1)
2005 Jul 19, Computer and printer maker Hewlett-Packard Co. said it will cut 14,500 jobs and overhaul its retirement program in a restructuring plan designed to save $1.9 billion annually.
(AP, 7/19/05)
2005 Aug 29, A Connecticut man known on the Internet as "illwill" pleaded guilty in Manhattan federal court to charges relating to the theft of the source code to Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating software, considered among the company's crown jewels. William Genovese, Jr. (28) admitted selling the source code for Windows 2000 and Windows NT 4.0. On January 27, 2006, he was sentenced to 2 years in jail.
(AP, 8/29/05)(www.usdoj.gov/criminal/cybercrime/genovesePlea.htm)
2005 Sep 7, Apple Computer Inc. Chief Executive Steve Jobs introduced a long-anticipated music-playing cell phone and surprised the faithful with a new pencil-thin iPod.
(AP, 9/8/05)
2005 Nov 22, Microsoft released its Xbox 360 videogame console.
(WSJ, 11/22/05, p.A1)
2005 George Gilder authored “The Silicon Eye: How a Silicon Valley Company Aims to Make All Current Computers, Cameras, and Cell Phones Obsolete." It was a history of the Foveon imaging chip, which began development under Carver mead and his associates in the 1980s with neural networks.
(WSJ, 5/3/05, p.D8)
2005 Jeffrey S. Young authored “iCon - Steve Jobs: The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business."
(SSFC, 5/22/05, p.F1)
2005 Intel planned to complete a new $375 million chipset assembly plant in Chengdu, China.
(SFC, 5/31/05, p.C1)
2005 Microsoft released MSN Search, powered by its own internally developed search engine. MSN had previously relied on Yahoo for its search function.
(SFC, 2/2/08, p.C1)
2005 Microsoft acquired Groove Networks along with its creator Ray Ozzie.
(Econ, 6/28/08, p.78)
2006 Mar 9, Microsoft Corp. took the wraps off its mysterious Project Origami, unveiling a computer that's about the size of a large paperback book but runs a full version of the Windows XP operating system.
(AP, 3/9/06)
2006 Apr 5, Apple Corp. introduced free software to allow users of its latest Mac models to run MS Windows.
(Reuters, 4/5/06)(WSJ, 4/6/06, p.B1)
2006 Jun 15, Bill Gates (50) announced that he would hand over his role as chief architect of Microsoft to Ray Ozzie (50).
(Econ, 6/24/06, p.75)
2006 Jun 29, The US government announced it had recovered a stolen laptop computer and hard drive with sensitive data on up to 26.5 million veterans and military personnel.
(AP, 6/29/07)
2006 Jul 27, Intel introduced a new line of microprocessors called Core 2 Duos. New features included higher performance and lower power consumption.
(SFC, 7/28/06, p.D1)
2006 Jul 27, Sharman Networks Ltd., the company behind Kazaa file-sharing software, said it will redesign its software and pay over $115 million in penalties to leading music and movie companies.
(SFC, 7/28/06, p.D3)
2006 Aug 25, A team led by Andy Jassy made available a beta version of “Elastic Compute Cloud" (EC2), the central offering of Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud-computing arm of Amazon.
(Econ, 8/27/16, p.46)(Econ, 8/27/16, p.46)
2006 Nov 14, Intel launched its first computer chips with four processing cores.
(www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2058457,00.asp)
2006 Nov 30, Microsoft Corp. released Windows Vista for businesses. This was the 1st major upgrade to its operating system in 5 years. Release for retail customers was set for Jan 30.
(SFC, 12/1/06, p.D1)
2006 Dec 11, Scientists from IBM, Macronix and Qimonda said they developed a material that made "phase-change" memory 500 to 1,000 times faster than the commonly-used "flash" memory, while using half as much power.
(AFP, 12/11/06)
2006 Dec 12, Online political groups, the Campaign to Defend the Constitution and the Christian Alliance for Progress, demanded that Wal-Mart dump Left Behind: Eternal Forces, a new computer game in which players must either kill or convert non-Christians.
(SFC, 12/12/06, p.A1)
2006 Dec 12, Alan Shugart, disk drive pioneer, died in Monterey, Ca. Shugart led a team of IBM engineers in 1969 that developed the floppy disk and went on to found Shugart Associates. In 1979 he co-founded Seagate Technology.
(SFC, 12/14/06, p.B5)
2006 Adam Greenfield authored “Everywhere: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing."
(Econ, 4/28/07, SR p.18)
2006 Frances E. Allen (b.1932), pioneer in the field of optimizing compilers, became the first woman to earn the Turing Award, regarded as the Nobel Prize of computing.
(SFC, 2/18/14, p.A6)
2007 Jan 5, Hitachi announced the 1st 1-terrabyte hard drive, eclipsing Seagate’s 750 gigabyte drives.
(SFC, 1/5/07, p.C1)
2007 Jan 9, Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone at the annual Macworld Expo in SF. The 4GB version would be sold for $499. Apple dropped the word “Computer" from its name.
(SFC, 1/10/07, p.C1)(WSJ, 1/11/07, p.C1)
2007 Jan 22, Intel and Sun Microsystems announced a major partnership under which Sun would begin selling business computers running on Intel’s Xeon microprocessors, while Intel will endorse and support sun’s Solaris operating system.
(SFC, 1/23/07, p.D3)
2007 Jan 26, Intel said it will begin using a new material on its next generation of chips making them more energy efficient. IBM also announced changes in its chip-making processes.
(SFC, 1/27/07, p.A1)
2007 Jan 30, The Windows Vista computer operating system from Microsoft went on sale in the consumer retail market.
(SFC, 1/30/07, p.C1)
2007 Feb 11, Intel introduced a new super-processor at the opening of an int’l conference of chip scientists. The processor would be able to perform over 1 trillion mathematical calculations per second (teraflop), but commercial use would not be available for 5 years.
(SFC, 2/12/07, p.A9)
2007 Feb 13, In Canada D-Wave Systems, based in Burnaby near Vancouver, announced the existence of the world’s first practical quantum computer.
(Econ, 2/17/07, p.81)
2007 Mar 17, John Backus (b.1924), programmer, died in Oregon. His development of the Fortran programming language in the 1950s changed how people interacted with computers and paved the way for modern software. Fortran, short for Formula Translation, reduced the number of programming statements necessary to operate a machine by a factor of 20. The Association for Computing Machinery gave Backus its 1977 Turing Award, one of the industry's highest accolades. Backus also won a National Medal of Science in 1975 and got the 1993 Charles Stark Draper Prize, the top honor from the National Academy of Engineering.
(AP, 3/20/07)
2007 Mar 26, Intel Corp. announced it will build a $2.5 billion chip factory in China, giving the US company a bigger presence in the booming Chinese market and boosting Beijing's efforts to attract high-tech investment. Intel also unveiled a prototype chip that uses optical connections to increase speed. Products using the technology were expected to appear within 3 years.
(AP, 3/26/07)(WSJ, 3/26/07, p.B6)
2007 Apr 4, Apple updated its desktop Mac Pro computers adding two new 3.0GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors, bringing 8-core processing to the Mac. The new machines can run the 3.0GHz Intel Xeon processors and are available as build to order options.
(www.macworld.com/news/2007/04/04/eightcore/index.php)
2007 May 30, Microsoft introduced a computer designed like a table with a touch-screen called Surface. It was aimed for use in hotels and casinos.
(WSJ, 5/30/07, p.B1)
2007 Aug 3, Lenovo Group Ltd. said it will sell a basic personal computer aimed at China's vast but poor rural market and priced as low as $199.
(AP, 8/3/07)
2007 Aug 27, In South Africa Hewlett-Packard became the first multinational to be exempted from selling 30 percent of its business in South Africa to black investors. Under an agreement reached with the government, the company will instead invest millions of dollars in a new business institute to provide training for 1,800 students over the next six years.
(AFP, 8/27/07)
2007 Aug 27, Taiwan's leading computer vendor Acer Inc moved to substantially boost its market share by acquiring US rival Gateway amid a major consolidation among the world's top computer companies. Acer said it would pay $710 million for Gateway.
(AP, 8/27/07)(Econ, 9/1/07, p.60)
2007 Oct 1, Teradata Corporation, a hardware and software vendor specializing in data warehousing and analytic applications, was spun off from NCR Corp. As of 2010 the former division of NCR is the largest company in Dayton, Ohio, with headquarters in Miamisburg, Ohio.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teradata)
2007 Dec 6, IBM reported that it has made a breakthrough in converting electrical signals into light pulses that brings closer the day when supercomputing, which now requires huge machines, will be done on a single chip.
(Reuters, 12/6/07)
2007 Dec 14, Asus Technology of Taiwan unveiled a $299 version of Eee PC, a 2-pound laptop for kids that stores data on flash memory.
(SFC, 12/14/07, p.D1)
2007 Ian Ayres authored “Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart," a look at how computers have enabled automatic processes to surpass human experts in numerous fields.
(Econ, 9/15/07, p.103)
2008 Feb 4, Intel said it has built a new chip with a record 2 billion transistors. Its new quad-core Itanium processor will operate at frequencies up to 2 gigahertz.
(SFC, 2/5/08, p.C2)
2008 Feb 12, European Union antitrust regulators raided Intel Corp. and computer resellers searching for evidence that they may have broken cartel or monopoly rules.
(AP, 2/12/08)
2008 Feb 15, It was reported that a new computer virus called Mocmex, identified as a Trojan Horse from China, had been discovered in digital photo frames. It recognized and blocked antivirus software from over 100 security vendors and collected passwords for online games.
(SFC, 2/15/08, p.C1)
2008 Feb 27, The EU fined Microsoft Corp. $1.3 billion for charging rivals too much for software information. The fine is the largest ever for a single company and the first time the EU has penalized a business for failing to obey an antitrust order.
(AP, 2/27/08)
2008 Feb 27, Germany's highest court found that government surveillance of personal computers violates the individual right to privacy. German investigators said this will restrict their ability to pursue terrorists.
(AP, 2/27/08)
2008 Mar 5, Joseph Weizenbaum (b.1923), a computer programmer who helped advance artificial intelligence only to become a critic of the technology later in his life, died. He was a professor at MIT when in 1966 he introduced ELIZA, named for Eliza Doolittle, the heroine of "My Fair Lady." The program allowed a person to "converse" with a computer, using what the person said to create the computer's reply.
(AP, 3/13/08)(WSJ, 3/15/08, p.A6)
2008 Apr 8, IBM began shipping high-end computers built around the Power6 processor, the fastest chip to date.
(SFC, 4/9/08, p.C1)
2008 Apr 21, It was reported that the 4th generation Oqo Model 02 personal computer, which weighed one pound and clipped onto a belt, was available for a starting price of $1,300. It had been developed over the last 8 years in SF in a venture begun by former Apple and IBM engineers.
(SFC, 4/21/08, p.D1)
2008 Apr 30, Scientists at Hewlett-Packard said they have discovered a fourth basic type of electrical circuit that could lead to a computer you never have to boot up. The three fundamental elements of a passive circuit included resistors, capacitors and inductors. In the 1970s Leon Chua of the University of California at Berkeley, theorized there should be a fourth called a memory resistor, or memristor, which remembers the direction and the amount of charge that flows through it.
(Reuters, 5/1/08)
2008 May 30, A jury in Syracuse, NY, found Hewlett-Packard guilty of infringing a patent for data processing held by Cornell Univ. and ordered the company to pay Cornell $184 million.
(SFC, 6/4/08, p.C5)
2008 Jul 13, Terry Childs (43), a San Francisco computer engineer, was arrested on felony charges for allegedly plotting to hijack the city’s computer system. Childs, who continue to draw his $127,735 annual salary, refused to provide passwords to the network system and was held in lieu of a $5 million bail. Mayor Newsom met with Childs on July 21, who provided system code. Cisco engineers had the system back under control by July 22. On April 27, 2010, Childs was convicted of felony computer tampering. On April 27, 2010, a Superior Court jury concluded that his crime cost the city over $200,000, making him eligible for a maximum state sentence of 5 years. On Aug 6, 2010, Childs was sentenced to 4 years in prison and ordered to pay $1.5 million. Hi conviction was upheld in 2013.
(SFC, 7/16/08, p.B1)(SFC, 7/23/08, p.B1)(SFC, 4/28/10, p.C1)(SFC, 8/7/10, p.C2)(SSFC, 10/27/13, p.C2C3)
2008 Jul 25, Randy Pausch (47), a Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist, died at his home in Virginia. His "last lecture" in September 2007, about facing terminal cancer, has become an Internet sensation and a best-selling book.
(AP, 7/25/08)
2008 Sep 7, In London an urgent inquiry was underway after a disc containing the personal details of 5,000 justice staff went missing in yet another embarrassing data loss blunder. Private contractor EDS told the Prison Service in July that the hard drive had gone astray. The missing disc was last seen in July 2007.
(AP, 9/7/08)
2008 Sep 7, South Korean police arrested four people over the theft of data on 11 million customers of a local oil refiner in what is being called the country's largest-ever data leak.
(AFP, 9/7/08)
2008 Sep 23, Portugal's Socialist government began the roll-out of 500,000 ultra-cheap laptops for school children in a program that the government said could be extended to Venezuela. While the Magellan computer will be assembled in Portugal by a company called JP Sa Couto, it is based on Intel's Classmate PC, a cheap computer that has been adopted in various formats in countries such as Brazil and Indonesia.
(Reuters, 9/23/08)
2008 Urs Gasser and John Palfrey authored “Born Digital."
(Econ, 3/6/10, TQ p.10)
2008 Roadrunner, a $121 million supercomputer housed at Los Alamos, NM, became the first computer to break the petaflop barrier by processing just over a quadrillion mathematical calculations per second. In 2013 it was decommissioned, replaced by something smaller, faster and more energy efficient.
(SSFC, 3/31/13, p.A8)
2008 By this year high-frequency trading made up the majority of equity trading in America.
(Econ., 12/19/20, p.98)
2008 The first Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) began in Canada as an online computing course. By 2012 MOOCS were offering college students lectures for a fraction of the cost of attending a university.
(Econ, 6/28/14, p.21)
2009 Jan 8, Dell Inc. announced that it is moving its Irish manufacturing operations to Poland by 2010, as part of a cost cutting measure that will result in the loss of some 1,900 Irish jobs.
(WSJ, 1/9/09, p.B4)
2009 Jan 21, Intel said it will close several older factories displacing some 5-6 thousand workers in reaction to a sharp drop in demand for its computer chips.
(WSJ, 1/22/09, p.B1)
2009 Mar 18, IBM announced that it was in talks to acquire Sun Microsystems for at least $6.5 billion in cash. The deal soon faltered as the companies failed to agree on terms.
(Econ, 3/21/09, p.69)(SFC, 4/6/09, p.A5)
2009 Mar 30, Intel released Nehalem, its new superfast chip for servers.
(Econ, 4/4/09, p.73)
2009 Jun 16, The Norwegian firm Opera Software unveiled new technology that allows it Opera 10 Web browser to also function as a file server. A feature called Opera Unite enables users to push content and establish communications without the need for a 3rd party.
(SFC, 6/17/09, p.C1)
2009 Jun 17, It was reported that security researchers at Finjan, a venture–funded security company in San Jose, have identified a sophisticated online network, called GoldenCashworld, that was used for buying and selling access to infected PCs. The network included tools for creating malicious code and stolen credentials for about 100,000 Web sites.
(SFC, 6/17/09, p.C1)
2009 Jul 7, Google announced its new operating system, Google Chrome OS, which would initially target low cost netbooks.
(SFC, 7/9/09, p.C1)
2009 Sep 18, South Korean scientists said they had developed a new transistor which moves faster and consumes less energy than existing semiconductors, a technology opening the way for no-booting computers.
(AP, 9/18/09)
2009 Oct 22, The Windows 7 computer operating system went on sale.
(SFC, 10/22/09, p.C2)
2009 Nov 11, Hewlett-Packard Co. said it will acquire 3Com Corp. in a $2.7 billion deal that would put HP in direct competition with Cisco Systems in networking technology.
(SFC, 11/12/09, p.A1)
2009 Dec 16, The US Federal Trade Commission voted to sue Intel Corp. over its business practices, saying it engaged in anti-competitive behavior by abusing its dominant market position. Intel controlled over 80% of the CPU market and will face an administrative law judge in September.
(SFC, 12/17/09, p.A1)
2009 Dec 22, A US federal appeals court ordered Microsoft Corp. to stop selling its Word program in January and pay a Canadian software company $290 million for violating a patent, upholding the judgment of a lower court. Toronto-based i4i Inc. sued Microsoft in 2007, saying it owned the technology behind a tool in the popular word processing program.
(AP, 12/22/09)
2009 Viktor Mayer-Schonberger authored “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age."
(Econ, 1/28/12, p.60)
2010 Jan 7, Intel CEO Paul Otellini introduced a technology called Intel Wireless Display (WiDi) that allows a user to beam the contents of a computer screen to a TV.
(SFC, 1/9/10, p.D1)
2010 Jan 27, Apple Inc CEO Steve Jobs took the wraps off a sleek tablet that it called the iPad, pitching the new gadget at $499, a surprisingly low price, to bridge the gap between smartphones and laptops. It will go on sale in late March for $499-829.
(Reuters, 1/28/10)(Econ, 1/30/10, p.11)
2010 Feb 6, Ethiopia’s official news agency said US software giant Microsoft has launched Windows Vista in Amharic, the first operating system in its national language. 40 scholars from the Addis Ababa University had taken part in the translation of the software for the country of over 80 million people.
(AFP, 2/6/10)
2010 Feb 18, It was reported that a new type of computer virus is known to have breached almost 75,000 computers in 2,500 organizations around the world. The virus, known as "Kneber botnet," gathers login credentials to online financial systems, social networking sites and email systems from infested computers and reports the information back to hackers.
(Reuters, 2/18/10)
2010 Feb 18, Microsoft won unconditional European Union approval for its planned search deal with Yahoo Inc to challenge market leader Google.
(Reuters, 2/18/10)
2010 Apr 1, Dr. Henry Edward Roberts (b.1941), American engineer and medical doctor, died in Georgia. In 1975 he developed and introduced the MITS Altair 8800. His Micro Instrumentation & Telemetry Systems of Albuquerque, N.M., sold the build-it-yourself kit by mail-order and Bill Gates and Paul Allen developed the first software program for it.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Roberts_%28computers%29)(SFC, 4/2/10, p.C7)
2010 Apr 3, Apple Inc. began selling its much-anticipated iPad, drawing eager customers intent on being among the first owners of a tablet-style device that the company is hoping to convince more people they actually need. Some 300,000 iPads were sold the first day.
(AP, 4/3/10)(SFC, 4/6/10, p.D1)
2010 Apr 12, Neofonie, the German maker of a new tablet PC, the WePad, was reportedly setting out to rival Apple's iPad with the promise of even more technology such as a bigger screen, a webcam and USB ports. When it hits stores starting late July, it will also boast a complete open source office package.
(AP, 4/12/10)
2010 Apr 15, Israel customs officials said they already have confiscated about 10 iPads since Israel announced new regulations this week. The iPad banned anyone from bringing an iPad into the country until officials certify that they are in compliance with local transmitter standards. Israel lifted a ban on April 25.
(AP, 4/15/10)(AP, 4/25/10)
2010 Apr 28, Palm Inc. a pioneer in the smart phone business that couldn't quite make the comeback it needed, agreed to be bought out by Hewlett-Packard Co. for about $1.4 billion in cash. Palm was founded in 1992 by Donna Dubinsky and Jeff Hawkins and helped originate the handheld computing market with its Palm Pilot "personal digital assistants" in the 1990s.
(AP, 4/29/10)
2010 May 31, It was reported that Google is phasing out the internal use of Microsoft’s ubiquitous Windows operating system because of security concerns.
(www.ft.com/cms/s/2/d2f3f04e-6ccf-11df-91c8-00144feab49a.html)
2010 Jun 10, A judge in the US District Court for the District of Utah granted Novell's request for declaratory judgment and ruled against SCO's claims of slander and breach of implied covenant of good faith. He also said that SCO is obligated to recognize Novell's waiver of SCO's claims against IBM and other companies that use Linux. He ordered the case closed.
(PCWorld, 6/11/10)
2010 Jun, Stuxnet, computer malware, was first detected by VirusBlokAda, a security firm in Belarus. It was tailored for Siemens supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems commonly used to manage water supplies, oil rigs, power plants and other industrial facilities. It was able to recognize a specific facility's control network and then destroy it. The code had a technology fingerprint of the control system it was seeking and would go into action automatically when it found its target. In September German computer security researcher Ralph Langner said he suspected that Stuxnet's mark was the Bushehr nuclear facility in Iran. Unspecified problems have been blamed for a delay in getting the facility fully operational. Stuxnet used 4 main exploits, packets of computer code that allow hackers to infiltrate or gain control of computers running software with design flaws.
(AP, 9/24/10)(Econ, 10/2/10, p.63)(Econ, 3/30/13, p.65)
2010 Jul 22, India unveiled the prototype of a $35 basic touchscreen tablet aimed at students, which it hopes to bring into production by 2011.
(AP, 7/23/10)
2010 Aug 16, Dell Inc. said it's buying 3Par Inc., a maker of enterprise data storage equipment, for about $1.13 billion cash or $18 per share. Hewlett Packard soon countered with a higher bid and a bidding war ensued raising the value of 3Par $2 billion, or $30/share. HP ended an 18-day battle with a $33 per share offer. On Sep 2 Dell refused to continue bidding and said it was entitled to a $72 million termination fee.
(AP, 8/16/10)(SSFC, 8/29/10, p.A9)(SFC, 9/3/10, p.D4)
2010 Aug 19, Chipmaker Intel announced a deal to buy security software maker McAfee Inc. for $7.68 billion, or $48 per share, a 60% premium over the stock’s closing price.
(SFC, 8/20/10, p.A1)
2010 Aug 27, The US military said it is demanding to know what happened to $1.9 million worth of computers intended for Iraqi schoolchildren. The computers were allegedly auctioned off by Iraqi officials for less than $50,000.
(SFC, 8/28/10, p.A2)
2010 Aug 30, The Hewlett-Packard Co. agreed to pay $55 million to settle a Justice Dept. probe on overcharges in a kickback scheme. The settlement involved a False Claims Act lawsuit dating back to 2004.
(SFC, 8/31/10, p.D1)
2010 Sep 13, Hewlett-Packard announced a $1.5 billion deal to buy ArcSight Inc, a provider of computer network security.
(SFC, 9/14/10, p.D1)
2010 Oct 3, In Iran a top official said Industrial computers infected by Stuxnet have been cleaned and returned to their units, following reports that the malware was mutating and wreaking havoc with equipment.
(AFP, 10/3/10)
2010 Oct 5, Iran claimed that the Stuxnet computer worm, found on the laptops of several employees at the country's nuclear power plant, is part of a covert Western plot to derail its nuclear program.
(AP, 10/5/10)
2010 Oct 28, Nvidia Corp. said China’s National University of Defense Technology has designed the world’s fastest supercomputer. Its Tianhe-1A set a performance record of 2.507 petaflops per second.
(SFC, 10/29/10, p.C5)
2010 Nov 22, Novell Inc., the maker of Linux operating-system software, said it has agreed to be bought by Attachmate Corp., for $2.2 billion, or about $6.10 per share.
(SFC, 11/23/10, p.D2)
2010 Apple bought Siri, a personal digital assistant, for $200 million.
(Econ, 9/12/15, p.57)
2010 The Imagenet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVCR) challenged research teams to submit programs that classify and detect objects and scenes. It began as a contest to encourage artificial intelligence workers to measure their progress in getting computers to recognize and label images automatically. In 2015 computers surpassed humans for the first time.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ImageNet)(Econ, 6/25/16, SR p.4)
2011 Feb 9, Hewlett-Packard unveiled its new TouchPad computer. It used Palm’s updated webOS software.
(SFC, 2/10/11, p.D1)
2011 Feb 14, A man-versus-machine showdown on popular US quiz show "Jeopardy!" ended in a tie on the first day of a three-day challenge, when an IBM computer named Watson showed off its knowledge of the Beatles, as well as a few glitches.
(AP, 2/15/11)
2011 Feb 16, The IBM computer named Watson beat two former Jeopardy champions, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, finishing a 3-day match at the TV quiz show.
(SFC, 2/17/11, p.D4)
2011 Mar 11, Apple’s iPad2 tablet computer arrived in stores.
(SFC, 3/12/11, p.D1)
2011 Mar, IBM began teaching a computer chip, called Synapse, to play Pong. The chip was designed to learn through experience and after a few weeks it was nearly unbeatable.
(SFC, 11/7/11, p.D1)
2011 Apr 4, Texas Instruments Inc announced that it is buying National Semiconductor Corp for about $6.5 billion in cash, paying a nearly 80 percent premium in a deal to expand its stake in analog chips used in everything from tablets to cars.
(Reuters, 4/4/11)
2011 Apr 26, Japanese electronics and entertainment giant Sony unveiled its first tablet computers, codenamed S1 and S2, in a direct but belated challenge to Apple's iPad.
(AFP, 4/26/11)
2011 May 4, Intel unveiled its new Ivy Bridge processor made with a 3-D manufacturing technique that increases chip performance as much as 37% while using less power.
(SFC, 5/5/11, p.D3)
2011 May 10, Microsoft announced an $8.5 billion deal to acquire Skype, an Internet voice and video communications company.
(SFC, 5/11/11, p.A1)
2011 Jun 1, Taiwan-based Acer Inc, the world No. 2 PC maker, said it will take a $150 million charge to write off inventory and doubtful payments in Europe and will cut 300 jobs there in the latest upheaval following the sudden departure of its CEO in March. Acer charged its former chief executive officer, Gianfranco Lanci, with performance issues, after he had criticized the company's resistance to globalization in interviews with the media.
(Reuters, 6/1/11)
2011 Jun 20, RIKEN and Fujitsu took first place on the 37th TOP500 list at the 26th International Supercomputing Conference (ISC'11) held in Hamburg, Germany. This ranking is based on a performance measurement of the "K computer," currently under their joint development.
(www.fujitsu.com/global/news/pr/archives/month/2011/20110620-02.html)
2011 Jul, Stanford Prof. Sebastian Thrun posted a shirt video on YouTube announcing that he and colleague Peter Norvig were making their “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence" course available free online. The course began in October and 160,000 people in 190 countries had signed up for it.
(Econ, 6/25/16, SR p.10)
2011 Aug 18, Hewlett-Packard said that it would exit the personal computer business.
(SFC, 8/19/11, p.A1)
2011 Aug 24, Silicon Valley legend Steve Jobs resigned as chief executive of Apple Inc in a stunning move that ended his 14-year reign at the technology giant he co-founded in a garage.
(Reuters, 8/24/11)
2011 Sep 28, Amazon.com CEO Jeff Beezos unveiled the new Kindle Fire tablet computer to sell for $199, compared with $499 for Apple’s least expensive iPad.
(SFC, 9/29/11, p.A1)
2011 Sep, The Way-C, an African handheld tablet to rival the iPad and similar western inventions, was first presented to the public in the Congo Republic by its inventor Verone Mankou (26). It was assembled in China and went on sale in Brazzaville on Jan 30, 2012.
(AFP, 1/30/12)
2011 Oct 3, Hewlett-Packard announced that it has acquired control of Autonomy, a British software firm, for $10.3 billion. In 2012 HP said it was writing down the value of Autonomy by $8.8 billion, ascribing over $5 billion to accounting improprieties.
(www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2011/111003xb.html)(Econ, 11/24/12, p.71)
2011 Oct 4, Apple Inc. unveiled a faster, more powerful iPhone, the iPhone 4S, in its first major product event in years without Steve Jobs presiding. The iPhone included Siri, a personal assistant application.
(AP, 10/4/11)(SFC, 1/23/15, p.A10)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siri)
2011 Oct 4, Apple Inc rejected an offer from Samsung Electronics Co to settle their tablet computer dispute in Australia, possibly killing off the commercial viability of the South Korean firm's new Galaxy tablet in that market.
(Reuters, 10/4/11)
2011 Oct 5, Steve Jobs (56), the mastermind behind Apple's iPhone, iPad, iPod, iMac and iTunes, died. Millions of people around the world mourned digital-gadget genius Steve Jobs as a man whose wizardry transformed their lives in big ways and small. Walter Isaacson soon published the biography “Steve Jobs."
(AP, 10/6/11)(Econ, 10/29/11, p.98)
2011 Oct 5, Datawind, a British technology company, released a student tablet costing $35. It claimed to have developed the world's least expensive computer tablet for wireless Internet access. In February, 2012, Datawind released an updated version of the Aakash computer tablet for the commercial market that costs $50.
{Technology, Computer, Britain}
(AFP, 2/19/12)(http://tinyurl.com/79ngd6m)
2011 Oct 5, India introduced a cheap tablet computer, saying it would deliver modern technology to the countryside to help lift villagers out of poverty. Developer Datawind is selling the tablets, called Aakash, or "sky" in Hindi, to the government for about $45 each. Subsidies will reduce that to $35 for students and teachers.
(AP, 10/5/11)
2011 Oct 7, Wired magazine reported that a computer virus has infected networks used by pilots who control US Air Force drones in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. The spyware resisted efforts to remove it from computers at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada.
(SSFC, 10/9/11, p.A12)
2011 Oct 12, Dennis Ritchie (b.1941), American computer scientist, was found dead at his home in New Jersey. In the late 1960s Ritchie invented the C programming language. Ritchie and Ken Thompson then used C to develop the Unix operating system.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Ritchie)(Econ, 10/22/11, p.22)
2011 Oct 24, John McCarthy (b.1927), computer science pioneer, died at his home on the Stanford campus. He coined the term AI and organized the first conference on artificial intelligence while teaching at Dartmouth. At MIT he invented the List Processing Language (LISP), still the language of choice for AI researchers.
