Overview · 39 events
A General History of Information Technology
1940s
01 events
Lucent Technologies / U.S. Federal Government (Wikimedia Commons) · Public Domain · Commons ↗ John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley at AT&T Bell Labs demonstrated amplification in a point-contact transistor made of germanium. The birth of solid-state electronic amplification—replacing the vacuum tube that had dominated since 1925—and the origin of the industrial revolution that made computing small, low-power, and mass-producible. The three shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics.
- Related organizations
- Bell Labs
- Appears in
- A History of Semiconductors and Hardware
1950s
03 events
null0 (Wikimedia Commons, via Flickr) · CC BY-SA 2.0 · Commons ↗ Over roughly eight weeks in the summer of 1956 at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, ten researchers including John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Claude Shannon, and Nathaniel Rochester proposed and adopted the term 'artificial intelligence'. Its historical weight lies less in any specific technical result than in establishing the field's own name and the researcher network that would carry it for decades.
- Related people
- John McCarthy · Marvin Minsky · Claude Shannon
- Appears in
- A History of Artificial Intelligence
After roughly three years of development, John Backus' team at IBM completed and shipped the first compiler for FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslator), the first practical high-level programming language, targeting the IBM 704. The transition point from writing assembly directly to writing mathematics in something close to mathematical notation; every high-level language that followed descends from it.
- Related organizations
- International Business Machines (IBM)
- Appears in
- A History of Programming Languages
Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments demonstrated the first working integrated circuit, fabricating several transistors, resistors, and capacitors onto a single germanium substrate. Six months later, Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor independently invented an IC on silicon using the planar process; Noyce's approach became the dominant manufacturing method. Kilby received the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics.
- Appears in
- A History of Semiconductors and Hardware
1960s
02 events
Unknown (via Jargon File, Wikimedia Commons) · Public Domain · Commons ↗ Having left the Multics project, Ken Thompson at AT&T Bell Labs began writing a small timesharing system on an idle PDP-7. Initially an experiment for one user, it gained a second when Dennis Ritchie joined; in 1970 it was named UNICS (later UNIX). Its rewrite in the C language (1972) gave it portability, and the operating-system lineage that followed has dominated the next half-century. Linux, macOS, Android, and iOS all descend from it.
- Related people
- Ken Thompson · Dennis Ritchie
- Related organizations
- Bell Labs
- Appears in
- A History of Operating Systems · A History of Open Source and Free Software
DARPA / U.S. Federal Government (Wikimedia Commons) · Public Domain · Commons ↗ At UCLA, Charles Kline tried to send the first message—'LOGIN'—to a host at SRI. The connection crashed after the second letter, so only 'LO' arrived. It was the first real operation of ARPANET, the packet-switched network funded by the US Department of Defense's ARPA (later DARPA), and the ancestor of the modern Internet. The initial network had four nodes: UCLA, SRI, UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah.
- Appears in
- A History of the Internet and the Web
1970s
02 events
Denise Panyik-Dale (Wikimedia Commons, via Flickr) · CC BY 2.0 · Commons ↗ Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs extended Ken Thompson's B language with a type system, producing C. UNIX was rewritten in it in 1973, making it the first language in which an operating system could be moved to different hardware as source code. Together with the 1978 K&R book *The C Programming Language*, C became the de facto standard of systems programming for more than half a century. C++, Objective-C, C#, Go, Rust, Zig, and most current systems languages either descend from C or are deliberately designed against its model.
- Related people
- Dennis Ritchie · Ken Thompson
- Related organizations
- Bell Labs
- Appears in
- A History of Programming Languages
Albuquerque, New Mexico Police Department (Wikimedia Commons) · Public Domain · Commons ↗ Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded the company in Albuquerque to sell their BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800. The original name was 'Micro-Soft'—with a hyphen. A year later, Gates' 1976 'Open Letter to Hobbyists', written in response to widespread piracy of Altair BASIC, became one of the earliest articulations of the idea of commercial software, and a symbolic document in the history of the industry.
- Related people
- Bill Gates
- Related organizations
- Microsoft Corporation
- Appears in
- A History of Microsoft
1980s
04 eventsMicrosoft adapted 86-DOS (formerly QDOS), which it had bought from Seattle Computer Products, and shipped it as PC DOS 1.0 with the IBM PC. Crucially, Microsoft retained the right to sell the same software, as MS-DOS, to any other compatible-machine manufacturer. Bill Gates' licensing strategy here produced the next fifteen years of PC OS dominance.
