Holographic Versatile Discs (2007)

the Classmate PC (2007)

the $100 laptop (2007)

Windows Vista (January 30, 2007)

AMD merged with ATI (October 25, 2006)

Intel Core 2 (July 2006)

Windows PowerShell (April 25, 2006)

UMPCs (2006)

Adobe Systems bought Macromedia (December 3, 2005)

digital photo frames

Windows Live (2005)

HD DVD, Blu Ray drives (2005)

Wine (October 25, 2005)

Google Earth (2005)

One billion people have access to the internet (2005)

the Pentium D (2005) contains two Pentium 4 Prescott dies, unlike

other multicore processors which place both cores on a single die

Multi-core CPUs (2005)

youtube (February 2005)

the Columbia (October 2004) is currently the second fastest computer in the world

running at 51.9 teraflops, or 51.9 trillion floating point calculations per second.

It knocked NEC's Earth Simulator off its perch as the world's No. 1 machine

- a spot it had held since 2002, before it was surpassed in turn by the Blue Gene/L

laser mice (2004)

Serial Attached SCSI (2004)

PCI Express (2004)

Web 2.0 (2004)

Microsoft was granted a patent on the double-click (April 27, 2004) by the US Patents and Trademark Office

Channel 9 (April 2004)

smartphones (2004) began to make up an increasingly large part of the mobile phone market

the Blue Gene/L (2004) is currently the fastest computer with a theoretical peak performance of 360

TFLOPS. On June 22, 2006, NNSA and IBM announced that Blue Gene/L has achieved 207.3 TFLOPS

Wi-Fi (2004)

SWsoft (2003) acquired the control panel companies Plesk and Confixx

MySpace (July 2003)

64 bit processors (June 23, 2003) started being offered for home use with the Apple Power

 Mac G5, the Athlon 64, and the Itanium, which had been introduced by Intel already in 2001

3G mobile phone systems (2003)

Sata (2003)

Voice over IP (200?)

Nullsoft Streaming Video (2003)

Centrino (March 2003)

thin clients

render farms

Digital terrestrial television (2002)

Flikr (2002)

.NET Framework (2002)

Tablet PCs (2002)

BitTorrent (2002)

Windows XP (October 25, 2001)

Port7Alliance (2001)

Wikipedia (January 15, 2001) began as a complement to the expert-written Nupedia. It is

edited by volunteers in wiki fashion, meaning articles are subject to change by nearly anyone

the Google search engine (2001) rose to prominence. Its success was based in part on

the concept of link popularity and PageRank. Google, Inc. was established in 1998

300,000,000 computers on the Internet (2001)

the Pentium 4 (November 2000)

Opera (2000) introduced tabbed browsing

Plesk (2000) released the first version of its hosting control panel

ASIMO (2000) is a humanoid robot

rss (2000) is a family of xml formats

Widescreen

flat panel displays (2000) started to replace cathode ray tube desktop monitors.

Liquid crystal displays were already invented in 1971 by James Fergason

Judge Jackson ordered that Microsoft split into two companies (June 7, 2000) during the antitrust trial in which

the U.S. Department of Justice, joined by twenty U.S. states, alleged that Microsoft abused monopoly power.

A year later the Bush administration Justice Department announced that it will no longer seek a breakup of

Microsoft (Sept. 6, 2001). Already on January 13, 2000 Bill Gates had created a new role for himself --

chairman and chief software architect. Steve Ballmer became president and CEO

the AMD Athlon (2000) was the first chip to reach the 1 GHz mark. Intel

came out with the 1GHz Intel Pentium III processor on March 8, 2000

the USB Flash drive (2000)

the Y2K bug (1999-2000) turned out not to have occurred on most computers

DDR SDRAM (1999)

Bluetooth (May 20, 1999) is an industrial specification for wireless personal area networks

DVI port (April 1999)

Napster (1999) was the first peer-to-peer file sharing

network. It was developed by Shawn Fanning

Pirates of Silicon Valley (1999)

ADSL (1999) was introduced in many countries with downstream rates

starting at 256 kbit/s and 8 Mbit/s as the current maximum transfer speed,

PayPal (December 1998)

ICANN (September 18, 1998) is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

multiple monitors

the Eiger Labs MPMan F10 (1998) was the first digital audio player on the American market

the rocket e book (1998)

Intel released the Accelerated Graphics Port specification (1997)

Winamp (1997)

Flash Memory Cards (90s)

