# IT History (history.itlibra.com) > A chronicle of information technology — from the 1947 transistor to today's LLMs. Curated, source-cited articles in Japanese (primary) and English. Published by itlibra. ## About this site - Domain: history.itlibra.com - Languages: Japanese (`/ja/...`) and English (`/en/...`); ja is x-default - Content licence: text under each entry's source citations; images via Wikimedia Commons under PD / CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only - Atom feed: https://history.itlibra.com/feed.xml - Sitemap: https://history.itlibra.com/sitemap.xml - Search index (JSON): https://history.itlibra.com/search-index.json ## Timelines - [A General History of Information Technology](https://history.itlibra.com/en/timelines/overview): 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 generative AI to a household scale, and from the EU AI Act through DeepSeek-R1, Stargate, and the AI-related Nobel Prizes, the late 2020s have woven geopolitics and AI into a single story. This chronicle takes the long view—lists only the era-marking events; the detailed lineages live in the genre timelines. - [A History of Programming Languages](https://history.itlibra.com/en/timelines/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, function, object, type, concurrency—languages have absorbed the abstractions each era demanded, and abandoned them when the next demand arrived. - [A History of Artificial Intelligence](https://history.itlibra.com/en/timelines/ai): 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 survived two winters before returning. The Transformer, the launch of ChatGPT, the standoff between OpenAI and Anthropic, the EU AI Act, Nobel Prizes, the militarisation of AI, the DeepSeek-R1 shock — this timeline follows seventy years in which optimism, disillusionment, and geopolitics now run at the same time. - [A History of the Internet and the Web](https://history.itlibra.com/en/timelines/internet-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 timeline follows the moments at which the experiments hardened into permanent infrastructure. - [A History of Cloud Computing](https://history.itlibra.com/en/timelines/cloud): The location of computation moved from ownership to rental, and then to metered consumption. Virtualization, hypervisor, container, serverless. Within a decade, the word 'server' shifted from a metal box in the room to a single line on an invoice. - [A History of Operating Systems](https://history.itlibra.com/en/timelines/operating-systems): Operating systems began with batch processing and reshaped themselves through timesharing, interactivity, graphics, networking, and mobility. UNIX, MS-DOS, Macintosh, Windows, Linux, Android, iOS—each lineage is a history of the translator standing between hardware and human. - [A History of Semiconductors and Hardware](https://history.itlibra.com/en/timelines/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 scaling laws turned computation from a scarce resource into a precondition as cheap as air. - [A History of Game Consoles and Game Technology](https://history.itlibra.com/en/timelines/game-consoles): 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 democratized computer ever sold and one of the most demanding stages on which hardware was ever built. - [A History of the iPhone](https://history.itlibra.com/en/timelines/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 Intelligence—each generation rewrote the assumptions of an entire industry. - [A History of Microsoft](https://history.itlibra.com/en/timelines/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; over the quarter-century that followed it shifted its centre of gravity to the cloud and to AI. The huge investment in OpenAI, the Activision acquisition, the Copilot+ PC—this timeline includes the changes of the Nadella decade. - [A History of Search Engines](https://history.itlibra.com/en/timelines/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 generative-AI redefinition of the late 2020s where the search engine writes the answer instead of returning a list. - [A History of Social Media](https://history.itlibra.com/en/timelines/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 launch reframing the field as 'billionaire's playground' vs 'big-platform counterpunch'. The chronicle of a machine that now moves speech, elections, and economies. - [A History of Mobile Phones and