(SFC, 10/29/11, p.C5)
2011 Oct 25, IBM said Virginia Rometty (54) will succeed Sam Palmisano as chief executive officer effective Jan 1. Rometty, currently head of sales and marketing, will become IBM’s first female chief.
(SFC, 10/26/11, p.D3)
2012 Feb, In Ethiopia 20 Motorola Xoom tablet computers were dropped off in Wenchi village by a group called One Laptop Per Child. The tablets were charged from a solar station built by One Laptop. By year’s end all the kids could chant the English alphabet, and some spelled words.
(AP, 12/24/12)
2012 Mar 7, Apple unveiled a third-generation iPad enhanced with features aimed at keeping it on top of the booming tablet computer market. The new iPad will go on sale March 16 in Canada, France, Germany and the United States at $499, the same price as the previous models, for the most basic iPad featuring wireless connectivity only.
(AFP, 3/8/12)
2012 Mar 13, British chip designer ARM unveiled what it said was the world's most energy-efficient microprocessor design that will help devices ranging from fridges to medical equipment to parking meters to communicate with other devices.
(Reuters, 3/13/12)
2012 Mar 16, The new iPad went on sale in Canada, France, Germany and the United States at $499, the same price as the previous models, for the most basic iPad featuring wireless connectivity only. 3 million were sold over the next 4 days.
(AFP, 3/8/12)(Econ, 3/24/12, p.71)
2012 Mar 19, Apple Corp. said it will reinstate a dividend, absent since 1995, and begin a $10 billion share buyback program. Shares closed at $601.10.
(SFC, 3/20/12, p.D1)
2012 Apr 4, A Russian antivirus company claimed that some 600,000 Macs, most in the US and Canada, have been infected with a trojan horse virus called "Flashback." Flashback was originally discovered in Sep 2011, and was designed to disguise itself as an Adobe Flash Player installer, using Flash player logos. After installing Flashback, the malware seeks out user names and passwords that are stored on your Mac.
(http://mashable.com/2012/04/05/mac-flashback-trojan/)
2012 Jun 18, Microsoft unveiled Surface, its new tablet computer that will showcase the Windows 8 operating system due to be rolled out this autumn.
(Econ, 6/23/12, p.66)
2012 Jul 2, In China the High Court of the southern province of Guangdong said Apple has paid $60 million to end a dispute with Shenzhen Proview Technology over who could use the iPad name in China, giving the US tech giant more certainty in selling its tablet computer in the Chinese market.
(AFP, 7/2/12)
2012 Jul 9, A British judge ruled that Samsung's Galaxy tablet was not "cool" enough to be confused with Apple's iPad giving South Korea's Samsung a patent battle win against US rival Apple.
(AFP, 7/9/12)
2012 Aug 15, A person with privileged access to the Saudi state-owned oil company’s computers, unleashed a computer virus to initiate what is regarded as among the most destructive acts of computer sabotage on a company to date. The virus erased data on three-quarters of Aramco’s corporate PCs — documents, spreadsheets, e-mails, files — replacing all of it with an image of a burning American flag.
(NYT, 10/23/12)(http://tinyurl.com/8mc4pom)
2012 Oct 8, An Iranian oil official said the country has successfully blocked a cyber-attack on the computer network of its offshore drilling platforms. An official blamed Israel and said the attack occurred over the past two weeks, was routed through China, and affected only the communications systems of the network.
(AP, 10/8/12)
2012 Oct 16, Britain's Home Secretary Theresa May said computer hacker Gary McKinnon (46), accused by the United States of causing more than $700,000 damage to US military systems, will not be extradited because of the high risk he could kill himself. McKinnon, arrested in 2005, has Asperger's Syndrome and has said he was looking for evidence of UFOs. In December British authorities opted not to charge McKinnon.
(AP, 10/16/12)(AP, 12/14/12)
2012 Nov 12, The Top500 website namedTitan, a computer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, as the world’s faster supercomputer.
(Econ, 11/17/12, p.74)
2012 Dec 25, An Iranian semi-official news agency said there has been another cyberattack by the sophisticated computer worm Stuxnet, this time on the industries in the country's south.
(AP, 12/25/12)
2012 George Dyson authored “Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe."
(Econ, 3/10/12, p.97)
2012 Adam Lashinsky authored “Apple: How America’s Most Admired – and Secretive – Company Really Works."
(SSFC, 1/22/12, p.G3)
2013 Jan 10, The US Department of Homeland Security urged computer users to disable Oracle Corp's Java software, amplifying security experts' prior warnings to hundreds of millions of consumers and businesses that use it to surf the Web.
(AP, 1/11/13)
2013 Feb 5, Dell and Menlo Park’s Silver Lake Management, the nation’s largest technology-focused private-equity firm, announced that they had agreed to pay $13.65 a share to take Dell private.
(SFC, 2/6/13, p.D1)
2013 Feb 21, Google unveiled its touch-screen Chromebook Pixel, a high-end laptop starting at $1,299.
(SFC, 2/22/13, p.A1)
2013 Mar, French entrepreneurs decided to launch a new 3-year school for software developers. The school, named “42," soon received 50 thousand applications for 1,000 student positions.
(Econ, 5/11/13, p.47)
2013 Jun 4, Intel launched the latest version of Its Core processor, known as Haswell, at Computex Taipei.
(Econ, 6/8/13, p.67)
2013 Jun 17, The semiannual TOP500 listing of the world's fastest supercomputers was released. It said the Tianhe-2, developed by the National University of Defense Technology in central China's Changsha city, is capable of sustained computing of 33.86 petaflops per second. The Tianhe-2, which means Milky Way-2, knocks the US Energy Department's Titan machine off the No. 1 spot. It achieved 17.59 petaflops per second.
(AP, 6/17/13)
2013 Sep 4, South Korea’s Samsung set the price of its new Galaxy Gear wristwatch at $299 with sales to begin Sep 25.
(SFC, 9/5/13, p.C3)
2013 Sep 12, Dell CEO Michael Dell won shareholder approval for a planned $24.9 buyout to take the company private.
(SFC, 9/13/13, p.C3)
2013 In France Xavier Niel, telecom entrepreneur, co-founded “42," a computer programming school with a capacity of 2,500 students that charges no tuition fees.
(Econ, 2/25/17, p.57)
2014 Jan 9, IBM said DBS Group Holdings Ltd. ff Singapore will begin to use the Watson supercomputer to aid financial planners in guiding its wealth management unit’s affluent customers.
(SFC, 1/10/14, p.C2)
2014 Feb 4, Microsoft announced that Satya Nadella will replace Steve Ballmer as CEO. John Thompson (64) will replace Bill Gates as chairman.
(AP, 2/4/14)(SFC, 2/5/14, p.C3)
2014 Intel launched the latest version of Its Core processor, known as the Xeon Haswell E-5. It sported over 5 billion transistors, just 22 nm apart.
(Econ, 3/12/15, TQ p.3)
2015 Jan 21, Microsoft unveiled its Windows 10 operating system. MS also showed a new wearable 3-D gadget called the HoloLens.
(SFC, 1/22/15, p.C3)
2015 Mar, Nvidea unveiled new hardware and software to bring speed, ease and power to deep learning research. The dedicated dee-learning computer “DIGITS" was priced at $15,000.
(http://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2015/03/17/digits-devbox/)(Econ., 4/4/15, p.16)
2015 Jun 1, Intel said it has agreed to buy Altera Corp. for $54 per share in cash to defend its presence in data centers. The deal was valued at $16.7 billion.
(SFC, 6/2/15, p.D1)
2015 Jun 23, State Councilor Yang Jiechi said China will work with the United States and other countries on cybersecurity issues.
(Reuters, 6/23/15)
2015 Jul 8, The NYSE halted trading for over three hours to technical problems related to a software upgrade.
(SFC, 7/9/15, p.C1)(SFC, 7/10/15, p.C3)
2015 Jul 29, Microsoft debuted Windows 10.
(SFC, 7/30/15, p.C2)
2015 Oct 21, Western Digital, a maker of hard drives, said it is buying SanDisk, a flash-memory chip maker, in a cash and stock deal valued at about $19 billion.
(SFC, 10/22/15, p.C3)
2015 Gordon Corera authored “Intercept: The Secret History of Computers and Spies."
(Econ, 7/18/15, p.70)
2016 Mar 21, Andy Grove (79), Hungarian-born former CEO of Intel Corp., died. In 1997 Time Magazine named him as “Man of the Year." His books included “Output Management) (1983) and “only the Paranoid Survive" (1999).
(SFC, 3/22/16, p.A1)
2016 Apr 19, Intel said it would cut 12,000 jobs, about 11% of its workforce, as demand for personal computers continued to fall.
(SFC, 4/20/16, p.C6)
2016 Dec 14, California regulators approved the nation’s first energy-efficiency standards for computers.
(SFC, 12/15/16, p.A1)
2016 Dec 16, Thailand's military-appointed legislature approved a bill tightening the country's already harsh Computer Crime Act, defying critics who said it infringes on the right to free expression.
(AP, 12/16/16)
2016 Data centers consumed 2% of all the electricity produced in the world.
(Econ, 3/12/15, TQ p.9)
2016 Quant investor trading volumes exceeded hedge-fund volumes in America.
(Econ., 12/19/20, p.98)
2017 Mar 6, IBM released the first commercial program for universal quantum computers. Various startups have released their own quantum software.
(Econ, 3/11/17, TQ p.10)
2017 Apr 22, Hubert L. Dreyfus (b.1929), philosopher, died at his home in Berkeley, Ca. His books included “Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence" (1965) and “What Computers Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason" (1972).
(http://tinyurl.com/l2efld9)(SFC, 5/4/17, p.D5)
2017 May 20, Jean Sammet (89), American tech innovator, died in Maryland. She was one of six people who designed the COBOL computer language in 1959.
(SSFC, 6/4/17, p.C10)
2017 May 23, In China Google’s AlphaGo computer defeated Ke Jie, China’s national go champion. Censors blocked access to the online broadcast by Google, which organized the game in Wuzhen, a town west of Shanghai, during a forum on artificial intelligence.
(AP, 5/24/17)
2017 Jul 18, Britain's National Cyber Security Center said it had never certified products from Russian cyber security firm Kaspersky Lab.
(Reuters, 7/18/17)
2017 Jul 20, China outlined a development strategy designed to make it the world’s leading artificial intelligence power by 2030.
(Econ 7/29/17, p.11)
2018 Mar 21, The Association for Computing Machinery announced that John Hennessey, a former president of Stanford and the new chairman of Alphabet, and UC Berkeley Prof. David Patterson are the recipients of the A.M. Turing Award for their work in advancing microprocessor design. The two men had authored "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach" (1990).
(SFC, 3/21/18, p.C5)
2018 Jun 8, It was announced that the US has regained the lead in creating the world's fastest computer with a new supercomputer built for the Oak Ridge national Laboratory in Tennessee by IBM in a partnership with Nvidia.
(SSFC, 6/10/18, p.D1)
2019 Mar 27, The $1 million Turing Award went to artificial intelligence pioneers Yoshua Bengio, Yann LeCun and Geoffrey Hinton.
(SFC, 3/28/19, p.D2)
2019 May 17, Hewlett Packard Enterprise said that it would buy the suprercomputer pioneer Cray for about $1.4 billion.
(SFC, 5/18/19, p.D1)
2019 Jul 12, Fernando Corbato, MIT professor, died in Newburyport, Mass. In the 1960s he oversaw a project called the Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS), which allowed multiple users in different locations to access a single computer simultaneously. In the course of refining time-sharing systems Corbato came up with the computer password.
(SFC, 7/15/19, p.C2)
2019 Jul 17, Microsoft Corp and AT&T Inc said they reached a deal, valued at more than $2 billion, under which the telecommunications company will tap Microsoft's Azure cloud service for its computing needs and use Microsoft 365, which includes Office productivity software, for much of its 268,000-strong workforce.
(Reuters, 7/17/19)
2019 Aug 12, Danny Cohen (b.1937), computer scientist, died at his home in Palo Alto, Ca. His work on computer graphics and networks led to innovations in flight simulation, internet telephony, cloud computing and one of the first online dates.
(SFC, 8/18/19, p.B10)
2019 Aug 27, The Dutch Data Protection Agency (DPA) said Microsoft is remotely collecting data from users of Windows Home and Windows Pro, in a potential breach of privacy rules.
(Reuters, 8/27/19)
2019 Sep 10, It was reported that IBM is joining forces with a German research institute to explore the potential of quantum computing in a project that the government in Berlin will back to the tune of 650 million euros ($717 million) over two years.
(Reuters, 9/10/19)
2019 Sep 23, Apple Inc said it will make new Mac Pro desktop computers at its Austin, Texas facility, following some relief on tariffs by the US government.
(Reuters, 9/23/19)
2019 Oct 23, Google said it had achieved a breakthrough in computer research, by solving a complex problem in minutes with a so-called quantum computer that would take today's most powerful supercomputer thousands of years to crack.
(Reuters, 10/23/19)
2019 Nov 4, Microsoft Corp announced a new service aimed at helping large businesses put to use the huge amounts of data stored in corporate systems. The Azure Synapse system, to be unveiled at an event in Florida, is part of the company's fast-growing cloud computing unit, which has driven the company's shares up over the past five years.
(Reuters, 11/4/19)
2019 Dec 9, Intel Corp announced a chip called "Horse Ridge" that is designed to take all the work being done by the wires in a quantum computer and shrink it down to a chip and electronics about the size of a tea cup saucer. The chip is named for one of the coldest spots in the state of Oregon, where many of its factories are located.
(Reuters, 12/9/19)
2020 Feb 16, Larry Tesler (b.1945), American computer scientist who worked in the field of human–computer interaction, died at his Portola Valley home. Tesler worked at Xerox PARC, Apple, Amazon, and Yahoo!
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Tesler)(SFC, 2/25/20, p.D2
2020 Feb 17, The UK said it will spend 1.2 billion pounds ($1.6 billion) on developing the most powerful weather and climate supercomputer in the world. Britain issued severe flood alerts, warning of life-threatening danger after Storm Dennis dumped weeks' worth of rain in some places. One woman swept away by the floodwaters was feared dead.
(Bloomberg, 2/17/20)(AP, 2/17/20)
2020 May 13, Amazon.com Inc launched three new versions of its Fire tablets with more storage and faster performance.
(Reuters, 5/13/20)
2020 Aug 4, Frances Allen, a computer scientist and researcher who helped create the fundamental ideas that allow practically anyone to build fast, efficient and useful software for computers, smartphones and websites, died at a nursing home in Schenectady, NY.
(NY Times, 8/8/20)
2020 Jul 24, Ann Syrdal (74), psychologist and computer science researcher, died at her home in San Jose, Ca. She helped develop synthetic voices that sounded like women and laid the groundwork for such modern digital assistants as Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa.
(NY Times, 8/21/20)
2020 Nov 30, Researchers from DeepMind presented results suggested that they have made enormous progress on using a computer to predict a protein's shape just from a list of its amino acids. Dennis Hassabis founded DeepMind, a British artificial-intelligence firm in 2010. In 2014 it was acquired by Alphabet, the parent company of Google.
(Econ., 12/5/20, p.75)
2021 Jun 8, Honeywell International Inc and quantum computer software startup Cambridge Quantum Computing (CQC) announced they will form a joint venture, integrating Honeywell’s quantum computer unit with the software maker.
(AP, 6/8/21)
2021 Jun 15, IBM unveiled one of Europe's most powerful quantum computers in Germany, boosting the country's efforts to stay in the race for what's considered a key technology of the future. IBM already has more than 30 such computers in the US.
(AP, 6/15/21)
2021 Jun 24, Microsoft unveiled the next generation of its Windows software, called Windows 11, that has a new Start Menu and other features. It is expected to become available later this year on new computers and other devices and as a free update for those with Windows 10.
(AP, 6/24/21)
2021 Sep 1, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co said it won a 10-year, $2 billion contract to supply high-performance computing systems to the US National Security Agency (NSA).
(Reuters, 9/1/21)
2021 Nov 15, International Business Machines said it has designed a new quantum computing chip that its executives believe will let quantum systems start to outperform classical computers at some tasks within the next two years.
(Reuters, 11/15/21)
2021 Nov 17, A new quantum computer startup born from researchers at Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology called QuEra Computing said it has raised $17 million from investors, including Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten Inc.
(Reuters, 11/17/21)
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Computing History: http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/
IBM History (1952-1957): http://www.thocp.net/timeline/1952.htm
1815 Dec 10, Ada Lovelace (d. Nov 27, 1852), Lord Byron's daughter and the inventor of computer language, was born. In 1998 the sci-fi film, "Conceiving Ada," was directed by Lynn Hershman-Leeson.
(SFC, 1/22/98, p.D7)(SFC, 4/30/98, p.E1)
1852 Nov 27, Ada Lovelace (b.1815), Lord Byron's daughter and the inventor of computer language, was bled to death by physicians at age 36. She had helped Charles Babbage develop his "Analytical Engine," that performed mathematical calculations through the use of punched cards.
(SFC, 1/22/98, p.D7)(SFC, 4/30/98, p.E1)
1871 Oct 18, Charles Babbage (b.1792), English mathematician and inventor of a calculating machine, died. In 2001 Doron Swade authored “The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer."
(www.thocp.net/biographies/babbage_charles.html)(WSJ, 3/7/09, p.W8)
1874 Feb 17, Thomas J. Watson Sr. (d.1956), U.S. industrialist, was born in upstate New York. In 1914 he began running the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Co., a predecessor to IBM. He converted the financially ailing manufacturing business into the international giant IBM.
(WUD, 1994, p.1614)(HN, 2/17/99)(WSJ, 5/15/03, p.A1)
1890 Mar 11, Vannevar Bush was born. He developed the 1st electronic analogue computer.
(MC, 3/12/02)
1890 Jun 1, The U.S. census stood at 62,622,250. The US government used the Jean Baptiste Pacard card punch to tabulate the results of the census. Herman Hollerith designed a system that used a machine with a sorter.
(DTnet, 6/1/97)(SFC, 8/5/97, p.A20)(WSJ, 10/15/01, p.R23)
1914 Thomas J. Watson Sr. (1874-1956) began running the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Co. (CTR), which he would rename International Business Machines in 1924. He instituted the Hundred Percent Club in 1916 to glorify employees who met their sales quotas; started an internal media machine, including a weekly broadsheet and a monthly magazine; published a company songbook; and founded the IBM symphony in 1936. He converted the financially ailing manufacturing business into the international giant IBM.
(WSJ, 5/15/03, p.A1)(http://tinyurl.com/tk3psra)(http://tinyurl.com/r8pfe6f)
1924 Mar 5, Computing-Tabulating-Recording Corp became IBM.
(MC, 3/5/02)
1937 Alan Turing published a paper showing that a universal machine could be designed to perform the functions and do the work of any device designed for problem-solving. More important, his paper showed that a digital computer could theoretically be designed to do the work of any analog computer. He is considered the founder of artificial intelligence.
(V.D.-H.K.p.349)
1937 John Vincent Atanasoff at Iowa State College conceived one of the first electronic digital computing devices. The Atanasoff–Berry Computer (ABC), created in 1939, was not programmable, being designed only to solve systems of linear equations. It was successfully tested in 1942.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atanasoff%E2%80%93Berry_Computer)(SFC, 12/12/01, p.A27)
1939 John Atanasoff created the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC) in the basement of the physics building at Iowa State College, which did not file patents. Physics Prof. John Mauchly took many of his ideas and filed a patent on over 100 ideas revolving around the computer in 1947. The patent, granted in 1964, claimed the Mauchly had invented the computer. This was disproved in 1973, following a 2-year court battle. In 2010 Jane Smiley authored “"The Man Who Invented the Computer: The Biography of John Atanasoff, Digital Pioneer."
(SSFC, 10/24/10, p.F3)
1939 Richard Bloch (21) taught programming to Grace Hopper (43), who later invented COBOL. Bloch (d.2000 at 78), as chief operations officer at Harvard's Computation Laboratory, played a key role in the development of the Mark I digital computer and invented the parity check for automatic error detection. Hopper led the effort to bring together people in 1959 to collaborate on the development of the Cobol computer language, but did not participate in its creation.
(SFC, 5/27/00, p.A26)(SSFC, 6/4/17, p.C10)
1941 Dec, Cecil Green (d.2003 at 102), Eugene McDermott, J. Eric Jonsson and H. Bates Peacock purchased Geophysical Service Inc. in Dallas, Texas. In 1951 the name was changed to Texas Instruments.
(SFC, 4/17/03, p.A22)
1943 British scientists led by Tommy Flowers (1905-1998) developed Colossus, the world's first large electronic valve programmable logic calculator, in order to break the German communication's code. Colossus is considered by many to be the world's first digital, programmable electronic computer. Its existence was only made public in 1989!
(Wired, 10/96, p.78)(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Flowers)
1944 Rear Admiral Grace Hopper (1906-1992) became one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I electro-mechanical computer. She was later credited with popularizing the term "debugging" for fixing computer glitches, inspired by an actual moth removed from a computer.
(SFC, 2/18/14, p.A6)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper)
1945 Sep 9, The 1st "bug" in a computer program was discovered by Grace Hopper. A moth was removed with tweezers from a relay and taped into the log.
(MC, 9/9/01)
1946 Feb 1, A press conference for what is considered the first computer, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator (ENIAC), was held at the University of Pennsylvania. The machine took up an entire room, weighed 30 tons and used more than 18,000 vacuum tubes to perform functions such as counting to 5,000 in one second. ENIAC, costing $450,000, was designed by the U.S. Army during World War II to make artillery calculations. The development of ENIAC paved the way for modern computer technology--but even today's average calculator possesses more computing power than ENIAC did. John Mauchley and John "Pres" Eckert supervised the project. In 1999 Scott McCartney published "ENIAC: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the World's First Computer."
(HN, 2/2/99)(WSJ, 6/30/99, p.A24)(SFEC, 8/29/99, BR p.5)
1946 Feb 15, The ENIAC, Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, had its official unveiling. It was created by John Mauchly and Presper Eckert. The first test problem it solved was concerned with the trajectory of a 155-millimeter shell. The problem was programmed by Jean Bartik and Betty Holberton who were part of an all-woman team that had performed the calculations by hand. The US Army had chosen 6 women, including Frances Holberton (d.2001 at 84), to program Eniac. Ms. Holberton later created the C-10 instruction code for the Univac using keyboard commands rather than dials and switches.
(WSJ, 11/15/96, p.B1)(www.thocp.net/hardware/eniac.htm)(SFC, 12/12/01, p.A27)
1946 John Tukey, statistician at Bell Labs, coined the term "bit "for binary digit..
(SFC, 7/29/00, p.A21)
1946 A patent dispute with the Univ. Pennsylvania drove John Presper Eckert (d.1995) and John Mauchley (d.1980) to move out on their own. The Electronic Control or Eckert-Mauchly computer was developed at 1215 Walnut St. In Philadelphia. By 1952 it was being sold as the Univac with a clock rate of 2.25 megahertz.
(SJM, 5/1/01, p.10C)
1947 Aug 18, The Hewlett-Packard Company was incorporated and reported revenues of $1.5 million. The 111 employees recorded sales of $679,000. In 2007 Michael S. Malone authored “Bill & Dave: How Hewlett and Packard Built the World’s Greatest Company."
(SFC, 3/3/99, p.A11)(SFC, 1/13/01, p.A15)(SSFC, 4/22/07, p.M3)
1947 Dec 16, The point-contact transistor was invented at Bell Labs.
(SFEC,12/14/97, p.A1)
1947 Dec 23, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain of AT&T Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, unveiled what was soon to be called the transistor, short for the electrical property known as trans-resistance, which paved the way to a new era of miniaturized electronics. The device was improved by William Schockley as a junction transistor. All 3 received a Nobel Prize in 1956. The events are described in the 1997 book by Michael Riordan and Lillian Hoddeson: "Crystal Fire: The Birth of the Information Age."
(WSJ, 9/22/95, p.A-7)(SFEC, 8/17/97, BR p.4)(AP, 12/23/97)
1948 Jun 30, Bell Labs introduced the point-contact transistor in the New York Times on p.46 as a replacement for the vacuum tube. Bell Labs had kept it secret for six months. John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley demonstrated their invention, the transistor, for the first time. John Pierce (d.2002) proposed the name. [see Dec 23, 1947]
(SFE, 10/1/95, p.D-5)(SFEC,12/14/97, p.A1)(WSJ, 2/13/98, p.A13)(HNQ, 12/23/99)(HN, 6/30/01)(SFC, 4/9/02, p.A18)(MC, 6/30/02)
1948 Claude Shannon, the father of coding theory, published a paper which showed the maximum theoretical rate at which information can be transmitted without error. By 2004 real codes began approaching Shannon’s theoretical limit.
(Econ, 7/3/04, p.65)
1948 Richard Bolt and Leo Beranek, professors at MIT, established a small acoustics consulting firm and soon added a former student of Bolt’s, Robert Newman. In 1949 BBN won its first major consulting contract, designing the acoustics for the UN General Assembly Hall.
(www.bbn.com/about/timeline/)
1950 Joseph Glickauf, engineer for Arthur Anderson & Co., constructed the "Glickiac" computer, which allowed the firm to help General Electric automate its payroll.
(WSJ, 6/7/02, p.A6)
1950s The Electronic Recording Method of Accounting (ERMA) was created and installed into the banking system under the oversight of Alfred R. Zipf (d.2000 at 82), executive VP for Bank of America.
(SFC, 1/800, p.A19)
1951 May 11, Jay Forrester patented computer core memory.
(MC, 5/11/02)
1951 Jun 14, UNIVAC, the first computer built for commercial purposes, was demonstrated in Philadelphia by Dr. John W. Mauchly and J. Prosper Eckert, Jr. Magnetic tape for data storage was first used on the UNIVAC.
(HN, 6/14/98)(SFC, 6/15/01, p.B3)(Econ, 11/30/13, TQ p.3)
1951 Jun 15, 1st commercial electronic computer was dedicated in Philadelphia. [see Jun 14]
(MC, 6/15/02)
1951 The video game NIM was created for the Festival of Britain. It was played on Nimrod, a computer developed by the Ferranti electronics firm.
(Econ, 12/10/11, SR p.12)
1951 In Britain J. Lyons & Co. used the world's first business computer to calculate payrolls and optimum mixes for tea blending.
(WSJ, 1/11/99, p.R14)
1951 The Harwell Dekatron, also known as the Wolverhampton Instrument for Teaching Computation (WITCH), was built at Harwell, the UK's atomic energy research establishment. In 2012 the supercomputer was restored after a period of three years by experts at England's National Museum of Computing in Bletchley Park.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harwell_computer)
1952 May 21, IBM introduced its 701 Electronic Data Processing System, the first commercially successful computer. It was withdrawn from marketing on October 1, 1954.
(http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/701/701_1415bx01.html)(Econ, 3/10/12, p.97)
1952 Nov 4, Dwight D. Eisenhower (Ike) was elected president the 34th president, defeating Democrat Adlai Stevenson in presidential elections. The Republicans took over for the first time in 20 years. A Univac computer in Philadelphia predicted the results based on early returns.
(TMC, 1994, p.1952)(AP, 11/4/97)(HN, 11/4/98)(SJM, 5/1/01, p.1C)
1952 Stanford asked Prof. John Herriot (d.2003 at 87) to lead a new Computation Center following the acquisition of its 1st computer, an IBM Card Programmed Calculator.
(SFC, 4/14/03, p.A1)
1952 IBM first moved to the Bay Area to take advantage of the engineers graduating from UC and Stanford. It opened the Almaden Research Center.
(SFC, 11/30/98, p.E1)
1953 John von Neumann and a band of engineers at Princeton Univ. created a computer that simulated nuclear explosions by day and modeled artificial life forms, the creations of Nils Barricelli (1912-1993), by night. Barricelli, a Norwegian-Italian mathematician, was wealthy and held an unpaid residency at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) at Princeton, NJ, in 1953, 1954. and 1956. His early computer-assisted experiments in symbiogenesis and evolution are considered pioneering in artificial life research.
(Econ, 3/10/12, p.97)
1953 Remington-Rand developed the 1st high-speed printer for use on the Univac mainframe computer.
(SFC, 7/26/04, p.F4)
1954 Sep 20, The 1st FORTRAN computer program was executed.
(MC, 9/20/01)
1954 The Semiautomatic Ground Environment (SAGE) program was established by the US Air Force. It was an air defense network of the time using the largest computer ever built. SAGE machines contained 55,000 vacuum tubes, weighed 275 tons and occupied half an acre of floorspace.
(WSJ, 10/15/01, p.R23)(Econ, 6/10/06, Survey p.33)
1954 The Arthur Anderson accounting-and-advisory firm helped persuade General Electric to install a Univac 1 computer.
(Econ, 3/14/20, p.53)
1954 IBM rolled out its models 704 and 705 computers.
(http://www.thocp.net/timeline/1952.htm)
1954 The Rand corp. built the Johnniac computer. Bill Gunning (1916-2006), computing pioneer, helped build the device, one of 17 designed around the computing architecture suggested by John von Neumann. Gunning went on to help develop Ethernet (1972) at Xerox’s PARC.
(SFC, 11/8/06, p.B13)
1955 Feb 24, Steven Jobs, co-founder (Apple Computer), was born.
(SFC, 8/25/11, p.A10)
1955 Prof. John Herriot (d.2003 at 87) began teaching Stanford's 1st programming course, Math 139: Theory and Operation of Computing Machines.
(SFC, 4/14/03, p.A1)
1955 William Shockley founded Shockley Semiconductor in Palo Alto.
(SFC, 10/11/00, p.A6)
1956 Sep 13, IBM introduced the Model 305 computer capable of storing 20 megabytes of data. Reynold B. Johnson (d.1998 at 92), IBM lab leader, developed a way to store computer data on a metal disk instead of on tape or drum. The first commercial disk drive, called RAMAC (random access method of accounting and control), was developed by IBM and sold for $50,000. It used 50 disk platters, each 2-feet in diameter. Together they held 5 megabytes of data. His Random Access Method of Accounting Control began the disk drive industry.