IBM's supercomputer Deep Blue (May 1997) beat chess master Garry Kasparov

 in a six-game match, in a dramatic reversal of their battle the previous year

Macromedia Flash Player (1997)

the browser wars (late 1990s)

the Internet Archive (1996)

Alexa Internet (1996)

Webby Awards (1996)

ICQ (November 1996)

the Tamagotchi (November 1996) is a handheld virtual pet

the first DVD players and discs (November 1996) became available in Japan and in March of

1997 in the United States. By the spring of 1999, the price of a DVD player had dropped below

the US $300 mark. At that point Wal-Mart began to offer DVD players for sale in its stores

Hotmail (July 4, 1996)

PNG (July 1, 1996)

Triumph of the Nerds (1996)

the Computer History Museum (1996)

cnet's download.com (1996)

the Apache HTTP Server (April 1996) became the most popular server on the net

the Palm Pilot PDA (1996) was released

21,000,000 computers on the Internet (1996) the number of computers

online had exceeded 10 000 in 1987, 100 000 in 1989, and 1 million in 1992.

Also in 1992 the term "surfing the net" was coined by Jean Armour Polly

Java 1.0 (1996) was released after five years of development by James Gosling and colleagues

MultiTorg Opera (1995)

Dragon (1995) released discrete word dictation-level speech recognition software. It was the first time dictation

speech recognition technology was available to consumers. IBM and Kurzweil followed a few months later.

In 1997 Dragon introduced "Naturally Speaking", the first "continuous speech" dictation software available

(meaning you no longer need to pause between words for the computer to understand what you're saying)

FrontPage (1995) was initially created by the Cambridge, Massachusetts company

Vermeer Technologies Incorporated. Vermeer was acquired by Microsoft in 1996

FireWire (1995)

the scroll wheel (1995)

VeriSign (1995) is a company that operates a diverse array of network

infrastructure, including two of the Internet's thirteen root nameservers

plug&play

USB (November 1995)

eBay (September 4, 1995) hosted its first auction

Windows 95 (August 24, 1995)

the NSFNET Backbone Service, operating since 1987, was successfully transitioned (April 30, 1995)

to a new architecture, where traffic is exchanged at interconnection points called Network access points

PHP (June 8, 1995) is one of the most popular server-side scripting systems on the net

Microsoft Bob (March 1995)

Yahoo! (1994)

Hackers on Planet Earth (1994)

Astalavista.box.sk (1994)

chat rooms (19??)

America Online (1994) announced that it had reached 1 million subscribers

the Zip drive (1994)

ergonomic split keyboards (1994)

Justin Hall (1994) who began eleven years of personal blogging while a student at Swarthmore College, is generally

recognized as one of the earliest bloggers. The term "weblog" was coined by Jorn Barger in December 1997. The

shorter version, "blog", was coined by Peter Merholz, who, in April or May of 1999, broke the word weblog into the

phrase "we blog" in the sidebar of his weblog. This was interpreted as a short form of the noun and also as a verb to blog,

meaning "to edit one's weblog or a post to one's weblog". Usage spread during 1999, with the word being further

popularized by the near-simultaneous arrival of the first hosted weblog tools: Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan's company

Pyra Labs launched Blogger (which was purchased by Google in February 2003) and Paul Kedrosky's GrokSoup. As of

March 2003, the Oxford English Dictionary included the terms weblog, weblogging and weblogger in their dictionary

Amazon.com (1994) was one of the first major companies to sell goods over the Internet

the World Wide Web Consortium (1994) creates standards that Web developers should

try to conform to, in order to maximize the ability of others to access their Web sites

CGI (1993)

the Toughbook (1993)

sub-notebooks (1993) at the time of its introduction, the HP Omnibook 300 was the

smallest and lightest PC on the market to feature a full-size keyboard and full VGA

the Adobe Acrobat Reader (1993)

the first Def Con hacking conference (July 9, 1993) took place in Las Vegas

Ntfs (July 1993)

Windows NT (July 1993)

the World Wide Web Wanderer (June, 1993) was a perl based web crawler that was first deployed to

measure the size of the World Wide Web. The Software was developed at MIT by Matthew Gray. Later

in 1993, it was used to generate an index called the "Wandex", providing the first search engine on the web

Peripheral Component Interconnect (1993)

the Mosaic web browser (April 22, 1993) written at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications,

has been described as "the killer application of the 1990s" because it was the first program to provide a slick

multimedia graphical user interface to the Internet's burgeoning wealth of distributed information services (formerly

mostly limited to  FTP, Usenet and Gopher) at a time when access to the Internet was expanding rapidly outside 

its previous domain of academia and large industrial research institutions. The company producing the software was

founded as Mosaic Communications Corporation on April 4, 1994 by Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark, and was

the first company to attempt to capitalize on the nascent World Wide Web. It released a web browser called

