Computers Timeline
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Computing History: http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/
Computing History: http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/timeline.html
IBM History (1952-1957): http://www.thocp.net/timeline/1952.htm
1815 Dec 10, Ada
Lovelace (d. Nov 27, 1852), Lord Byron's daughter and the inventor of
computer language, was born. In 1998 the sci-fi film, "Conceiving Ada,"
was directed by Lynn Hershman-Leeson.
(SFC, 1/22/98, p.D7)(SFC, 4/30/98, p.E1)
1852 Nov 27, Ada Lovelace
(b.1815), Lord Byron's daughter and the inventor of computer language,
was bled to death by physicians at age 36. She had helped Charles
Babbage develop his "Analytical Engine," that performed mathematical
calculations through the use of punched cards.
(SFC, 1/22/98, p.D7)(SFC, 4/30/98, p.E1)
1871 Oct 18, Charles Babbage
(b.1792), English mathematician and inventor of a calculating machine,
died. In 2001 Doron Swade authored “The Difference Engine: Charles
Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer.”
(www.thocp.net/biographies/babbage_charles.html)(WSJ, 3/7/09, p.W8)
1874 Feb 17, Thomas J. Watson Sr.
(d.1956), U.S. industrialist, was born in upstate New York. In 1914 he
began running the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Co., a predecessor to
IBM. He converted the financially ailing manufacturing business into
the international giant IBM.
(WUD, 1994, p.1614)(HN, 2/17/99)(WSJ, 5/15/03, p.A1)
1890 Mar 11, Vannevar Bush was
born. He developed the 1st electronic analogue computer.
(MC, 3/12/02)
1890 Jun 1, The U.S. census stood
at 62,622,250. The US government used the Jean Baptiste Pacard card
punch to tabulate the results of the census. Herman Hollerith designed
a system that used a machine with a sorter.
(DTnet, 6/1/97)(SFC, 8/5/97, p.A20)(WSJ, 10/15/01,
p.R23)
1914 Thomas J. Watson Sr.
(1874-1956) began running the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Co., a
predecessor to IBM. He converted the financially ailing manufacturing
business into the international giant IBM.
(WUD, 1994, p.1614)(HN, 2/17/99)(WSJ, 5/15/03, p.A1)
1924 Mar 5,
Computing-Tabulating-Recording Corp became IBM.
(MC, 3/5/02)
1937 Alan Turing published a paper
showing that a universal machine could be designed to perform the
functions and do the work of any device designed for problem-solving.
More important, his paper showed that a digital computer could
theoretically be designed to do the work of any analog computer. He is
considered the founder of artificial intelligence.
(V.D.-H.K.p.349)
1937 The 1st special purpose
digital computer with regenerative memory was invented by John Vincent
Atanasoff at Iowa State College.
(SFC, 12/12/01, p.A27)
1939 Richard Bloch (21) taught
programming to Grace Hopper (43), who later invented COBOL. Bloch
(d.2000 at 78), as chief operations officer at Harvard's Computation
Laboratory, played a key role in the development of the Mark I digital
computer and invented the parity check for automatic error detection.
(SFC, 5/27/00, p.A26)
1941 Dec, Cecil Green (d.2003 at
102), Eugene McDermott, J. Eric Jonsson and H. Bates Peacock purchased
Geophysical Service Inc. in Dallas, Texas. In 1951 the name was changed
to Texas Instruments.
(SFC, 4/17/03, p.A22)
1943 British scientists led by
Tommy Flowers developed Colossus, the world's first large electronic
valve programmable logic calculator, in order to break the German
communication's code. Colossus is considered by many to be the world's
first digital, programmable electronic computer. Its existence was only
made public in 1989!
(Wired, 10/96, p.78)(HNQ, 8/16/00)
1945 Sep 9, The 1st "bug" in a
computer program was discovered by Grace Hopper. A moth was removed
with tweezers from a relay and taped into the log.
