IT History :: index
A Chronicle of Information Technology
Decades during which computation rewove the world, read as a timeline.
- TIMELINES
- 16
- EVENTS
- 164
- PEOPLE
- 16
- ORGS
- 08
- PRODUCTS
- 01
- TERMS
- 68
- RANGE
- 1947–2025
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.
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
- March 1994Yahoo! Directory Launches — A Hand-Curated Map of the Early Web
- January 2009WhatsApp Launches — The Ad-Free, Subscription Messenger
- May 12, 2017WannaCry — The Ransomware That Weaponised a Leaked NSA Tool
- September 2016Douyin and the Rise of TikTok — Algorithm-Driven Social Goes Global
- June 2010 (discovery)Stuxnet — The First State-Built Cyberweapon for Physical Destruction
- December 13, 2020SolarWinds — Russian SVR Poisons the Update Pipeline Itself
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. ChatGPT brought…
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…
A History of Search Engines
Search engines — the indexing machines that made the explosive growth of the web navigable. Yahoo's directories, AltaVista's full-text search, Google's PageRank, and the generativ…
A History of Social Media
From Friendster and MySpace to Facebook and Twitter as urban infrastructure, then Instagram and TikTok turning feeds into video, then 2022's Twitter takeover and 2023's Threads la…
A History of Mobile Phones and Smartphones
From the Palm stylus through Japan's i-mode era, BlackBerry's keyboard, Nokia's Symbian empire, the 2007 iPhone reset, Android's volume conquest, and the 2020s fragmentation into…
A History of Open Source and Free Software
From Bell Labs UNIX through the birth of the BSD licence, GNU and the GPL, the Linux kernel, Apache, Mozilla, and GitHub. The forty-year arc of how 'shared code' became the substr…
A History of Cybersecurity
From the Morris Worm through Stuxnet, Snowden, WannaCry, SolarWinds, Log4Shell, and 2024's CrowdStrike outage. A chronicle of the incidents and concepts that defined an era where…
A History of Databases
From Codd's 1970 relational model paper through the Oracle/MySQL/PostgreSQL golden age of RDBMS, the 2009 NoSQL revolt, Snowflake's cloud data warehouse, and the LLM era's vector…