Smartphones](https://history.itlibra.com/en/timelines/mobile): 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 foldables and on-device AI. Thirty years of the pocket computer. - [A History of Open Source and Free Software](https://history.itlibra.com/en/timelines/open-source): 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 substrate of everything from cloud infrastructure to LLM training data. - [A History of Cybersecurity](https://history.itlibra.com/en/timelines/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 cryptography, states, criminal groups — and a single vendor update — can take the whole internet down. - [A History of Databases](https://history.itlibra.com/en/timelines/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 databases. How structured-data storage and retrieval shifted from application foundation to AI memory. ## Featured events (Tier 1, with full articles) - [The Point-Contact Transistor — Bell Labs](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/transistor-1947): On December 23, 1947, John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley at AT&T Bell Labs demonstrated amplification in a germanium point-contact transistor… - [The Dartmouth Workshop — Naming Artificial Intelligence](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/dartmouth-workshop-1956): In the summer of 1956, an eight-week workshop at Dartmouth College brought together John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Claude Shannon, Nathaniel Rochester, and oth… - [The Birth of UNIX — Bell Labs](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/unix-release-1969): In 1969, Ken Thompson at Bell Labs—having left Multics—built a small timesharing system on an idle PDP-7. Joined by Dennis Ritchie, it was named UNICS (later … - [ARPANET's First Message](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/arpanet-1969): On October 29, 1969, UCLA's Charles Kline tried to send 'LOGIN' to SRI; the link crashed after two letters and only 'LO' arrived. It was ARPANET's first real … - [Codd's Relational Model Paper — Giving Databases a Mathematical Foundation](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/codd-relational-1970): In June 1970, E. F. Codd at IBM San Jose Research Lab published 'A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks' in CACM. The paper introduced the rel… - [The C Language — Dennis Ritchie](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/c-language-1972): In 1972, Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs extended Ken Thompson's B language with a type system to create C. UNIX was rewritten in C in 1973—the first time an OS c… - [Microsoft Founded](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/microsoft-founded-1975): On April 4, 1975, Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded 'Micro-Soft' in Albuquerque to sell their BASIC for the Altair 8800. Gates' 1976 'Open Letter to Hobbyists… - [1BSD Released — The Berkeley Fork of UNIX Begins](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/bsd-1977): In March 1977, UC Berkeley's CSRG distributed 1BSD—a tape of enhancements to AT&T UNIX V6 edited by Bill Joy, in roughly thirty copies. It seeded SunOS, FreeB… - [Oracle V2 Ships — The First Commercial SQL Relational Database](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/oracle-1979): In June 1979, Software Development Laboratories—founded by Ellison, Miner, and Oates—shipped Oracle V2, the first commercial SQL relational DBMS and the first… - [The GNU Project Begins — Stallman's Free-Software Declaration](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/gnu-1983): On 27 September 1983, MIT AI Lab's Richard Stallman posted 'Free Unix!' to Usenet net.unix-wizards, launching the GNU Project. The Free Software Foundation fo… - [The Morris Worm — The First Large-Scale Internet Attack](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/morris-worm-1988): On 2 November 1988, a worm by Cornell student Robert T. Morris paralysed about 10% of the early Internet, leading to the first CFAA conviction and the foundin… - [The World Wide Web Proposed — CERN](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/www-proposal-1989): In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee at CERN submitted 'Information Management: A Proposal'. His manager scrawled 'Vague, but exciting' in the margin—and the world'… - [Linux — Linus Torvalds' 21-Year-Old Announcement](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/linux-kernel-1991): On