(http://tinyurl.com/k3rzf)(SFC, 9/21/98, p.A21)(WSJ, 8/22/06, p.B3)
1956 Walter Brattain, John Bardeen and William Shockley were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for the invention of the transistor. The trio invented the transistor in 1948 at the Bell Laboratories. William Schockley, co-developer of the transistor, founded Schockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Palo Alto. Two of his hires, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, later went on to start Intel Corp. Tim Jackson in 1998 published "Inside Intel."
(SFEC, 8/17/97, BR p.4)(WSJ, 2/13/98, p.A13)(HNQ, 12/23/99)
1956 John McCarthy (1927-2011), computer science pioneer, led the first conference on “artificial intelligence" at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire. He coined the term to attract funding for the conference.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McCarthy_%28computer_scientist%29)(Econ, 11/5/11, p.114)
1956 The Fortran computer language was developed.
(TL, 1988, p.115)
1956 The computer mouse was invented at SRI Int’l. by Doug Engelbart and Bill English. It was patented on Nov 17, 1970. The point-and-click graphical interface was introduced by an MIT group working on the Whirlwind computer. Engelbart was working at the Stanford Research Institute, a think tank sponsored by Stanford University, and originally referred to the mouse as a "X-Y Position Indicator for a Display System."
(Economist, 9/15/12, p.16)(http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch001083.htm)
1956 Thomas J. Watson Sr. (b.1874), founder of IBM, died. In 2003 Kevin Maney authored "The Maverick and His Machine," a biography of Watson.
(TOH, 1982, p.1956)(WSJ, 5/15/03, p.D8)
1957 Sep 19, Eight engineers, who had recently left Shockley Semiconductor, signed papers to form Fairchild Semiconductor in Santa Clara County. Jean A. Hoerni (1925-1997) was one of the "Fairchild Eight." He was credited with building the bridge from the transistor to the integrated circuit. Eugene Kleiner (d.2003), another co-founder, helped found the Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers venture capital firm in 1972. The other engineers included Julius Blank (1925-2011), Jay Last, Victor Grinich (d.2000 at 75), Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce and Sheldon Roberts. NYC bankers Arthur Rock and Bud Coyle helped the engineers start Fairchild Semiconductor.
(SFC, 11/11/00, p.A26)(SFC, 11/26/03, p.D1)(SSFC, 9/30/07, p.F1)(SFC, 9/24/11, p.C3)
1957 Ken Olson, a former MIT engineer, received $70,000 from American Research & Development (ARD) to develop Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC) in return for a 70% stake.
(WSJ, 5/21/08, p.A17)
1957 The Hewlett-Packard Corp. went public and began operating its new site at Stanford Research Park.
(SFC, 3/3/99, p.A11)
1958 Jul 24, Jack Kilby (1923-2005) of Texas Instruments came up with the idea for creating the 1st integrated circuit on a piece of silicon. By September 12 he made a working prototype.
(SFC, 10/11/00, p.A6)(SFC, 6/22/05, p.A5)(Econ, 7/25/05, p.75)
1958 An anti-trust court case forced AT&T to license its non-telephone related technology to anyone who asked.
(Econ, 6/12/04, p.38)
1958 John Tukey (d.2000 at 85), statistician, became the 1st person to define the programs on which electronic calculators ran as "software."
(SFC, 7/29/00, p.A21)
1958 John McCarthy (1927-2011), computer science pioneer, invented the List Processing Language (LISP).
(SFC, 10/29/11, p.C5)(Econ, 11/5/11, p.114)
1959 Feb 1, Texas Instruments requested a patent for the IC (Integrated Circuit).
(MC, 2/1/02)
1959 Jean Sammet (1928-2017) was one of six people who designed the Cobol computer language.
(SSFC, 6/4/17, p.C10)
1959 Robert Noyce (1927-1990) of Fairchild Semiconductor constructed an integrated circuit. Both Texas Instruments and Fairchild claimed independent discovery of the IC. Noyce went on to found Intel Corp. Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments had made a working prototype in 1958.
(WSJ, 9/22/98, p.B3)(SFC, 10/11/00, p.A6)
1959 Bank of America became the first to use computers to automate book-keeping.
(Econ., 12/19/20, p.98)
1960 IBM Pres. Thomas J. Watson committed $5 billion to develop the System/360 new computer line. It became the most profitable series of machines ever made.
(WSJ, 11/5/99, p.A1)(WSJ, 10/15/01, p.R23)
1960 The PDP-1 was the 1st mini-computer built by the Digital Computer Corp. The 1st video game, Space War! Was written for it.
(WSJ, 10/15/01, p.R23)
1960 Bob Bemer, programmer at IBM, created the software "escape sequence" that allowed computers to break from one alphabet to another. He later led efforts to establish the universal character set called ASCII, named the COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language) programming language, and helped develop the standard for the 8 bit byte.
(WSJ, 6/20/97, p.B1)
1960 Hans Freudenthal, Dutch mathematician, designed the Lincos artificial language. It was designed to communicate with aliens.
(Wired, 8/96, p.88)
1960 James Cooke Brown designed Loglan, an artificial language to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that language influences the thoughts of the speaker. The Lojban language later grew out of Loglan for the purpose of studying artificial intelligence. It used the same grammar but a completely different vocabulary.
(Wired, 8/96, p.88)
1960 Quotron allowed stock market quotes to be shown on a screen. Citicorp bought Quotron in 1986.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotron)(Econ., 12/19/20, p.98)
1961 Apr 25, Robert Noyce patented the integrated circuit.
(SS, 4/25/02)
1961 Dana Ulery (b.1938) became the first female engineer at the NASA Jet Propulsion laboratory in Pasadena.
(SFC, 2/18/14, p.A6)
1962 Aug, The first recorded description of the social interactions that could be enabled through networking was a series of memos written by J.C.R. Licklider of MIT discussing his "Galactic Network" concept. He envisioned a globally interconnected set of computers through which everyone could quickly access data and programs from any site. In spirit, the concept was very much like the Internet of today. Licklider was the first head of the computer research program at DARPA, 4 starting in October 1962. While at DARPA he convinced his successors at DARPA, Ivan Sutherland, Bob Taylor, and MIT researcher Lawrence G. Roberts, of the importance of this networking concept.
(SFEC, 3/16/97, Z1 p.3)(www.isoc.org/internet/history/brief.shtml#Origins)
1962 Charles Molnar (1935-1996) and Wesley A. Clark led a team that developed a machine widely considered as the first personal computer. They made the Laboratory Instrument Computer (LINC) intended for doctors and medical researchers. It was self-contained with a simple operating system. It has a small display and used magnetic tape for storing programs.
(SFC, 12/16/96, p.A24)
1962 Ross Perot founded Electronic Data Systems (EDS). The company pioneered the business of outsourced data management. In 1984 Perot sold the firm to General Motors. GM spun it off in 1996. In 2008 Hewlett-Packard acquired EDS for $13.9 billion.
(Econ, 5/17/08, p.78)
1962 Steve Russell at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology created "Spacewar!", one of the earliest video games for a digital computer.
(AFP, 10/20/06)
1962 Janet Sammet, American computer scientist, directed the development of the FORMAC programming language at IBM.
(SFC, 2/18/14, p.A6)
1964 Apr 7, IBM introduced its innovative System/360, the company's first line of compatible mainframe computers that gave customers the option of upgrading from lower-cost models to more powerful, expensive ones.
(AP, 4/7/04)
1964 May 1, The 1st BASIC program ran on a computer at Dartmouth.
(MC, 5/1/02)
1964 The Ford Research Laboratory developed the superconducting quantum interference device, an exquisitely sensitive magnetic field sensor.
(Econ, 3/11/17, TQ p.11)
1965 Feb 15, Raymond Kurzweil, a diffident but self-possessed high school student, appeared as a guest on a game show called I've Got a Secret. He was introduced by the host, Steve Allen, and then played a short musical composition on a piano that was composed by a computer that he had built. By 2011 Kurzweil believed that we're approaching a moment when computers will become intelligent, and not just intelligent but more intelligent than humans. He believed that this moment was not only inevitable but imminent. According to his calculations, the end of human civilization as we know it would take place about 2045.
(AP, 2/11/11)
1965 Apr 19, An article in Electronics magazine by Gordon Moore, later Intel Chairman, noted that chips seem to double in power every 18 months. Thus was born Moore's Law. Moore later asserted that his claim was that the number of components that can be packed on a computer chip doubles every 2 years. In 2005 Intel offered $10,000 for a pristine copy of the magazine.
(SFEC, 12/21/97, p.A2)(SFC, 10/11/00, p.A6)(SFC, 4/12/05, p.A1)(SFC, 4/18/05, p.E1)
1965 Mar, In this issue of American Scientist Henry David Block showed how easy it was to build a computer that learns using just dixie cups and cardboard. Block called his computer G-1 (G is for Golem, the robot slave of Jewish legend). He used the game of Nim to illustrate his subject.
(NOHY, 3/90, p.204)
1965 Mary Ann Wilkes, American computer programmer, became by most accounts the first person to use a home computer, a machine she built herself.
(SFC, 2/18/14, p.A6)
1966 Charles Rosen (d.2002) helped create and directed the Artificial Intelligence Center at Stanford Research Institute (SRI).
(SFC, 12/20/02, p.A33)
1966 Phil Stone (1936-2006) authored "The General Inquirer: A Computer Approach to Content Analysis." This followed a 1962 paper titled: "The general inquirer: A computer system for content analysis and retrieval based on the sentence as a unit of information."
(https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/general-inquirer)
1966 Joseph Weizenbaum of MIT published a comparatively simple program called ELIZA, named after the ingenue in George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, which performed natural language processing. It was driven by a script named DOCTOR and was capable of engaging humans in a conversation which bore a striking resemblance to one with an empathic psychologist.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Weizenbaum)
1966 Texas Instruments introduced its 1st hand-held calculator based on the integrated circuit developed by Jack Kilby in 1958.
(Econ, 7/25/05, p.75)
1966 Hewlett-Packard introduced its first computer, the HP 2116A. The 9,000 person company had sales of around $200 million.
(SFC, 3/3/99, p.A11)
1966 In South Korea the Korean Productivity Center purchased the country’s first computer.
(LSA, Spring, 2009, p.17)
1967 Jan 12, HAL, the Heuristically Programmed Algorithmic Computer, from the 1968 Arthur C. Clark and Stanley Kubrick movie/book, became operational at the HAL plant in Urbana, Illinois. The book "HAL's Legacy: 2001's Computer as Dream and Reality" was published in 1997 by MIT Press. The birthday in the movie was 1/12/92.
(SFEC, 1/12/97, p.C14)(SFC, 1/25/97, p.E1)(SFEC, 3/16/97, Par p.31)(WSJ, 10/3/97, p.A8)
1967 IBM opened a plant in Austin, Texas, to make Selectric typewriters. The plant moved on to make mainframe circuit boards, terminals and eventually personal computers.
(Econ, 9/23/06, p.74)
1967 Syukuro Manabe and Richard Wetherald of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab. in Princeton, New Jersey, performed one of the first serious computer analysis of the climate using computers. Later GCMs (global circulation models) reached wide use.
(NOHY, 3/90, p.59)
1967 Simon Sze and Dawon Kahng, researchers at Bell Labs in New Jersey, devised a new semiconductor memory device in which information could be stored and updated, and which was non-volatile. It retained its contents even after it was turned off.
(Econ, 3/11/06, Survey p.26)
1968 Jul 15, Intel was founded. Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore had left Fairchild Semiconductor to form NM Electronics in Mountain View, Ca. In 1997 Tim Jackson published "Inside Intel: Andrew Grove and the Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Chip Company." Grove joined Intel in this year and became its president in 1979. They bought the rights to the name Intel from Intelco fro $15,000.
(SFEC,10/26/97, BR p.3)(SFEC,12/21/97, p.A2)(SFC, 10/11/00, p.A6)(SFC, 7/16/03, p.B1)
1968 Jul 18, Intel incorporated. [see Jul 15]
(MC, 7/18/02)
1968 Dec 9, Doug Engelbart and researchers at Stanford Research Institute first demonstrated in SF the computer mouse along with a graphical user interface (gui), display editing, integrated text and graphics, hyper documents and 2-way video-conferencing with shared work spaces. In 2001 Thierry Bardini authored "Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing."
(SFC, 12/4/98, p.B2)(SSFC, 1/21/01, BR p.6)(SFC, 12/8/08, p.A1)
1968 Dec, The Cambridge company Bolt Beranek and Newman won a Dept. of Defense ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) contract to develop packet switches called Interface Message Processors (IMP). The project was led by Frank Heart and Robert Kahn. The first internode was to installed at the Univ. of California at Los Angeles.
(SFEC, 3/16/97, z1 p.3)(SFC,10/24/97, p.E5)
1968 Jul 15, Intel was founded. Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore had left Fairchild Semiconductor to form NM Electronics in Mountain View, Ca. In 1997 Tim Jackson published "Inside Intel: Andrew Grove and the Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Chip Company." Grove (1936-2016) joined Intel in this year as its first employee and became its president in 1979. They bought the rights to the name Intel from Intelco for $15,000.
(SFEC, 10/26/97, BR p.3)(SFEC, 12/21/97, p.A2)(SFC, 10/11/00, p.A6)(SFC, 7/16/03, p.B1)(Econ, 3/26/15, p.75)
1968 Jul 18, Intel was incorporated as N M Electronics (the letters standing for Noyce and Moore), but quickly changed its name to Intel, formed from the first syllables of the words integrated and electronics.
(http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_gx5202/is_2004/ai_n19123399)
1968 Dec 9, Doug Engelbart and researchers at Stanford Research Institute first demonstrated in SF the computer mouse along with a graphical user interface (gui), display editing, integrated text and graphics, hyper documents and 2-way video-conferencing with shared work spaces. In 2001 Thierry Bardini authored "Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing." William English (1929-2020) helped build the mouse and orchestrated its elaborate demonstration.
(SFC, 12/4/98, p.B2)(SSFC, 1/21/01, BR p.6)(SFC, 12/8/08, p.A1)(SSFC, 8/2/20, p.C10)
1968 Barbara Liskov received a doctorate from Stanford Univ. in computer science, the first such degree ever awarded to a woman in the US. In 2009 she won the $250,000 Turing computing award from the Association for Computing Machinery for her work in organizing complex programs and efforts to make software more resistant to errors and hacking.
(SFC, 3/13/09, p.C3)
1969 Sep 2, The first Internet message was a packet switch delivered to UCLA from BBN Corp. (Bolt Beranek and Newman). The 1st 2 machines of ARPANET were connected at Prof. Len Kleinrock's lab at UCLA. The US Dept. of Defense’s Advanced Research and Projects Agency (ARPANET) launched a self-healing computer network with TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol). By the early 1980’s the military component became a separate network and the true birth of today’s Internet is marked. By 2007 some university researchers with the federal government's blessing want to scrap the Internet and start over.
(http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070414/ap_on_hi_te/rebuilding_the_internet_8)(SFEC, 3/16/97, z1 p.3)(CompuServe Mag., 6/95, p.18)(SFC, 8/30/99, p.C10)(SFC, 9/3/99, p.C1)
1969 Jean Sammet (1928-2017) authored “Programming Languages: History and Fundamentals." She was one of six people who designed the Cobol computer language in 1959.
(SSFC, 6/4/17, p.C10)
1969 Frank Heart (1929-2018) oversaw the first routing computer for the Arpanet. He led a Bolt Beranek and Newman team to build the Interface Message Processor (IMP) to switch data among Arpanet computers.
(SFC, 6/27/18, p.D5)
1969 Ken Thompson (b.1943), computer scientist at Bell Labs, wrote the first version of the UNIX operating system on a PDP-7, a $72,000 closet sized DEC computer that arranged memory in 8,192 18-bit words. UNIX programming language was created by Bell labs in 1970. Dennis Ritchie (1941-2011) and others helped develop Unix. Ritchie later invented the C programming language (1969-1973. Dr. Thompson wrote C’s predecessor, known as B.
(www.bell-labs.com/history/unix/thompsonbio.html)(SFEC, 1/12/97, p.B6)(Econ, 6/12/04, p.37)(SFC, 10/14/11, p.D4)
1969 Intel's 1st product was a random access memory chip. Marcian Hoff Jr., Stanley Mazor and Federico Faggin of Intel developed the 4004 chip for a Japanese customer, Busicom, a calculator manufacturer. Intel acquired the rights to the chip for $60,000. The 3 men were later inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Akron, Ohio, in Sept. 1996. The 4004 packed 2300 transistors onto a single silicon chip.
(SJSVB, 7/8/96, p.12)(TAR, 1996, p.19)(WSJ, 9/22/98, p.B3)(SFC, 7/16/03, p.B1)
1969 Instinet was founded and later became owned by Reuters PLC. It became the biggest of the electronic trading systems for institutional traders.
(Wired, 2/98, p.96)
1969 Honeywell marketed its kitchen computer for $10,600 in a Niemann-Marcus catalog. Units were sold to universities as the Honeywell 316.
(WSJ, 10/15/01, p.R23)
1969 Manugistics was founded as a mainframe time-sharing company. In the 1980s it emerged as leader in software for managing factories and inventory.
(WSJ, 1/10/00, p.B6)
1969 Max Palevsky (d.2010 at 85) sold Scientific Data Systems, founded in 1961, to Xerox for $1 billion. He used the money to fund then-startup chip maker Intel becoming a director in the company.
(SFC, 5/8/10, p.C4)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Data_Systems)
1970 Jun 30, IBM announced the System 370 computer.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_370)
1970 Aug, The first all-computer championship was held in New York and won by CHESS 3.0 (CDC 6400), a program written by Slate, Atkin and Gorlen at Northwestern University. Six programs had entered the first Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) North American Computer Championships. The event was organized by Monty Newborn. The other programs were DALY CP, J Brit, COKO III, SCHACH, and the Marsland CP.
(http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lab/7378/comphis.htm)
1970 Oct 19, Amdahl Corp., a manufacturer of IBM mainframe compatible products, was formed at Sunnyvale, California by Dr. Gene Amdahl, a former IBM employee. In 1997 it became a wholly owned subsidiary of Fujitsu.
(www.wordiq.com/definition/Amdahl)
1970 The Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) of Xerox opened on the outskirts of Palo Alto. George Pake (1924-2004) ran the center until 1978. It was founded by Dr. Jacob Goldman.
(www.mit-forum.org.il/2000events/tenyears_eng.htm)(SFC, 10/25/00, p.D1)(SFC, 3/11/04, p.C5)
1970 Intel Corp. brought out the 1103 DRAM, the world's first commercially produced memory chip and launched the personal-computer revolution.
(SFEC,10/26/97, BR p.3)(http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa100898.htm)
1970 The first electronic editing terminals were used by newspapers.
(SFC, 1/29/00, p.E3)
1970-1980 CAT Scan (Computer Assisted Tomography) technology was developed.
(MT, 10/94, D. Swanbrow, p.9)
1970s The Dynabook was a CD-ROM based electronic book. Alan Kay suggested elements of the dynabook in his 1969 doctoral dissertation at Utah Univ.
(WSJ, 6/15/99, p.A16)(SFC, 10/25/00, p.D1)
1971 Jan, Intel Corp. created the first microprocessor. The 4004, the world's first microprocessor, is signed with the initials F.F., for Federico Faggin, its designer. The 4004 was released in 16-pin CERDIP packaging on November 15, 1971.
(www.intel4004.com/)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_4004)
1971 Nov 15, Intel first advertised its 4004 microprocessor in Electronic News. It contained 2,300 transistors, each the size of a red blood cell.
(www.intel.com/museum/archives/4004.htm)(Econ, 3/12/15, p.11)
1971 Jun, T. Vincent Learson (1912-1996) became CEO of IBM. He had helped develop the IBM System/360, one of the first commercially available business computers.
(SFC, 11/5/96, p.A22)
1971 Alan Kay led a team working on smalltalk, a pioneering object-oriented language at PARC.
(SFC, 10/25/00, p.D1)
1971 The 1st laser printer was made at Xerox PARC in Palo Alto, Ca.
(SFC, 7/26/04, p.F4)
1971 Ray Tomlinson, computer engineer, put the @ sign into the first e-mail message sent from one machine to another at BBN, a computer consulting firm, tomlinson@bbn-tenexa.
(SFC, 10/23/96, p.B1)(WSJ, 11/16/99, p.A1)
1972 Feb 1, Hewlett-Packard introduced the 1st scientific hand-held calculator, the HP-35, for $395.
(www.hp-collection.org/calculators/35a.html)(SFC, 8/31/09, p.D1)
1972 Jul, Robert Metcalf at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) combined packet switching from the Arpanet and single wire broadcasting to lay the foundations for computer networks. This system was called Ethernet and marked the first Internet message. The IEEE committee 802.3 later defined the ethernet standard.
(WSJ,11/14/94, p.R26)(SFEC, 3/28/99, Z1 p.8)(Econ, 6/12/04, p.26)
1972 Hubert L. Dreyfus (1929-2017), UC Berkeley Prof. of Philosophy, authored “What Computers Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason" (1972).
(http://tinyurl.com/l2efld9)(SFC, 5/4/17, p.D5)
1972 The term hypervisor originated in IBM's CP-370 reimplementation of CP-67 for the System/370, released this year as VM/370. The term hypervisor call referred to the paravirtualization interface, by which a "guest" operating system could access services directly from the (higher-level) control program – analogous to making a "supervisor call" to the (same level) operating system.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypervisor)
1972 Atari was founded by Nolan Bushnell, 2 years after he built the first videogame, Computer Space. He conceived Pong and it was built by Al Alcorn.
(Wired, 10/96, p.168)
1972 Vinton Cerf, hearing-impaired since birth, developed e-mail-like text messaging protocols for the Arpanet.
(SFC, 7/26/00, p.D3)
1972 Gary Starkweather at PARC completed a prototype of the 1st laser printer.
(SFC, 10/25/00, p.D1)
1972 Seymour Cray left Control Data Corp. and co-founded Cray Research Inc. There he built the Cray-1 and Cray-2 supercomputers. They were used to help the defense system create sophisticated weapons systems and the oil industry to construct geologic models for predicting mineral deposits.
(SFC, 9/24/96, p.A6)
1972 Hewlett-Packard introduced the first scientific handheld calculator, the HP-35, which made the slide-rule obsolete.
(SFC, 3/3/99, p.A11)
1972 Intel Corp. brought out the 8008 microprocessor, the first to use 8-bit addressing. it had 3,500 transistors.
(TAR, 1996, p.21)
1972 SAP, a German business software company based in Walldorf, Baden-Wurttemberg, was founded by Hasso Plattner and 4 other dissidents from IBM.
(Econ, 5/20/06, p.73)(Econ, 10/28/06, p.78)
1972-1994 A computer error miscalculated payments to 695,000 Social Security recipients to a total of $850 million in retirement benefits over this period.
(SFC, 10/4/96, p.A3)
1973 May 22, Robert Metcalf (b.1946), at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), circulated a memo about his Ethernet ideas to PARC colleagues. He later fixed this day as the birthdate of Ethernet. Metcalf had combined packet switching from the Arpanet and single wire broadcasting to lay the foundations for computer networks. Bob Metcalf described ethernet for the 1st time in a patent memo.
(Econ, 12/12/09, TQ p.23)(SFC, 10/25/00, p.A16)
1973 Nick Sheridan, a researcher at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) created the first electronic letter in history: an X, for Xerox.
(WSJ, 1/4/00, p.B1)
1973 Alto, the 1st complete computer with a graphical interphase, mouse and ethernet networking, went live at PARC.
(SFC, 10/25/00, p.D1)
1974 Ted Nelson authored his manifesto “Computer Lib / Dream Machines," in which he announced that computing should be available to all without complication or human servility being required.
(SSFC, 4/23/05, p.B4)
1974 Josef Raviv (d.1999 at 65) co-authored the paper: "Optimal Decoding of Linear Codes for Minimizing Symbol Error Rate." This was the basis for the algorithm known as backward/forward algorithm, which helped computers understand a human's natural language.
(SFC, 10/30/99, p.C2)
1974 Intel Corp. introduced the 8080 microprocessor. It became the heart of the first microcomputer, the 1975 MITS Altair.
(TAR, 1996, p.21)(WSJ, 11/16/98, p.R10)
1974 Intel's Israel Development Center opened in the northern port city of Haifa. This was the company's first design and development center outside the United States.
(AFP, 5/1/14)
1974 Motorola helped launch the smartcard market by building the first smartcard chip with Groupe Bull of France.
(FT, 3/4/98, p.21)
1974 Tandem Computers was founded.
(SFEM,11/2/97, p.15)
1974 Ronald Aurel Lesea (1940-2004), violinist and inventor, developed the 1st hand-held translator. It turned 9 foreign languages into English. His inventions also included the 1st call-forwarding device for a telephone.
(SFC, 12/6/04, p.B3)
1974 Charles Simonyi at PARC completed Bravo, the 1st WYSIWYG word processor for Alto.
(SFC, 10/25/00, p.D1)
1975 Mar 5, The Homebrew Computer Club, founded by peace activist Fred Moore, held its first meeting in Menlo Park, Ca. It was an outgrowth of the store-front based People’s Computer Co. The meeting inspired Steve Wozniak (24) to design and build the first Apple computer.
(SSFC, 4/23/05, p.B1)(Reuters, 9/27/06)
1975 Sep, Byte Magazine began publishing with the birth of the PC. It was regarded as the most technically minded of the new computer magazines. Publication was suspended in 1998.
(WSJ, 5/28/98, p.B4)(www.vintage-computer.com/byte.shtml)
1975 Fred Brooks authored "The Mythical Man Month: Essays on Software Engineering."
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month)
1975 Gary Kildall, working as a consultant to Intel, was asked to design and develop a language called PL/M for the 8080 chip. He wrote a primitive operating system for it which he called CP/M.
(http://museum.sysun.com/museum/cpmhist.html)
1975 Paul Allen and Bill Gates began working on the first computer language for personal computers. Allen became a minority owner with a 35% stake.
(WSJ, 4/4/00, p.A16)(WSJ, 1/22/04, p.A1)
1975 Kurzweil Computer Products created the Kurzweil Reading machine and the 1st multifont optical character recognition (OCR) technology.
(SFC, 7/26/00, p.D3)
1975 Dr. Henry Edward Roberts (1941-2010), American engineer and medical doctor, developed and introduced the MITS Altair 8800. His Micro Instrumentation & Telemetry Systems of Albuquerque, N.M., sold the build-it-yourself kit by mail-order. Bill Gates and Paul Allen developed the first software program for it.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Roberts_%28computers%29)(WSJ, 11/16/98, p.R10)(SFC, 4/2/10, p.C7)
1975 PARC engineers demonstrated an improved user interface using icons and the 1st use of pop-up menus.
(SFC, 10/25/00, p.D1)
1976 Apr 1, Stephen Wozniak, Ronald Wayne and Steven Jobs founded Apple Computer. They incorporated Jan 3, 1977. Wayne soon sold his share of Apple for $800 US dollars, and later accepted $1,500 to forfeit any claims against Apple. From 1976 to 1977 Jobs and Wozniak built 200 Apple-1 computers selling them for about $666 each.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Wayne)(Econ, 1/30/15, p.56)(SFC, 8/27/18, p.A4)
1976 Joseph Weizenbaum (1923-2008) wrote "Computer Power and Human Reason." He described here his program called ELIZA that demonstrated a conversation between a patient and a computer posing as a psychiatrist.
(I&I, Penzias, p.144)( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Weizenbaum)
1976 Computer Associates was founded as a maker of business programs for mainframe computers. In 2018 CA Technologies agreed to be acquired by Broadcom for nearly $19 billion.
(SFC, 7/13/18, p.C5)
1976 Jim Goodnight co-founded software-maker SAS on the campus of the Univ. of North Carolina. By 2007 the company was a leader in business intelligence software and the world’s largest privately owned software maker.
(Econ, 12/1/07, p.84)
1976 Intel Corp. began construction of a plant in Hillsboro, Oregon.
(SFC, 3/12/02, p.B10)
1976 The 6502 microprocessor by MOS Technologies was introduced and later used in the Apple II personal computer.
(TAR, 1996, p.22)
1976 Gary Kildall separated out the parts of CP/M version 1 that addressed the specific format of the diskettes, and placed them in a separate module he called the BIOS, for Basic Input/Output System. That way, the system could easily be adapted to new hardware without having to rewrite or even revise the complex heart of the software.
(http://museum.sysun.com/museum/cpmhist.html)
1976 The 1st CRAY-1 supercomputer was installed at Los Alamos Laboratories in New Mexico for a 6-month trial.
(www.cisl.ucar.edu/computers/gallery/cray/cray1.jsp)(WSJ, 3/2/00, p.B8)
1977 Jan 3, Apple Computers incorporated under Steven Jobs and Steve Wozniak. In March Apple produced the Apple II, the first pre-assembled, mass-produced PC.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer)(WSJ, 1/11/99, p.R42)
1977 Apr 14, Computer enthusiasts gathered for the 1st West Coast Computer Faire at the SF Civic Auditorium. An estimated 20-30 thousand American homes had computers.
(SFC, 4/12/02, p.G6)
1977 Apr 16, Jim Warren (1936-2021) and Bob Reiling staged the first West Coast Computer Faire. The 2-day event, where the Commodore Pet and Apple II were introduce, drew nearly 13,000 people to the San Francisco Civic Auditiorium.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Coast_Computer_Faire)(SSFC, 12/5/21, p.F1)
1977 May, Larry Ellison and Robert Miner founded Oracle Corp. in Belmont, Ca., after they persuaded the CIA to let them pick up a lapsed contract for a special database program.
