Author Archives: mstanton

1980

• Tim Berners-Lee writes a notebook program, “Enquire-Within-Upon-Everything,” which allows links to be made between arbitrary nodes. Each node has a title, a type, and a list of bidirectional typed links.
• Sony Walkman introduced, changing music into a more exclusive/singular experience.
• IBM licenses DOS from Microsoft.
• Namco’s Pac-Man hits coin-operated arcades worldwide.
• Ted Turner’s Cable News Network (CNN) begins broadcasting.

1981

• IBM introduces the IBM Personal Computer on August 12; the single disk drive, 16k RAM PC sells for about $1,600. This PC debut’s MS-DOS 1.0, a new operating system from Microsoft.
• Motorola and American Radio telephone test a cellular phone system in the Washington/Baltimore area.
• Adam Osbourne completes the first portable computer, the Osbourne 1, weighing 24 pounds at a cost of $1,795. However, although the unit sells well at first, Osbourne openly promotes the power of his company’s next generation computer. Consumers become anxious for the Osbourne 2 and opt to wait for it, causing sales of the Osbourne 1 to dry up and put Osbourne out of business. This sort of suicidal marketing becomes known in the technology business as the Osbourne Effect.
• MTV debuts.

1982

• Gannett Corp. begins publishing USA Today, the first newspaper marketed specifically to a nationwide audience.
• Lotus announces 1-2-3 for the IBM PC.
• Disney releases the movie Tron, featuring groundbreaking computer-generated images throughout most of the movie.
• Atari develops the data glove.
• In the United States, the FCC finally authorizes commercial cellular service.
• TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) is established at the protocol suite for ARPANET.
• Sun Microsystems is incorporated with just four employees.

1983

• IBM introduces the XT, an “extended” PC with a built-in 10 MB hard drive and 128K RAM.
• Apple debuts a new computer called Lisa, a forerunner to the Macintosh.
• The movie WarGames popularizes the “hacker hero” character.
• Compact Discs debut as a popular format for music albums, computer data storage, and multimedia.

1984

• Apple Computers buys airtime during Super Bowl XVII to preview its next new personal computer, the Macintosh. The 30-second commercial, directed by Ridley Scott, is broadcast only once but becomes a milestone in television advertising history.
• The first Macintosh released later in January features a 3.5-inch floppy drive, 128k of RAM, a built-in 9-inch black and white screen and speakers – no internal hard drive. A 512K Mac is released in September.
• In December, Apple gives free Macintosh computers to Michael Jackson, Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol and other strategic celebrities.
• Paul Mockapetris of USC releases proposals for the Domain Name System to route traffic over networks.
• William Gibson’s book Neuromancer wins several science fiction awards and puts the term “cyberspace” into popular use.

1985

• On May 24, Quantum Computer Services is incorporated in Delaware. The company will later change its name to America Online.
• On Nov. 20, Microsoft ships Windows 1.0, a DOS shell which looks very similar to the new Macintosh “desktop” GUI (graphic user interface).
• Apple introduces a laser printer with built-in PostScript controller.
• In September, Steve Jobs resigns from Apple to form NeXT.
• The Commodore Amiga debuts as the first true multimedia computer.
• Fed up with current versions of Unix, Richard Stallman publishes the “GNU Manifesto” calling for “anticopyrighted” (later called open source) programs.
• Ninendo Entertainment System (NES) comes to the United States.
• Max Headroom: 20 Minutes Into The Future movie airs on British television. (An American TV series on ABC debuts the following year.)
• Attributed to Nathan J. Mehl: Around this time a new user disrupts a text-based online adventure game by continually submitting the word “SPAM” to other players. The story of “that asshole who spammed us” gets passed around the Internet and eventually becomes associated with the type of “junk” e-mail which clutters up users’ accounts. The original joke stems from a Monty Python comedy sketch in which Vikings loudly sing the word “Spam” over and over to drown out all conversation in a restaurant specializing in the canned meat product. (Note: Other sources date the “spamming” of this online game as sometime in 1991.)

1986

• Intel ships the 80386 CPU.
• The Academic American Encyclopedia becomes the first CD-ROM encyclopedia.
• Larry Wall creates the Perl scripting language to create reports for his boss. Perl later becomes the dominant Web scripting language used throughout the 1990s on many Web servers.

1987

• Apple announces the Mac II with 1 MB of RAM.
• U.S. Robotics unveils a 9600 bps modem which sells for $495.
• Apple Human Interface Guidelines: The Apple Desktop Interface is published.
• 3M introduces a 2MB 3.5-inch floppy disk.
• Andrew S. Tanenbaum creates Minix, an open-source clone of Unix.
• CompuServe introduces the GIF image file format.
• Apple debuts Hypercard, Bill Atkinson’s hypertext-linking multimedia program.
• Adobe Illustrator released.