August 25, 1991, University of Helsinki student Linus Torvalds posted to comp.os.minix: 'just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu'. The 10,000-… - [Yahoo! Directory Launches — A Hand-Curated Map of the Early Web](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/yahoo-1994): In 1994, Stanford doctoral students Jerry Yang and David Filo launched Yahoo!, a hand-curated web directory. Its 1996 IPO valued it at about US$848M; by 1998 … - [Apache HTTP Server Released — "A Patchy Server" Holds Up the Web](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/apache-1995): In April 1995, Brian Behlendorf and seven others released Apache HTTP Server 0.6.2 as a 'patchy' fork of NCSA HTTPd. By 1996 Apache had the largest web server… - [MySQL 1.0 Released — The Open RDB That Powered the LAMP Stack](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/mysql-1995): On 23 May 1995, Monty Widenius and partners founded MySQL AB and released MySQL 1.0. As the heart of the LAMP stack, MySQL powered the 2000s Web boom; Sun acq… - [Windows 95 Released](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/windows-95-release): On August 24, 1995, Microsoft released Windows 95 with 32-bit preemptive multitasking, long filenames, plug-and-play, and the lasting Start menu and taskbar. … - [AltaVista Goes Live — The First Serious Full-Text Web Search](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/altavista-1995): On December 15, 1995, DEC launched AltaVista, the first serious full-text web search engine. Its Scooter crawler indexed 16 million pages, traffic peaked at 8… - [Palm Pilot 1000/5000 — The Palmtop That Defined the PDA Category](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/palm-pilot-1996): In 1996, Palm Computing launched the Palm Pilot 1000 and 5000. With a shirt-pocket size, HotSync PC synchronisation, and the Graffiti handwriting system, it r… - [PostgreSQL 6.0 Released — Berkeley Postgres Reborn as a Rigorous OSS RDB](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/postgresql-1996): On 8 July 1996, PostgreSQL 6.0 was released as the successor to UC Berkeley Postgres. Strict ACID, MVCC, extensibility, PostGIS, and pgvector built a deep fol… - [Netscape Opens Its Source — mozilla.org Is Born](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/mozilla-1998): On 22 January 1998, Netscape Communications announced it would open-source the Netscape Communicator codebase; code shipped 31 March, the day mozilla.org was … - [BlackBerry 850 Launches — Hardware QWERTY and Push Email Take Over the Enterprise](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/blackberry-1999): On 19 January 1999, RIM launched the BlackBerry 850. With a hardware QWERTY keyboard and encrypted push email, it became the essential tool of corporate profe… - [i-mode Launches — The World's First Mass-Market Mobile Internet](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/imode-1999): On 22 February 1999, NTT DoCoMo launched i-mode, the world's first mass-market mobile internet service. Peaking at 49 million subscribers, it was the birthpla… - [Nokia 7650 Launches — Symbian S60 Opens the Smartphone Era](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/nokia-symbian-2002): In June 2002, Nokia launched the 7650 — the first mass-produced Symbian S60 device and Nokia's first camera phone. Symbian reached 65% global smartphone OS sh… - [MySpace Launches — The First Hegemon of the Friend-Graph Web](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/myspace-2003): In August 2003, Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe launched MySpace inside eUniverse. Customisable profiles and an indie-music hub captured young users; News Corp… - [Git Released — Torvalds Writes Distributed Version Control in Ten Days](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/git-2005): In April 2005, Linus Torvalds wrote Git in ten days after BitKeeper revoked its free licence. The first self-hosting commit landed 7 April; the Linux kernel m… - [The Original iPhone Goes on Sale](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/iphone-original-release): On June 29, 2007, Apple released the original iPhone in the US after Steve Jobs' January Macworld unveiling. By replacing the physical keyboard with capacitiv… - [GitHub Goes Public — A Social UI Over Git](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/github-2008): On 10 