- Related people
- Bill Gates
- Related organizations
- Microsoft Corporation · International Business Machines (IBM)
- Appears in
- A History of Operating Systems · A History of Microsoft
ARPANET switched in a single day from its previous NCP (Network Control Program) to the TCP/IP suite Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn had designed in 1974. The forced cutover, remembered as 'Flag Day', established the protocols that now carry the Internet, and made operational the idea of an 'internetwork' interconnecting many networks.
- Related people
- Vint Cerf
- Appears in
- A History of the Internet and the Web
Apple introduced the Macintosh, bringing the graphical user interface invented at Xerox PARC—windows, icons, mouse—to a US$2,495 mass-market price. After the commercial failure of the more expensive Lisa the year before, Apple deliberately moved the balance of simplicity versus extensibility hard toward the former. The Ridley Scott Super Bowl ad introducing it has its own place in television history.
- Related people
- Steve Jobs
- Related organizations
- Apple Inc.
- Appears in
- A History of Operating Systems
Geni (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Commons ↗ Tim Berners-Lee, a computer engineer at CERN, sent his manager Mike Sendall a hypertext document-management proposal—'Information Management: A Proposal'—as a solution to information sharing inside the laboratory. Sendall wrote in the margin: 'Vague, but exciting...'. The implementation went public in 1991, and the world's first web server, browser, HTTP, and HTML descend from this document.
- Related people
- Tim Berners-Lee
- Appears in
- A History of the Internet and the Web
1990s
05 events
Lukas Schulze / SPORTSFILE (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY 2.0 · Commons ↗ Linus Torvalds, then a student at the University of Helsinki, posted to comp.os.minix: "I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu)." The first sources ran to about 10,000 lines, indebted to Minix but written as an independent kernel. Released under the GPL in 1992, it grew through contributions from developers worldwide; by 2026, Linux is the kernel at the core of most of the world's servers, smartphones, and supercomputers.
- Related people
- Linus Torvalds
- Appears in
- A History of Operating Systems · A History of Open Source and Free Software
Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina at NCSA at the University of Illinois built the first major web browser that displayed text and images inline on the same page. Distributed free for Windows, Mac, and UNIX, it took the Web out of research labs and put it in front of ordinary users almost overnight. Andreessen co-founded Netscape the following year, opening the commercial web era.
Microsoft (Wikimedia Commons) · Public domain (logo, below threshold of originality) · Commons ↗ 32-bit preemptive multitasking, long file names, plug-and-play, and—most lastingly—the Start menu and taskbar. For many people the image of 'what a PC is' was set by this product. The campaign built around the Rolling Stones' 'Start Me Up' and the midnight launches drew lines around the block; the PC had become a household appliance. Seven million copies were sold in the first week.
- Related people
- Bill Gates
- Related organizations
- Microsoft Corporation
- Appears in
- A History of Operating Systems · A History of Microsoft
IBM's chess-specific machine Deep Blue defeated the reigning world champion Garry Kasparov 3.5–2.5 in their six-game rematch. Kasparov had won the 1996 series; IBM substantially upgraded both hardware and evaluation function over the following year. It was the first decisive defeat of a top human chess player by a machine, and is often cited in AI history as a symbolic threshold—though its substance was game-tree search plus a specialised evaluation function, with no modern learning involved.
- Related organizations
- International Business Machines (IBM)
- Appears in
- A History of Artificial Intelligence
Stanford graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded the search company built around PageRank—an algorithm that estimated importance from the link structure of the web. Where the leading engines of the day (Yahoo!, AltaVista, Excite) depended on human directories and keyword matching, Google's ranking was fully algorithmic and its interface stripped to a single screen. It became a leading search engine within six months.
- Related organizations
- Appears in
- A History of the Internet and the Web · A History of Search Engines
2000s
03 eventsAmazon launched its object storage service S3 (Simple Storage Service). The compute service EC2 followed in August. Together, Amazon Web Services—AWS—became the de facto start of what would be called 'the cloud'. The idea of opening to outside customers the infrastructure built internally for selling books would, over the next decade and a half, restructure the entire IT industry.