1988

• Apple sues Microsoft for copyright infringement of its OS GUI. Courts later side with Microsoft.
• Starting on Nov. 3, Robert Tappan Morris’s self-replicating Internet Worm infects servers all over the world.
• Macromind (later renamed Macromedia) releases Director.

1989

• Tim Berners-Lee writes “Information Management: A Proposal” and circulates it for comment at CERN.
• MCI mail and Compuserv create the first relays between the Internet and a commercial e-mail carrier.
• In September, Quantum Computer Services launches a new service called “America Online” available for Macintosh and Apple II users.

1971

• Ted Hoff invents the microprocessor.
• First edition of the UNIX operating system released from Bell Labs. (Various varieties of UNIX follow.)
• Computer engineer Ray Tomlinson sends the first e-mail message and designates “@” as the locator symbol for electronic addresses.

1972

• Nolan Bushnell founds Atari and introduces Pong, the first modern commercial video game. (In 1976, Bushnell sells Atari for $28 million. A year later he opens the first Chuck E. Cheese’s restaurant, which he also later sells.)

1974

• MITS releases the first successful personal computer, the Altair. Elsewhere, the 64K RAM mouse-equipped Alto is developed at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). The Alto would later inspire Steve Jobs at Apple Computers to create the Macintosh.
• Motion Pictures Product Group forms.

1975

• Bill Gates and Paul Allen adapt BASIC to run on the Altair 8800 and sell the interpreter to MITS. By November, Gates and Allen found a new company called Micro-soft.
• The term “data highway” is used in some articles to describe global networking.
• Sony Betamax video cassette recorder released.

1976

• Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs found Apple Computers and introduce the Apple II, the first PC to use color graphics.

1977

• AT&T and Bell Labs construct a prototype cellular phone system; public trials happen a year later.
• JVC VHS videocassettes introduced.
• Atari Video Computer System (VCS/2600) released.
• The first Star Wars movie debuts.

1978

• Taito’s Space Invaders coin-operated videogame sweeps Japan; Bally Midway releases the game in the United States.
• Video laser disc introduced.

1979

• On April 12, Kevin MacKenzie suggests to the MsgGroup they start using text to suggest emotions, like 😉 for meaning something is meant tongue-in-cheek. Despite an initial poor reaction, emoticons become widely used.
• USENET and newsgroup protocols are created by Tom Truscott, Jim Ellis and Steve Bellovin.
• Tokyo becomes the market for the first commercial cellular telephone system.

1960s

• Doug Engelbart prototypes an “oNLine System” (NLS) which does browsing among linked documents, editing and email. He invents the mouse for helping perform these tasks.
• Influenced by Engelbart and Bush, Ted Nelson begins work about a form of non-sequential writing he calls hypertext. Nelson also imagines Xanadu, a global chain of public access “Silver Stands” which enable people to pull information from hypertext documents all over the world.

1962

• Launch of Telstar, the first orbital communications satellite.
• MIT programmers use a DEC PDP-1 (the world’s first minicomputer) to create Spacewar, the first video game. Soon similar versions of the game are created on campuses around the nation.

1964

• Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, predicts the number of transistors that can be built on a piece of silicon will double every 18 months. This axiom becomes known as Moore’s Law.

1965

• IBM introduces the word processor.

1966

• On Sept. 8, Star Trek debuts on NBC.
• Ralph Baer’s Odyssey, produced by Magnavox, becomes the first commercial computer game.

1969

• Xerox PARC founded.
• First use of computer-generated graphics in a commercial, an ad for IBM.
• Alan Kay at Xerox develops the graphical user interface (GUI).
• Spin-off technologies from NASA’s moon mission include laptop computers, small solid-state lasers, cordless power tools, solar power cells, liquid crystals, and Tang.
• And now, for something completely different: Monty Python’s Flying Circus debuts on BBC-1.

1900s

• Nickelodeons become popular in the United States.

1901

• Guglielmo Marconi perfects a wireless radio system that transmits Morse code over the Atlantic Ocean.

1903

• German scientist Arthur Korn invents the fax machine.
• The Great Train Robbery becomes the first feature film.

1912

• David Sarnoff, a Marconi wireless operator in New York, receives the SOS from the sinking H.M.S. Titanic. (Sarnoff later goes on to create RCA and its spinoff, NBC.)

1914

• Teletype is introduced; journalism no longer requires knowledge of Morse Code.

1915

• Transcontinental telephone service is established between New York and San Francisco.

1920

• KDKA-AM radio signs on the air in Pittsburgh to becomes the world’s first commercial radio station.

1922

• Time becomes the first weekly news magazine.

1926

• J.L. Baird demonstrates the first practical television system based on designs created in 1884 by German scientist Paul Nipkow. Baird debuts the first color TV two years later.
• NBC becomes the first radio network.