April 2008, Tom Preston-Werner, Chris Wanstrath, PJ Hyett, and Scott Chacon launched GitHub. A web UI over Git and social primitives (Pull Request, Fork… - [The App Store Opens](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/app-store-launch): In July 2008, Apple launched the App Store alongside iPhone OS 2.0 with around 500 apps. Official distribution and the 70/30 revenue split set the spine of mo… - [DuckDuckGo Launches — A Search Engine That Doesn't Track You](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/duckduckgo-2008): On September 25, 2008, Gabriel Weinberg launched DuckDuckGo — a privacy-first search engine that logs no IP addresses or search histories and refuses to perso… - [WhatsApp Launches — The Ad-Free, Subscription Messenger](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/whatsapp-2009): In January 2009, ex-Yahoo engineers Jan Koum and Brian Acton launched WhatsApp—a US$0.99/year, ad-free messenger. Facebook acquired it for US$19B in February … - [MongoDB 1.0 Released — The Document-Oriented Symbol of the NoSQL Movement](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/mongodb-2009): On 11 February 2009, 10gen (later MongoDB Inc.) released MongoDB 1.0, a document-oriented NoSQL database. With BSON documents and a schemaless design, it beca… - [Samsung Galaxy S Launches — The Android Empire's Real Beginning](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/samsung-galaxy-s-2010): On 4 June 2010, Samsung released the Galaxy S (i9000) — a 4-inch Super AMOLED Android 2.1 flagship that sold 10 million units in six months. The S line has co… - [Stuxnet — The First State-Built Cyberweapon for Physical Destruction](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/stuxnet-2010): Stuxnet, discovered in 2010, used four zero-days, stolen code-signing certificates, and deep knowledge of Siemens PLCs to wreck around 1,000 centrifuges at Ir… - [iPhone 4 — Retina Display and 'Antennagate'](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/iphone-4-release): On June 24, 2010, Apple released iPhone 4 with the 326-ppi 'Retina display' and a new glass-and-stainless-steel design that defined every iPhone that followed… - [Instagram Launches — The Invention of the Photo-First Social Network](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/instagram-2010): On 6 October 2010, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger launched Instagram as an iPhone-only photo-sharing app. It hit 1 million users in two months. Facebook acqui… - [Snapchat Launches — The Origin of Ephemeral Messaging and Social AR](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/snapchat-2011): In September 2011, Stanford students Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, and Reggie Brown launched Snapchat—an app of disappearing photos. In 2013 they rejected Faceb… - [AlexNet — The Deep-Learning Era Begins](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/imagenet-alexnet-2012): In September 2012, Krizhevsky, Sutskever, and Hinton reached a 15.3% top-5 error rate on ImageNet, beating the runner-up by over 10 points. Trained on two NVI… - [Amazon Redshift Announced — The Cloud Data Warehouse Era Begins](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/redshift-2012): On 28 November 2012, AWS announced Amazon Redshift at re:Invent. A column-oriented cloud DWH based on ParAccel, it delivered petabyte-scale analytics at rough… - [The Snowden Disclosures — The Day NSA Mass Surveillance Became Public](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/snowden-disclosures-2013): In June 2013 NSA contractor Edward Snowden gave The Guardian and Washington Post documents revealing PRISM, XKeyscore, Bullrun and other US–UK mass-surveillan… - [Heartbleed — A Single TLS Bug That Weakened Most of the Internet](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/heartbleed-2014): In April 2014, CVE-2014-0160 (Heartbleed) was disclosed in OpenSSL's heartbeat extension, allowing attackers to read up to 64 KB of server memory including pr… - [Snowflake Goes GA — Separating Storage from Compute Rewrites the DWH](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/snowflake-2014): In October 2014, Snowflake reached GA. Its full separation of storage from compute distinguished it from Redshift and BigQuery; the 2020 IPO closed at roughly… - [Douyin and the Rise of TikTok — Algorithm-Driven Social Goes Global](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/tiktok-2016): In