(SFC, 5/20/02, p.A13)
1977 Jun 5, The first Apple II personal computers went on sale.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II)
1977 Jun 10, Apple Computer shipped its 1st Apple II.
(MC, 6/10/02)
1977 Jul 11, The CRAY 1-A was delivered to the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). This was Cray Research's first official customer, paying US$8.86 million ($7.9 million plus $1 million for the disks).
(www.cisl.ucar.edu/computers/gallery/cray/cray1.jsp)
1977 Aug 3, Radio Shack issued a press release introducing the TRS-80 computer. 25 existed and within weeks thousands were ordered.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80)
1977 CP/M version 2.2 added expanded disk formatting tables which could allow access to up to 8 (eight) megabytes per drive in up to 8 (eight) total drives. It was version 2.2 that became the megahit that dominated microcomputing almost from its outset.
(http://museum.sysun.com/museum/cpmhist.html)
1977 Microsoft was formed as a partnership.
(WSJ, 4/4/00, p.A16)
1977 John Young succeeded William Hewlett as President and became CEO in 1978.
(SFC, 3/3/99, p.A11)
1977 Innovations made on the NASDAQ stock exchange were incorporated into Canada's CATS, Computer Assisted Trading System. After Canada electronic trading moved to the Paris Bourse and other exchanges such as Brussels and Madrid.
(Hem, 8/95, p.78)
1977 The RSA standard for cryptography was introduced. RSA stands for Riverst, Shamir, and Adelman, three Israelis at MIT who played a fundamental role in developing the PKI infrastructure. They founded RSA Data Security in 1982.
(Econ, 5/25/13, p.79)(http://tinyurl.com/7mdfone)
1977 Xerox PARC in Palo Alto held a "Futures Day" and demonstrated their Alto personal computer and mouse.
(WSJ, 3/16/99, p.A24)
1977 Xerox launched its laser printer.
(WSJ, 3/16/99, p.A24)
1978 Feb 14, G. W. Boone and M.J. Cochran of Texas Instruments received a patent for their Variable Function Programmed Calculator.
(www.patents4technologies.com/Historical.htm)
1978 Feb 16, The 1st Computer Bulletin Board System was Ward & Randy's CBBS in Chicago.
(www.historyoftheinternet.com/chap3.html)
1978 Late Feb, Computers made the cover of Time.
(TMC, 1994, p.1978)
1978 Jun, Intel introduced the 8086 16-bit HMOS chip.
(SFC, 7/16/03, p.B1)
1978 The "Space Invaders" computer game became the first video game mega-hit and spurred sales of the Atari 2600.
(SFC, 7/5/97, p.E1)
1978 Micron Technology was founded in Boise, Idaho, by 4 engineers: Ward Parkinson, Joe Parkinson, Dennis Wilson and Doug Pitman. Startup funding to produce memory chips was provided by Idaho billionaire J.R. Simplot.
(www.micron.com)
1978 Microsoft annual sales topped $1 million.
(WSJ, 4/4/00, p.A16)
1978 Robert Miner of Oracle Corp. developed the world's 1st relational database program using IBM's Structured Query Language.
(SFC, 5/20/02, p.A13)
1979 May 8, Radio Shack released TRSDOS 2.3.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-DOS)
1979 Sep 24, CompuServe began operation as the 1st computer information service.
(www.businesshistorybooks.com/Computers.htm)
1979 Nov, The first annual COMDEX trade show opened in Las Vegas at the MGM Grand. It was a trade show for business related computer hardware and software. The acronym used to stand for Computer Dealer Expo, but since 1984, the D has stood for Distribution.
(Hem, Nov.'95, p.138)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COMDEX)
1979 Gwen Bell founded the Computer Museum in Boston. It originally used space in Marlborough, Mass., and moved to Boston in 1982 when it became a public, nonprofit educational foundation.
(SFC, 10/18/96, C9)
1979 Jim Ellis (d.2001 at 45) and Tom Truscott, Duke graduate students, linked computers to share information and created the Usenet electronic bulletin board.
(SFC, 6/29/01, p.D5)
1979 Steve Jobs and team of Apple staff visited PARC. They incorporated many of the ideas they saw into their Lisa and Macintosh computers.
(SFC, 10/25/00, p.D1)
1979 Robert Metcalf of Xerox Corp. started 3Com Corp. The company specialized in connecting computers using the Ethernet system, which he helped develop. The early Ethernet adapters sold for $5000. In 1994 they sold for $100.
(WSJ,11/14/94, p.R26)
1979 Samuel Maslak founded Acuson Corp. The company was based on the use of ultrasound, which shoots sound waves into the body, and then converts the echoes to visible images.
(WSJ, 5/13/96, p.B-3)
1979 Sue Rugge established Information on Demand in Berkeley, a pioneering full service information company. It was later acquired by Robert Maxwell and managed through Pergamon Press. She later authored "The Information Broker's Handbook."
(SFC, 6/16/99, p.B4)
1979 Carol Shaw became the first female video game designer with the release of her Atari game, 3D Tic-Tac-Toe.
(SFC, 2/18/14, p.A6)
1979 IBM Corp. adopted the Intel 8088 microprocessor for its new personal computer (PC), which launched in 1981. DOS, Lotus 1-2-3, and other new software were based on the 8088.
(TAR, 1996, p.25)
1979 The Motorola 68000 microprocessor made its debut. It was chosen to be used in the Macintosh Computer, which introduced the first graphical user interface.
(TAR, 1996, p.26)
1979 Seagate Corp., a manufacturer of disk drives, was founded by Alan Shugart and Finis Conner. Shugart was credited with leading an IBM team that invented the floppy disk.
(SFC, 11/15/99, p.A6)
1979 Teradata, a software company, was founded to develop and sell relational database management system with the same name.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teradata)
1979 Roy Trubshow and Richard Bartle, Univ. of Essex students, created the 1st text-only MUD (Multi-User Dungeon).
(NW, 11/25/02, p.48)
1979 VisiCalc (for "visible calculator") became the first spreadsheet computer program for personal computers. It was originally released for Apple II by VisiCorp.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisiCalc)
1980 Apr, Commodore president Jack Tramiel ordered the development of a computer that could sell for under $300 US. What had been an oversupply of parts became the VIC-20.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_VIC-20)
1980 May 22, The computer game Pac-Man was first released in Japan. Pac-Man, with its characters: Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde, epitomized the arcade games of the 1980s.
(SFC, 7/5/97, p.E1)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pac-Man)
1980 Jun 25, The Associated Press chose 11 major newspapers to launch a cooperative experiment to deliver news electronically to computer-equipped homes.
(SFC, 6/24/05, p.F2)
1980 Jul, Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products completed version 0.10 of QDOS.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Paterson)
1980 Oct 9, 1st consumer use of home banking by computer at Knoxville, Ten.
(MC, 10/9/01)
1980 Oct, Hambrecht & Quist took public Apple and Genentech Corp.
(SFC, 6/22/96, p.D1)
1980 Dec 1, IBM delivered its 1st prototype PC to Microsoft. IBM selected Microsoft to create MS-DOS, the operating system for its first PC. Steve Ballmer arrived from Proctor & Gamble as an assistant to Gates. Paul Allen bought the QDOS operating system (Quick and Dirty Operating System) from a rival company for $50,000. It was renamed MS-DOS and licensed to IBM. The IBM 5150 PC standardized the marketplace.
(WSJ, 4/4/00, p.A16)(SFEC, 4/16/00, p.B1)
1980 Dec 11, Massachusetts Sec. of State Michael Connolly banned the sale of Apple Computer stock arguing that the $22 price per share was too high.
(SFC, 12/9/05, p.F6)
1980 Dec 12, US copyright law was amended to include computer programs.
(MC, 12/12/01)
1980 Dec 12, Hambrecht & Quist took Apple Corp. public with 4.6 million shares at $22 per share, which closed at $29 per share.
(www.macworld.com/2006/03/features/30timeline/index.php)(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
1980 Dec, Microsoft bought a QDOS license. The "Microsoft Disk Operating System" or MS-DOS was based on QDOS, the "Quick and Dirty Operating System" written by Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products, for their prototype Intel 8086 based computer. QDOS was based on Gary Kildall's CP/M. Paterson had bought a CP/M manual and used it as the basis to write his operating system in six weeks. QDOS was different enough from CP/M to be considered legal. Microsoft bought the rights to QDOS for $50,000, keeping the IBM deal a secret from Seattle Computer Products.
(WSJ, 4/4/00, p.A16)(WSJ, 1/22/04, p.A1)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QDOS)
1980 Hewlett-Packard introduced its first personal computer, the HP-85. Company sales topped $3 billion and employees numbered 57,000.
(SFC, 3/3/99, p.A11)
1980 IBM went to Digital Research to license the ubiquitous CP/M for the new IBM-PC, but failed to reach an agreement with Gary Kildall. IBM soon struck a deal with Microsoft.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QDOS#Reasons_for_QDOS)
1980 The Ctrl-Alt-Delete reboot command was created by David Bradley, an IBM engineer.
(SFC, 9/7/01, p.B3)
1980 Informix was founded by Roger Sippl. It was taken over by Phil White in 1989. The company suffered accounting fraud and illegal insider trading charges in 1997 following problems with a new multimedia database product.
(SFC, 11/16/99, p.A5)
1980 Iomega, was founded. It designed and manufactured computer memory storage devices. The company became public in 1983.
(WSJ, 6/17/96, p.B6)
1980 Tim Paterson wrote QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System), a 16-bit operating system for an Intel 8086-based computer kit sold by Seattle Computer Products.
(http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa033099.htm)
1980 J.R. Simplot, Idaho potato tycoon, began serving on the board of startup Micron Technology. He invested several million dollars into the company, which made memory chips.
(WSJ, 10/7/04, p.A12)(www.micron.com)
1980 United Telecommunications under Paul Henson (d. 1997 at 71) began laying the 23,000 mile, first optical fiber communications network.
(SFC, 4/16/97, p.A21)
1980 Xerox with Intel and Digital Equipment licensed Ethernet for a nominal fee. It became and remained an industry standard.
(SFC, 10/25/00, p.D1)
1980 Dr. Fujio Masuoka, a researcher at Toshiba, filed a patent for a variation on floating-gate memory. His invention was dubbed flash memory because it allowed entire sections of memory to be erased quickly.
(Econ, 3/11/06, Survey p.28)
1980s Herwart Holland-Moritz (d.2001) and other early hackers formed the Chaos Computer Club (CCC).
(SFC, 8/2/01, p.C2)
1981 Apr 24, The IBM Personal Computer was introduced. IBM had developed a personal computer with a technical specification other manufacturers could copy. The operating system was licensed from Microsoft and the microprocessor circuitry from Intel.
(HN, 4/24/98)(WSJ, 11/16/98, p.R10)(WSJ, 1/11/99, p.R42)
1981 Apr, Osborne Computer Corp., founded by Adam Osborne (1939-2003), launched the 24-pound portable Osborne 1 for $1,795.
(SFC, 3/28/03, p.A16)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Osborne)
1981 Apr, Tim Paterson, who wrote QDOS in 1980, quit Seattle Computer Products and began working at Microsoft in May. He became best known as the original author of the popular MS-DOS operating system (1981).
(http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa033099.htm)
1981 Aug 12, IBM introduced the IBM 5150, better known as the PC, along with PC-DOS version 1.0. The beige box with 16 kilobytes of memory was priced at $1,565.
(http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa033099.htm)(Econ, 7/29/06, p.57)
1981 Tracy Kidder published "The Soul of a New Machine."
(WSJ, 3/4/99, p.A12)
1981 LSI Logic of Milpitas, Ca., helped create the market for custom chips used for specific chores.
(WSJ, 9/4/02, p.B9)
1981 In San Jose, Ca., water supply wells were found to be contaminated due to leaks from Fairchild and IBM storage tanks used for toxic solvents.
(SFC, 1/30/04, p.E6)
1981 In India N.R. Narayana Murthy co-founded Infosys Technologies with 6 other software writers including S. Gopalakrishnan with some 10,000 rupees (about $1000) pooled from household money. In 1999 it became the first Indian company to list its shares in the US. Chairman Murthy retired in 2006 with Infosys employing 58,000 people. His 5.9% stake was valued at $1.2 billion.
(WSJ, 8/21/06, p.B7)(Econ, 10/7/06, Survey p.9)(SSFC, 6/29/08, p.C1)
1981 In Japan Masayoshi Son (b.1957), US educated entrepreneur, set up Softbank as a software distributor.
(Econ, 11/27/10, p.71)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masayoshi_Son)
1982 Jul, The Timex Sinclair 1000 (TS1000), the first computer produced by Timex Sinclair, a joint-venture between Timex Corporation and Sinclair Research, was launched.
(http://oldcomputers.net/ts1000.html)
1982 Aug, Commodore Business Machines (CBM) released the Commodore 64 for $595.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64)
1982 Sep, 3Com under Robert Metcalf started shipping EtherLink adaptor cards for IBM’s new personal computer.
(Econ, 12/12/09, TQ p.24)
1982 Dec 26, TIME magazine's Man of the Year was a computer.
(MC, 12/26/01)
1982 John Walker founded Autodesk. His AutoCAD computer aided design software was introduced and shipped.
(http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=3235534)
1982 John Warnock and Charles Geschke founded Adobe Corp., a software company that developed tools for desktop publishing. In 1993 Adobe introduce the Acrobat software that allowed documents to appear on computer screen exactly as you would see them on paper.
(SFC, 5/16/96, p.B1)(Econ, 4/16/05, p.58)
1982 Commodore’s VIC-20, criticized in print as being underpowered, became the first computer to sell more than 1 million units and was the best-selling computer of 1982.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_VIC-20)
1982 Compaq Computer was founded by Rod Canion, Jim Harris and Bill Murto. They designed the company's product at a local House of Pies.
(SSFC, 10/6/02, p.G1)
1982 Control Video Corp. was founded as an online video game company. It transformed to Quantum Computer Services, a private online service for Apple and IBM, and then became America Online (AOL) in 1989. In 1998 Kara Swisher wrote "aol.com: How Steve Case beat Bill Gates, Nailed the Netheads, and Made Millions in the War for the Web.
(SFEC, 8/2/98, BR p.1,8)
1982 Intel introduced the 286 microprocessor, the first to support general protection and virtual memory. It ran at speeds of 8-12 Mhz and was 6 times more powerful than the 8086. IBM used the 286 in its fledgling PC and bought a 12%, $250 million stake in Intel to keep it afloat.
(TAR, 1996, p.26)(SFC, 7/18/08, p.C1)
1982 Microsoft was a company in one building with about 100 employees.
(WSJ, 12/12/95, p.A16)
1982 Silicon Graphics was founded by Stanford engineering professor James Clark. It made sophisticated computers for modeling. Its first product, the IRIS graphics terminal ,was released in 1983. The company went public in 1986. Clark left the company in 1994 to start Netscape. In 2006 the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. In 2009 the company again filed for Bankruptcy and sold itself to Rackable systems from $25 million.
(Econ, 7/29/06, p.58)(WSJ, 4/2/09, p.B7)(WSJ, 4/2/09, p.B7)
1982 Sun Microsystems was founded by tech whiz Andreas Bechtolsheim, CEO Scott McNeally, entrepreneur Vinod Khosla, and software inventor Bill Joy. The Sun slogan was "the network is the computer." Khosla later made a fortune as a partner at the Kleiner Perkins venture capital firm.
(WSJ, 8/11/95, p.B-10)(WSJ, 3/19/97, p.B1)(Econ, 3/25/06, p.72)
1982 John Hopfield, Bell Labs physicist, reawakened scientific interest in neural networks by finding a resemblance between their neighbor-pulling-neighbor structure and the behavior of magnetized atoms in some kinds of crystals..
(I&I, Penzias, p.107)
1982 The computer game "Raiders of the Lost Arc" was designed for the Atari 2600 platform.
(SFC, 3/11/03, p.D5)
1982 The computer game "Donkey Kong" by Nintendo became a hit in America. Nintendo also introduced the overweight plumber named "Mario."
(SFC, 7/5/97, p.E1)
1982 Flight Simulator 1.0 hit the market from Microsoft. It was the first flight simulator game.
(USAT, 3/24/99, p.10E)
1982 Rich Skrenta (b.1967), a freshman in Pennsylvania, developed Elk Cloner as a practical joke. It was the 1st virus to hit computers worldwide and later became known as a "boot sector" virus. When it boots, or starts up, an infected disk places a copy of the virus in the computer's memory. Whenever someone inserts a clean disk into the machine and types the command "catalog" for a list of files, a copy gets written onto that disk as well. The newly infected disk is passed on to other people, other machines and other locations.
(AP, 9/1/07)(SFC, 9/3/07, p.C3)
1983 Jan 1, TCP/IP became the standard for Internet protocol.
(SFC, 8/30/99, p.C10)
1983 Jan 19, Apple’s Lisa computer went on sale for $1400. It was pulled from the market after 2 years.
(SFC, 8/25/11, p.A10)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lisa)
1983 Feb 18, Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, left the company but kept his stake in the business. Allen was forced to resign from Microsoft after being diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease which was successfully treated by several months of radiation therapy.
(http://tinyurl.com/62v8hh9)(Econ, 4/30/11, p.90)(www.thocp.net/biographies/allen_paul.htm)
1983 Mar 8, IBM released PC DOS version 2.0.
(http://www.e-articles.info/e/a/title/DOS-Versions/)
1983 Oct 20, IBM-PC DOS Version 2.1 was released.
(www.e-articles.info/e/a/title/DOS-Versions/)
1983 Nov 30, Radio Shack announced the Tandy Model 2000 computer (80186 chip).
(www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lakes/6757/t2kfaq.txt)
1983 Jim and Marie Petcoff founded the Computer Museum of America at La Mesa in San Diego County. It was later relocated to Coleman College.
(SFC, 8/5/97, p.A20)
1983 Betty Holberton led a committee to establish standards for COBOL, the Common Business Oriented Language for computers.
(WSJ, 11/22/96, p.A12)
1983 Compaq unveiled its 1st portable computer.
(WSJ, 1/9/02, p.B1)
1983 IBM unveiled its PCJr home computer.
(WSJ, 1/9/02, p.B1)
1983 The Windows operating system was first introduced.
(NW, 8/6/01, p.8)
1983 Richard Stallman of MIT launched the GNU Project (GNU's Not Unix) to create a free version of the UNIX operating system.
(SFEC, 8/13/00, p.D4)
1983 Optical fibers began to replace copper cables for transmitting information.
(WSJ, 8/1/97, p.A9C)
1983 John Sculley was recruited from Pepsico to reorganize Apple Computer Corp.
(I&I, Penzias, p.183)
1983 Fred Cohen, graduate student, released (in a controlled experiment) the world's first computer virus. Cohen is generally credited with having coined the term "computer virus." He later became the security guru at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, Ca.
(Wired, 8/95, p.117)(SSFC, 2/10/02, p.A4)
1983 Mitch Kapor’s Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet lured non-techies buy personal computers.
(WSJ, 1/13/06, p.P8)
1983 Paul Mochapetris, an Internet address system researcher, grouped computers into groups. "Thus .edu signified a university, .gov indicated a government agency. Corporations got .com."
(WSJ, 10/11/99, p.B1)
1984 Jan 24, Apple Computer Inc unveiled its Macintosh personal computer. It included sound-sampling technology that could play recorded sounds. The CPU had a speed of 8 MHz and 128k of RAM. It sold for $2,495.
(WSJ,11/14/94, p.R26)(WSJ, 3/4/97, p.B1)(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
1984 Apr 1, Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant launched the Well (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) in Sausalito. In La Jolla, Ca., Larry Brilliant, physician and head of Network Technologies Int'l. in Michigan, pitched the idea for a public computer conferencing system to Stewart Brand, publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog. Their meeting led to the 1985 founding of "The Well" online service that operated as a collection of conferences. It used the PicoSpan conferencing software. In 2001 Katie Hafner authored "The Well: A Story of Love, Death and Real Life in the Seminal Online Community."
(Wired, 5/97, p.100)(SSFC, 5/27/01, DB p.69)
1984 Apr 24, Apple leaders Steve Jobs. Steve Wozniak and John Scully introduced the new $1295 Apple IIc personal computer at San Francisco’s Moscone Center.
(SFC, 3/25/17, p.C1)
1984 Aug 14, IBM released PC DOS version 3.0.
(www.islandnet.com/~kpolsson/today/814.htm)
1984 Jeremy Bernstein wrote a book on Bell Labs titled: "Three Degrees Above Zero." Here he described the computerized chess program know as Belle.
(I&I, Penzias, p.151)
1984 Michael Moritz authored “The Little Kingdom: The Private Story of Apple Computer."
(SSFC, 5/22/05, p.F1)
1984 Tim Berners-Lee, a researcher at CERN, envisioned a computer system for researchers to share documents and databases. This grew to become the World Wide Web.
(WSJ, 10/1/99, p.W6)
1984 Cisco Systems was founded by Sandy Lerner and her husband Len Bosack. It was one of the first companies to connect networks of computers to other networks.
(SFC, 5/30/12, p.E1)(http://newsroom.cisco.com/overview)
1984 Doug Lenat founded Cycorp to develop the Cyc database in an effort to teach a computer common sense. In 2002 a web link was established to gather data from the public: www.cyc.com.
(SFC, 6/10/02, p.E1)
1984 Crazy Eddie Inc. went public. The retail electronics chain grew rapidly and then burned out in 1989 in a scandal of missing inventory, stolen cash and bogus merchandise bookings. In 1990 assets were frozen and founder Eddie Antar disappeared under charges of bilking investors out of $74 mil. He was nabbed in Israel in 1992 and sent to a US prison.
(WSJ, 6/13/96, p.A1,8)
1984 The Dallas Semiconductor Corp. began operations under Vin Prothro (d.2000 at 58).
(SFC, 11/18/00, p.A24)
1984 Michael Dell (19), a student at the Univ. of Texas, founded Dell Computer in Austin, Texas.
(SFEC, 3/7/99, p.B9)(SSFC, 4/13/03, p.I1)
1984 John Lasseter left his animation job at Disney to join George Lucas’ special effects computer group. The division was purchased in 1986 by Steve Jobs and became Pixar.
(SFC, 1/25/06, p.C1)
1984 Ray Ozzie left Lotus Development and founded Iris Associates, which created Lotus Notes, a collaborative software program. Iris was acquired by Lotus in 1994 and Lotus was acquired by IBM in 1995. In 2006 Bill Gates named Ozzie to succeed him as Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Ozzie)
1984 Ted Waitt started Gateway Computer at his grandmother’s Iowa farmhouse.
(SFC, 5/20/05, p.C2)
1984 Hewlett-Packard introduced the HP Laser-Jet printer. Company sales passed $6 billion and the number of workers approached 85,000. HP also introduced a printer using its ground-breaking thermal inkjet printing technology.
(SFC, 3/3/99, p.A11)(SFC, 2/22/06, p.C1)
1984 Prodigy was founded as a joint venture of CBS, IBM and Sears. CBS dropped out in 1986, two years before the first service called Trintex went online. Its name was changed to Prodigy in 1989 and went national in 1990. In 1996 it was sold for less than $200 million to its management, a private group with backing by the Mexican firm Grupo Carso.
(SFC, 5/13/96, p.A4)(WSJ, 1/22/98, p.B14)
1984 China’s Lenovo computer firm was founded by 11 engineers, including Liu Chuanzhi, with a $25,000 loan from the Chinese Academy of Sciences to help commercialize government-funded technologies. Until 2004 it was known as Legend Computer. By 2012 Lenovo’s revenues reached $15 billion.
(Econ, 8/4/12, p.61)(Econ, 1/12/12, p.55)(Econ, 6/20/15, p.60)
1984 In Russia Alexander Pajitnov, a computer programmer at the Moscow Academy of Science, invented the game "Tetris" on an old Electronica 60 computer. He gave up the rights to the game to the State for ten years. In 1985 it was introduced on the IBM and Commodore 64 and ported to handheld devices in 1989. In 1996 rights for the game reverted back to Pajitnov. He and Henk Rogers soon founded Blue Planet Software to manage the Tetris rights.
(SFC, 7/7/96, C5)(SFC, 6/3/09, p.C5)(SFC, 6/6/14, p.E3)
1985 Feb 21, The first 3-day Macworld Expo opened at Brooks Hall in San Francisco.
(SSFC, 1/30/21, p.F2)
1985 Feb, Steve Wozniak left Apple Corp. to start his own company making home video products.
(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
1985 Mar, The Well online conferencing service went live from Sausalito, Ca., with a VAX computer, 6 modems and 6 phone lines.
(WSJ, 8/5/96, p.B5)(Wired, 5/97, p.106)
1985 Sep, Steven Jobs left Apple Computer Corp. after losing control over the Macintosh division to Jean-Louis Gasee, appointed by John Sculley. Jobs went on to start NeXt.
(I&I, Penzias, p.185)(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
1985 Oct 16, Intel introduced its 32-bit 80386 microcomputer chip.
(www.islandnet.com/~kpolsson/micropro/proc1980.htm)
1985 Dec, IBM-PC DOS Version 3.2 was released.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-DOS)
1985 Autodesk went public. The IPO of 1.6 million shares was at $11.00 per share.
(http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=3235534)
1985 Raymond Portwood Jr. (d.2000 at 66) co-created the Carmen Sandiego computer game for learning academic subjects.
(SFEC, 7/30/00, p.C12)
1985 The multi-media Amiga computer was introduced. Commodore sold some 5 million before it filed for bankruptcy in 1994. A German PC maker bought the company and went bankrupt. Gateway acquired it in 1997 and sold it in 1999.
(WSJ, 1/3/00, p.A12)
1985 Ted Waitt co-founded Gateway Computer in an Iowa farmhouse.
(WSJ, 3/1/00, p.A1)
1985 IBM pulled its PCJr computer from the market.
(WSJ, 1/9/02, p.B1)
1985 Navigation Technologies (NavTech) was started by Russell Shields. It grew to become one of the premier suppliers of digital-map databases in the world.
(Wired, Dec., '95, p.96)
1985 Nintendo Co. of Japan launched its first home video game console: the Nintendo Entertainment System with “Super Mario Bros." included. In Japan it was known as the Family Computer or Famicom.
(Hem, 4/96, p.29)(Econ, 12/24/16, p.68)
1985 Parametric Technology, an industrial design software firm, was founded by Samuel Geisberg, a former mathematics professor at Leningrad State Univ.
(WSJ, 5/27/97, pB6)
1985 Steve Case founded Quantum Computer Services, the predecessor to America Online (AOL).
(WSJ, 1/11/00, p.B1)
1985 Radia Perlman, software designer and network engineer, earned the name “Mother of the Internet" for her invention of the Spanning Tree Protocol, a fundamental function to the operation of network bridges.
(SFC, 2/18/14, p.A6)
1986 Jan, The first PC virus, called Brain, was discovered in the wild. Though it achieved fame because it was the first of its type, the virus was not widespread as it could only travel by hitching a ride on floppy disks swapped between users. The first virus to hit computers running a Microsoft Corp.'s operating system (DOS) came when two brothers in Pakistan wrote a boot sector program now dubbed "Brain," purportedly to punish people who spread pirated software.
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4630910.stm)(AP, 9/1/07)
1986 Mar 13, Microsoft Corp., an 11-year-old company, went public with 2.5 million shares and rose from $21 to $28 on opening day. Its revenues for the year were $197 million and it employed 1,153 people.
(Wired, 12/98, p.196)(WSJ, 4/4/00, p.A16)
1986 Mar, Oracle Corp. sold 1 million shares in its 1st public stock offering. Sales this year reached $55.4 million.
(SFC, 5/20/02, p.A13)
1986 The US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act was created. Under the act the release of a computer virus was illegal, but the construction of such viruses was not.
(WSJ, 3/31/05, p.B1)
1986 Beny Alagem, a former Israeli tank driver, founded Packard Bell Electronics, a small computer manufacturer. He bought the old Packard Bell name and marketed his computers under the old name.
(WSJ, 3/26/96, p.A-1)
1986 Finis Connor left Seagate and founded Connor Peripherals.
(WSJ, 1/20/02, p.B4)
1986 Phillip W. Katz (d.2000 at 37) founded PKWare, a maker of compression software later known as PKZip.
(WSJ, 6/19/00, p.A1)
1986 Steve Jobs founded NeXT Inc. and purchased the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm for $10 million and started his own company called Pixar.
(SFC, 1/25/06, p.C1)(SFC, 8/25/11, p.A10)
1986 Dr. Nathan Myhrvold, founder and president of Dynamical Systems, sold his software firm to Microsoft and joined Microsoft, where he spent the next 14 years.
(Econ, 10/22/05, Survey p.9)
1986 Microsoft, and Novell Corporations went public. At its debut Microsoft was worth $519 mil. with just over $85 mil. in revenue for the prior six months.
(WSJ, 8/9/95, p.C-1)
1987 Mar 2, The Macintosh II computer was introduced. The 1st color Mac had a CPU speed of 16 MHz and sold for $3,898.
(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)(www.applematters.com/index.php/section/history/2006/03/02/)
1987 Apr 2, IBM announced the upcoming release of the PS/2 and OS/2 computers featuring the Microsoft MS OS/2 and Windows 2.0 computer operating systems.
(Wired, 12/98, p.196)(http://pages.prodigy.net/michaln/history/pr/87apr_m3592.html)
1987 Apr 17, President Reagan slapped $300 million in punitive duties on imported Japanese computers, television sets and power tools, in retaliation for Japan's alleged violation of a computer chip trade agreement.
(AP, 4/17/97)
1987 Apr, PeopleSoft Corp., a personnel-management software firm, was founded by David A. Duffield and 7 former employees of Integral Systems, which Duffield had founded in 1972. PeopleSoft went public in 1992. In 1995 it established its headquarters in Pleasanton. CEO Craig Conway was fired in 2004 and a takeover by Oracle seemed imminent.