1927

• Philo Farnsworth transmits the first electronic TV picture. Bell Telephone Laboratories tests wireless TV broadcasts.

1928

• WGY in Schenectady, New York, becomes the first experimental television station.

1935

• Germany begins airing regular public TV broadcasts.

1936

• German aircraft engineer Konrad Zuse creates the first binary computer, the Z1 mechanical calculator.
• Life becomes the first American magazine using photographs.

1937-1942

• At Iowa State University, professor John Atanasoff and graduate student Clifford Berry develop the Atanasoff-Berry Computer, or ABC, the first electronic digital computer.

1937

• While the Hindenburg explodes in flames above Lakehurst, New Jersey, Herbert Morrison delivers the first U.S. coast-to-coast radio broadcast (“Oh, the humanity”).

1938

• Edward R. Murrow, later dubbed “the father of broadcast journalism,” begins making war reports from Europe for CBS.

1939

• Konrad Zuse completes the Z2, the first fully-functioning electro-mechanical computer.

1941

• NBC and CBS launch commercial television stations in New York City.

1945

• Vannevar Bush writes “As We May Think,” an article in August’s The Atlantic Monthly, describing a photo-electrical-mechanical device called Memex (from memory extension). Bush’s device in theory could make and follow links between documents called microfiche.
• On Dec. 5, Konrad Zuse completes the Z3, the first electronic, fully programmable computer. A year later Zuse writes Plankalkul, the first algorithmic programming language, which Zuse later uses to create a chess-playing program.

1946

• John Mauchly and John Presper Eckert develop ENIAC I (Electrical Numerical Integrator And Calculator), a massive computer using vacuum tubes to perform calculations for the U.S. military.

1947

• AT&T proposes idea of cellular phones to the Federal Communications Commission. The FCC responds by limiting frequencies for only 23 possible phone conversations, so AT&T drops research for decades.

1948

• The transistor is invented at Bell Telephone Laboratories.

1950s

• Computer technology is used in flight simulators, arguable the first application of computer interactivity.

1951

• The first U.S. coast-to-coast television broadcast takes place as President Harry S Truman addresses the opening of the Japanese Peace Treaty Conference in San Francisco.

1953

• In order to raise funds, Stanford University in California starts leasing nearby land to high-tech companies. Varian Associates puts up the first building in Palo Alto’s new Stanford Industrial Park, part of the area soon to become known as “Silicon Valley.”

1958

• Willy Higinbotham builds a computer-generated tennis-like game which almost becomes the first video game, but the idea fails to gain popular support.

1959

• Debut of the integrated circuit.

c. 3000 B.C.

• Chinese entertainers use firelight to project silhouettes of puppets onto a screen. Fundamentally, movies and video representations throughout all future technologies rely on this same principle: casting light onto a flat surface to communicate visually.

165

• Egyptian astronomer Ptolemy proves the phenomena of rapidly moving still pictures appearing as one moving image. This idea had originally been conceived by the Roman poet Lucretius in 65 B.C.

793

• Caliph Haroun-el-Raschid employs Chinese workmen to found a paper factory in Baghdad.

c. 1450

• Johann Gutenberg invents movable type, allowing mass production of documents.

1771

• England’s Parliament formally concedes the right of journalists to cover its proceedings.

1776

• Americans spread the cause of the revolution by distributing printed copies of the Declaration of Independence and Thomas Paine’s Common Sense.

1791

• The First Amendment of the United State Constitution guarantees freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

1834

• Charles Babbage designs the first automatic digital computer, the Analytical Engine. (A working model is not built until 1991.)

1837

• Samuel Morse debuts the telegraph, connecting Philadelphia and Washington D.C. and revolutionizing long-distance communication.

1848

• Six U.S. newspapers pool their resources to establish The Associated Press. The partnership is designed to defray the costs of sending news via telegraph.

1858

• North America and Europe are temporarily linked by transatlantic telegraph cable, but the connection is not permanent until 1866.

1875

• Despite objections from Western Union, The Associated Press leases its own telegraph line from New York to Washington, D.C.

1876

• Alexander Graham Bell invents the telephone.

1877

• Thomas Ava Edison invents the Phonograph. Two years later he invents the light bulb.

1880

• While tabulating the 1880 U.S. census, statistician Herman Hollerith invents an electro-mechanical machine that reads holes in perforated cards.

1889

• Fusajiro Yamauchi begins manufacturing “Hanafuda” playing cards in Kyoto, Japan. Over the next four generations, the Yamauchi family business will evolve from playing cards into electronic games, becoming the modern Nintendo Company Ltd.

1896

• Herman Hollerith founds the Tabulating Machine Company, which later becomes International Business Machines Corporation (IBM).