September 2016, ByteDance launched Douyin in China as a vertical short-video app. The international TikTok followed in August 2017, with Musical.ly acquire… - [WannaCry — The Ransomware That Weaponised a Leaked NSA Tool](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/wannacry-2017): On 12 May 2017, WannaCry — attributed to North Korea's Lazarus Group — spread to 300,000 machines across 150 countries via the leaked NSA exploit EternalBlue,… - [iPhone X — The Home Button Goes, Face ID Arrives](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/iphone-x-face-id): In November 2017, on the iPhone's tenth anniversary, Apple released iPhone X—abandoning the physical home button and Touch ID, embedding a depth sensor and IR… - [The Facebook–Cambridge Analytica Scandal — An Irreversible Point for Social Media and Democracy](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/facebook-cambridge-analytica-2018): On 17 March 2018, The Observer/Guardian and NYT broke the story that Cambridge Analytica had improperly harvested data on 87M Facebook users and used it in th… - [BERT Released — Bidirectional Transformer Pretraining](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/bert-2018): In October 2018, Jacob Devlin and Google AI posted BERT to arXiv. Bidirectional masked-language pretraining of a Transformer encoder rewrote GLUE and other NL… - [Xbox Series X/S Released](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/xbox-series-x-s-2020): On November 10, 2020, Microsoft launched the Xbox Series X ($499) and digital Series S ($299) simultaneously. Built on AMD Zen 2/RDNA 2 with Quick Resume and … - [PlayStation 5 Released](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/playstation-5-2020): On November 12, 2020, Sony launched PlayStation 5 in North America and Japan. With AMD Zen 2 8-core CPU, RDNA 2 GPU, a 5.5 GB/s custom SSD, and the haptic Dua… - [SolarWinds — Russian SVR Poisons the Update Pipeline Itself](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/solarwinds-2020): In December 2020 Russia's SVR planted the SUNBURST backdoor in SolarWinds Orion updates, breaching nine US federal agencies including Treasury and DHS plus mu… - [GitHub Copilot — The Start of AI-Assisted Coding](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/github-copilot-2021): On June 29, 2021, GitHub and OpenAI released Copilot as a technical preview—an AI pair programmer powered by OpenAI Codex (GPT-3 fine-tuned on code). It becam… - [Windows 11 Released](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/windows-11-release-2021): On October 5, 2021, Microsoft released Windows 11 after a six-year gap from Windows 10. The UI brought a centred Start menu, Snap Layouts, and Android app sup… - [Log4Shell — How a Single Log Line Took Over the World's Java Servers](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/log4shell-2021): In December 2021, CVE-2021-44228 (CVSS 10.0) hit Apache Log4j 2.x: a string like `${jndi:...}` in any log line triggered remote code execution. With billions … - [Elon Musk Acquires Twitter for US$44 Billion](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/musk-twitter-acquisition-2022): On October 27, 2022, Elon Musk closed his $44B Twitter acquisition. He fired the CEO, CFO, and head of legal immediately, laid off ~3,700 (half the staff) wit… - [ChatGPT Launched](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/chatgpt-launch-2022): On 30 November 2022, OpenAI launched ChatGPT—GPT-3.5 fine-tuned for dialogue and free in any browser. It hit 1M users in 5 days and 100M in 2 months, the fast… - [Perplexity AI Goes Public — A Search Engine That Answers, with Sources](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/perplexity-2022): On December 7, 2022, Aravind Srinivas and co-founders launched Perplexity AI, pairing an LLM with real-time web search and footnoted citations. Just seven day… - [Rust Enters the Linux Kernel — The Beginning of C's End](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/rust-in-linux-2022): On December 11, 2022, Linus Torvalds merged initial Rust support into Linux 6.1. After roughly 50 years of C-only kernel code, memory-safe Rust formally enter… - [Microsoft Invests Another US$10 Billion in OpenAI](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/microsoft-openai-10b-2023): On 23 Jan 2023, two months after ChatGPT's launch, Microsoft announced a reported US$10B