(MC, 9/9/01)
1946 Feb 1, A press conference for
what is considered the first computer, the Electronic Numerical
Integrator and Calculator (ENIAC), was held at the University of
Pennsylvania. The machine took up an entire room, weighed 30 tons and
used more than 18,000 vacuum tubes to perform functions such as
counting to 5,000 in one second. ENIAC, costing $450,000, was designed
by the U.S. Army during World War II to make artillery calculations.
The development of ENIAC paved the way for modern computer
technology--but even today's average calculator possesses more
computing power than ENIAC did. John Mauchley and John "Pres" Eckert
supervised the project. In 1999 Scott McCartney published "ENIAC: The
Triumphs and Tragedies of the World's First Computer."
(HN, 2/2/99)(WSJ, 6/30/99, p.A24)(SFEC, 8/29/99, BR
p.5)
1946 The US Army chose 6 women,
including Frances Holberton (d.2001 at 84), to program Eniac. Ms.
Holberton later created the C-10 instruction code for the Univac using
keyboard commands rather than dials and switches.
(SFC, 12/12/01, p.A27)
1946 John Tukey, statistician at
Bell Labs, coined the term "bit "for binary digit..
(SFC, 7/29/00, p.A21)
1946 A patent dispute with the
Univ. Pennsylvania drove John Presper Eckert (d.1995) and John Mauchley
(d.1980) to move out on their own. The Electronic Control or
Eckert-Mauchly computer was developed at 1215 Walnut St. In
Philadelphia. By 1952 it was being sold as the Univac with a clock rate
of 2.25 megahertz.
(SJM, 5/1/01, p.10C)
1947 Aug 18, The Hewlett-Packard
Company was incorporated and reported revenues of $1.5 million. The 111
employees recorded sales of $679,000. In 2007 Michael S. Malone
authored “Bill & Dave: How Hewlett and Packard Built the World’s
Greatest Company.”
(SFC, 3/3/99, p.A11)(SFC, 1/13/01, p.A15)(SSFC,
4/22/07, p.M3)
1947 Dec 16, The point-contact
transistor was invented at Bell Labs.
(SFEC,12/14/97, p.A1)
1947 Dec 23, John Bardeen and
Walter Brattain of AT&T Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey,
unveiled what was soon to be called the transistor, short for the
electrical property known as trans-resistance, which paved the way to a
new era of miniaturized electronics. The device was improved by William
Schockley as a junction transistor. All 3 received a Nobel Prize in
1956. The events are described in the 1997 book by Michael Riordan and
Lillian Hoddeson: "Crystal Fire: The Birth of the Information Age."
(WSJ, 9/22/95, p.A-7)(SFEC, 8/17/97, BR p.4)(AP,
12/23/97)
1948 Jun 30, Bell Labs introduced
the point-contact transistor in the New York Times on p.46 as a
replacement for the vacuum tube. Bell Labs had kept it secret for six
months. John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley
demonstrated their invention, the transistor, for the first time. John
Pierce (d.2002) proposed the name. [see Dec 23, 1947]
(SFE, 10/1/95, p.D-5)(SFEC,12/14/97, p.A1)(WSJ,
2/13/98, p.A13)(HNQ, 12/23/99)(HN, 6/30/01)(SFC, 4/9/02, p.A18)(MC,
6/30/02)
1948 Claude Shannon, the father of
coding theory, published a paper which showed the maximum theoretical
rate at which information can be transmitted without error. By 2004
real codes began approaching Shannon’s theoretical limit.
(Econ, 7/3/04, p.65)
1948 Richard Bolt and Leo Beranek,
professors at MIT, established a small acoustics consulting firm and
soon added a former student of Bolt’s, Robert Newman. In 1949 BBN won
its first major consulting contract, designing the acoustics for the UN
General Assembly Hall.