Mosaic Netscape 0.9 on October 13, 1994. This browser was subsequently renamed Netscape Navigator,

and the company took on the 'Netscape' name on November 14, 1994. In January 1998 Netscape open sourced

 its Web browser as the Mozilla Project. On November 24, 1998 America Online announced it would acquire

Netscape Communications in a tax-free stock-swap valued at US$4.2 billion at the time of the announcement

the earliest Pentiums (March 22, 1993) were released at the clock speeds of 66 MHz and 60 MHz.

Later on 75, 90, 100, 120, 133, 150, 166, 200 and 233 MHz versions gradually became available.

Other versions of the Pentium line include the Pentium Pro (November 1995), the Pentium II

(May 7, 1997), the Pentium III (March 2000) and the Pentium 4 which was released in November 2000

Wired magazine (March 1993)

the Internet Society (1992) is the parent corporation of the Internet

Architecture Board and the Internet Engineering Task Force

Windows 3.1 (August 1992) was released two years after Version 3.0

the *7 (1992)

jpeg (1992)

SAP R/3 (July 6, 1992) is one of the most popular ERP (Enterprise resource planning systems)

 software products. These are management information systems that integrate and automate many

of the business practices associated with the operations or production aspects of a company

the SupraFax 14400 (1991) ran at the 14.4 kbit/s rate

the Advanced Computing Environment (1991)

the AIM alliance (1991)

the Trojan room coffee pot (1991) was the inspiration for the world's first webcam

Linux (September 1991) is a computer operating system which is written by many programmers

at once in a process called open-source development. The software was originally programmed by

Linus Torvald only, with the aim to develop a capable UNIX operating system that could be run on

a PC. It was inspired by Minix (a kernel and operating system developed by Andrew Tanenbaum)

Pretty Good Privacy (1991)

the first web page (August 6, 1991)

Visual Basic 1.0 (May 1991) was released for Windows

second generation mobile phone systems (1991) such as GSM, IS-136 ("TDMA"), iDEN and IS-95

("CDMA") began to be introduced. The first digital cellular phone call was made in the United States

 in 1990, in 1991 the first GSM network opened in Europe

PCMCIA (1990)

MS-Works for Windows (1990)

Object Linking and Embedding (1990)

the Electronic Frontier Foundation (1990) was formed by Mitch Kapor and John Perry Barlow

in part to defend the rights of those investigated for alleged computer hacking

the NeXTstation (1990-1993)

Windows 3.0 (May 22, 1990)

machine learning

video projectors

the www (1990) as well as http, html and urls were invented by Tim Berners-Lee at Cern

Advanced Technology Attachment (1989)

sound cards (1989)

Microsoft Office (1989)

Silicon Graphics introduced what was arguably the first 3D graphics workstation (1989) the IRIS 4D Superworkstation

the first dial-up internet service provider (1989) was world.std.com

the touchpad (1989)

the Game Boy (April 21, 1989)

the ZIP file format (1989)

the GNU General Public License (January 1989) is the most popular license for free software

the NeXTcube (1988)

the Moving Picture Experts Group (1988)

spec (1988)

IRC (August 1988)

Flash memory (1988)

e-mail clients (1988)

raid (1988)

most dialup modems follow the Hayes Command Set (1988) it was originally developed for the Hayes Smartmodem 2400

music sequencer software (late 80s)

Windows 2.0 (December 9, 1987) was released, with icons & overlapping windows

IBM Personal System/2 (1987)

HyperCard (1987)

the mp3 format (1987) for digital audio encoding was invented by Karlheinz

Brandenburg and Jürgen Herre of the "Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits."