multi-year extension of its OpenAI investment. Azure became OpenAI's … - [New Bing and Microsoft Copilot — LLMs Enter Search](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/new-bing-copilot-2023): On February 7, 2023, Microsoft unveiled New Bing with GPT-4-based chat and announced Copilot for Microsoft 365. Two months after ChatGPT, LLMs entered search … - [Anthropic Releases Claude — A Safety-First Rival LLM](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/anthropic-claude-2023): On 14 March 2023, Anthropic—founded by ex-OpenAI Amodei siblings—released Claude. OpenAI announced GPT-4 the same day. With Constitutional AI as its safety me… - [AWS Bedrock — Foundation Models as a Cloud Service](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/aws-bedrock-2023): On April 13, 2023, AWS announced Amazon Bedrock, a unified API for foundation models including Anthropic Claude, AI21 Jurassic, Stable Diffusion, and Titan. T… - [Geoffrey Hinton Leaves Google to Warn About AI's Dangers](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/hinton-leaves-google-2023): On 1 May 2023, Geoffrey Hinton—the 'Godfather of AI'—revealed he had left Google after a decade to speak freely about AI's dangers. He warned of misinformatio… - [pgvector Comes of Age — Putting AI Vector Search inside the RDB](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/pgvector-2023): In 2023, the PostgreSQL extension pgvector exploded as a vector DB for LLM-era RAG. It stores embeddings in tables and supports cosine, L2, and inner-product … - [Meta Threads — Fastest App Ever to 100 Million Users](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/threads-launch-2023): On July 5, 2023, Meta launched Threads, an Instagram-linked text social network, in 100 countries. It hit 100M users in five days—shattering ChatGPT's two-mon… - [iPhone 15 — The Move to USB-C](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/iphone-15-usb-c): In September 2023, Apple replaced eleven years of Lightning with USB-C on the iPhone 15—forced compliance with the EU Common Charger Directive (2022, mandator… - [Microsoft Closes US$68.7 Billion Acquisition of Activision Blizzard](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/microsoft-activision-2023): On 13 Oct 2023, Microsoft closed its US$68.7B acquisition of Activision Blizzard—the largest gaming deal ever. Call of Duty, WoW, Diablo, and Candy Crush move… - [Biden's Executive Order on Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy AI](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/biden-ai-executive-order-2023): On 30 Oct 2023, Biden signed Executive Order 14110 on 'Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy AI'. It required developers of frontier models above a compute threshold … - [The OpenAI Coup — Altman Fired, Reinstated in Five Days](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/openai-altman-firing-2023): On 17 Nov 2023, OpenAI's board fired CEO Sam Altman for 'lack of candour'. About 700 of 770 employees threatened to resign and Microsoft offered him a job; fi… - [AI Goes to War — OpenAI Policy Reversal and the Anthropic-Palantir-AWS Pact](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/ai-military-use-2024): On 10 Jan 2024, OpenAI quietly removed its 'military and warfare' ban from its usage policy. In Nov 2024, Anthropic partnered with Palantir and AWS to provide… - [EU AI Act Adopted — The World's First Comprehensive AI Regulation](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/eu-ai-act-2024): On 13 March 2024, the European Parliament adopted the AI Act 523-46. The world's first comprehensive AI regulation classifies AI by four risk tiers, bans soci… - [NVIDIA Blackwell B200 — Flagship GPU for the Generative-AI Era](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/nvidia-blackwell-b200-2024): On March 18, 2024 at GTC, NVIDIA unveiled the Blackwell GPU architecture and B200: 208 billion transistors, 20 PFLOPS FP4, 192 GB HBM3e, and a chiplet design.