(www.bbn.com/about/timeline/)
1950 Joseph Glickauf, engineer for
Arthur Anderson & Co., constructed the "Glickiac" computer, which
allowed the firm to help General Electric automate its payroll.
(WSJ, 6/7/02, p.A6)
1950s The Electronic Recording
Method of Accounting (ERMA) was created and installed into the banking
system under the oversight of Alfred R. Zipf (d.2000 at 82), executive
VP for Bank of America.
(SFC, 1/800, p.A19)
1951 May 11, Jay Forrester
patented computer core memory.
(MC, 5/11/02)
1951 Jun 14, UNIVAC, the first
computer built for commercial purposes, was demonstrated in
Philadelphia by Dr. John W. Mauchly and J. Prosper Eckert, Jr.
(HN, 6/14/98)(SFC, 6/15/01, p.B3)
1951 Jun 15, 1st commercial
electronic computer was dedicated in Philadelphia. [see Jun 14]
(MC, 6/15/02)
1952 Nov 4, Dwight D. Eisenhower
(Ike) was elected president the 34th president, defeating Democrat
Adlai Stevenson in presidential elections. The Republicans took over
for the first time in 20 years. A Univac computer in Philadelphia
predicted the results based on early returns.
(TMC, 1994, p.1952)(AP, 11/4/97)(HN, 11/4/98)(SJM,
5/1/01, p.1C)
1952 Stanford asked Prof. John
Herriot (d.2003 at 87) to lead a new Computation Center following the
acquisition of its 1st computer, an IBM Card Programmed Calculator.
(SFC, 4/14/03, p.A1)
1952 IBM first moved to the Bay
Area to take advantage of the engineers graduating from UC and
Stanford. It opened the Almaden Research Center.
(SFC, 11/30/98, p.E1)
1953 Remington-Rand developed the
1st high-speed printer for use on the Univac mainframe computer.
(SFC, 7/26/04, p.F4)
1954 Sep 20, The 1st FORTRAN
computer program was executed.
(MC, 9/20/01)
1954 The Semiautomatic Ground
Environment (SAGE) program was established by the US Air Force. It was
an air defense network of the time using the largest computer ever
built. SAGE machines contained 55,000 vacuum tubes, weighed 275 tons
and occupied half an acre of floorspace.
(WSJ, 10/15/01, p.R23)(Econ, 6/10/06, Survey p.33)
1954 IBM rolled out its models 704
and 705 computers.
(http://www.thocp.net/timeline/1952.htm)
1954 The Rand corp. built the
Johnniac computer. Bill Gunning (1916-2006), computing pioneer, helped
build the device, one of 17 designed around the computing architecture
suggested by John von Neumann. Gunning went on to help develop Ethernet
(1972) at Xerox’s PARC.
(SFC, 11/8/06, p.B13)
1955 Feb 24, Steven Jobs,
co-founder (Apple Computer), was born.
(MC, 2/24/02)
1955 Prof. John Herriot (d.2003 at
87) began teaching Stanford's 1st programming course, Math 139: Theory
and Operation of Computing Machines.
(SFC, 4/14/03, p.A1)
1955 William Shockley founded
Shockley Semiconductor in Palo Alto.
(SFC, 10/11/00, p.A6)
1956 Sep 13, IBM introduced the
Model 305 computer capable of storing 20 megabytes of data. Reynold B.
Johnson (d.1998 at 92), IBM lab leader, developed a way to store
computer data on a metal disk instead of on tape or drum. The first
commercial disk drive, called RAMAC (random access method of accounting
and control), was developed by IBM and sold for $50,000. It used 50
disk platters, each 2-feet in diameter. Together they held 5 megabytes
of data. His Random Access Method of Accounting Control began the disk
drive industry.
(http://tinyurl.com/k3rzf)(SFC, 9/21/98, p.A21)(WSJ,
8/22/06, p.B3)
1956 Walter Brattain, John Bardeen
and William Shockley were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for the
invention of the transistor. The trio invented the transistor in 1948
at the Bell Laboratories. William Schockley, co-developer of the
transistor, founded Schockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Palo Alto.