(SFC, 11/18/99, p.A14)(SFC, 10/2/04, p.C1)
1987 Jul 30, Microsoft acquired Forethought, the developer of PowerPoint, for $14 million. Microsoft created its own version 3 years later. Robert Gaskins had engaged Dennis Austin to do the initial programming for PowerPoint 1.0 for Macs.
(Wired, 12/98, p.196)(WSJ, 6/20/07, p.B1)
1987 Sep 8, Microsoft shipped its first CD ROM application, MS Bookshelf.
(Wired, 12/98, p.196)
1987 Oct 6, Microsoft announced its first Windows application, Excel.
(Wired, 12/98, p.196)
1987 Oct, NEC contacted all its customers about a potential problem in a disk controller that occurred during multitasking. Potential consequences included loss of data.
(WSJ, 11/5/99, p.B5)
1987 M.I.T. Press published "A Few Good Men from Univac." It was a history of the computer.
(WSJ, 11/22/96, p.A12)
1987 Dr. Fujio Masuoka, a researcher at Toshiba, invented another type of flash memory that could be produced more cheaply and in denser arrays. This came to be called NAND flash.
(Econ, 3/11/06, Survey p.28)
1987 Tera Computer was founded by Jim Rottsolk and Burton Smith.
(WSJ, 3/2/00, p.B8)
1988 Mar 17, Apple filed suit against Microsoft, alleging copyright infringement in the Windows GUI.
(Wired, 12/98, p.196)
1988 Apr, Microsoft surpassed Lotus to become the number one computer software vendor.
(Wired, 12/98, p.196)
1988 Nov 2, A computer worm, named Morris, unleashed by a Cornell University graduate student began replicating, clogging thousands of computers around the country, but causing no real damage. The virus infected an estimated 6,000 university and military computers over the Internet.
(AP, 11/2/98)(SFC, 9/3/07, p.C3)
1988 Microsoft revenues rose to $590 million with 2,793 employees.
(Wired, 12/98, p.197)
1988 In Canada Claude Comair, a Lebanese-born, computer animation specialist, founded the DigiPen Institute of Technology in Vancouver. It taught students fundamentals of video game development and in 1996 moved to Seattle.
(WSJ, 10/13/98, p.A1)
1988 Linksys was founded to provide networking for homes and small offices. It was purchased by Cisco in 2003.
(WSJ, 1/21/02, p.A1)
1988 Nintendo of Japan launched its Nintendo Power magazine aimed at boys 8-15 years old. It claims a subscription based circulation of 1 million.
(Hem, 4/96, p.30)
1988 Mauritius formed a National Computer Board to spur technology.
(SFC, 10/28/02, p.E6)
1989 Mar, The first versions of HTML that launched the Web appeared. Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web.
(SFEC, 3/15/98, p.W26)(SFEC, 5/30/99, Z1 p.4)
1989 Jun 5, Microsoft created its Multimedia Division.
(Wired, 12/98, p.197)
1989 Sep 18, The NeXT computer with NeXTSTEP 1.0 software was released. The computer was priced at $6,500.
(SFC, 8/25/11, p.A10)
1989 Nov 6, Word Perfect 5.1 was released.
(www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/chronology.html)
1989 Nov 13, IBM and Microsoft expanded their partnership and agreed to develop software for MS-DOS, MS OS/2, and MS LAN.
(Wired, 12/98, p.197)
1989 Cliff Stoll authored “The Cuckoo’s Egg," an account of a computer break-in at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
(SSFC, 10/23/11, p.F1)
1989 The National Computer Security Association (NCSA) was founded.
(Wired, 10/96, p.88)
1989 Seymour Cray formed a new supercomputer company, Cray Computer Corp.
(WSJ, 3/2/00, p.B8)
1989 Creative Labs introduced the SoundBlaster sound card that became a standard in personal computers. Sim Wong Hoo was the founder of Creative Tech. He later authored "Chaotic Thoughts from the Old Millennium."
(WSJ, 3/4/97, p.B1)(WSJ, 3/6/00, p.B1)
1989 Jeff Hawkins developed software for the GridPad, the first computer was a pen-based interface.
(Econ, 3/8/08, TQ p.31)
1989 Hewlett-Packard acquired Apollo Computer and moved into the workstation market.
(SFC, 3/3/99, p.A11)
1989 Intel shipped the first 486 microprocessor, an enhanced version of the 386. It held more than 1 million transistors and included a built-in floating point unit and 8K of internal RAM.
(TAR, 1996, p.28)
1989 John McAfee, an engineer for Lockheed, posted his VirusScan software on an Internet bulletin board as freeware. He earned $5 million in the first year and founded McAfee Associates. The company merged with Network General in 1997.
(SFC, 11/13/12, p.A8)
1989 Nintendo Co. of Japan launched its Game Boy product, a portable, hand-held game system with interchangeable game packs. The game was designed by Gunpei Yokoi (d.1997 at 56).
(Hem, 4/96, p.29)(SFC, 10/11/97, p.A19)
1989 Ralph Merkle, computer scientist at Xerox PARC, evaluated intellectual processing power 3 different ways. An average of his methods indicated that the brain runs about 1 quadrillion operations per second. With computing power doubling every 18 months, he reasoned that hardware would catch up with brainpower around 2020.
(Wired, 8/96, p.204)
1989 Jack Jewell at Bell Labs figured out how to make vertical cavity surface emitting lasers practical. They were first described by Prof. Kenichi Iga at the Tokyo Institute of Tech. in the late 1970s. They became fabricated like computer chips were capable of transmitting data at 6 Gbps.
(Wired, 2/98, p.77)
1989 The Univ. of Phoenix enrolled 8 students in the world's first online campus. (http://www.uopphx.edu/online).
(LT, 9/30/96, p.76)
1989 IBM scientists used 35 xenon atoms to spell out the company name on a nickel surface. This demonstrated the possibility of the positional control of atoms and the future road of nanotechnology.
(SFC, 7/19/99, p.A8)
1989 In Israel Dov Moran founded M-Systems, the original maker of USB flash drives (1999). He sold the business to SanDisk in 2006 for $1.6 billion.
(www.twst.com/notes/articles/lzt068.html)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Systems)
1990 May 22, Microsoft released Windows 3.0.
(www.guidebookgallery.org/guis/windows/win30)
1990 Jun 3, Robert Noyce (b.1927), co-inventor of the integrated circuit, co-founder and 1st CEO of Intel Corp. (1968), died at age 62. In 2005 Leslie Berlin authored “The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley.
(www.ieee.org/organizations/history_center/legacies/noyce.html)(SSFC, 7/10/05, p.E1)
1990 Jun, The FTC launched a probe into possible collusion between Microsoft and IBM.
(Wired, 12/98, p.197)
1990 Oct, At the 13th National Computer Security Conference in Washington, DC, Dorothy Demming presented her paper "Concerning Hackers Who Break into Computers." In 1995 she published a postscript denounced the group.
(Wired, 9/96, p.221)
1990 John Hennessey, the founder of MIPS Computer Systems, authored the textbook "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach."
(SFC, 4/4/00, p.A13)
1990 The Joshi computer virus began forcing users of infected machines to type "Happy Birthday Joshi" to recapture control of their machines.
(Sp., 5/96, p.70)
1990 Lawrence G. Lawler (d.1997 at 56) was awarded the President's Award for Outstanding Service to the US. He was an FBI agent and helped create the National Crime Information Center, a computer system that linked law enforcement agencies.
(SFC, 3/26/97, p.C3)
1990 Fore Systems Inc. of Warrendale, Pa. introduced the first ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) hardware for computer networks. It allowed data to be transferred at 2.5 billion bits per second. It was already being adopted by the phone companies and cable-TV operators. It was founded by 4 teachers and researchers and went public in 1994.
(WSJ,11/14/94, p.R27)(WSJ, 5/14/97, p.A1)
1990 Microsoft revenues hit $1.183 billion with 5,635 employees.
(Wired, 12/98, p.197)
1990 Prof. David Patterson began writing about IRAM, intelligent random access memory, the possibility of including memory into the design of microprocessors. He originated the concept of RISC, reduced instruction set computing.
(WSJ, 8/28/98, p.B1)
1990 Computers used to store files for the World Wide Web were given the prefix "www."
(WSJ, 10/11/99, p.B1)
1990 A digital method for transmitting TV pictures was invented.
(WSJ, 4/10/00, p.B2)
1990 Hugh Loebner agreed with The Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies to underwrite a contest designed to implement the Turing Test. Dr. Loebner pledged a Grand Prize of $100,000 and a Gold Medal for the first computer whose responses were indistinguishable from a human's. Robert Epstein co-founded the prize with Hugh Loebner. The first competition was held in November, 1991.
(http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/loebner-prize.html)(Econ, 5/7/11, p.92)
1990 ARM Holdings PLC, a multinational semiconductor and software company, was founded. It is headquartered in Cambridge, United Kingdom. The acronym ARM, first used in 1983, originally stood for "Acorn RISC Machine." However, when the company was incorporated in 1990, the acronym was changed to stand for "Advanced RISC Machines" in the company name "Advanced RISC Machines Holdings." Then, at the time of the IPO in 1998, the company name was changed to "ARM Holdings"
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_Holdings)
c1990 Paul Mockapetris created the domain-name system of the Web.
(WSJ, 1/08/00, p.B1)
1990s In the early 1990s truckloads of foreign waste computer equipment began to be trucked in to Guiyu, China. Salvaging operations soon caused fish to disappear and the drinking water to go foul.
(SFC, 3/1/02, p.B3)
1991 Jan 9, Microsoft announced Excel 3.0
(Wired, 12/98, p.197)
1991 Feb 28, NCR Corporation acquired the Ohio-based Teradata Company specializing in data warehousing and analytic applications.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teradata)
1991 Apr 22, Intel released 486SX chip.
(MC, 4/22/02)
1991 May 13, Apple released Macintosh System 7.0.
(SS, Internet, 5/13/97)
1991 Jun 11, Microsoft released MS DOS 5.0.
(http://tinyurl.com/rkbnf)
1991 Jul 3, Former corporate enemies Apple Computer and IBM publicly joined forces in a broad pact to swap technologies and develop new machines. Plans eventually led to the PowerPC processors.
(AP, 7/3/01)(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
1991 Aug 25, Linus Torvalds (b.1969), Finnish software engineer, asked other software developers to comment on a computer operating system he had written, which became known as Linux.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds)(Econ, 8/27/16, p.46)
1991 Aug, James Gossling developed his new computer language called Oak. It was to be the progenitor of the new Java software for the Internet by Sun Microsystems.
(Wired, Dec. '95, p.238)
1991 Aug, The World Wide Web was launched by Tim Berners Lee of CERN.
(Economist, 9/1/12, TQ p.11)
1991 Gordon Bell, architect of DEC's VAX minicomputer, authored "High Tech Ventures: The Guide to Entrepreneurial Success."
(SFC, 9/10/98, p.B3)
1991 John Detwiler, brokerage executive, founded Computers for Schools in San Diego.
(SFC, 11/14/96, p.B1)
1991 Al Gore as US Senator held hearings that led to the passage of the National High-Performance Computer Technology Act. It boosted federal support of the Internet by about $1 billion a year.
(Wired, Dec. '95, p.154)
1991 The FTC began to investigate claims that Microsoft had monopolized the market for PC operating systems.
(WSJ, 4/4/00, p.A16)
1991 Cambridge Univ. scientists set up a video to monitor their coffee pot in the Trojan Room and spawned the Web cam revolution. In 2001 Spiegel Online paid $4,750 for the $70 coffee pot.
(SFC, 8/15/01, p.B3)
1991 Bruce Katz, the founder of Rockport Shoes, bought half of the Sausalito online community called the Well.
(SFC, 4/8/99, p.B1)
1991 The computer game character Sonic, the hedgehog, was introduced by Sega.
(SFC, 7/5/97, p.E1)
1991 Microsoft introduced its Windows 3.1 operating system.
(WSJ, 11/16/98, p.R10)
1991 Quantum Computer Services changed its name to America Online.
(WSJ, 1/11/00, p.B1)
1991 Digital Lightwave was founded by MIT researcher Brian Zwan. The company went public in 1997.
(WSJ, 1/10/00, p.A14)
1991 The first AI-based fraud detection was developed.
(Econ., 12/19/20, p.98)
1992 Jan 12, HAL, the Heuristically Programmed Algorithmic Computer, from the 1968 Arthur C. Clark and Stanley Kubrick movie and book, “became operational" at the HAL plant in Urbana, Illinois. [1997 article claimed 1/12/97 as birthdate] The book "HAL’s Legacy: 2001’s Computer as Dream and Reality" was published in 1997 by MIT Press. The birthday in the movie was 1/12/92.
1992 Mar 6, Personal computer users braced for a virus known as "Michelangelo," set to trigger on March 6, but only scattered cases of lost files were reported. The Michelangelo computer virus threatened computer systems around the world. It was designed to lodge itself into a corner of the system and infect any floppies put into the system, and to eventually mangle the hard drive.
(Sp., 5/96, p.68)(AP, 3/6/02)
1992 Apr 6, Microsoft released Windows 3.1.
(www.microsoft.com/presspass/legal/poole.mspx)
1992 Apr 15, Court threw out Apple's lawsuit against Microsoft.
(www.abo.fi/~adeheer/students/itlekt1e.)
1992 David Gelernter, computer professor at Yale, authored “Mirror Worlds: or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox...How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean." Today's small scale software programs are about to be joined by vast public software works that will revolutionize computing and transform society as a whole.
(Econ, 11/6/10, SR p.3)(http://tinyurl.com/26tnnfb)
1992 Neal Stephenson published "Snow Crash." It focused on new technology and depicted a virtual bar for Avatars and an all-knowing Librarian that answers all spoken questions with educated, plain-English answers.
(WSJ, 11/16/98, p.R12)
1992 Carol Bartz (48) became chairwoman of the board and CEO of Autodesk, a company that pioneered the market for computer-aided design.
(Econ, 6/3/06, p.64)(www.thetech.org/revolutionaries/bartz/)
1992 Network Solutions won a government contract to be the exclusive registrar of Internet addresses.
(WSJ, 11/5/99, p.B5)
1992 Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky launched a company to produce a hand-held computer they called the Palm, which began sales in 1996.
(WSJ, 8/8/00, p.A1)
1992 Lewis Platt was named president and CEO of Hewlett-Packard.
(SFC, 3/3/99, p.A11)
1992 America Online (AOL), a popular Internet company, went public.
(WSJ, 5/24/99, p.R8)
1992 The Moving Picture Experts Group finalized a standard for squeezing audio into relatively small computer files. It was called MPEG-1 Layer 3 and became known as MP3.
(WSJ, 6/20/00, p.B1)
1993 Jan 19, IBM announced a $4.97 billion loss for 1992, which was at that time the largest single-year corporate loss in United States history.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibm)
1993 Jan, Wired Magazine in SF published its first issue under Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalf as a bimonthly with 12 employees. The 1st issue featured a cover story on the military's use of computer war simulations and sold 100,000 copies. In 1998 the monthly magazine was sold to S.I. Newhouse's Advance Publications for $90 million. Before the end of the year it became a monthly. In 2003 Gary Wolf authored "Wired: A Romance," the story of Wired and its 1996 IPO.
(SFEC, 1/18/98, p.C1)(SFEC, 5/10/98, p.B1)(SFC, 6/7/99, p.E1)(WSJ, 7/9/03, p.D8)
1993 Feb, Apple shipped its 10 millionth Mac computer.
(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
1993 Apr, Louis Gerstner became the CEO of IBM. In 2001 Gerstner received British knighthood (K.B.E.), Knight of the British Empire.
(SFC, 9/7/01, p.B1)
1993 Mar 22, Intel introduced its Pentium processor (80586): 64 bits-60 MHz-100+ MIPS.
(www.intel.com/pressroom/kits/quickreffam.htm#pentium)
1993 Mar 22, Microsoft began shipping its Encarta encyclopedia on CD-ROM. It had licensed content from Funk & Wagnalls after being rebuffed by Britannica.
(Wired, 12/98, p.198)(WSJ, 3/18/09, p.A13)
1993 May 24, Microsoft launched Windows NT.
(Wired, 12/98, p.198)
1993 Jun, Michael Spindler replaced John Sculley as CEO of Apple Comp.
(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
1993 Aug 21, The US Justice Dept. took over the FTC investigation into the business practices of Microsoft Corp.
(WSJ, 11/8/99, p.A30)
1993 Sep 30, MS Dos 6.2 was released.
(MC, 9/30/01)
1993 Oct, John Sculley left Apple Corp. A.C. Markkula became chairman.
(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
1993 John Hennessey, the founder of MIPS Computer Systems, authored the textbook "Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware/Software Interface."
(SFC, 4/4/00, p.A13)
1993 Guillermo Gaede, an Intel engineer, used his computer to tap into plans for the Pentium & 486 chip manufacturing process and video taped the information. He sent the info his former employer Advanced Micro Devices who notified federal authorities. He claimed to have been double-crossed by the FBI and also to have passed info from AMD to Cuba, China, North Korea and Iran. He was arrested in Phoenix on Sep 23, 1995.
(SFC, 6/25/96, p.A23)
1993 The computer game "Mortal Combat" sparked a controversy in Congress over video game violence.
(SFC, 7/5/97, p.E1)
1993 The computer game "Myst" swept the US with its eerie puzzle plot.
(SFC, 7/5/97, p.E1)
1993 Mark Weiser (d.1999 at 46) performed as a drummer with the band "Severe Tire Damage." The group was made up of computer researchers and the band was the first to perform live over the Internet. Weiser was called "the father of ubiquitous computing" for spreading his belief that computer technology could be incorporated unobtrusively into all facets of everyday life.
(SFC, 5/1/99, p.A17)
1993 Microsoft Windows users topped 25 million.
(WSJ, 4/4/00, p.A16)
1993 Apple Chairman John Sculley introduced the Newton MessagePad, the first personal digital assistant. The device was terminated in 1998.
(SFC, 2/28/98, p.D1)
1993 The graphics chip company nVidea (Nvidia) was founded in Santa Clara, Ca.
(WSJ, 3/17/03, p.B1)(SFC, 12/2/06, p.C2)
1993 Arthur Hair received a patent titled "Method for Transmitting a Desired Digital Video or Audio Signal." He and Scott Sander then launched Sightsound.com to build a market for transmitting music and video over the internet.
(WSJ, 5/7/99, p.B1)
1993 Joseph Paul Jernigan, a convicted murderer, was executed in Huntsville, Texas. He donated his body to medical research and it was quick frozen, sliced, photographed and computer enhanced and used to make the 1997 CD Body Voyage.
(SFEC, 3/30/97, BR. p.9)
1994 Feb, Python, a formal language comprising a set of instructions that produce various kinds of output, was introduced. It later became the dominant financial programming language.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_(programming_language))(Econ., 12/19/20, p.98)
1994 Mar, Apple Corp. introduced the Power Macintosh. It used the PowerPC chip co-developed with IBM. It was able to run both Apple and Microsoft software.
(Hem, Mar. 95, p.89)(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
1994 Apr 4, Jim Clark and Marc Andreeson founded Mosaic Communications Corp., the predecessor of Netscape Communications.
(WSJ, 11/25/98, p.B1)
1994 Apr, Charles H. Ferguson started Vermeer Technologies. It developed Front Page, the first software program to allow people to develop a Web site without mastering a programming language. He sold the company to Microsoft after 20 months for $133 million.
(WSJ, 12/15/99, p.A20)
1994 Spring, David Filo and Jerry Yang, graduates students of Stanford Univ., started a guide to their favorite sites on the Internet: Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web." They later named the site Yahoo: "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle."
(WSJ, 3/6/00, p.B1)(SFC, 7/18/00, p.A8)
1994 Jul 11, Gary Kildall (52), pioneer software writer, died in Monterey, Ca.
(www.maxframe.com/kildallr.htm)
1994 Jul 15, Microsoft Corp. reached a settlement with the Justice Department, promising to end practices it used to corner the market for personal computer software programs. In a consent decree with the Justice Dept. Microsoft agreed to change contracts with PC makers and other software companies ending the government's antitrust investigation.
(AP, 7/15/99)(WSJ, 4/4/00, p.A16)
1994 Aug 31, In the London Intel Speed Chess Grand Prix a Pentium computer beat world chess champ Gari Kasparov.
(www.correspondencechess.com/campbell/apctcol/c9411.htm)
1994 Sep, Apple Corp. announced that it would allow other companies clone the Mac.
(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
1994 Nov 28, Mosaic changed its name to Netscape Communications.
(WSJ, 4/21/99, A1)
1994 Dec 12, IBM stopped shipments of personal computers with Intel's flawed Pentium chip, saying the processor's problems were worse than earlier believed.
(AP, 12/12/99)
1994 Dec 20, Intel announced it would replace all flawed Pentium computer chips.
(AP, 12/20/04)
1994 Dec, Power Computer of Milpitas, Ca., announced plans to build Mac clones.
(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
1994 Rob Glaser, a former Microsoft executive, founded RealNetworks.
(SFC, 10/12/05, p.C2)
1994 Richard Lipton, Princeton computer scientist, published a paper on molecular computing titled: "Speeding to Computation via Molecular Biology."
(Wired, 8/95, p.166)
1994 Marvin Minsky wrote in a Scientific American article that: "In the end we will find ways to replace every part of the body and brain and thus repair all the defects and injuries that make our lives so brief."
(Hem., 2/96, p.95)
1994 Vincent Connare designed the Comic Sans typeface while working for Microsoft, which included it in the Miscosoft Windows operating system.
(WSJ, 4/16/09, p.A10)
1994 Lou Montulli, computer programmer at Netscape, invented "cookies" to help enable purchasing products from a Web site.
(WSJ, 2/28/00, p.B1)
1994 Scientists at Carnegie Mellon Univ. created a search engine. Rights were bought by CMGI Inc., an Internet venture fund, and Lycos was formed in 1995.
(SFC, 3/29/00, p.D3)
1994 The first Internet stock trade was completed by K. Aufhauser & Co., later part of Ameritrade Holding Corp.
(WSJ, 6/2/99, p.C1)
1994 Compaq became No. 1 in PC sales.
(WSJ, 1/9/02, p.B1)
1994 Bruce Katz, the founder of Rockport Shoes, bought the 2nd half of the Sausalito online community called the Well for a reported $1 million.
(SFC, 4/8/99, p.B1)
1994 The Timex Datalink watch was introduced. It was the first watch capable of wirelessly downloading information from a computer.
(Econ., 3/28/15, p.24)
1994 The first useful quantum algorithm was discovered at Bell Labs.
(Econ., 9/26/20, p.18)
1994 Britannica posted a web site for its reference work.
(WSJ, 4/22/99, A1)
1995 Jan, Jed Katz and Phil Marcus founded Rent Net, a computerized listing of available rental units across the US. Its web address was:
http://www.rentfacts.com
(SFC, 5/12/96, p.E-6)
1995 Apr 1, Aaron, a computer-driven robot will begin painting a new 25 sq. ft canvas on a daily basis. It is designed and programmed by Harold Cohen, a San Diego computer scientist. The event is scheduled to start in Boston at 300 Congress St. and go to May 29.
(WSJ, 3/28/95, p.A-24)
1995 Apr, Progressive Networks unveiled RealAudio software to stream music bit by bit over the WWW.
(WSJ, 6/20/00, p.B1)
1995 Aug 9, Netscape Communications went public and was valued at $2.2 billion. In 1999 Jim Clark and Owen Edwards authored "Netscape Time: The Making of the Billion-Dollar Start-Up That Took on Microsoft."
(WSJ, 11/25/98, p.B1)(SFEC, 6/27/99, BR p.6)
1995 Aug 24, Microsoft Corporation began selling its highly publicized Windows 95 personal computer software. The Windows 95 operating system was priced at $89 for an upgrade.
(WSJ, 4/4/00, p.A16)(AP, 8/24/00)
1995 Sep 13, The FBI made at least a dozen arrests, capping a nationwide two-year investigation of pedophiles and pornographers using the America Online computer network.
(AP, 9/13/00)
1995 Sep 23, Guillermo Gaede, an Intel engineer, was arrested in Phoenix. He had used his computer to tap into plans for the Pentium & 486 chip manufacturing process and video taped the information in May 1993. He sent the info to his former employer Advanced Micro Devices who notified federal authorities. He claimed to have been double-crossed by the FBI and also to have passed info from AMD to Cuba, China, North Korea and Iran.
(SFC, 6/25/96, p.A23)
1995 Sep, The US government came up with a new proposal security in computer communications, dubbed by critics as Clipper II.
(Wired, 9/96, p.224)
1995 Nov 20, Salon produced its 1st online issue. Salon.com was founded in SF as an online publisher by former staffers of the SF Examiner. The company purchased the Sausalito online community Well in 1999 from Bruce Katz, the founder of Rockport Shoes. In June 1999 it became a public corporation with an IPO at $10/share.
(SFC, 4/8/99, p.B1)(SFEC, 6/27/99, p.B1)(SFC, 7/28/00, p.A19)
1995 Nov, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 3.0 and gave it away for free in a challenge to Netscape's Navigator browser.
(WSJ, 4/4/00, p.A16)
1995 Dec 7, Bill Gates announced Microsoft's Internet counterattack [on Netscape and the browser market].
(WSJ, 11/25/98, p.B1)
1995 Bill Gates, head of Microsoft Corp., authored “The Road Ahead."
(Econ, 6/28/08, p.78)
1995 David Packard authored his treatisse "The HP Way."
(SFC, 3/3/99, p.A11)
1995 The first Electronic Entertainment Expo for the computer and video game industry was held.
(SFC, 6/18/97, p.B1)
1995 The Knowledge Universe company, a conglomerate of educational companies, was founded in Menlo Park with some $750 million from investment banker Michael Milken, his brother Lowell and Larry Ellison of Oracle Corp.
(SSFC, 8/5/01, p.E1)
1995 Pierre Omidyar founded eBay as a site for auctioning items. It also helped his fiancée trade her Pez dispensers. In 2002 Adam Cohen authored "The Perfect Store," a chronicle of the rise of eBay.
(WSJ, 6/25/02, p.D9)
1995 Michael Wood of Orinda founded Leapfrog Enterprises. In 1997 it came under the wing of Knowledge Universe.
(SSFC, 8/5/01, p.E1)
1995 Cray Computer filed for Chapter 11.
(WSJ, 3/2/00, p.B8)
1995 IBM acquired Lotus and its corporate groupware for $3.5 billion.
(SFC, 11/30/98, p.E3)
1995 Intel unveiled the universal serial bus (USB) technology.
(SFC, 12/13/99, p.B3)
1995 Samsung bought AST. They sold it for a loss in 1999.
(WSJ, 12/6/04, p.B1)
1995 US Robotics bought Palm Inc.
(WSJ, 6/5/03, p.B1)
1995 The first quantum computations, using the quantum effects of physics, were done in a lab environment.
(Econ, 2/25/12, p.91)
1995 VocalTec, an Israeli company, was the first company to release commercial PC-to-PC calling software, which it called Internet Phone. However, many competitors soon followed. In 2010 VocalTec merged with YMax Corp, maker of magicJack, an Internet phone gadget.
(AP, 8/14/10)
1995-1997 In Brazil Rodrigo Baggio organized efforts to provide computer education to the children of Rio's slums. He formed the Committee for Computer Science Democratization, which had opened schools in 32 Rio slums over the last 2 years.
(SFC, 7/7/97, p.A8)
1996 Feb 2, Gil Amelio (b.1943), CEO of National Semiconductor from 27 May 1991 to 2 February 1996, took over as chairman and CEO of Apple Computer. Markkula became vice-chairman and Michael Spindler left the company. Amelio lasted until 1997 when Steve Jobs came back to the company. In 1998 Amelio published "On the Firing Line: My 500 Days at Apple," written with William L. Simon.
(WSJ, 7/2/98, p.A20)(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gil_Amelio)
1996 Feb 10, World chess champion Garry Kasparov lost the first game of a match in Philadelphia against an I-B-M computer dubbed "Deep Blue."
(AP, 2/10/01)
1996 Feb 17, World chess champion Garry Kasparov beat IBM supercomputer "Deep Blue," winning a six-game match in Philadelphia.
(AP, 2/17/98)
1996 Feb, Kevin Mitnick, 33-year-old computer wizard, was arrested in Raleigh, N.C. with the help of computer security expert Tsutomu Shimomura. Mitnick was accused of breaking into the systems of software companies and attacking the computers of Internet service providers (ISPs). In 1999 he admitted breaking in to computer systems at Sun Microsystems and Motorola where he stole software and installed programs that caused millions of dollars in damage. He was ordered to pay token restitution of $4,125 and was prohibited from any access to computers and the Internet for 3 years following his release.
(SFC, 9/28/96, p.A3)(SFC, 8/10/99, p.A3)
1996 Mar 26, David Packard, co-founder of Hewlett-Packard Co., died. In a 1988 letter to his children he declared that the David & Lucille Packard Foundation's highest priority must be to reduce world-wide population growth.
(WSJ, 3/27/96, p.A-1)(WSJ, 3/6/98, p.)
1996 Spring, Yahoo went public at $13 per share and quickly rose to $33 in its 1st day of trading.
(WSJ, 3/6/00, p.B1)
1996 Apr, The web site DJ.com launched RealAudio's technology to broadcast 24 channels of music over the web. The site was later renamed Spinner.com.
(WSJ, 6/20/00, p.B1)
1996 May 25, In the US Pastors for Peace called off a hunger strike after reaching a deal with the Treasury Dept over 395 impounded old computers that were destined for medical clinics in Cuba. The computers were given over to the General Board of Church and Society of the United Methodist Church. The board agreed not to ship the computers without a license, and that if no license could be issued to donate the computers for charitable purposes in the US.