… - [AI Eats Search — Google AI Overviews and the Rise of Perplexity](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/ai-search-overview-2024): On May 14, 2024, Google launched LLM-generated AI Overviews atop US search results at Google I/O. Alongside Perplexity and ChatGPT Search, search shifted from… - [Copilot+ PC and Recall — On-Device AI and an Instant Retreat](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/copilot-plus-pc-recall-2024): On May 20, 2024, Microsoft announced Copilot+ PC requiring a 40+ TOPS NPU. Its Recall feature, capturing screenshots every 5 seconds, leaked plaintext SQLite … - [NVIDIA Briefly Becomes the World's Most Valuable Company](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/nvidia-most-valuable-2024): On June 18, 2024, NVIDIA's market cap hit about US$3.34 trillion, briefly overtaking Microsoft and Apple as the world's most valuable company. The ninefold ju… - [The CrowdStrike Falcon Outage — The Largest IT Outage in History](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/crowdstrike-outage-2024): On July 19, 2024, a faulty Channel File 291 update from CrowdStrike Falcon Sensor blue-screened about 8.5 million Windows machines worldwide. Delta cancelled … - [SearchGPT Announced — OpenAI Enters the Search Market](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/searchgpt-2024): On July 25, 2024, OpenAI unveiled SearchGPT—an AI-search prototype combining LLM answers, real-time web results and source links. It became ChatGPT Search at … - [macOS Sequoia and Apple Intelligence — AI Built Into the OS](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/macos-sequoia-apple-intelligence-2024): On September 16, 2024, Apple released macOS 15 Sequoia with iOS 18 and iPadOS 18, all carrying Apple Intelligence. On-device AI ran on A17 Pro / M-series sili… - [Nobel Prizes for AI — Physics and Chemistry in the Same Week](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/nobel-prize-ai-2024): On 8–9 October 2024, the Nobel Prize in Physics went to Hopfield and Hinton for neural networks, and Chemistry to DeepMind's Hassabis and Jumper for AlphaFold… - [Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger Steps Down — A Semiconductor Empire Stumbles](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/intel-gelsinger-out-2024): On December 2, 2024, Intel's board ousted CEO Pat Gelsinger. The IDM 2.0 strategy collapsed under 18A process delays, lost AI-chip share to NVIDIA, a US$16.6 … - [The DeepSeek-R1 Shock — A Low-Cost Chinese Reasoning Model Rocks the Market](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/deepseek-r1-2025): On 20 January 2025, China's DeepSeek released R1, an open-weights reasoning model rivaling OpenAI o1, under MIT license. On 27 January, NVIDIA stock fell abou… - [The Trump AI Pivot — Biden's Order Rescinded, Stargate's $500 Billion Pledge](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/trump-ai-stargate-2025): On 20 Jan 2025, Trump rescinded Biden's AI Executive Order 14110. The next day, OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank announced the Stargate Project, pledging up to US… - [Nintendo Switch 2 Released](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/nintendo-switch-2-2025): On June 5, 2025, Nintendo released the Switch 2, the successor to the 2017 original. With a custom NVIDIA Tegra T239 (DLSS), 4K TV output, a 1080p/120Hz LCD, … - [Windows 10 End of Support](https://history.itlibra.com/en/events/windows-10-eol-2025): On October 14, 2025, Microsoft formally ended free support for Windows 10. Consumers could pay US$30/year for Extended Security Updates or get a free path thr… ## People - [Alan Kay](https://history.itlibra.com/en/people/alan-kay): Led the development of Smalltalk at Xerox PARC and articulated much of object-oriented programming as a discipline. In the 1970s he proposed - [Bill Gates](https://history.itlibra.com/en/people/bill-gates): Co-founder of Microsoft (1975, with Paul Allen). Beginning with BASIC for the Altair 8800, he led the strategy by which Microsoft came to do - [Brendan Eich](https://history.itlibra.com/en/people/brendan-eich): Creator of JavaScript (1995). Worked at Netscape, then Mozilla, where he served as CTO and—briefly in 2014—as CEO. After leaving Mozilla, he - [Claude Shannon](https://history.itlibra.com/en/people/claude-shannon): Founder of information theory. His MIT master's thesis (1937) showed how Boolean algebra mapped onto relay circuits, giving computer logic i - [Dennis Ritchie](https://history.itlibra.com/en/people/dennis-ritchie): Designer of the C programming language (1972) and, with Ken Thompson, co-creator of UNIX. Spent his career at Bell Labs. ACM Turing Award 19 - [Frank Rosenblatt](https://history.itlibra.com/en/people/frank-rosenblatt): Psychologist and computer scientist at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory. Introduced