Two of his hires, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, later went on to start
Intel Corp. Tim Jackson in 1998 published "Inside Intel."
(SFEC, 8/17/97, BR p.4)(WSJ, 2/13/98, p.A13)(HNQ,
12/23/99)
1956 The Fortran computer language
was developed.
(TL, 1988, p.115)
1956 The computer mouse was
invented at SRI Int’l. by Doug Engelbart and Bill English. It was
patented in 1963.
(Hem., 1/96, p.11)
1956 Thomas J. Watson Sr.
(b.1874), founder of IBM, died. In 2003 Kevin Maney authored "The
Maverick and His Machine," a biography of Watson.
(TOH, 1982, p.1956)(WSJ, 5/15/03, p.D8)
1957 Sep 19, Eight engineers, who
had recently left Shockley Semiconductor, signed papers to form
Fairchild Semiconductor in Santa Clara County. Jean A. Hoerni
(1925-1997) was one of the "Fairchild Eight." He was credited with
building the bridge from the transistor to the integrated circuit.
Eugene Kleiner (d.2003), another co-founder, helped found the Kleiner
Perkins Caufield and Byers venture capital firm in 1972. The other
engineers included Julius Blank, Jay Last, Victor Grinich (d.2000 at
75), Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce and Sheldon Roberts. NYC bankers Arthur
Rock and Bud Coyle helped the engineers start Fairchild Semiconductor.
(SFC, 2/5/97, p.A20)(SFC, 11/11/00, p.A26)(SFC,
11/26/03, p.D1)(SSFC, 9/30/07, p.F1)
1957 Ken Olson, a former MIT
engineer, received $70,000 from American Research & Development
(ARD) to develop Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC) in return for a 70%
stake.
(WSJ, 5/21/08, p.A17)
1957 The Hewlett-Packard Corp.
went public and began operating its new site at Stanford Research Park.
(SFC, 3/3/99, p.A11)
1958 Jul 24, Jack Kilby
(1923-2005) of Texas Instruments came up with the idea for creating the
1st integrated circuit on a piece of silicon. By September 12 he made a
working prototype.
(SFC, 10/11/00, p.A6)(SFC, 6/22/05, p.A5)(Econ,
7/25/05, p.75)
1958 An anti-trust court case
forced AT&T to license its non-telephone related technology to
anyone who asked.
(Econ, 6/12/04, p.38)
1958 John Tukey (d.2000 at 85),
statistician, became the 1st person to define the programs on which
electronic calculators ran as "software."
(SFC, 7/29/00, p.A21)
1959 Feb 1, Texas Instruments
requested a patent for the IC (Integrated Circuit).
(MC, 2/1/02)
1959 Robert Noyce (1927-1990) of
Fairchild Semiconductor constructed an integrated circuit. Both Texas
Instruments and Fairchild claimed independent discovery of the IC.
Noyce went on to found Intel Corp. Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments had
made a working prototype in 1958.
(WSJ, 9/22/98, p.B3)(SFC, 10/11/00, p.A6)
1960 IBM Pres. Thomas J. Watson
committed $5 billion to develop the System/360 new computer line. It
became the most profitable series of machines ever made.
(WSJ, 11/5/99, p.A1)(WSJ, 10/15/01, p.R23)
1960 The PDP-1 was the 1st
mini-computer built by the Digital Computer Corp. The 1st video game,
Space War! Was written for it.
(WSJ, 10/15/01, p.R23)
1960 Bob Bemer, programmer at IBM,
created the software "escape sequence" that allowed computers to break
from one alphabet to another. He later led efforts to establish the
universal character set called ASCII, named the COBOL programming
language, and helped develop the standard for the 8 bit byte.
(WSJ, 6/20/97, p.B1)
1960 Hans Freudenthal, Dutch
mathematician, designed the Lincos artificial language. It was designed
to communicate with aliens.