- Appears in
- A History of Cloud Computing
Rafael Fernandez / TheGoldenBox (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Commons ↗ Unveiled by Steve Jobs at Macworld in January 2007, the iPhone went on sale in the United States on June 29 of the same year. By dropping the physical keyboard in favour of capacitive multi-touch and putting an OS X-derived operating system on a phone, the device rewrote the grammar of the product category that would later be called the smartphone.
- Related people
- Steve Jobs
- Related organizations
- Apple Inc.
- Related products
- iPhone
- Related terms
- Multi-touch
- Appears in
- A History of Operating Systems · A History of the iPhone · A History of Mobile Phones and Smartphones
The first shipping device—HTC Dream, sold in the US as the T-Mobile G1—running the OS Google had acquired with the 2005 purchase of Android Inc. A Linux kernel, a Java VM (later replaced by the Android Runtime), and a custom UI stack: Google's strategy of supplying an open-source smartphone OS was the inverse of Apple's, and over the next decade and a half grew into an ecosystem accounting for more than 70% of the world's smartphones.
- Related organizations
- Appears in
- A History of Operating Systems · A History of Mobile Phones and Smartphones
2010s
03 events
Daniel Voigt Godoy (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY 4.0 · Commons ↗ At ImageNet 2012, Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever, and Geoffrey Hinton of the University of Toronto reached a top-5 error rate of 15.3%—more than ten points ahead of the runner-up's 26.2% obtained by conventional methods. Their convolutional neural network, 'AlexNet', trained on two NVIDIA GTX 580 GPUs, proved the practical viability of deep learning overnight. Computer vision shifted, almost completely, from hand-engineered features to deep learning from that point forward.
- Related people
- Geoffrey Hinton
- Appears in
- A History of Artificial Intelligence · A History of Semiconductors and Hardware
Succeeding Steve Ballmer, Satya Nadella—who had long led the cloud business—became Microsoft's third CEO. He shifted the company from the Windows-and-Office strategy of the 1990s and 2000s to one centred on Azure: Linux support, embrace of open source (the GitHub acquisition in 2018), and the large investment in OpenAI from 2019 onward. Over a decade in the role, Microsoft's market capitalisation grew more than tenfold, from roughly US$300 billion to over US$3 trillion.
- Related organizations
- Microsoft Corporation
- Appears in
- A History of Microsoft
DeepMind's AlphaGo won its five-game series against Lee Sedol, one of the world's top Go players, 4–1. The combinatorial explosion of Go had long been thought to put a machine victory at least a decade away; the combination of Monte Carlo tree search and deep reinforcement learning broke that wall. Move 37 in Game 2—'the divine move'—introduced a placement so unlike anything a human player would have chosen that the professional Go community discussed it for weeks.
- Related organizations
- DeepMind · Google
- Appears in
- A History of Artificial Intelligence
2020s
16 events
Howardcorn33 (Wikimedia Commons) · CC0 1.0 (Public domain) · Commons ↗ Sony released PlayStation 5 in North America and Japan. Built on AMD Zen 2 (8-core CPU) and RDNA 2 GPU, with a custom 5.5 GB/s SSD that drastically cut load times. The DualSense controller introduced haptic feedback and adaptive triggers. COVID-19 supply-chain disruption created chronic shortages for nearly two years after launch. Alongside the Xbox Series X/S released in the same period, PS5 opened the ninth generation of home consoles. By the November 2024 PS5 Pro release (US$799), the platform had sold roughly 65 million units.
Gage Skidmore (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Commons ↗ Proposed in April, attempted to withdraw in July with litigation following, the deal finally closed on 27 October. Purchase price: US$44 billion. Within hours of closing, Musk dismissed the CEO, CFO, and head of legal; within a week he laid off roughly half the workforce (about 3,700 people), replaced the verified badge with a monthly subscription (Twitter Blue), and shrank content moderation. Citing free-speech grounds, he reinstated accounts permanently suspended including Donald Trump's. The platform was renamed X in July 2023. One of the largest social-media platforms became, unusually, the personal property of a billionaire.
OpenAI (Wikimedia Commons) · Public domain (below threshold of originality) · Commons ↗ OpenAI made ChatGPT publicly available—GPT-3.5 fine-tuned for dialogue and accessible free through any browser. One million users within five days; one hundred million within two months (the fastest growth of any consumer internet service to that point). Overnight, generative AI moved from a specialist research conversation into homes, schools, and workplaces, and prompted strategic pivots at Google, Meta, Anthropic, and Microsoft.