In the first half of 1995, mp3 files began flourishing on the Internet

Video Graphics Array (1987)

the Canon Cat (1987)

the first digital desktop slide scanner (1987) was produced by Barneyscan

vector graphics editor (1987)

Congress passed the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (1986)

RSA Security (1986)

386 CPU's (1986) were the standard for IBM PCs until the introduction of the 486 CPU in April 1989.

The predecessor of the 80386 was the Intel 80286, a 16-bit processor with a segment-based memory

management and protection system. The 80386 added a 32-bit architecture and a paging translation unit,

which made it much easier to implement operating systems which used virtual memory. The first

80386-based PC was the Compaq Deskpro 386 introduced in September 1986

the IBM Convertible (April 1986) was the first real laptop

Loyd Blankenship's Hacker Manifesto (1986)

C++ (1985)

the Hacker zine Phrack (1985) was first published by Craig Neidorf ('Knight Lightning') and Randy Tischler

Aldus PageMaker (1985) was the first desktop publishing program

NeXT was founded (1985) by Steve Jobs after his resignation from Apple Computer. Apple Computer

 acquired NeXT in 1997 in order to use the OpenStep operating system as the basis for Mac OS X

Microsoft Windows 1.0 (November 1985) was Microsoft's first attempt to implement a

multitasking graphical user interface-based operating environment on the PC platform.

The program has by now come to dominate the world market for personal computer with

a market share estimated to be around 95% for desktop personal computers.

Developement on the project named "Interface Manager" started in September 1981.

the File Transfer Protocol (October 1985) was first developed in 1971 for

implementation on hosts at M.I.T. In 1985 ftp was defined by the RFC 959 documnet

the CD-ROM (1985) was introduced

shareware (mid-1980s)

Out of the Inner Circle: A Hacker's Guide to Computer Security (1985) by Bill Landreth and Howard Rheingold

the Atari ST (1985)

bitmap graphics editors (1980s)

multimedia

the Amiga 1000 (1985) was followed up with the introduction

of the A500 and A2000 models in 1987 and the A3000 in 1990

Cisco Systems (1984) created the first commercially successful multi-protocol router

Enhanced Graphics Adapter (1984)

the Cult of the Dead Cow (1984)

2600: The Hacker Quarterly (1984) was founded by Eric Corley

the Legion of Doom (1984)

the TRON Project (1984)

X Window System (June 1984)

FidoNet (1984) was started by Tom Jennings of San Francisco, California as a means to

network together BBSes or mailboxes (like MausNet) that used his own "Fido" BBS software

the Macintosh (January 1984)

Symbolics.com

the Domain Name System (1984) was introduced by Paul Mockapetris.

Symbolics.com became the first registered commercial domain name

Screensavers (December 1983)

ADAM computer (1983)

VisiOn (December 1983) was the first integrated graphical software environment for IBM PCs

Microsoft Word (November 1983) took many concepts and ideas from Bravo, the original

 GUI word processor developed at Xerox PARC by Charles Simonyi. Later versions were

created for the Apple Macintosh (1984), SCO UNIX, and Microsoft Windows (1989)

the Nintendo Famicom (July 1983) was released in its American and

European version as the NES video game console in June 1985

Smart Cards (1983)

PC World (1983)

DRM (1983)

the biggest-selling early laptop was the Kyocera Kyotronic 85 (1983)

the HP-150 (1983) was one of the world's earliest commercialized touch screen computers

the wired glove (1983)

Lotus 1-2-3 (January 26, 1983) is a spreadsheet program which was the IBM PC's first killer application

the Apple Lisa (January 1983) was the second computer with a graphical user interface (GUI)

after the Xerox Alto. Nevertheless it became a commercial failure due to its price of $9,995

freeware (1983)

the TCP/IP protocol (January 1, 1983) began to be used for ARPAnet and the Defense Data Network

the Commodore 64 (August 1982-1993) with estimated sales between 17 and 25

million units  became and remains the best-selling computer model of all time

Norton Utilities (1982)

the hp 75c (1982-1986)

the 3 1/2-inch hard cartridge disk standard (1982)

the Epson HX-20 (July 1982)

the GRiD Compass 1100 (April 1982) was arguably the first laptop computer

Autodesk (1982)

the Intel 80286 (February 1, 1982) was initially released in 6 and 8 MHz editions, and subsequently scaled

up to 20 MHz. It was widely used in IBM PC compatible computers during the mid 1980s to early 1990s

PC Magazine (January 1982)

SCSI (1981)

the Chaos Computer Club (September 12, 1981) was founded in Berlin by Wau Holland and others

the first cell phone network with automatic roaming (September 1981) was started in Saudi Arabia

bios (1981)

Front side bus

Graphics processing units (1981)

Industry Standard Architecture (1981)

the CGA graphics card (1981) gave 640x200 resolution with 16 colors

with the release of the IBM PC (August 12, 1981) began the WinTel (Windows-Intel) monopoly

IBM announced the System/23 Datamaster (July 28, 1981)

