USB 3.0 (2009)
Netbooks (2008)
Microsoft Surface (2008)
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)
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)
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
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
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
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)
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)
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)
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)