- Related organizations
- OpenAI
- Appears in
- A History of Artificial Intelligence
Anthropic (Wikimedia Commons) · Public domain (below threshold of originality) · Commons ↗ Anthropic—founded in 2021 by the Amodei siblings (Dario and Daniela) and others after their departure from OpenAI—released Claude, its conversational LLM, to the public. By coincidence OpenAI announced GPT-4 the same day. Anthropic emphasises its own safety methodology (Constitutional AI), and the two-pole structure of generative AI was established. Google invested US$400 million in 2023; Amazon committed up to US$4 billion over 2023–24. Anthropic grew into the most well-capitalised counter-pole to OpenAI.
- Related organizations
- Anthropic · OpenAI
- Appears in
- A History of Artificial Intelligence
Christopher P. Michel (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Commons ↗ Geoffrey Hinton—called the 'Godfather of AI'—revealed in a New York Times interview that he had left Google after a decade so he could speak about the dangers of AI without considering how it affected Google. He said he regretted parts of his life's work, and that what he had thought was 30 to 50 years off he no longer believed was. He warned of a flood of misinformation, job displacement, and autonomous weapons. An exceptional alarm from the man whose 2012 AlexNet ignited the deep-learning revolution, it accelerated international debate on AI regulation.
- Related people
- Geoffrey Hinton
- Related organizations
- Appears in
- A History of Artificial Intelligence
Adam Schultz / The White House (Wikimedia Commons) · Public domain (PD-USGov-POTUS) · Commons ↗ US President Joe Biden signed an executive order titled 'Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence' (Executive Order 14110). It required developers of models above a compute threshold to report to the government, directed NIST to lead the development of AI safety evaluation standards, and addressed discrimination in immigration, housing, and criminal justice. The most comprehensive US AI regulatory framework to date. The Trump administration would rescind it in January 2025.
- Appears in
- A History of Artificial Intelligence
Steve Jennings / TechCrunch (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY 2.0 · Commons ↗ On 17 November, the OpenAI board fired Sam Altman as CEO, citing 'a lack of consistent candour in his communications with the board'. The dismissal grew out of tensions between AI-safety and acceleration factions and questions about Altman's conduct. About 700 of 770 employees signed a letter threatening to resign; Microsoft signalled it would take Altman aboard; and within five days, on 22 November, Altman was reinstated. The safety-leaning directors were removed, and Bret Taylor (chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D'Angelo joined the new board. The episode is remembered as a shock to the very governance structure of the AI industry.
- Related organizations
- OpenAI · Microsoft Corporation
- Appears in
- A History of Artificial Intelligence
European Parliament / Laia Ros (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY 2.0 · Commons ↗ The European Parliament adopted the AI Act 523 to 46. It classifies AI systems into four risk tiers—unacceptable, high, limited, minimal—prohibits some outright (social-credit scoring, indiscriminate biometric recognition), and imposes strict duties on high-risk AI in medicine, hiring, and justice. General-purpose AI (GPAI) models are required to provide transparency and respect copyright. The Council of the EU adopted it on 21 May and the Act entered into force on 1 August 2024. As the world's first comprehensive AI regulation, it has become a textbook 'Brussels effect' reference point for AI legislation worldwide.
- Appears in
- A History of Artificial Intelligence
Electronic Frontier Foundation (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY 3.0 · Commons ↗ On 10 January, OpenAI quietly removed the 'military and warfare' prohibition from its usage policy, opening the door to defense work. In November of the same year, Anthropic announced a partnership with Palantir and AWS to provide Claude to the US intelligence and defense community. The pretense that generative AI was a peaceful Silicon Valley tool fell away; AI was openly recast as critical national-security infrastructure. A US Department of Defense collaboration with OpenAI was also disclosed in the same year; the integration with the military-industrial complex passed a point of no return.
- Related organizations
- OpenAI · Anthropic
- Appears in
- A History of Artificial Intelligence
Smishra1 (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Commons ↗ On 19 July, a faulty update file (Channel File 291) distributed by the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike's Falcon Sensor sent an estimated 8.5 million Windows machines worldwide into bootloop / blue-screen failure. Airline flights (Delta cancelled about 7,000 flights, with reported losses of US$500 million), hospitals, bank ATMs, emergency response systems, and broadcasters were simultaneously taken down. Total estimated economic loss exceeded US$10 billion, the largest of any single IT outage. Recovery required manual boot into Safe Mode; many organisations needed days to weeks. The incident exposed, at global scale, the supply-chain risk of SaaS security products and the weakness of software validation processes.