Microsoft bought all rights to 86-DOS (July 27, 1981) from Seattle Computer Products for US$50,000, and the name MS-DOS was adopted

the Xerox Star (1981) was the first computer to feature a WIMP

(window, icon, menu, pointing device) graphical user interface

the Osborne 1 (April 1981) was one of the first portable computers. Despite

 its interesting characteristics, Osborne Computer Corporation suffered the

competition of the first IBM PC compatibles and went bankrupt in 1983

MIDI (1981) is an industry-standard protocol that defines each note precisely and

concisely, allowing electronic musical instruments and computers to exchange data

Seagate Technology created the first hard disk drive for microcomputers (1980) the disk held 5

megabytes of data, five times as much as a standard floppy disk, and fit in the space of a floppy disk drive

SGML (1980)

Ethernet (1980)

the optical mouse (1980) was invented by Steven T. Kirsch

Tim Berners-Lee (1980) wrote a hyperlinking program called

Enquire which eventually evolved into the World Wide Web

dBASE (1980)

Softcard (March 1980)

the first router was created at Stanford University (January 1980) by a staff researcher named William Yeager

COMDEX (1979-2003)

the Perq graphical workstation (1979)

delivermail (1979)

VisiCalc (1979) was the first spreadsheet program available for personal computers. It was the

application that turned the microcomputer from a hobby for computer enthusiasts into a business tool.

After the Apple II version, VisiCalc was also released for the Atari 8-bit family, the Commodore

PET (both based on the MOS Technology 6502 processor, like the Apple), and the IBM PC

the Atari 400 (1979)

UUCP (1978) stands for Unix to Unix Copy Protocol, and is a computer program and protocol allowing

remote execution of commands and transfer of files, email and netnews between Unix computers

not connected to the Internet proper. In 1979 Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis of Duke University created

Usenet a distributed Internet discussion system that evolved from a general purpose UUCP network.

Now widely recognized concepts and terms such as "FAQ" and "spam" were originated on the usenet

Space Invaders (1978)

Language technology (1978)

InfoWorld (1978-2007)

the Speak & Spell talking learning aid (1978)

the Atari VCS (October 1977) was the first successful video game console to use plug-in

cartridges instead of having one or more games built in. It was later renamed as the Atari 2600

the Tandy TRS-80 Model I (August 3, 1977)

the Commodore PET 2001 (1977)

Lisp machines (1977)

the Demoscene

the Apple II (June 5, 1977) was the first PC with color graphics. Customers

used their own TV sets as monitors and audiocassette recorders for data storage

the Apple I (April 1976) was the first computer to combine a keyboard with a microprocessor and a

connection to a monitor. Designed by Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, it was sold as Apple's first product

PostScript

PostScript (1976)

the Cray 1 (1976)

the Fat file system (1976)

Open Letter to Hobbyists (February 3, 1976)

Electronic paper (1970s)

Byte (September 1975)

Fingerprint Reader (1975)

pipeline (1975)

risc cpus (1975)

the IBM 5100 Portable Computer (September 1975) weighed about 25 kg

the CCD flatbed scanner (1975) was invented by Ray Kurzweil

the Homebrew Computer Club (March 1975) had its first meeting

Micro-Soft (1975) was founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen. Their first product was

Altair BASIC - the first programming language for the world's first truly personal computer, the

MITS Altair 8800. Gates and Allen had already founded Traf-o-Data, their first company, in 1972

the bus

the MITS Altair 8800 (1975) was a microcomputer design based on the Intel 8080A CPU. Sold

as a kit through Popular Electronics magazine, the designers intended to sell only a few hundred

 to hobbyists, and were surprised when they sold over ten times that many in the first month

Marsh’s Supermarket in Troy, Ohio (June 1974) was the first to use the bar-code for scanning groceries

the Intel 8080 (April 1974) is an 8-bit CPU generally considered to be the first truly usable

microprocessor CPU design. The 8080 was used in many early computers, such as the MITS

Altair 8800 and IMSAI 8080, forming the basis for machines running the CP/M operating system

widgets (19??)

the motherboard (19??)

the Xerox Alto (1973) was the first personal computer and the first

computer to use the desktop metaphor and graphical user interface (GUI)

the Micral industrial microcomputer (1973) was based on the Intel 8008

Plankalkül was first published (1972) the first compiler for it was implemented in 2000 by the Free University of Berlin

Pong (1972) an adaptation of table tennis to the video screen, was

the first commercially successful video game. It was released by Atari

the Magnavox Odyssey (1972) was the first home video game console

the original laser printer (1971) called EARS was developed at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.

The Xerox 9700 Electronic Printing System, the first xerographic laser printer product, was released in 1977