(SFC, 5/26/96, p.A-10)
1996 May, The government released a draft proposal on computer security that was dubbed Clipper III.
(Wired, 9/96, p.226)
1996 Jun 10, Intel released its 200 Mhz Pentium chip.
(www.intel.com/pressroom/kits/quickreffam.htm)
1996 Jul 4, Hot Mail, a free internet E-mail service began.
(Maggio)
1996 Aug 13, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 3.0.
(http://docs.yahoo.com/docs/pr/release33.html)
1996 Aug 20, In Germany officials arrested 2 businessmen suspected of smuggling computer technology to Libya that could be used to make lethal nerve gas.
(WSJ, 8/20/96, p.A1)
1996 Sep 5, Computer scientists found the largest known prime number while testing a Cray T94 computer system. It has 378,632 digits and can be expressed as two to the 1,257,787th power minus 1.
(WSJ, 9/5/96, p.A6)
1996 Dec 13, Trade ministers from 28 countries meeting in Singapore endorsed a U.S.-crafted trade pact to abolish import duties on computers, software and other high-tech products.
(AP internet 12/13/97)
1996 Dec 16, Intel announced the world's fastest computer capable of 1 trillion operations per second.
(SFC, 12/17/96, p.C1)
1996 Dec, Apple Comp. hired co-founder Steve Jobs as a consultant and purchased his NeXt Software Inc. for $430 million.
(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
1996 Andy Grove, head of Intel Corp., authored "Only the Paranoid Survive."
(www.amazon.com/Only-Paranoid-Survive-Andrew-Grove/dp/0385482582)
1996 Super Mario 64 showed the capabilities of the new Nintendo 64 computer game machine.
(SFC, 7/5/97, p.E3)
1996 The $1.6 billion FLAG project (Fiber-Optic Link Around the Globe) was completed for transmission of data from Europe to the Far East. Neil Tagare pushed the project with financial assistance from Nynex.
(SFC, 3/15/99, p.B7)
1996 David Warthen founded Ask Jeeves Inc., a company devoted to scouring the Net for data based on simple questions. www.ask.com
(WSJ, 4/8/99, p.B9)
1996 NEC bought Packard Bell. It later exited the US retail PC market.
(WSJ, 12/6/04, p.B1)
1996 Toshiba Corp. invested $3 million in Lexar Media under the premise of supplying flash cards for Lexar’s high-speed controller.
(SSFC, 4/3/05, p.B3)
1997 Mar 2, Saudi Arab billionaire Prince al-Waleed bin Talal acquired 5% of Apple.
(SC, 3/2/02)
1997 Mar, Apple Corp. announced it would lay off 4,100 workers.
(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
1997 Apr 8, Microsoft Corp released Internet Explorer 4.0.
(http://tinyurl.com/dax6p)
1997 Jul, Apple released its newest Mac operating system, OS 8.
(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
1997 Aug 6, Ending years of impassioned rivalry, Apple Computer and Microsoft agreed to share technology in a deal giving Microsoft a stake in Apple's survival. Microsoft announced that it would buy $150 million in non-voting Apple stock.
(SFC, 8/7/97, p.A1)(AP, 8/6/98)
1997 Sep, IBM announced copper connections on silicon transistors instead of aluminum.
(SFC, 11/30/98, p.E3)
1997 Sep, Steve Jobs was named interim CEO of Apple Corp. Jobs dropped the term interim in 2000.
(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)(Econ, 6/9/07, p.80)
1997 Oct 20, The US government alleged that Microsoft's bundling of its browser into the operating system violates a 1995 consent decree.
(WSJ, 11/25/98, p.B1)
1997 Nov 20, It was reported that Lucent Tech.'s Bell Labs has developed a new tiny transistor that is 5 times faster and 1/4th the size of commercially available transistors.
(WSJ, 11/20/97, p.B4)
1997 Dec 11, A US federal judge ordered Microsoft not to bundle IE4 in Windows.
(MC, 12/11/01)
1997 Dec 31, Intel cut the price of Pentium II-233 MHz from $401 to $268.
(MC, 12/31/01)
1997 Dec 31, Microsoft bought the Hotmail E-mail service.
(MC, 12/31/01)
1997 Dec, Michael Robertson launched a web site called MP3.com as a repository for music in the MP3 format.
(WSJ, 6/20/00, p.B1)
1997 Scott Kurnit founded About.com, a web site for information originally known as the Mining Company.
(WSJ, 7/7/99, p.A23)
1997 Acer bought the PC unit of Texas Instruments. It later exited the US retail PC market.
(WSJ, 12/6/04, p.B1)
1997 Silicon Graphics bought Cray Research.
(WSJ, 3/2/00, p.B8)
1997 3Com bought US Robotics.
(WSJ, 6/5/03, p.B1)
1997 Seymour Cray (71) died from injuries from a car accident.
(WSJ, 3/2/00, p.B8)
1997 In Taiwan the High Tech Computer company was founded as a designer and manufacturer of products sold under other brand names. The company was later renamed HPC and created its own brand name. In 2007 it launched the HTC Touch, a touch screen device whose sales were boosted by the appearance of Apple’s first iPhone.
(Econ, 4/7/12, p.73)
1998 Jan 22, Microsoft under court pressure signed an agreement giving PC makers the freedom to install Windows 95 without an Internet Explorer icon.
(WSJ, 11/8/99, p.A30)
1998 Mar 19-25, CeBIT, the world's largest exhibition for information and communications, was held in Hanover, Germany. 600,000 visitors were expected.
(FT, 3/4/98, p.IT4)
1998 May, Federal and state regulators filed an antitrust suit against Microsoft accusing it of using illegal actions to destroy competition.
(WSJ, 4/4/00, p.A16)
1998 May, Apple Corp. introduced the iMac. The $1,300 computer housed in translucent plastic had a 233 MHz G3 processor.
(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
1998 Jun, An appeals court panel ruled in favor of Microsoft and considered Internet Explorer and Windows and integrated product.
(WSJ, 4/4/00, p.A16)
1998 Jun, Microsoft released Windows 98 with an upgrade price of $109.
(WSJ, 4/4/00, p.A16)
1998 Aug 23, Retailers began marketing computers with the new 450 MHz Intel Pentium II.
(SFC, 8/25/98, p.D3)
1998 Aug, F. Thomson Leighton and Daniel Lewin founded Akamai based on technology they had developed at MIT in 1995. Their main product, FreeFlow - a system that routed Internet traffic - began selling in April 1999. Lewin (31) was aboard AA Flight 11 on Sep 11, 2001, and died when hijackers crashed the plane into the WTC.
(WSJ, 12/8/99, p.C28)(SFC, 9/14/01, p.A29)
1998 Sep, Diamond Multimedia introduced the Rio, a Walkman-like portable player for MP3 files.
(WSJ, 6/20/00, p.B1)
1998 Oct, The US Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in an effort to protect writers and artists from piracy in the free-for-all world of Net music.
(WSJ, 6/20/00, p.B1)(SFC, 8/13/01, p.D1)
1998 Oct, The board of directors for ICANN was seated. The Clinton administration created ICANN, the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers. It had been run by Jon Postel (d.1998), director of the Computer Networks Division at Information Sciences Institute at the Univ. of Southern Calif.
(WSJ, 11/5/99, p.B5)(SFEC, 7/30/00, p.B6)
1998 Nov 13, The globe.com, founded by Tod Krizelman and Stephen Paternot, went public and leaped from $9 to $97 a share. In 2001 Paternot authored "A Very Public Offering."
(WSJ, 5/2/01, p.A17)(WSJ, 8/27/01, p.A13)
1998 Nov 21, Isao Okawa, chairman of CSK Corp., and Sega Enterprises, donated $27 million to MIT for the creation of a center for children founded on the belief that new digital technology will drive fundamental changes in education.
(SFC, 11/23/98, p.A5)
1998 Nov 23, Nintendo began distributing its video game "Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time." It was designed for the new 64-bit Nintendo player and quickly sold out.
(SFC, 11/23/98, p.E1)(WSJ, 12/3/98, p.B1)
1998 Nov 23, It was reported that American Online planned to purchase Netscape Communication for about $4 billion in stock.
(SFC, 11/23/98, p.A1)
1998 Nov, IBM unveiled a disk drive capable of holding 25 gigabytes of data.
(SFC, 11/30/98, p.E1)
1998 Dec 3, Digital MP3 file-squishing technology was reported as a threat to recording industry.
(SFC, 12/3/98, p.A1)
1998 Dec 3, In Vienna 33 nations signed the Wassenaar Arrangement limiting arms exports. The agreement included export controls on the most powerful data-scrambling technologies.
(SFC, 12/4/98, p.B2)
1998 Dec 4, The first PC for the car, made by Clarion Co., went on sale for $1,299. It use a Microsoft operating system and responded to voice commands to change radio stations and CDs, check e-mail, and use global positioning.
(SFC, 12/5/98, p.D1)
1998 Dec 7, South Carolina ended its participation in the antitrust case against Microsoft.
(SFC, 11/6/99, p.A3)
1998 Dec 18, The new electronic Rocket Book by NuvoMedia weighed 22 ounces and stored 10 books.
(WSJ, 12/18/98, p.W15)
1998 Sergey Brin, a Russian immigrant, and Larry Page of Stanford Univ. raised $1 million and launched the Google search engine in Menlo Park, Ca. By 2003 over 200 million searches were logged daily. In 2004 Google filed for IPO. Google's core search technology patent, owned by Stanford, was set to expire in 2011.
(SSFC, 11/9/03, p.I1)(WSJ, 4/30/04, p.A1)
1998 Michael Dell (33) of the Dell Computer Company recorded personal holdings of $7.22 billion.
(SFEC, 3/7/99, p.B9)
1998 Jeff Hawkins, Donna Dubinsky and Ed Colligan left Palm, a unit of 3Com, to create Handspring.
(WSJ, 6/5/03, p.B1)
1998 VMware was founded by Mendel Rosenblum with assistance by his wife Diane Greene, who later became chief executive. The company developed computer virtualization software that allowed multiple servers to be consolidated into a single machine. It accomplished this be developing a small program called a hypervisor, which controls how access to a computer’s processors and memory is shared. In 2004 it was later acquired by EMC.
(Econ, 1/19/08, p.74)(www.vmware.com/company/)(Econ, 7/5/08, p.78)
1998 A brain implant let a paralyzed stroke victim move a cursor on a computer screen to point out simple phrases. [see Apr 13, 2004]
(SFC, 4/14/04, p.C8)
1998 Cybernetics Prof. Kevin Warwick had a chip implanted into his arm for 9 days to monitor his body's electrical signals and transmit results to a computer. He followed up with a more sophisticated chip in 2000.
(SFC, 4/3/00, p.E16)
1999 Jan, Shawn Fanning (18), a computer science student at Boston's Northeastern Univ., wrote Napster, a software program to share music files over the Internet.
(SFC, 3/3/00, p.A7)
1999 Feb 22, IBM planned to unveil a new microchip that included both logic functions and memory functions.
(SFC, 2/22/99, p.B2)
1999 Feb 22, 3Com planned to unveil 2 new PalmPilot devices. The Palm V weighed in at 4 oz, and the Palm IIIx personal display assistant (PDA) was a upgrade to the Palm III with more memory and better display.
(SFC, 2/22/99, p.B3)
1999 Feb 25, The FCC ruled that connecting to the internet constitutes a long-distance call.
(WSJ, 2/26/99, p.B3)
1999 Feb 26, Intel's new Pentium III began appearing in low priced PCs.
(WSJ, 2/26/99, p.B3)
1999 Mar 18, The 3rd annual Webbies was held at the Herbst Theater under the direction of Tiffany Schlain (28).
(SFC, 3/13/99, p.A17)
1999 Mar 29, The Melissa computer virus, first reported Mar 26, was spreading and infecting E-mail in tens of thousands of computers. In Dec. David L. Smith, a New Jersey programmer, pleaded guilty to creating the virus and spreading it through a sex Web site. It was reported to have caused $80 million in damage.
(SFC, 3/29/99, p.A3)(SFC, 12/10/99, p.B1)
1999 Mar, Pokemon Blue and Pokemon Red from Nintendo of America were the top selling video games.
(USAT, 3/24/99, p.10E)
1999 Apr, The film "Pi" became the first film sold by download from Sightsound.com.
(WSJ, 5/7/99, p.B1)
1999 May 6, A US appeals court ruled that government restrictions on the export of encryption software violated free speech.
(WSJ, 5/7/99, p.A1)
1999 Jun 6, The Worm.Explore.Zip virus was first detected in Israel. The virus was disguised a an e-mail attachment and destroyed files when opened.
(SFEC, 6/13/99, p.A6)
1999 Jun 11, The FBI was seeking the creator of Worm.Explore.Zip, a file-destroying computer virus which had hit some of the nation's biggest corporations.
(AP, 6/11/00)
1999 Jun 15, The US Senate passed legislation protecting companies from lawsuits stemming from Year 2000 computer problems.
(SFC, 6/16/99, p.A1)
1999 Jun 23, House Republicans unveiled their "e-Contract," a pitch to the high-tech community that included a promise to keep the Internet free.
(SFC, 6/24/99, p.A1)
1999 Jun, Microsoft annual revenues hit $19.75 billion.
(WSJ, 4/4/00, p.A16)
1999 Jul 19, Carleton "Carly" Fiorina (44) was named the new president and CEO of Hewlett Packard Co. She was brought over from Lucent Tech. and became the 3rd woman running a Fortune 500 company. In 2003 George Anders authored "Perfect Enough," a look at HP and Fiorina's efforts. In 2003 Peter Burrows authored "Backfire," a look at Fiorina's past work.
(SFC, 7/20/99, p.A1)(WSJ, 2/7/03, p.W12)
1999 Jul, Apple corp. introduced a mobile Macintosh, the iBook. The laptop was priced at $1,599 and had a 233 MHz G3 processor.
(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
1999 Aug 18, Ramos Horta of Indonesia, 1996 Nobel Prize winner, warned the government that computer hackers would wreak electronic mayhem on the country if voting in the East Timor referendum is hampered.
(SFC, 8/18/99, p.D10)
1999 Sep 16, The White House said it would allow US firms to export computer encryption technology.
(SFC, 9/17/99, p.A1)
1999 Oct 6, SanDisk issued a press release announcing plans to jointly manufacture flash memory chips with Toshiba Corp.
(SSFC, 4/3/05, p.B3)
1999 Oct 6, Jon Lech Johansen (15) of Norway released DeCSS, a program that allows users to copy DVDs onto computer hard disks.
(WSJ, 10/13/05, p.A8)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS)
1999 Oct 25, Intel introduced its code-named Coppermine chip as the new Pentium III with speeds up to 500 megahertz. The internal circuitry was squeezed to .18 micron.
(SFC, 10/25/99, p.B1)
1999 Nov 5, US Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson ruled in a finding of fact that Microsoft Corp. is a monopoly and has wielded its power to stifle competition.
(SFC, 11/6/99, p.A1)
1999 Nov 11, The computer virus dubbed Bubbleboy was reported to spread through electronic mail without attachments.
(WSJ, 11/11/99, p.A1)
1999 Oct 21, Organizers called for a "Jam Echelon Day," an effort to overload US National Security Agency (NSA) supercomputers with e-mail containing words such as "bomb." Echelon was a worldwide surveillance network run by the NSA and partners in Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
(SFEC, 11/14/99, p.A7)
1999 Nov 29, A company called C3D planned to demonstrate discs holding 140 gigabytes of data, over 200 times the capacity of a CD-ROM.
(SFC, 11/29/99, p.C1)
1999 Nov 30, It was reported that the EU passed the Electronic Signature Directive, a law that gave legal status to digital signatures.
(WSJ, 12/1/99, p.A24B15)
1999 Dec 6, AT&T agreed in principle to give competing Internet providers access to its high-speed cable lines.
(SFC, 12/6/99, p.A3)
1999 Dec, The recording industry filed a copyright infringement suit against Napster.
(WSJ, 6/20/00, p.B1)
1999 Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, authored "Weaving the Web."
(WSJ, 10/1/99, p. W6)
1999 Po Bronson authored "The Nudist on the Late Shift: and Other True Tales of Silicon Valley."
(SFC, 7/2/99, p.C1)
1999 The book "Dealers of Lightning: Xerox Park and the Dawn of the Computer Age" by Michael Hiltzik was about the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.
(WSJ, 3/16/99, p.A24)(SFEC, 8/1/99, BR p.9)
1999 David A. Kaplan authored "The Silicon Boys," a history of the companies and characters who began Silicon Valley.
(WSJ, 7/1/99, p.A21)
1999 Michael Lewis authored "The New New Thing," a book about Silicon Valley as well as a character study of Jim Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics, Netscape and Healtheon.
(SFC, 10/27/99, p.B1)
1999 Michael S. Malone authored "Infinite Loop: How Apple, the World's Most Insanely Great Computer Company Went Insane."
(SFEC, 4/18/99, BR p.9)
1999 The book "The Visionary Position" by Fred Moody" was about the development of virtual reality in Seattle in the mid 1990s. It focused on the Human Interface Technology Laboratory (HIT) founded by Tom Furness.
(WSJ, 3/4/99, p.A12)
1999 Anthony B. and Michael C. Perkins authored "The Internet Bubble." The founding editors of Red Herring and Red Herring Online believed that Internet stocks were overvalued.
(WSJ, 11/1/99, p.A52)
1999 Gary Rivlin authored "The Plot To Get Bill Gates: An Irreverent Investigation of the World's Richest Man… and the People Who Hate Him."
(SFEC, 8/15/99, BR p.6)
1999 Jerre Stead, CEO of Ingram Micro, authored "Soaring with the Phoenix: Renewing the Vision, Reviving the Spirit and RE-Creating the Success of Your Company." Ingram was the largest distributor of computer products and services and a new CEO was sought to replace Stead later in the year.
(WSJ, 9/9/99, p.A1)
1999 William Bennett, former US education secretary under Pres. Reagan, began opening cyber charter schools.
(SSFC, 8/31/03, p.A23)
1999 CollabNet launched Subversion, a collaborative platform for programmers.
(Econ, 3/8/08, TQ p.19)
1999 IBM abandoned the retail PC business.
(WSJ, 1/9/02, p.B1)
1999 Nokia, Matsushita, Motorola and Psion PLC formed a joint venture named Symbian to devise a new operating system called Epoc to run on cellular phones. Microsoft countered with a joint venture with Ericsson of Sweden.
(WSJ, 12/9/99, p.A3)
1999 Pyra software company released Blogger for free. It allowed users to set up a Weblog, a simple personal web site program. By 2002 some 500,000 weblogs were on the Internet.
(NW, 8/26/02, p.42)
1999 Advanced RISC Machines Ltd, a British chip manufacturer, changed its name to ARM Ltd. The company was founded in 1990 as Advanced RISC Machines, ARM, a joint venture between Acorn Computers, Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.) and VLSI Technology.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_Holdings)
1999 In Russia legislation was passed that created SORM-2, a Russian acronym for the system of Operative and Investigative procedures. It required every Internet service provider to install monitoring equipment that allowed access by Russian security agencies.
(SFC, 3/11/00, p.A1)
1999 South Korea initiated OPEN (Online Procedures Enhancement for Civil Applications), an Internet-based anti-graft program.
(SFC, 11/23/01, p.D6)
2000 Jan 1, In California the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act became law. It validated all transactions formed, transmitted and recorded electronically, with certain exemptions.
(SFEC, 1/2/00, p.B1)
2000 Jan 7, Pres. Clinton announced a $91 million program to protect computer security as part of the 2001 fiscal budget.
(SFC, 1/800, p.A1)
2000 Jan 13, Bill Gates stepped down as CEO of Microsoft and handed the leadership over to Steve Ballmer.
(SFC, 1/14/00, p.A1)
2000 Jan 19, Transmeta Corp. leaders unveiled a pair of new microprocessors named Crusoe designed for hand-held Internet-access devices.
(SFC, 1/20/00, p.B2)
2000 Jan 20, It was reported that the number of Internet users in China had more than doubled over the last 6 months from 4 to 8.9 million, most of them young single men.
(SFC, 1/20/00, p.C16)
2000 Jan 24, A torrent of data to the US National Security Agency brought the system to a crashing halt that lasted 3˝ days.
(Econ, 2/27/10, p.18)(http://intellit.muskingum.edu/nsa_folder/nsa00.html)
2000 Jan 26, In China the State Bureau of Secrecy issued a 20-article circular that banned discussion of state secrets on the Internet, in e-mail, and in chat rooms or bulletin boards. Content and service providers were also required to undergo a "security certification" prior to operation.
(SFC, 1/27/00, p.A1)
2000 Feb 3, The Ford Motor Co. said it would provide new PCs and a printer with Internet access to its 300,000 employees at $5 per month over 3 years.
(SFC, 2/5/00, p.A1)
2000 Feb 4, Delta Air Lines said it would provide new PCs and Internet access to its 72,000 employees at $12 per month over 3 years.
(SFC, 2/5/00, p.A1)
2000 Feb 4, The Sims, a new game from SimCity creator Will Wright, was released to retail sales.
(SFC, 2/5/00, p.B1)
2000 Feb 7, An apparent team of computer hackers shut the Yahoo web site down with a "denial-of-service" attack that mimicked millions of phantom users.
(SFC, 2/8/00, p.A1)
2000 Feb 8, Net hackers shut down at least 4 popular Web sites including Amazon.com, eBay, CNN.com and buy.com with "denial of service attacks."
(SFC, 2/9/00, p.A1)(AP, 2/8/01)
2000 Mar 2, Gov. Angus King announced that he would like to give every 7th grader in Maine (17,000 students) a laptop computer, regardless of whether they have a computer at home.
(SFC, 3/3/00, p.A2)
2000 Mar 3, It was reported that student use of Napster software to download music files from the Internet was clogging up university networks and causing officials to block or limit access to the site.
(SFC, 3/3/00, p.A1)
2000 Mar 27, Cisco Systems passed Microsoft as the most valuable company in the world.
(SFC, 3/28/00, p.A1)
2000 Mar, Palm separated from 3Com with an IPO offering.
(WSJ, 6/5/03, p.B1)
2000 Mar, Tera Computer bought the Cray Research business from Silicon Graphics and changed its name to Cray Inc.
(WSJ, 3/2/00, p.B8)
2000 Apr 3, It was reported that 6 prestigious int'l. universities and cultural institutions planned to sell knowledge and education over the Internet via the Fathom Web site.
(SFC, 4/3/00, p.A5)
2000 Apr 3, Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson ruled that Microsoft violated the Sherman Act by tying its Internet browser to its operating system. The Nasdaq plunged 349 points while the Dow rose 300.
(SFC, 4/4/00, p.A1)
2000 Apr 5, The Netscape 6 browser was introduced.
(WSJ, 4/5/00, p.B1)
2000 Apr 14, Phillip W. Katz, founder of compression software PKWare, died at age 37 from chronic alcoholism.
(WSJ, 6/19/00, p.A1)
2000 Apr 28, The US Justice Dept. and 17 states filed to split Microsoft Corp. into 2 corporations.
(SFC, 4/29/00, p.A1)
2000 May 4, The e-mail virus "I Love You" bug hit millions of computers around the world. It was considered the most virulent, most damaging ($2.6 bil), most costly and most rapidly spread virus to date.
(SFC, 5/5/00, p.A1)(SFC, 5/6/00, p.A1)
2000 May 18, Another computer virus, described as a complex polymorph, began to spread around the world.
(SFC, 5/19/00, p.A1)
2000 May 26, The "Killer Resume" computer virus began to circulate.
(SFC, 5/27/00, p.A1)
2000 May 28, Donald W. Davies, who helped pioneer packet switching, died in London at age 75.
(WSJ, 6/1/00, p.A1)
2000 Jun 4, It was reported that IBM planned to build the "Blue Gene" computer over the next five years to model the way human proteins fold into shapes that give them unique biological properties.
(SFEC, 6/4/00, p.A12)
2000 Jun 5, Computer rebels planned to launch a data haven, an independent colony in cyberspace, based on the island of Sealand, a WW II military fortress 6 miles off the coast of England.
(SFEC, 6/4/00, p.A4)
2000 Jun 9, The FBI began discussions on the "Serbian Badman Trojan: computer virus disguised as a movie clip and embedded in some 2000 commercial and home computers.
(SFC, 6/9/00, p.A7)
2000 Jun 10, The single-elimination contest for battling robots, Battlebots San Francisco, was held at the Festival Pavilion of Fort Mason in SF.
(SFEC, 6/11/00, p.D1)
2000 Jun 16, The US Senate passed a bill to allow e-signatures for online contracts. Pres. Clinton said he would sign the bill.
(SFC, 6/17/00, p.A3)
2000 Jun 30, Pres. Clinton signed legislation for "digital signatures."
(WSJ, 7/3/00, p.A1)
2000 Jun, Handspring went public.
(WSJ, 6/5/03, p.B1)
2000 Jul 21, It was reported that computers at Los Alamos simulated a nuclear blast in 3 dimensions for the 1st time.
(WSJ, 7/21/00, p.A1)
2000 Jul 26, Napster Inc. was hit with a preliminary injunction to halt all illegal song swapping over the Internet.
(SFC, 7/27/00, p.A1)
2000 Oct 10, The Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments, co-inventor of the computer chip, Herbert Kroemer (72) of UC Santa Barbara and Zhores Alferov (70) of Russia for work in high-speed transistors and tiny lasers.
(SFC, 10/11/00, p.A1,6)
2000 Nov 20, Intel planned to introduce the Pentium 4 microprocessor with speeds of 1.4 and 1.5 GHz.
(SFC, 11/18/00, p.D1)
2000 Dec 8, Richard Clarke, top cyberspace official of the US National Security Council, warned that several nations had already created information-warfare units for disrupting computer networks.
(SFC, 12/9/00, p.A3)
2000 Luis von Ahn, computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon, together with Manuel Blum, Nicholas J. Hopper and John Langford coined the term CAPTCHA (completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart) in a joint paper. This led to the use of mangled text to verify human users of computer software over the Internet. The Recaptcha system was launched in 2007 and used words that machines could not read.
(Econ, 9/5/09, TQ p.16)
2000 Peter Wayner authored "Free For All: How Linux and the Free Software Movement Undercut the High-Tech Titans."
(WSJ, 7/26/00, p.A24)
2000 Data centers consumed .6% of the world’s electricity. By 2005 this reached 1%.
(Econ, 5/24/08, p.19)
2000 The government of Estonia decided to go paperless and conduct as much business as possible online.
(NW, 5/13/02, p.72)
2001 Jan 8, Advanced Micro Devices announced its new 850 MHz Duron chip.
(WSJ, 1/09/01, p.B7)
2001 Mar 19, Palm unveiled its m500 line but wasn't able to ship in volume until May.
(WSJ, 9/7/01, p.A1)
2001 Mar, Apple Corp. introduced the Mac OS X.
(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
2001 May 29, Intel unveiled its new 64-bit processor, the Itanium, previously known under the code name Merced. A 2nd generation of the chip, code-named McKinley, was planned for 2002. The project was a joint venture with HP.
(WSJ, 5/29/01, p.A1)(Econ, 2/28/04, p.63)
2001 May 31, Microsoft released its new Office XP for Windows software.
(SFC, 5/31/01, p.C1)
2001 May, Apple Corp. announced plans to open 25 retail stores.
(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
2001 Jun 11, It was reported that Intel researchers had developed tiny silicon transistors that would allow production of chips with 1 billion transistors by 2007.
(SFC, 6/11/01, p.D1)
2001 Jun 28, A US federal appeals court reversed the order to breakup Microsoft Corp. into two parts.
(SFC, 6/29/01, p.A1)
2001 Jul 19, The Code Red computer worm began hitting Internet-connected computers, exploiting a flaw in Microsoft software. This was among the first network worms to spread rapidly because it required only a network connection, not a human opening an attachment.
(SFC, 7/30/01, p.D1)(SFC, 9/3/07, p.C3)
2001 Jul 23, The US Pentagon shut down public access to its web sites due to a computer worm called the Code Red worm. It defaced web sites with the words "Hacked by Chinese."
(SFC, 7/24/01, p.A2)
2001 Jul 30, Intel rolled out its new Pentium III-M processor based on .13 micron chip technology.
(SFC, 7/31/01, p.E3)
2001 Aug 2, Houston launched SimHouston, a program to provide each of its 1.8 million residents with free e-mail accounts and access to word processing software.
(SFC, 8/21/01, p.C1)
2001 Aug 26, IBM computer scientists reported that they had constructed a working logic circuit within a single molecule of carbon fiber known as a carbon nanotube.
(SSFC, 8/26/01, p.A20)(SFC, 8/27/01, p.D1)
2001 Aug 27, Intel unveiled a 2-GHz Pentium 4 chip.
(SFC, 8/27/01, p.D1)
2001 Aug 27, Michael Dertouzos, MIT computer scientist, died at age 64. His books included ""The Unfinished Revolution: Human Centered Computers and What They Can Do For Us." He also helped drive the creation of the WWW Consortium to ensure uniformity on the Web.
(SFC, 8/31/01, p.A24)
2001 Aug 28, Gateway, the nation's No. 4 manufacturer of personal computers, said it was laying off 4,700 employees, 25% of its global work force, because of an increasingly bleak market.
(AP, 8/28/02)
2001 Sep 3, Hewlett-Packard announced plans to buy Compaq Computer in a $25 billion stock swap. The bid was expected to eliminate as many as 15,000 jobs.
(SFC, 9/4/01, p.A1)(SFC, 9/5/01, p.A1)
2001 Sep 6, The US Justice Dept. and 18 states dropped efforts to breakup Microsoft Corp.
(SFC, 9/7/01, p.A1)
2001 Sep 18, The new computer worm, W32.Nimda, struck the Internet.
(SFC, 9/19/01, p.D1)
2001 Sep, Larry Ellison of Oracle Corp. advocated a national ID card system and said Oracle software could be used.
(SFC, 5/20/02, p.A13)
2001 Oct 3, Apple introduced the iPod, a breakthrough MP3 music player that packs up to 1,000 CD-quality songs into an ultra-portable, 6.5 ounce design that fits in your pocket, at a cost of $399.
