Modern Computing

1945 – ongoing71 items

technology
Modern Computing

Eight decades in one spine

From a room-sized calculator built for artillery tables to a model that writes prose. Four eras, each named for who the computer was for:

  1. Mainframes — one computer, shared by an institution

  2. Microcomputers — one computer, owned by one person

  3. The internet — every computer, joined together

  4. Smartphones — a computer in every pocket

Two shorter bands lie over them: the dot-com bubble, and the deep-learning boom that is still going.

Five threads

Filter by tag to follow one line through all of it: hardware, software, internet, ai and games. The AI thread starts earlier than most people expect — in 1950.

The best way to predict the future is to invent it. — Alan Kay, Xerox PARC, 1971

Items

  1. Mainframe era

    ≈ 25 years

  2. First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC

  3. ENIAC unveiled

    Moore School, Philadelphia

  4. Transistor invented

    Bell Labs, Murray Hill, New Jersey

  5. Manchester Baby runs the first stored program

    Victoria University of Manchester

  6. Shannon's theory of information

    Bell Labs, Murray Hill, New Jersey

  7. Turing asks “Can machines think?”

  8. UNIVAC I delivered to the Census Bureau

  9. Grace Hopper's A-0 compiler

  10. “Artificial intelligence” named

    Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire

  11. FORTRAN released

  12. The “traitorous eight” leave Shockley

    Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, Mountain View

  13. First integrated circuit

    Texas Instruments, Dallas

  14. Spacewar!

    MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts

  15. IBM System/360 announced

  16. First BASIC program runs

    Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire

  17. Moore's law

  18. The “Mother of All Demos”

    Brooks Hall, San Francisco Civic Center

  19. Unix

    Bell Labs, Murray Hill, New Jersey

  20. Apollo guidance software lands Eagle

  21. ARPANET first message

    Boelter Hall, UCLA

  22. Email gets its @

    Bolt Beranek and Newman, Cambridge, Massachusetts

  23. Intel 4004

  24. Pong

  25. Xerox Alto

    Xerox PARC, Porter Drive, Palo Alto

  26. Ethernet memo

    Xerox PARC, Porter Drive, Palo Alto

  27. Microcomputer revolution

    ≈ 11 years

  28. Cerf and Kahn publish TCP

  29. Altair 8800 on the cover of Popular Electronics

  30. Homebrew Computer Club's first meeting

    Menlo Park, California

  31. Microsoft founded

    MITS, Albuquerque, New Mexico

  32. Apple Computer Company founded

    Jobs family garage, Los Altos

  33. Apple II

  34. VisiCalc released

  35. IBM PC

  36. Commodore 64 launched

  37. ARPANET switches to TCP/IP

  38. Time's “Machine of the Year”

  39. GNU announced

  40. Macintosh unveiled

    Flint Center, Cupertino

  41. Tetris

    Moscow

  42. Windows 1.0

  43. World Wide Web proposed

    CERN, Meyrin, near Geneva

  44. Internet era

    ≈ 17 years

  45. World Wide Web goes public

    CERN, Meyrin, near Geneva

  46. Linux announced

    University of Helsinki

  47. CERN gives the web away

    CERN, Meyrin, near Geneva

  48. Mosaic browser

    NCSA, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  49. Amazon founded

    Bellevue, Washington

  50. Dot-com bubble

    ≈ 7 years, 2 months

  51. Windows 95

  52. Deep Blue beats Kasparov

    Equitable Center, New York

  53. Google founded

    Menlo Park, California

  54. Napster launched

  55. Wikipedia launched

  56. Facebook launched

    Kirkland House, Harvard

  57. First YouTube video

    San Diego Zoo

  58. Amazon Web Services launches S3

  59. Smartphone era

  60. iPhone unveiled

    Moscone Center, San Francisco

  61. App Store opens

  62. Bitcoin whitepaper published

  63. Deep learning era

  64. Raspberry Pi launched

  65. AlexNet wins ImageNet

    University of Toronto

  66. AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol

    Four Seasons Hotel, Seoul

  67. Transformer architecture

  68. GPT-3 released

  69. AlphaFold 2 solves protein structure prediction

  70. ChatGPT launches

  71. Nobel Prizes for AI