IT History :: index
A Chronicle of Information Technology
Decades during which computation rewove the world, read as a timeline.
- TIMELINES
- 16
- EVENTS
- 192
- PEOPLE
- 43
- ORGS
- 17
- PRODUCTS
- 01
- TERMS
- 68
- RANGE
- 1945–2026
16 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.
▸ Featured events
November 30, 2022
ChatGPT Launched
January 20, 2025
The DeepSeek-R1 Shock — A Low-Cost Chinese Reasoning Model Rocks the Market
June 29, 2007
The Original iPhone Goes on Sale
March 1989
The World Wide Web Proposed — CERN
August 25, 1991
Linux — Linus Torvalds' 21-Year-Old Announcement
December 23, 1947
The Point-Contact Transistor — Bell Labs
▸ Recently updated
- August 22, 2025The United States Becomes an Intel Shareholder — CHIPS Act Grants Turned into Equity
- January 20, 2025The DeepSeek-R1 Shock — A Low-Cost Chinese Reasoning Model Rocks the Market
- October 8–9, 2024Nobel Prizes for AI — Physics and Chemistry in the Same Week
- September 16, 2024macOS Sequoia and Apple Intelligence — AI Built Into the OS
- May 20, 2024Copilot+ PC and Recall — On-Device AI and an Instant Retreat
- March 13, 2024 (European Parliament adoption)EU AI Act Adopted — The World's First Comprehensive AI Regulation
▸ Browse by decade
▸ Index of timelines
A General History of Information Technology
Start here when you don't know where to start: sixty-six turning points, with the detail delegated to the other fifteen timelines.
A History of Programming Languages
FORTRAN opens it; a machine that writes code closes it. Nineteen languages, three of which arrive in 1995 alone.
A History of Artificial Intelligence
More than half of the thirty entries are dated 2023 or later. Named in 1956, the field does most of its crowding now.
A History of the Internet and the Web
Where does the plumbing stop and the platform start? Twenty-one entries decline to draw the line, and hand search and social media to other timelines.
A History of Cloud Computing
Two of the twelve are not about software at all: a worldwide outage, and a nuclear reactor switched back on.
A History of Operating Systems
It does not end on a launch: the last entry is a support cut-off date, Windows 10, 2025. Operating systems have deaths too.
A History of Semiconductors and Hardware
The physics runs out around the middle. After that the story is capital, foundries, a CEO's exit, and a government taking a stake.
A History of Game Consoles and Game Technology
It opens on a tennis game drawn on an oscilloscope for a national laboratory's open day, and closes on the Switch 2.
A History of the iPhone
One company, one product line, one entry per generation. Read it for what each generation removed: the headphone jack, the home button, Lightning.
A History of Microsoft
The only timeline here organised around a company rather than a technology, which makes it readable as one long argument about strategy.
A History of Search Engines
Yahoo indexed the web by hand. What replaced that was machine, then model — and in the last stretch the engine answers instead of listing.
A History of Social Media
Launches for the first half; then a data scandal, a hostile takeover, and a joint venture forced by American law.
A History of Mobile Phones and Smartphones
The argument is in the first four entries: what the pocket computer looked like while Nokia, RIM and NTT DoCoMo still set the terms.
A History of Open Source and Free Software
The licence text does more work than the code — BSD and the GPL at one end, GitHub sold to Microsoft at the other.
A History of Cybersecurity
Read it by who was doing the breaking: a graduate student, then criminals, then states, then a regulator.
A History of Databases
Nine entries across sixty-seven years — the widest spacing on this site, because this field turns over in decades, not quarters.