(www.apple.com/pr/library/2001/oct/23ipod.html)(Econ, 10/4/08, p.14)
2001 Oct 9, Pres. Bush appointed Richard Clarke as special adviser for cyberspace security.
(SFC, 10/10/01, p.A4)
2001 Oct 17, Researchers at Lucent's Bell Labs reported the development of a tiny new transistor made of a simple cluster of organic molecules.
(SFC, 10/18/01, p.D2)
2001 Oct 25, Microsoft introduced its new Windows XP operating system.
(SFC, 10/26/01, p.B1)
2001 Nov 8, Scientists from Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs issued a report on "nanotransistors," so tiny that 10 million could fit on the head of a pin.
(SFC, 11/9/01, p.A19)
2001 Nov 14, The Microsoft Xbox, a video game player, went on sale for $299.
(SFC, 11/14/01, p.D1)
2001 Nov, The US and some 2 dozen other nations signed a broad accord known as the Convention on Cybercrime developed by the Council of Europe.
(WSJ, 12/3/01, p.B1)
2001 Dec 4, The "Goner" computer worm was reported spreading worldwide disguised as a screen saver.
(SFC, 12/5/01, p.B1)
2001 Dec 8, Israeli police arrested 3 teenagers for creating and spreading the "Goner" computer worm.
(SSFC, 12/9/01, p.A18)
2001 Dec 11, US Federal agents carried out dozens of raids and seized computers in some 27 cities and 21 states suspected of pirating software over the Internet. The "Warez" network of software pirates was targeted.
(SFC, 12/12/01, p.A3)
2001 Marc Prensky authored “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants," in which he argued that students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.
(Econ, 3/6/10, TQ p.10)
2001 M. Mitchell Waldrop authored "The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal," a history of the personal computer.
(SSFC, 8/26/01, DB p.78)
2001 Citadel Securities, a high-frequency market maker, was founded by Kenneth Griffin.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citadel_LLC)(Econ., 12/19/20, p.98)
2001 Jimmy Wales (35), a retired futures and options trader, founded Wikipedia, an Internet encyclopedia.
(SFC, 12/6/05, p.A10)
2002 Jan 28, Palm Inc. introduced its $449 i705 handheld computer with wireless e-mail and message service.
(SFC, 1/28/02, p.E1)
2002 Jan, Apple Corp. introduced a line of iMacs with a swiveling flat screen on a circular base containing an 800 MHz G4 processor. It was priced at $1,799.
(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
2002 Mar 14, It was reported that scientists had developed a brain implant that allowed monkeys to control a computer cursor by thought alone.
(SFC, 3/14/02, p.A2)
2002 Mar 19, Carly Fiorina, head of Hewlett-Packard, claimed victory by a slim margin in a proxy battle to buy Compaq Computer. Some $180 million was reportedly spent in the effort to win votes.
(SFC, 3/20/02, p.A1,21)
2002 Jun, Computer hackers from around the world gathered in Odessa, Ukraine, for summit on trading tips and setting up rules for bilking targets.
(SSFC, 10/23/11, p.F2)
2002 Nov 19, The US Dept. of Energy awarded IBM a contract to develop a 100 teraflop computer (ASCI Purple), the estimated speed of the human brain. This followed the recent development of a Japanese NEC computer that was clocked at 36.5 teraflops, trillions of floating point operations a second, more than 4 times the fastest US computer. Completion was expected in 2004.
(WSJ, 11/19/02, p.B1)
2002 Lou Gerstner (60), former CEO of IBM, authored, "Who Says Elephants Can't Dance," an account of his leadership at IBM.
(SFC, 11/18/02, p.E1)
2002 David Sheff authored "China Dawn," a close-up look at the young men building Internet infrastructure in China.
(WSJ, 3/12/02, p.A24)
2002 IBM stopped making desktop computers and sold manufacturing operations to a contract manufacturer.
(WSJ, 1/8/02, p.AB1)
2003 Jan 16, Microsoft announced its 1st dividend along with a stock split.
(SFC, 1/17/03, p.A1)
2003 May, Munich, Germany, ousted Microsoft from 14,000 government computers in favor of Linux.
(Econ, 9/13/03, p.59)
2003 Jun 2, PeopleSoft announced an agreement to buy J.D. Edwards for $1.7 billion.
(SFC, 12/14/04, p.D1)
2003 Apr, Apple Corp. launched its iTunes music store to provide downloadable music for its iPod. Downloads were offered at 99 cents per track.
(Econ, 7/8/06, p.70)(Econ, 11/14/09, p.18)
2003 Jun 4, Palm Inc. said it would buy rival Handspring in a stock deal valued at $195 mil.
(SFC, 6/5/03, p.B1)(WSJ, 6/5/03, p.B1)
2003 Jun 6, Oracle issued a $5.1 billion hostile takeover bid for PeopleSoft at $16 per share.
(SFC, 12/14/04, p.D1)
2003 Jun 23, Apple Computer Inc. introduced new Macintosh computers that use its "G5" microprocessor, a design by IBM Corp. that can handle twice as much data at once as traditional PC microchips.
(Reuters, 6/23/03)
2003 Sep 12, A climate prediction experiment, expected to involve two million people around the world, was launched. The program, downloaded from (www.climateprediction.net) and ran on an ordinary desktop or laptop computer.
(Reuters, 9/11/03)
2003 Sep 23, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) introduced 64-bit computing for PC users. The 1st new chip is the AMD Athalon 64 Processor 3200+, which runs at 2 GHz.
(SFC, 9/23/03, p.B1)
2003 Oct, Apple Corp. introduced a Windows version of the Mac music jukebox software, iTunes.
(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
2003 Nov 9, Endpcnoise.com (http://www.endpcnoise.com), a Vancouver, Washington-based custom outlet, was reported to specialize in creating nearly silent PCs. These PCs can drop their noise levels to 25 or 26 decibels, while a human's lowest hearing threshold is generally considered to be about 20 decibels. A busy road is about 80 decibels and a quiet bedroom at night is about 30 decibels.
(Reuters, 11/9/03)
2003 Nov 20, Advanced Micro Devices said it would build $2.4 billion chip factory in Germany to produce microprocessors on 300-mm silicon wafers.
(SFC, 11/21/03, p.B1)
2003 Dec 18, RealNetworks filed a federal anti-trust suit against Microsoft, alleging it has tried to use it monopoly power in PC operating systems to unlawfully dominate the digital media market. A settlement was reached in 2005.
(SFC, 10/12/05, p.C2)
2003 David Kushner authored "Masters of Doom," an account of how John Carmack and John Romero created the computer games "Doom" and "Quake."
(WSJ, 5/6/03, p.D5)
2004 Feb 9, Culturecom Holdings Ltd. of Hong Kong unveiled a DVD player and word-processing device built with chips developed by Chinese computer scientist Chu Bong-foo. Chu found a way to put Asia characters in position to command binary code.
(WSJ, 2/9/04, p.A1)
2004 Mar 16, Japan's Toshiba Corp said that Guinness World Records had certified its stamp-sized hard disk drives (HDDs) as the smallest in the world. The 0.85-inch HDDs, unveiled in January, have storage capacity of up to four gigabytes and will be used in products such as cellphones and digital camcorders.
(AP, 3/16/04)
2004 Mar 24, EU regulators slapped a $613 million anti-trust fine against Microsoft.
(WSJ, 3/23/04, p.A3)(SFC, 3/25/04, p.C1)
2004 Apr 2, Sun Microsystems announced that Microsoft would pay it nearly $2 billion to settle a legal dispute. Sun also announced layoffs of 3,300 and a business partnership with Microsoft.
(SFC, 4/3/04, p.A1)
2004 Apr 3, Techies organized a flash mob to create a supercomputer at UCSF's Koret Gym. 669 computers were hooked together, but the fastest speed, 180 gigaflops, was achieved with just 256. The world's fastest computer was Japan's $400 million Earth Simulator running at 35 teraflops, or 35,000 gigaflops.
(SSFC, 4/4/04, p.B1)
2004 Apr 12. Microsoft reported that it agreed to pay $440 million to settle a broad patent suit with InterTrust. It covered the protection of digital content against unauthorized copying.
(WSJ, 4/12/04, p.A3)
2004 Apr 13, The FDA approved a clinical trial by Cyberkinetics on implants in humans for a brain-computer interface.
(SFC, 4/14/04, p.C8)
2004 Jun 22, Microsoft received patent #6,754,472 for “a method and apparatus for transmitting power and data using the human body."
(Econ, 7/3/04, p.66)
2004 Sep 28, IBM Corp. claimed unofficial bragging rights as owner of the world's fastest supercomputer. IBM said its still-unfinished BlueGene/L System, named for its ability to model the folding of human proteins, can sustain speeds of 360 teraflops. A teraflop is 1 trillion calculations per second. BlueGene/L reached full capacity in 2005
(AP, 9/29/04)(SFC, 9/29/04, p.C1)(SFC, 8/29/05, p.E1)
2004 Oct 14, Google Inc. introduced a program that quickly scours hard drives for documents, e-mails, instant messages and past Web searches.
(AP, 10/14/04)
2004 Dec 7, IBM and China’s Lenovo Group planned a joint PC venture. Lenovo was expected to pay some $2 billion for a majority share of IBM’s PC business. Lenovo announced a $1.75 billion cash and stock deal to acquire a majority interest in IBM’s PC business.
(WSJ, 12/7/04, p.A3)(SFC, 12/8/04, p.A1)
2004 Dec 13, Google announced plans to digitally scan the book collections of 5 major libraries, including the Univ. Michigan, Stanford, Harvard, NY Public Library and Oxford, which agreed to books published before 1900.
(SFC, 12/14/04, p.A1)
2004 Dec 13, Oracle Corp. raised its takeover bid for bitter rival PeopleSoft Inc. by 10 percent and sealed a $10.3 billion deal that will create the world's second largest maker of business applications software.
(AP, 12/13/04)(SFC, 12/14/04, p.A1)
2004 Dec 16, Symantec agreed to acquire Veritas Software.
(SFC, 12/17/04, p.D1)
2004 A system named Red Storm was scheduled for completion using AMD chips in a $90 million Cray supercomputer for Sandia National Labs.
(SFC, 10/22/02, p.D1)
2004 Mark Shuttleworth of South Africa began funding the Ubuntu project, which made a user-friendly version of Linux, an open source operating system.
(Econ, 6/9/07, TQ p.33)
2005 Jan 1, A new California law took effect levying a surcharge on computer sales to defray recycling costs.
(Econ, 1/29/05, p.60)
2005 Jan 11, LeapFrog Enterprises displayed a $99 digital pen that talks, corrects spelling and answers math problems. Sales were to begin in the Fall.
(WSJ, 1/12/05, p.B1)
2005 Feb 1, HP researchers introduced groundbreaking nanotechnology that could replace traditional transistors on computer chips.
(SFC, 2/1/05, p.A1)
2005 Feb 1, Sun Microsystems began selling information technology on a pay-per-use basis offering customers access to computing power for $1 per hour.
(SFC, 2/1/05, p.A1)
2005 Feb 7, IBM, Toshiba and Sony disclosed the architectural design of a new, jointly developed, multi-core processor called the Cell.
(Econ, 2/12/05, p.77)(www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS2972427392.html)
2005 Feb 14, The annual RSA Conference opened in SF. RSA stands for Riverst, Shamir, and Adelman -- three Israelis who played a fundamental role in developing the PKI infrastructure. The RSA show remains a fundamental gathering for the cryptographic community.
(IHub, 2/14/05)
2005 Feb 17, ChoicePoint Inc., a national provider of identification and credential verification services, said it will send an additional 110,000 statements to people informing them of possible identity theft after a group of well-organized criminals was able to obtain personal information on almost 140,000 consumers through the company. In 2006 ChoicePoint agreed to pay $15 million to settle FTC charges that consumer privacy rights were violated in the DB theft.
(http://money.cnn.com/2005/02/17/technology/personaltech/choicepoint/)(SFC, 1/27/06, p.D3)
2005 Feb 26, Jef Raskin (61), computer pioneer, died in Pacifica, Ca. he led the shift to a graphical interface with Apple’s Macintosh.
(WSJ, 3/1/05, p.A1)
2005 Mar 9, Information broker LexisNexis reported that thieves hacked into records and stole personal data on some 310,000 US individuals.
(SFC, 4/13/05, p.A4)
2005 Mar 24, A California jury ordered Toshiba Corp. to pay an additional $84 million in punitive damages to Lexar Media, Inc. one day after a 381 million award for breach of fiduciary duty. The total damages of $465 million was the largest IP verdict in California history.
(SSFC, 4/3/05, p.B1)
2005 Apr 29, Apple began selling the Tiger operating system, OS X version 10.4, for the Mac computer.
(SFC, 4/30/05, p.C1)
2005 May 31, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) introduced its 1st PC microprocessors with a dual-core chip design, the Athlon 64 X2.
(SFC, 5/31/05, p.C4)
2005 Jun 8, Seagate introduced a disk drive for notebook computers that stores 160 gigabytes of data. It used new technology called perpendicular recording.
(WSJ, 6/9/05, p.B7)
2005 Jun 6, IBM and Ecole Polytechnique of Lausanne, Switz., announced a partnership to begin building a computer model of the human brain.
(Econ, 6/11/05, p.75)
2005 Jun 11, It was reported that the latest flash drives can store 4 gigabytes of data.
(Econ, 6/11/05, TQ p.13)
2005 Jun 22, The IBM BlueGene/L System at Lawrence Livermore National Lab., a computer with 62,000 microprocessors, was crowned king among supercomputers at a conference in Germany.
(SFC, 6/22/05, p.C1)
2005 Jul 19, Computer and printer maker Hewlett-Packard Co. said it will cut 14,500 jobs and overhaul its retirement program in a restructuring plan designed to save $1.9 billion annually.
(AP, 7/19/05)
2005 Aug 29, A Connecticut man known on the Internet as "illwill" pleaded guilty in Manhattan federal court to charges relating to the theft of the source code to Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating software, considered among the company's crown jewels. William Genovese, Jr. (28) admitted selling the source code for Windows 2000 and Windows NT 4.0. On January 27, 2006, he was sentenced to 2 years in jail.
(AP, 8/29/05)(www.usdoj.gov/criminal/cybercrime/genovesePlea.htm)
2005 Sep 7, Apple Computer Inc. Chief Executive Steve Jobs introduced a long-anticipated music-playing cell phone and surprised the faithful with a new pencil-thin iPod.
(AP, 9/8/05)
2005 Nov 22, Microsoft released its Xbox 360 videogame console.
(WSJ, 11/22/05, p.A1)
2005 George Gilder authored “The Silicon Eye: How a Silicon Valley Company Aims to Make All Current Computers, Cameras, and Cell Phones Obsolete." It was a history of the Foveon imaging chip, which began development under Carver mead and his associates in the 1980s with neural networks.
(WSJ, 5/3/05, p.D8)
2005 Jeffrey S. Young authored “iCon - Steve Jobs: The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business."
(SSFC, 5/22/05, p.F1)
2005 Intel planned to complete a new $375 million chipset assembly plant in Chengdu, China.
(SFC, 5/31/05, p.C1)
2005 Microsoft released MSN Search, powered by its own internally developed search engine. MSN had previously relied on Yahoo for its search function.
(SFC, 2/2/08, p.C1)
2005 Microsoft acquired Groove Networks along with its creator Ray Ozzie.
(Econ, 6/28/08, p.78)
2006 Mar 9, Microsoft Corp. took the wraps off its mysterious Project Origami, unveiling a computer that's about the size of a large paperback book but runs a full version of the Windows XP operating system.
(AP, 3/9/06)
2006 Apr 5, Apple Corp. introduced free software to allow users of its latest Mac models to run MS Windows.
(Reuters, 4/5/06)(WSJ, 4/6/06, p.B1)
2006 Jun 15, Bill Gates (50) announced that he would hand over his role as chief architect of Microsoft to Ray Ozzie (50).
(Econ, 6/24/06, p.75)
2006 Jun 29, The US government announced it had recovered a stolen laptop computer and hard drive with sensitive data on up to 26.5 million veterans and military personnel.
(AP, 6/29/07)
2006 Jul 27, Intel introduced a new line of microprocessors called Core 2 Duos. New features included higher performance and lower power consumption.
(SFC, 7/28/06, p.D1)
2006 Jul 27, Sharman Networks Ltd., the company behind Kazaa file-sharing software, said it will redesign its software and pay over $115 million in penalties to leading music and movie companies.
(SFC, 7/28/06, p.D3)
2006 Aug 25, A team led by Andy Jassy made available a beta version of “Elastic Compute Cloud" (EC2), the central offering of Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud-computing arm of Amazon.
(Econ, 8/27/16, p.46)(Econ, 8/27/16, p.46)
2006 Nov 14, Intel launched its first computer chips with four processing cores.
(www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2058457,00.asp)
2006 Nov 30, Microsoft Corp. released Windows Vista for businesses. This was the 1st major upgrade to its operating system in 5 years. Release for retail customers was set for Jan 30.
(SFC, 12/1/06, p.D1)
2006 Dec 11, Scientists from IBM, Macronix and Qimonda said they developed a material that made "phase-change" memory 500 to 1,000 times faster than the commonly-used "flash" memory, while using half as much power.
(AFP, 12/11/06)
2006 Dec 12, Online political groups, the Campaign to Defend the Constitution and the Christian Alliance for Progress, demanded that Wal-Mart dump Left Behind: Eternal Forces, a new computer game in which players must either kill or convert non-Christians.
(SFC, 12/12/06, p.A1)
2006 Dec 12, Alan Shugart, disk drive pioneer, died in Monterey, Ca. Shugart led a team of IBM engineers in 1969 that developed the floppy disk and went on to found Shugart Associates. In 1979 he co-founded Seagate Technology.
(SFC, 12/14/06, p.B5)
2006 Adam Greenfield authored “Everywhere: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing."
(Econ, 4/28/07, SR p.18)
2006 Frances E. Allen (b.1932), pioneer in the field of optimizing compilers, became the first woman to earn the Turing Award, regarded as the Nobel Prize of computing.
(SFC, 2/18/14, p.A6)
2007 Jan 5, Hitachi announced the 1st 1-terrabyte hard drive, eclipsing Seagate’s 750 gigabyte drives.
(SFC, 1/5/07, p.C1)
2007 Jan 9, Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone at the annual Macworld Expo in SF. The 4GB version would be sold for $499. Apple dropped the word “Computer" from its name.
(SFC, 1/10/07, p.C1)(WSJ, 1/11/07, p.C1)
2007 Jan 22, Intel and Sun Microsystems announced a major partnership under which Sun would begin selling business computers running on Intel’s Xeon microprocessors, while Intel will endorse and support sun’s Solaris operating system.
(SFC, 1/23/07, p.D3)
2007 Jan 26, Intel said it will begin using a new material on its next generation of chips making them more energy efficient. IBM also announced changes in its chip-making processes.
(SFC, 1/27/07, p.A1)
2007 Jan 30, The Windows Vista computer operating system from Microsoft went on sale in the consumer retail market.
(SFC, 1/30/07, p.C1)
2007 Feb 11, Intel introduced a new super-processor at the opening of an int’l conference of chip scientists. The processor would be able to perform over 1 trillion mathematical calculations per second (teraflop), but commercial use would not be available for 5 years.
(SFC, 2/12/07, p.A9)
2007 Feb 13, In Canada D-Wave Systems, based in Burnaby near Vancouver, announced the existence of the world’s first practical quantum computer.
(Econ, 2/17/07, p.81)
2007 Mar 17, John Backus (b.1924), programmer, died in Oregon. His development of the Fortran programming language in the 1950s changed how people interacted with computers and paved the way for modern software. Fortran, short for Formula Translation, reduced the number of programming statements necessary to operate a machine by a factor of 20. The Association for Computing Machinery gave Backus its 1977 Turing Award, one of the industry's highest accolades. Backus also won a National Medal of Science in 1975 and got the 1993 Charles Stark Draper Prize, the top honor from the National Academy of Engineering.
(AP, 3/20/07)
2007 Mar 26, Intel Corp. announced it will build a $2.5 billion chip factory in China, giving the US company a bigger presence in the booming Chinese market and boosting Beijing's efforts to attract high-tech investment. Intel also unveiled a prototype chip that uses optical connections to increase speed. Products using the technology were expected to appear within 3 years.
(AP, 3/26/07)(WSJ, 3/26/07, p.B6)
2007 Apr 4, Apple updated its desktop Mac Pro computers adding two new 3.0GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors, bringing 8-core processing to the Mac. The new machines can run the 3.0GHz Intel Xeon processors and are available as build to order options.
(www.macworld.com/news/2007/04/04/eightcore/index.php)
2007 May 30, Microsoft introduced a computer designed like a table with a touch-screen called Surface. It was aimed for use in hotels and casinos.
(WSJ, 5/30/07, p.B1)
2007 Aug 3, Lenovo Group Ltd. said it will sell a basic personal computer aimed at China's vast but poor rural market and priced as low as $199.
(AP, 8/3/07)
2007 Aug 27, In South Africa Hewlett-Packard became the first multinational to be exempted from selling 30 percent of its business in South Africa to black investors. Under an agreement reached with the government, the company will instead invest millions of dollars in a new business institute to provide training for 1,800 students over the next six years.
(AFP, 8/27/07)
2007 Aug 27, Taiwan's leading computer vendor Acer Inc moved to substantially boost its market share by acquiring US rival Gateway amid a major consolidation among the world's top computer companies. Acer said it would pay $710 million for Gateway.
(AP, 8/27/07)(Econ, 9/1/07, p.60)
2007 Oct 1, Teradata Corporation, a hardware and software vendor specializing in data warehousing and analytic applications, was spun off from NCR Corp. As of 2010 the former division of NCR is the largest company in Dayton, Ohio, with headquarters in Miamisburg, Ohio.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teradata)
2007 Dec 6, IBM reported that it has made a breakthrough in converting electrical signals into light pulses that brings closer the day when supercomputing, which now requires huge machines, will be done on a single chip.
(Reuters, 12/6/07)
2007 Dec 14, Asus Technology of Taiwan unveiled a $299 version of Eee PC, a 2-pound laptop for kids that stores data on flash memory.
(SFC, 12/14/07, p.D1)
2007 Ian Ayres authored “Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart," a look at how computers have enabled automatic processes to surpass human experts in numerous fields.
(Econ, 9/15/07, p.103)
2008 Feb 4, Intel said it has built a new chip with a record 2 billion transistors. Its new quad-core Itanium processor will operate at frequencies up to 2 gigahertz.
(SFC, 2/5/08, p.C2)
2008 Feb 12, European Union antitrust regulators raided Intel Corp. and computer resellers searching for evidence that they may have broken cartel or monopoly rules.
(AP, 2/12/08)
2008 Feb 15, It was reported that a new computer virus called Mocmex, identified as a Trojan Horse from China, had been discovered in digital photo frames. It recognized and blocked antivirus software from over 100 security vendors and collected passwords for online games.
(SFC, 2/15/08, p.C1)
2008 Feb 27, The EU fined Microsoft Corp. $1.3 billion for charging rivals too much for software information. The fine is the largest ever for a single company and the first time the EU has penalized a business for failing to obey an antitrust order.
(AP, 2/27/08)
2008 Feb 27, Germany's highest court found that government surveillance of personal computers violates the individual right to privacy. German investigators said this will restrict their ability to pursue terrorists.
(AP, 2/27/08)
2008 Mar 5, Joseph Weizenbaum (b.1923), a computer programmer who helped advance artificial intelligence only to become a critic of the technology later in his life, died. He was a professor at MIT when in 1966 he introduced ELIZA, named for Eliza Doolittle, the heroine of "My Fair Lady." The program allowed a person to "converse" with a computer, using what the person said to create the computer's reply.
(AP, 3/13/08)(WSJ, 3/15/08, p.A6)
2008 Apr 8, IBM began shipping high-end computers built around the Power6 processor, the fastest chip to date.
(SFC, 4/9/08, p.C1)
2008 Apr 21, It was reported that the 4th generation Oqo Model 02 personal computer, which weighed one pound and clipped onto a belt, was available for a starting price of $1,300. It had been developed over the last 8 years in SF in a venture begun by former Apple and IBM engineers.
(SFC, 4/21/08, p.D1)
2008 Apr 30, Scientists at Hewlett-Packard said they have discovered a fourth basic type of electrical circuit that could lead to a computer you never have to boot up. The three fundamental elements of a passive circuit included resistors, capacitors and inductors. In the 1970s Leon Chua of the University of California at Berkeley, theorized there should be a fourth called a memory resistor, or memristor, which remembers the direction and the amount of charge that flows through it.
(Reuters, 5/1/08)
2008 May 30, A jury in Syracuse, NY, found Hewlett-Packard guilty of infringing a patent for data processing held by Cornell Univ. and ordered the company to pay Cornell $184 million.
(SFC, 6/4/08, p.C5)
2008 Jul 13, Terry Childs (43), a San Francisco computer engineer, was arrested on felony charges for allegedly plotting to hijack the city’s computer system. Childs, who continue to draw his $127,735 annual salary, refused to provide passwords to the network system and was held in lieu of a $5 million bail. Mayor Newsom met with Childs on July 21, who provided system code. Cisco engineers had the system back under control by July 22. On April 27, 2010, Childs was convicted of felony computer tampering. On April 27, 2010, a Superior Court jury concluded that his crime cost the city over $200,000, making him eligible for a maximum state sentence of 5 years. On Aug 6, 2010, Childs was sentenced to 4 years in prison and ordered to pay $1.5 million. Hi conviction was upheld in 2013.
(SFC, 7/16/08, p.B1)(SFC, 7/23/08, p.B1)(SFC, 4/28/10, p.C1)(SFC, 8/7/10, p.C2)(SSFC, 10/27/13, p.C2C3)
2008 Jul 25, Randy Pausch (47), a Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist, died at his home in Virginia. His "last lecture" in September 2007, about facing terminal cancer, has become an Internet sensation and a best-selling book.
(AP, 7/25/08)
2008 Sep 7, In London an urgent inquiry was underway after a disc containing the personal details of 5,000 justice staff went missing in yet another embarrassing data loss blunder. Private contractor EDS told the Prison Service in July that the hard drive had gone astray. The missing disc was last seen in July 2007.
(AP, 9/7/08)
2008 Sep 7, South Korean police arrested four people over the theft of data on 11 million customers of a local oil refiner in what is being called the country's largest-ever data leak.
(AFP, 9/7/08)
2008 Sep 23, Portugal's Socialist government began the roll-out of 500,000 ultra-cheap laptops for school children in a program that the government said could be extended to Venezuela. While the Magellan computer will be assembled in Portugal by a company called JP Sa Couto, it is based on Intel's Classmate PC, a cheap computer that has been adopted in various formats in countries such as Brazil and Indonesia.
(Reuters, 9/23/08)
2008 Urs Gasser and John Palfrey authored “Born Digital."
(Econ, 3/6/10, TQ p.10)
2008 Roadrunner, a $121 million supercomputer housed at Los Alamos, NM, became the first computer to break the petaflop barrier by processing just over a quadrillion mathematical calculations per second. In 2013 it was decommissioned, replaced by something smaller, faster and more energy efficient.
(SSFC, 3/31/13, p.A8)
2008 By this year high-frequency trading made up the majority of equity trading in America.
(Econ., 12/19/20, p.98)
2008 The first Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) began in Canada as an online computing course. By 2012 MOOCS were offering college students lectures for a fraction of the cost of attending a university.
(Econ, 6/28/14, p.21)
2009 Jan 8, Dell Inc. announced that it is moving its Irish manufacturing operations to Poland by 2010, as part of a cost cutting measure that will result in the loss of some 1,900 Irish jobs.
(WSJ, 1/9/09, p.B4)
2009 Jan 21, Intel said it will close several older factories displacing some 5-6 thousand workers in reaction to a sharp drop in demand for its computer chips.
(WSJ, 1/22/09, p.B1)
2009 Mar 18, IBM announced that it was in talks to acquire Sun Microsystems for at least $6.5 billion in cash. The deal soon faltered as the companies failed to agree on terms.
(Econ, 3/21/09, p.69)(SFC, 4/6/09, p.A5)
2009 Mar 30, Intel released Nehalem, its new superfast chip for servers.
(Econ, 4/4/09, p.73)
2009 Jun 16, The Norwegian firm Opera Software unveiled new technology that allows it Opera 10 Web browser to also function as a file server. A feature called Opera Unite enables users to push content and establish communications without the need for a 3rd party.
(SFC, 6/17/09, p.C1)
2009 Jun 17, It was reported that security researchers at Finjan, a venture–funded security company in San Jose, have identified a sophisticated online network, called GoldenCashworld, that was used for buying and selling access to infected PCs. The network included tools for creating malicious code and stolen credentials for about 100,000 Web sites.
(SFC, 6/17/09, p.C1)
2009 Jul 7, Google announced its new operating system, Google Chrome OS, which would initially target low cost netbooks.
(SFC, 7/9/09, p.C1)
2009 Sep 18, South Korean scientists said they had developed a new transistor which moves faster and consumes less energy than existing semiconductors, a technology opening the way for no-booting computers.
(AP, 9/18/09)
2009 Oct 22, The Windows 7 computer operating system went on sale.
(SFC, 10/22/09, p.C2)
2009 Nov 11, Hewlett-Packard Co. said it will acquire 3Com Corp. in a $2.7 billion deal that would put HP in direct competition with Cisco Systems in networking technology.
(SFC, 11/12/09, p.A1)
2009 Dec 16, The US Federal Trade Commission voted to sue Intel Corp. over its business practices, saying it engaged in anti-competitive behavior by abusing its dominant market position. Intel controlled over 80% of the CPU market and will face an administrative law judge in September.