the perceptron in 1957–58 and built the Mark I Percep - [Geoffrey Hinton](https://history.itlibra.com/en/people/geoffrey-hinton): A central figure of deep learning. Known for popularising backpropagation (1986, with Rumelhart and Williams), for the Boltzmann machine and - [Guido van Rossum](https://history.itlibra.com/en/people/guido-van-rossum): Creator of Python (1991). Has worked at CWI in the Netherlands, CNRI in the US, Google, Dropbox, and—since 2020—Microsoft. Long held the tit - [John McCarthy](https://history.itlibra.com/en/people/john-mccarthy): Co-coiner of the term 'artificial intelligence' (1956), designer of LISP (1958), and founder of the Stanford AI Lab (1963). Also contributed - [Joseph Weizenbaum](https://history.itlibra.com/en/people/joseph-weizenbaum): MIT computer scientist; author of ELIZA (1966). Among the earliest to identify the phenomenon of humans projecting meaning onto computers. H - [Ken Thompson](https://history.itlibra.com/en/people/ken-thompson): Principal designer of UNIX (1969). Author of the B language, the predecessor of C. Worked at Bell Labs and later at Google. Co-recipient wit - [Linus Torvalds](https://history.itlibra.com/en/people/linus-torvalds): Author of the Linux kernel (1991), which he still maintains. Studied computer science at the University of Helsinki, then moved to the Unite - [Marvin Minsky](https://history.itlibra.com/en/people/marvin-minsky): Co-founder of the MIT AI Lab and one of the most influential figures of the first generation of AI research. A participant in the Dartmouth - [Steve Jobs](https://history.itlibra.com/en/people/steve-jobs): Co-founder of Apple. Together with Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne, he founded Apple Computer in 1976 and stood at the centre of the product - [Tim Berners-Lee](https://history.itlibra.com/en/people/tim-berners-lee): Inventor of the World Wide Web. While at CERN from 1989 to 1991 he implemented its foundational technologies—HTTP, HTML, URL, the first serv - [Vint Cerf](https://history.itlibra.com/en/people/vint-cerf): Co-designer with Bob Kahn of the TCP/IP suite in 1974, and one of those known as a 'father of the internet'. Career has spanned Stanford, AR ## Organizations - [Anthropic](https://history.itlibra.com/en/organizations/anthropic): An AI-safety research company founded in the US in 2021, led by the Amodei siblings (Dario and Daniela), formerly of OpenAI. It introduced C - [Apple Inc.](https://history.itlibra.com/en/organizations/apple): A computer and consumer-electronics company founded in 1976 by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne. Across several decades it has re - [Bell Labs](https://history.itlibra.com/en/organizations/bell-labs): Founded as AT&T's research arm in 1925, Bell Labs was one of the twentieth century's largest industrial research institutions. The transisto - [DeepMind](https://history.itlibra.com/en/organizations/deepmind): Founded in London in 2010 by Demis Hassabis, Shane Legg, and Mustafa Suleyman. Acquired by Google in 2014. Known for deep reinforcement lear - [Google](https://history.itlibra.com/en/organizations/google): A search company founded in 1998 by Stanford graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin. From the precision advantage of the PageRank algo - [International Business Machines (IBM)](https://history.itlibra.com/en/organizations/ibm): Founded as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company in 1911 (renamed IBM in 1924). From the 1920s the world's principal office-equipment s - [Microsoft Corporation](https://history.itlibra.com/en/organizations/microsoft): Founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen to sell BASIC for the Altair 8800. The 1981 supply of MS-DOS to the IBM PC, with parallel licen - [OpenAI](https://history.itlibra.com/en/organizations/openai): Founded in December 2015 by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman and others as a non-profit research organisation pursuing s ## Products - [iPhone](https://history.itlibra.com/en/products/iphone): The smartphone series Apple released in 2007. Updated annually or biannually since, the iPhone has successively led the introduction of feat ## Optional - [Glossary](https://history.itlibra.com/en/glossary): 68 technical terms (AI/ML, web, OS, hardware, cloud, security) - [Japanese feed](https://history.itlibra.com/ja/feed.xml) - [English feed](https://history.itlibra.com/en/feed.xml)