itlibra/history :: index
A Chronicle of Information Technology
Decades during which computation rewove the world, read as a timeline.
- TIMELINES
- 10
- EVENTS
- 097
- PEOPLE
- 16
- ORGS
- 07
- PRODUCTS
- 01
- TERMS
- 07
- RANGE
- 1947–2024
Ten timelines are bound here. A general chronicle gives the broad view of the century; each genre timeline traces a particular lineage—programming languages, AI, networks, the machine itself. Click any event to expand its card in place. Where a deeper article exists, a link follows.
A General History of Information Technology
An abstraction that once lived in equations migrated, decade by decade, into vacuum tubes, into silicon, into networks, into screens, and finally into the pocket. This chronicle t…
A History of Programming Languages
The lineage of high-level languages, from FORTRAN onward, is a long succession of attempts to close the distance between the machine and the way a human thinks. Procedure, functio…
A History of Artificial Intelligence
The name 'artificial intelligence' was coined in the summer of 1956 at Dartmouth. Symbol, logic, expert system, each had its turn at the centre of the stage; neural networks survi…
A History of the Internet and the Web
What began with four ARPANET nodes spread from universities into homes and then into pockets. Protocol, domain, hypertext, search—each layer started as an experiment. This timelin…
A History of Cloud Computing
The location of computation moved from ownership to rental, and then to metered consumption. Virtualization, hypervisor, container, serverless. Within a decade, the word 'server'…
A History of Operating Systems
Operating systems began with batch processing and reshaped themselves through timesharing, interactivity, graphics, networking, and mobility. UNIX, MS-DOS, Macintosh, Windows, Lin…
A History of Semiconductors and Hardware
From the point-contact transistor of 1947 to the integrated circuit, the microprocessor, the GPU, and the domain-specific accelerator. Seventy years of exponential progress under…
A History of Game Consoles and Game Technology
From Tennis for Two to home consoles, 3D, online play, the handheld, and the hybrids that blurred the line between living-room and pocket. The console has been the most democratiz…
A History of the iPhone
The 2007 reveal was less an evolution of the telephone than a reinvention of the computer in the pocket. Multi-touch, the App Store, Retina, Face ID, Dynamic Island, Apple Intelli…
A History of Microsoft
Microsoft began in 1975 as a small company selling BASIC for the Altair. A quarter-century later it dominated the PC market in both operating systems and productivity software; ov…