- Related organizations
- Microsoft Corporation
- Appears in
- A History of Cloud Computing · A History of Cybersecurity
NVIDIA Corporation (Wikimedia Commons) · Apache License 2.0 (trademark applies) · Commons ↗ On 18 June, NVIDIA's market capitalisation reached about US$3.34 trillion, briefly overtaking Microsoft and Apple to become the world's most valuable company. A market acknowledgment of its transformation from gaming-GPU vendor into the central infrastructure company of AI compute. At the November 2022 ChatGPT launch, NVIDIA had been valued at roughly US$360 billion—a ninefold growth in under eighteen months. NVIDIA reclaimed the top spot in 2025, and Jensen Huang became one of the most influential executives in the AI industry.
- Appears in
- A History of Semiconductors and Hardware
Jay Dixit (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Commons ↗ On 8 October, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to John Hopfield (the Hopfield network) and Geoffrey Hinton (the Boltzmann machine and deep learning). The next day, the Chemistry prize went to David Baker (computational protein design) and Demis Hassabis and John Jumper (DeepMind's AlphaFold2 for protein structure prediction). Both basic-science prizes going to AI work in the same week was unprecedented—a recognition of machine learning as an established scientific field. Hinton himself remarked that AlphaFold lay 'on a direct line' from his work.
- Related people
- Geoffrey Hinton
- Related organizations
- DeepMind
- Appears in
- A History of Artificial Intelligence
DeepSeek (Wikimedia Commons) · MIT License · Commons ↗ China's DeepSeek released DeepSeek-R1, an open-weights reasoning model on par with OpenAI's o1, under the MIT licence. The reported training cost was extraordinarily low (single-digit millions of dollars), and it was trained on older NVIDIA H800s permitted under US export controls. The market reaction was violent: on 27 January, NVIDIA stock fell about 17% in a single day, erasing roughly US$589 billion in market value—the largest single-day loss in US stock market history. The narrative of a US monopoly on frontier LLMs cracked under the combination of low cost, open weights, and a Chinese provenance.
- Appears in
- A History of Artificial Intelligence
Daniel Torok / The White House (Wikimedia Commons) · Public domain (PD-USGov-POTUS) · Commons ↗ On 20 January, the second Trump administration took office and rescinded Biden's AI Executive Order (EO 14110) on day one, pivoting US policy to liberalisation of AI development and 'American AI dominance'. The following day, the White House announced the Stargate Project—a joint venture of OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank to invest up to US$500 billion in data centres, power, and chips over four years. On 23 January, a new executive order on 'Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence' was signed, formalising AI as national strategic infrastructure. Against US-China competition, AI was now positioned as a sovereign asset.
- Related organizations
- OpenAI
- Appears in
- A History of Artificial Intelligence · A History of Cloud Computing
Crisco 1492 (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Commons ↗ Nintendo released the successor to the original Switch (2017), after a gap of eight years and four months. Powered by a custom NVIDIA Tegra T239 with DLSS support, capable of 4K TV output, with a 1080p/120Hz LCD in handheld mode and Joy-Con 2 controllers that can act as mice. Backwards-compatible with the original Switch, it launched with Mario Kart World, Donkey Kong Bananza, an enhanced Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and others. US$449 / ¥49,980. As the successor to one of the best-selling home consoles in history (over 150 million units of the original), it was the industry's most-watched release of the year.
Microsoft (Wikimedia Commons) · Public domain (below threshold of originality; trademark applies) · Commons ↗ Microsoft formally ended free support for Windows 10, ten years and three months after its July 2015 release. Security updates ended; consumers could pay US$30 per year for Extended Security Updates, or use a free path through 2027 conditional on a Microsoft account and OneDrive sync. At end of support, an estimated 30–40% of the Windows install base was still on Windows 10. Debate intensified over the environmental cost of hundreds of millions of PCs that could not be upgraded to Windows 11 because of hardware requirements. The transition exposed that an OS major-version change is not a UI cosmetic but a generator of large-scale electronic waste.
- Related organizations
- Microsoft Corporation
- Appears in
- A History of Operating Systems