(SFC, 12/17/09, p.A1)
2009 Dec 22, A US federal appeals court ordered Microsoft Corp. to stop selling its Word program in January and pay a Canadian software company $290 million for violating a patent, upholding the judgment of a lower court. Toronto-based i4i Inc. sued Microsoft in 2007, saying it owned the technology behind a tool in the popular word processing program.
(AP, 12/22/09)
2009 Viktor Mayer-Schonberger authored “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age."
(Econ, 1/28/12, p.60)
2010 Jan 7, Intel CEO Paul Otellini introduced a technology called Intel Wireless Display (WiDi) that allows a user to beam the contents of a computer screen to a TV.
(SFC, 1/9/10, p.D1)
2010 Jan 27, Apple Inc CEO Steve Jobs took the wraps off a sleek tablet that it called the iPad, pitching the new gadget at $499, a surprisingly low price, to bridge the gap between smartphones and laptops. It will go on sale in late March for $499-829.
(Reuters, 1/28/10)(Econ, 1/30/10, p.11)
2010 Feb 6, Ethiopia’s official news agency said US software giant Microsoft has launched Windows Vista in Amharic, the first operating system in its national language. 40 scholars from the Addis Ababa University had taken part in the translation of the software for the country of over 80 million people.
(AFP, 2/6/10)
2010 Feb 18, It was reported that a new type of computer virus is known to have breached almost 75,000 computers in 2,500 organizations around the world. The virus, known as "Kneber botnet," gathers login credentials to online financial systems, social networking sites and email systems from infested computers and reports the information back to hackers.
(Reuters, 2/18/10)
2010 Feb 18, Microsoft won unconditional European Union approval for its planned search deal with Yahoo Inc to challenge market leader Google.
(Reuters, 2/18/10)
2010 Apr 1, Dr. Henry Edward Roberts (b.1941), American engineer and medical doctor, died in Georgia. In 1975 he developed and introduced the MITS Altair 8800. His Micro Instrumentation & Telemetry Systems of Albuquerque, N.M., sold the build-it-yourself kit by mail-order and Bill Gates and Paul Allen developed the first software program for it.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Roberts_%28computers%29)(SFC, 4/2/10, p.C7)
2010 Apr 3, Apple Inc. began selling its much-anticipated iPad, drawing eager customers intent on being among the first owners of a tablet-style device that the company is hoping to convince more people they actually need. Some 300,000 iPads were sold the first day.
(AP, 4/3/10)(SFC, 4/6/10, p.D1)
2010 Apr 12, Neofonie, the German maker of a new tablet PC, the WePad, was reportedly setting out to rival Apple's iPad with the promise of even more technology such as a bigger screen, a webcam and USB ports. When it hits stores starting late July, it will also boast a complete open source office package.
(AP, 4/12/10)
2010 Apr 15, Israel customs officials said they already have confiscated about 10 iPads since Israel announced new regulations this week. The iPad banned anyone from bringing an iPad into the country until officials certify that they are in compliance with local transmitter standards. Israel lifted a ban on April 25.
(AP, 4/15/10)(AP, 4/25/10)
2010 Apr 28, Palm Inc. a pioneer in the smart phone business that couldn't quite make the comeback it needed, agreed to be bought out by Hewlett-Packard Co. for about $1.4 billion in cash. Palm was founded in 1992 by Donna Dubinsky and Jeff Hawkins and helped originate the handheld computing market with its Palm Pilot "personal digital assistants" in the 1990s.
(AP, 4/29/10)
2010 May 31, It was reported that Google is phasing out the internal use of Microsoft’s ubiquitous Windows operating system because of security concerns.
(www.ft.com/cms/s/2/d2f3f04e-6ccf-11df-91c8-00144feab49a.html)
2010 Jun 10, A judge in the US District Court for the District of Utah granted Novell's request for declaratory judgment and ruled against SCO's claims of slander and breach of implied covenant of good faith. He also said that SCO is obligated to recognize Novell's waiver of SCO's claims against IBM and other companies that use Linux. He ordered the case closed.
(PCWorld, 6/11/10)
2010 Jun, Stuxnet, computer malware, was first detected by VirusBlokAda, a security firm in Belarus. It was tailored for Siemens supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems commonly used to manage water supplies, oil rigs, power plants and other industrial facilities. It was able to recognize a specific facility's control network and then destroy it. The code had a technology fingerprint of the control system it was seeking and would go into action automatically when it found its target. In September German computer security researcher Ralph Langner said he suspected that Stuxnet's mark was the Bushehr nuclear facility in Iran. Unspecified problems have been blamed for a delay in getting the facility fully operational. Stuxnet used 4 main exploits, packets of computer code that allow hackers to infiltrate or gain control of computers running software with design flaws.
(AP, 9/24/10)(Econ, 10/2/10, p.63)(Econ, 3/30/13, p.65)
2010 Jul 22, India unveiled the prototype of a $35 basic touchscreen tablet aimed at students, which it hopes to bring into production by 2011.
(AP, 7/23/10)
2010 Aug 16, Dell Inc. said it's buying 3Par Inc., a maker of enterprise data storage equipment, for about $1.13 billion cash or $18 per share. Hewlett Packard soon countered with a higher bid and a bidding war ensued raising the value of 3Par $2 billion, or $30/share. HP ended an 18-day battle with a $33 per share offer. On Sep 2 Dell refused to continue bidding and said it was entitled to a $72 million termination fee.
(AP, 8/16/10)(SSFC, 8/29/10, p.A9)(SFC, 9/3/10, p.D4)
2010 Aug 19, Chipmaker Intel announced a deal to buy security software maker McAfee Inc. for $7.68 billion, or $48 per share, a 60% premium over the stock’s closing price.
(SFC, 8/20/10, p.A1)
2010 Aug 27, The US military said it is demanding to know what happened to $1.9 million worth of computers intended for Iraqi schoolchildren. The computers were allegedly auctioned off by Iraqi officials for less than $50,000.
(SFC, 8/28/10, p.A2)
2010 Aug 30, The Hewlett-Packard Co. agreed to pay $55 million to settle a Justice Dept. probe on overcharges in a kickback scheme. The settlement involved a False Claims Act lawsuit dating back to 2004.
(SFC, 8/31/10, p.D1)
2010 Sep 13, Hewlett-Packard announced a $1.5 billion deal to buy ArcSight Inc, a provider of computer network security.
(SFC, 9/14/10, p.D1)
2010 Oct 3, In Iran a top official said Industrial computers infected by Stuxnet have been cleaned and returned to their units, following reports that the malware was mutating and wreaking havoc with equipment.
(AFP, 10/3/10)
2010 Oct 5, Iran claimed that the Stuxnet computer worm, found on the laptops of several employees at the country's nuclear power plant, is part of a covert Western plot to derail its nuclear program.
(AP, 10/5/10)
2010 Oct 28, Nvidia Corp. said China’s National University of Defense Technology has designed the world’s fastest supercomputer. Its Tianhe-1A set a performance record of 2.507 petaflops per second.
(SFC, 10/29/10, p.C5)
2010 Nov 22, Novell Inc., the maker of Linux operating-system software, said it has agreed to be bought by Attachmate Corp., for $2.2 billion, or about $6.10 per share.
(SFC, 11/23/10, p.D2)
2010 Apple bought Siri, a personal digital assistant, for $200 million.
(Econ, 9/12/15, p.57)
2010 The Imagenet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVCR) challenged research teams to submit programs that classify and detect objects and scenes. It began as a contest to encourage artificial intelligence workers to measure their progress in getting computers to recognize and label images automatically. In 2015 computers surpassed humans for the first time.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ImageNet)(Econ, 6/25/16, SR p.4)
2011 Feb 9, Hewlett-Packard unveiled its new TouchPad computer. It used Palm’s updated webOS software.
(SFC, 2/10/11, p.D1)
2011 Feb 14, A man-versus-machine showdown on popular US quiz show "Jeopardy!" ended in a tie on the first day of a three-day challenge, when an IBM computer named Watson showed off its knowledge of the Beatles, as well as a few glitches.
(AP, 2/15/11)
2011 Feb 16, The IBM computer named Watson beat two former Jeopardy champions, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, finishing a 3-day match at the TV quiz show.
(SFC, 2/17/11, p.D4)
2011 Mar 11, Apple’s iPad2 tablet computer arrived in stores.
(SFC, 3/12/11, p.D1)
2011 Mar, IBM began teaching a computer chip, called Synapse, to play Pong. The chip was designed to learn through experience and after a few weeks it was nearly unbeatable.
(SFC, 11/7/11, p.D1)
2011 Apr 4, Texas Instruments Inc announced that it is buying National Semiconductor Corp for about $6.5 billion in cash, paying a nearly 80 percent premium in a deal to expand its stake in analog chips used in everything from tablets to cars.
(Reuters, 4/4/11)
2011 Apr 26, Japanese electronics and entertainment giant Sony unveiled its first tablet computers, codenamed S1 and S2, in a direct but belated challenge to Apple's iPad.
(AFP, 4/26/11)
2011 May 4, Intel unveiled its new Ivy Bridge processor made with a 3-D manufacturing technique that increases chip performance as much as 37% while using less power.
(SFC, 5/5/11, p.D3)
2011 May 10, Microsoft announced an $8.5 billion deal to acquire Skype, an Internet voice and video communications company.
(SFC, 5/11/11, p.A1)
2011 Jun 1, Taiwan-based Acer Inc, the world No. 2 PC maker, said it will take a $150 million charge to write off inventory and doubtful payments in Europe and will cut 300 jobs there in the latest upheaval following the sudden departure of its CEO in March. Acer charged its former chief executive officer, Gianfranco Lanci, with performance issues, after he had criticized the company's resistance to globalization in interviews with the media.
(Reuters, 6/1/11)
2011 Jun 20, RIKEN and Fujitsu took first place on the 37th TOP500 list at the 26th International Supercomputing Conference (ISC'11) held in Hamburg, Germany. This ranking is based on a performance measurement of the "K computer," currently under their joint development.
(www.fujitsu.com/global/news/pr/archives/month/2011/20110620-02.html)
2011 Jul, Stanford Prof. Sebastian Thrun posted a shirt video on YouTube announcing that he and colleague Peter Norvig were making their “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence" course available free online. The course began in October and 160,000 people in 190 countries had signed up for it.
(Econ, 6/25/16, SR p.10)
2011 Aug 18, Hewlett-Packard said that it would exit the personal computer business.
(SFC, 8/19/11, p.A1)
2011 Aug 24, Silicon Valley legend Steve Jobs resigned as chief executive of Apple Inc in a stunning move that ended his 14-year reign at the technology giant he co-founded in a garage.
(Reuters, 8/24/11)
2011 Sep 28, Amazon.com CEO Jeff Beezos unveiled the new Kindle Fire tablet computer to sell for $199, compared with $499 for Apple’s least expensive iPad.
(SFC, 9/29/11, p.A1)
2011 Sep, The Way-C, an African handheld tablet to rival the iPad and similar western inventions, was first presented to the public in the Congo Republic by its inventor Verone Mankou (26). It was assembled in China and went on sale in Brazzaville on Jan 30, 2012.
(AFP, 1/30/12)
2011 Oct 3, Hewlett-Packard announced that it has acquired control of Autonomy, a British software firm, for $10.3 billion. In 2012 HP said it was writing down the value of Autonomy by $8.8 billion, ascribing over $5 billion to accounting improprieties.
(www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2011/111003xb.html)(Econ, 11/24/12, p.71)
2011 Oct 4, Apple Inc. unveiled a faster, more powerful iPhone, the iPhone 4S, in its first major product event in years without Steve Jobs presiding. The iPhone included Siri, a personal assistant application.
(AP, 10/4/11)(SFC, 1/23/15, p.A10)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siri)
2011 Oct 4, Apple Inc rejected an offer from Samsung Electronics Co to settle their tablet computer dispute in Australia, possibly killing off the commercial viability of the South Korean firm's new Galaxy tablet in that market.
(Reuters, 10/4/11)
2011 Oct 5, Steve Jobs (56), the mastermind behind Apple's iPhone, iPad, iPod, iMac and iTunes, died. Millions of people around the world mourned digital-gadget genius Steve Jobs as a man whose wizardry transformed their lives in big ways and small. Walter Isaacson soon published the biography “Steve Jobs."
(AP, 10/6/11)(Econ, 10/29/11, p.98)
2011 Oct 5, Datawind, a British technology company, released a student tablet costing $35. It claimed to have developed the world's least expensive computer tablet for wireless Internet access. In February, 2012, Datawind released an updated version of the Aakash computer tablet for the commercial market that costs $50.
{Technology, Computer, Britain}
(AFP, 2/19/12)(http://tinyurl.com/79ngd6m)
2011 Oct 5, India introduced a cheap tablet computer, saying it would deliver modern technology to the countryside to help lift villagers out of poverty. Developer Datawind is selling the tablets, called Aakash, or "sky" in Hindi, to the government for about $45 each. Subsidies will reduce that to $35 for students and teachers.
(AP, 10/5/11)
2011 Oct 7, Wired magazine reported that a computer virus has infected networks used by pilots who control US Air Force drones in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. The spyware resisted efforts to remove it from computers at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada.
(SSFC, 10/9/11, p.A12)
2011 Oct 12, Dennis Ritchie (b.1941), American computer scientist, was found dead at his home in New Jersey. In the late 1960s Ritchie invented the C programming language. Ritchie and Ken Thompson then used C to develop the Unix operating system.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Ritchie)(Econ, 10/22/11, p.22)
2011 Oct 24, John McCarthy (b.1927), computer science pioneer, died at his home on the Stanford campus. He coined the term AI and organized the first conference on artificial intelligence while teaching at Dartmouth. At MIT he invented the List Processing Language (LISP), still the language of choice for AI researchers.
(SFC, 10/29/11, p.C5)
2011 Oct 25, IBM said Virginia Rometty (54) will succeed Sam Palmisano as chief executive officer effective Jan 1. Rometty, currently head of sales and marketing, will become IBM’s first female chief.
(SFC, 10/26/11, p.D3)
2012 Feb, In Ethiopia 20 Motorola Xoom tablet computers were dropped off in Wenchi village by a group called One Laptop Per Child. The tablets were charged from a solar station built by One Laptop. By year’s end all the kids could chant the English alphabet, and some spelled words.
(AP, 12/24/12)
2012 Mar 7, Apple unveiled a third-generation iPad enhanced with features aimed at keeping it on top of the booming tablet computer market. The new iPad will go on sale March 16 in Canada, France, Germany and the United States at $499, the same price as the previous models, for the most basic iPad featuring wireless connectivity only.
(AFP, 3/8/12)
2012 Mar 13, British chip designer ARM unveiled what it said was the world's most energy-efficient microprocessor design that will help devices ranging from fridges to medical equipment to parking meters to communicate with other devices.
(Reuters, 3/13/12)
2012 Mar 16, The new iPad went on sale in Canada, France, Germany and the United States at $499, the same price as the previous models, for the most basic iPad featuring wireless connectivity only. 3 million were sold over the next 4 days.
(AFP, 3/8/12)(Econ, 3/24/12, p.71)
2012 Mar 19, Apple Corp. said it will reinstate a dividend, absent since 1995, and begin a $10 billion share buyback program. Shares closed at $601.10.
(SFC, 3/20/12, p.D1)
2012 Apr 4, A Russian antivirus company claimed that some 600,000 Macs, most in the US and Canada, have been infected with a trojan horse virus called "Flashback." Flashback was originally discovered in Sep 2011, and was designed to disguise itself as an Adobe Flash Player installer, using Flash player logos. After installing Flashback, the malware seeks out user names and passwords that are stored on your Mac.
(http://mashable.com/2012/04/05/mac-flashback-trojan/)
2012 Jun 18, Microsoft unveiled Surface, its new tablet computer that will showcase the Windows 8 operating system due to be rolled out this autumn.
(Econ, 6/23/12, p.66)
2012 Jul 2, In China the High Court of the southern province of Guangdong said Apple has paid $60 million to end a dispute with Shenzhen Proview Technology over who could use the iPad name in China, giving the US tech giant more certainty in selling its tablet computer in the Chinese market.
(AFP, 7/2/12)
2012 Jul 9, A British judge ruled that Samsung's Galaxy tablet was not "cool" enough to be confused with Apple's iPad giving South Korea's Samsung a patent battle win against US rival Apple.
(AFP, 7/9/12)
2012 Aug 15, A person with privileged access to the Saudi state-owned oil company’s computers, unleashed a computer virus to initiate what is regarded as among the most destructive acts of computer sabotage on a company to date. The virus erased data on three-quarters of Aramco’s corporate PCs — documents, spreadsheets, e-mails, files — replacing all of it with an image of a burning American flag.
(NYT, 10/23/12)(http://tinyurl.com/8mc4pom)
2012 Oct 8, An Iranian oil official said the country has successfully blocked a cyber-attack on the computer network of its offshore drilling platforms. An official blamed Israel and said the attack occurred over the past two weeks, was routed through China, and affected only the communications systems of the network.
(AP, 10/8/12)
2012 Oct 16, Britain's Home Secretary Theresa May said computer hacker Gary McKinnon (46), accused by the United States of causing more than $700,000 damage to US military systems, will not be extradited because of the high risk he could kill himself. McKinnon, arrested in 2005, has Asperger's Syndrome and has said he was looking for evidence of UFOs. In December British authorities opted not to charge McKinnon.
(AP, 10/16/12)(AP, 12/14/12)
2012 Nov 12, The Top500 website namedTitan, a computer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, as the world’s faster supercomputer.
(Econ, 11/17/12, p.74)
2012 Dec 25, An Iranian semi-official news agency said there has been another cyberattack by the sophisticated computer worm Stuxnet, this time on the industries in the country's south.
(AP, 12/25/12)
2012 George Dyson authored “Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe."
(Econ, 3/10/12, p.97)
2012 Adam Lashinsky authored “Apple: How America’s Most Admired – and Secretive – Company Really Works."
(SSFC, 1/22/12, p.G3)
2013 Jan 10, The US Department of Homeland Security urged computer users to disable Oracle Corp's Java software, amplifying security experts' prior warnings to hundreds of millions of consumers and businesses that use it to surf the Web.
(AP, 1/11/13)
2013 Feb 5, Dell and Menlo Park’s Silver Lake Management, the nation’s largest technology-focused private-equity firm, announced that they had agreed to pay $13.65 a share to take Dell private.
(SFC, 2/6/13, p.D1)
2013 Feb 21, Google unveiled its touch-screen Chromebook Pixel, a high-end laptop starting at $1,299.
(SFC, 2/22/13, p.A1)
2013 Mar, French entrepreneurs decided to launch a new 3-year school for software developers. The school, named “42," soon received 50 thousand applications for 1,000 student positions.
(Econ, 5/11/13, p.47)
2013 Jun 4, Intel launched the latest version of Its Core processor, known as Haswell, at Computex Taipei.
(Econ, 6/8/13, p.67)
2013 Jun 17, The semiannual TOP500 listing of the world's fastest supercomputers was released. It said the Tianhe-2, developed by the National University of Defense Technology in central China's Changsha city, is capable of sustained computing of 33.86 petaflops per second. The Tianhe-2, which means Milky Way-2, knocks the US Energy Department's Titan machine off the No. 1 spot. It achieved 17.59 petaflops per second.
(AP, 6/17/13)
2013 Sep 4, South Korea’s Samsung set the price of its new Galaxy Gear wristwatch at $299 with sales to begin Sep 25.
(SFC, 9/5/13, p.C3)
2013 Sep 12, Dell CEO Michael Dell won shareholder approval for a planned $24.9 buyout to take the company private.
(SFC, 9/13/13, p.C3)
2013 In France Xavier Niel, telecom entrepreneur, co-founded “42," a computer programming school with a capacity of 2,500 students that charges no tuition fees.
(Econ, 2/25/17, p.57)
2014 Jan 9, IBM said DBS Group Holdings Ltd. ff Singapore will begin to use the Watson supercomputer to aid financial planners in guiding its wealth management unit’s affluent customers.
(SFC, 1/10/14, p.C2)
2014 Feb 4, Microsoft announced that Satya Nadella will replace Steve Ballmer as CEO. John Thompson (64) will replace Bill Gates as chairman.
(AP, 2/4/14)(SFC, 2/5/14, p.C3)
2014 Intel launched the latest version of Its Core processor, known as the Xeon Haswell E-5. It sported over 5 billion transistors, just 22 nm apart.
(Econ, 3/12/15, TQ p.3)
2015 Jan 21, Microsoft unveiled its Windows 10 operating system. MS also showed a new wearable 3-D gadget called the HoloLens.
(SFC, 1/22/15, p.C3)
2015 Mar, Nvidea unveiled new hardware and software to bring speed, ease and power to deep learning research. The dedicated dee-learning computer “DIGITS" was priced at $15,000.
(http://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2015/03/17/digits-devbox/)(Econ., 4/4/15, p.16)
2015 Jun 1, Intel said it has agreed to buy Altera Corp. for $54 per share in cash to defend its presence in data centers. The deal was valued at $16.7 billion.
(SFC, 6/2/15, p.D1)
2015 Jun 23, State Councilor Yang Jiechi said China will work with the United States and other countries on cybersecurity issues.
(Reuters, 6/23/15)
2015 Jul 8, The NYSE halted trading for over three hours to technical problems related to a software upgrade.
(SFC, 7/9/15, p.C1)(SFC, 7/10/15, p.C3)
2015 Jul 29, Microsoft debuted Windows 10.
(SFC, 7/30/15, p.C2)
2015 Oct 21, Western Digital, a maker of hard drives, said it is buying SanDisk, a flash-memory chip maker, in a cash and stock deal valued at about $19 billion.
(SFC, 10/22/15, p.C3)
2015 Gordon Corera authored “Intercept: The Secret History of Computers and Spies."
(Econ, 7/18/15, p.70)
2016 Mar 21, Andy Grove (79), Hungarian-born former CEO of Intel Corp., died. In 1997 Time Magazine named him as “Man of the Year." His books included “Output Management) (1983) and “only the Paranoid Survive" (1999).
(SFC, 3/22/16, p.A1)
2016 Apr 19, Intel said it would cut 12,000 jobs, about 11% of its workforce, as demand for personal computers continued to fall.
(SFC, 4/20/16, p.C6)
2016 Dec 14, California regulators approved the nation’s first energy-efficiency standards for computers.
(SFC, 12/15/16, p.A1)
2016 Dec 16, Thailand's military-appointed legislature approved a bill tightening the country's already harsh Computer Crime Act, defying critics who said it infringes on the right to free expression.
(AP, 12/16/16)
2016 Data centers consumed 2% of all the electricity produced in the world.
(Econ, 3/12/15, TQ p.9)
2016 Quant investor trading volumes exceeded hedge-fund volumes in America.
(Econ., 12/19/20, p.98)
2017 Mar 6, IBM released the first commercial program for universal quantum computers. Various startups have released their own quantum software.
(Econ, 3/11/17, TQ p.10)
2017 Apr 22, Hubert L. Dreyfus (b.1929), philosopher, died at his home in Berkeley, Ca. His books included “Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence" (1965) and “What Computers Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason" (1972).
(http://tinyurl.com/l2efld9)(SFC, 5/4/17, p.D5)
2017 May 20, Jean Sammet (89), American tech innovator, died in Maryland. She was one of six people who designed the COBOL computer language in 1959.
(SSFC, 6/4/17, p.C10)
2017 May 23, In China Google’s AlphaGo computer defeated Ke Jie, China’s national go champion. Censors blocked access to the online broadcast by Google, which organized the game in Wuzhen, a town west of Shanghai, during a forum on artificial intelligence.
(AP, 5/24/17)
2017 Jul 18, Britain's National Cyber Security Center said it had never certified products from Russian cyber security firm Kaspersky Lab.
(Reuters, 7/18/17)
2017 Jul 20, China outlined a development strategy designed to make it the world’s leading artificial intelligence power by 2030.
(Econ 7/29/17, p.11)
2018 Mar 21, The Association for Computing Machinery announced that John Hennessey, a former president of Stanford and the new chairman of Alphabet, and UC Berkeley Prof. David Patterson are the recipients of the A.M. Turing Award for their work in advancing microprocessor design. The two men had authored "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach" (1990).
(SFC, 3/21/18, p.C5)
2018 Jun 8, It was announced that the US has regained the lead in creating the world's fastest computer with a new supercomputer built for the Oak Ridge national Laboratory in Tennessee by IBM in a partnership with Nvidia.
(SSFC, 6/10/18, p.D1)
2019 Mar 27, The $1 million Turing Award went to artificial intelligence pioneers Yoshua Bengio, Yann LeCun and Geoffrey Hinton.
(SFC, 3/28/19, p.D2)
2019 May 17, Hewlett Packard Enterprise said that it would buy the suprercomputer pioneer Cray for about $1.4 billion.
(SFC, 5/18/19, p.D1)
2019 Jul 12, Fernando Corbato, MIT professor, died in Newburyport, Mass. In the 1960s he oversaw a project called the Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS), which allowed multiple users in different locations to access a single computer simultaneously. In the course of refining time-sharing systems Corbato came up with the computer password.
(SFC, 7/15/19, p.C2)
2019 Jul 17, Microsoft Corp and AT&T Inc said they reached a deal, valued at more than $2 billion, under which the telecommunications company will tap Microsoft's Azure cloud service for its computing needs and use Microsoft 365, which includes Office productivity software, for much of its 268,000-strong workforce.
(Reuters, 7/17/19)
2019 Aug 12, Danny Cohen (b.1937), computer scientist, died at his home in Palo Alto, Ca. His work on computer graphics and networks led to innovations in flight simulation, internet telephony, cloud computing and one of the first online dates.
(SFC, 8/18/19, p.B10)
2019 Aug 27, The Dutch Data Protection Agency (DPA) said Microsoft is remotely collecting data from users of Windows Home and Windows Pro, in a potential breach of privacy rules.
(Reuters, 8/27/19)
2019 Sep 10, It was reported that IBM is joining forces with a German research institute to explore the potential of quantum computing in a project that the government in Berlin will back to the tune of 650 million euros ($717 million) over two years.
(Reuters, 9/10/19)
2019 Sep 23, Apple Inc said it will make new Mac Pro desktop computers at its Austin, Texas facility, following some relief on tariffs by the US government.
(Reuters, 9/23/19)
2019 Oct 23, Google said it had achieved a breakthrough in computer research, by solving a complex problem in minutes with a so-called quantum computer that would take today's most powerful supercomputer thousands of years to crack.
(Reuters, 10/23/19)
2019 Nov 4, Microsoft Corp announced a new service aimed at helping large businesses put to use the huge amounts of data stored in corporate systems. The Azure Synapse system, to be unveiled at an event in Florida, is part of the company's fast-growing cloud computing unit, which has driven the company's shares up over the past five years.
(Reuters, 11/4/19)
2019 Dec 9, Intel Corp announced a chip called "Horse Ridge" that is designed to take all the work being done by the wires in a quantum computer and shrink it down to a chip and electronics about the size of a tea cup saucer. The chip is named for one of the coldest spots in the state of Oregon, where many of its factories are located.
(Reuters, 12/9/19)
2020 Feb 16, Larry Tesler (b.1945), American computer scientist who worked in the field of human–computer interaction, died at his Portola Valley home. Tesler worked at Xerox PARC, Apple, Amazon, and Yahoo!
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Tesler)(SFC, 2/25/20, p.D2
2020 Feb 17, The UK said it will spend 1.2 billion pounds ($1.6 billion) on developing the most powerful weather and climate supercomputer in the world. Britain issued severe flood alerts, warning of life-threatening danger after Storm Dennis dumped weeks' worth of rain in some places. One woman swept away by the floodwaters was feared dead.
(Bloomberg, 2/17/20)(AP, 2/17/20)
2020 May 13, Amazon.com Inc launched three new versions of its Fire tablets with more storage and faster performance.
(Reuters, 5/13/20)
2020 Aug 4, Frances Allen, a computer scientist and researcher who helped create the fundamental ideas that allow practically anyone to build fast, efficient and useful software for computers, smartphones and websites, died at a nursing home in Schenectady, NY.
(NY Times, 8/8/20)
2020 Jul 24, Ann Syrdal (74), psychologist and computer science researcher, died at her home in San Jose, Ca. She helped develop synthetic voices that sounded like women and laid the groundwork for such modern digital assistants as Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa.
(NY Times, 8/21/20)
2020 Nov 30, Researchers from DeepMind presented results suggested that they have made enormous progress on using a computer to predict a protein's shape just from a list of its amino acids. Dennis Hassabis founded DeepMind, a British artificial-intelligence firm in 2010. In 2014 it was acquired by Alphabet, the parent company of Google.
(Econ., 12/5/20, p.75)
2021 Jun 8, Honeywell International Inc and quantum computer software startup Cambridge Quantum Computing (CQC) announced they will form a joint venture, integrating Honeywell’s quantum computer unit with the software maker.
(AP, 6/8/21)
2021 Jun 15, IBM unveiled one of Europe's most powerful quantum computers in Germany, boosting the country's efforts to stay in the race for what's considered a key technology of the future. IBM already has more than 30 such computers in the US.
(AP, 6/15/21)
2021 Jun 24, Microsoft unveiled the next generation of its Windows software, called Windows 11, that has a new Start Menu and other features. It is expected to become available later this year on new computers and other devices and as a free update for those with Windows 10.
(AP, 6/24/21)
2021 Sep 1, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co said it won a 10-year, $2 billion contract to supply high-performance computing systems to the US National Security Agency (NSA).
(Reuters, 9/1/21)
2021 Nov 15, International Business Machines said it has designed a new quantum computing chip that its executives believe will let quantum systems start to outperform classical computers at some tasks within the next two years.
(Reuters, 11/15/21)
2021 Nov 17, A new quantum computer startup born from researchers at Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology called QuEra Computing said it has raised $17 million from investors, including Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten Inc.
(Reuters, 11/17/21)
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