Overview · 24 events
A General History of Information Technology
1940s
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.
1950s
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.
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.
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.
1960s
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.
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.
1970s
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.
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.
1980s
Microsoft 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.
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.
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.
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.
1990s
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
2000s
Amazon 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.
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.
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.
2010s
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.
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.
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.
2020s
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.