(Wired, 8/96, p.88)
1960 James Cooke Brown designed
Loglan, an artificial language to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that
language influences the thoughts of the speaker. The Lojban language
later grew out of Loglan for the purpose of studying artificial
intelligence. It used the same grammar but a completely different
vocabulary.
(Wired, 8/96, p.88)
1961 Apr 25, Robert Noyce patented
the integrated circuit.
(SS, 4/25/02)
1962 Aug, The first recorded
description of the social interactions that could be enabled through
networking was a series of memos written by J.C.R. Licklider of MIT
discussing his "Galactic Network" concept. He envisioned a globally
interconnected set of computers through which everyone could quickly
access data and programs from any site. In spirit, the concept was very
much like the Internet of today. Licklider was the first head of the
computer research program at DARPA, 4 starting in October 1962. While
at DARPA he convinced his successors at DARPA, Ivan Sutherland, Bob
Taylor, and MIT researcher Lawrence G. Roberts, of the importance of
this networking concept.
(SFEC, 3/16/97, Z1
p.3)(www.isoc.org/internet/history/brief.shtml#Origins)
1962 Charles Molnar (1935-1996)
and Wesley A. Clark led a team that developed a machine widely
considered as the first personal computer. They made the Laboratory
Instrument Computer (LINC) intended for doctors and medical
researchers. It was self-contained with a simple operating system. It
has a small display and used magnetic tape for storing programs.
(SFC, 12/16/96, p.A24)
1962 Steve Russell at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology created "Spacewar!", one of the
earliest video games for a digital computer.
(AFP, 10/20/06)
1962 Ross Perot founded Electronic
Data Systems (EDS). The company pioneered the business of outsourced
data management. In 1984 Perot sold the firm to General Motors. GM spun
it off in 1996. In 2008 Hewlett-Packard acquired EDS for $13.9 billion.
(Econ, 5/17/08, p.78)
1964 Apr 7, IBM introduced its
innovative System/360, the company's first line of compatible mainframe
computers that gave customers the option of upgrading from lower-cost
models to more powerful, expensive ones.
(AP, 4/7/04)
1964 May 1, The 1st BASIC program
ran on a computer at Dartmouth.
(MC, 5/1/02)
1965 Apr 19, An article in
Electronics magazine by Gordon Moore, later Intel Chairman, noted that
chips seem to double in power every 18 months. Thus was born Moore's
Law. Moore later asserted that his claim was that the number of
components that can be packed on a computer chip doubles every 2 years.
In 2005 Intel offered $10,000 for a pristine copy of the magazine.
(SFEC, 12/21/97, p.A2)(SFC, 10/11/00, p.A6)(SFC,
4/12/05, p.A1)(SFC, 4/18/05, p.E1)
1965 Mar, In this issue of
American Scientist Henry David Block showed how easy it was to build a
computer that learns using just dixie cups and cardboard. Block called
his computer G-1 (G is for Golem, the robot slave of Jewish legend). He
used the game of Nim to illustrate his subject.
(NOHY, 3/90, p.204)
1966 Charles Rosen (d.2002) helped
create and directed the Artificial Intelligence Center at Stanford
Research Institute (SRI).
(SFC, 12/20/02, p.A33)
1966 Texas Instruments introduced
its 1st hand-held calculator based on the integrated circuit developed
by Jack Kilby in 1958.
(Econ, 7/25/05, p.75)
1966 Hewlett-Packard introduced
its first computer, the HP 2116A. The 9,000 person company had sales of
around $200 million.
(SFC, 3/3/99, p.A11)
1967 Jan 12, HAL, the
Heuristically Programmed Algorithmic Computer, from the 1968 Arthur C.
Clark and Stanley Kubrick movie/book, became operational at the HAL
plant in Urbana, Illinois. The book "HAL's Legacy: 2001's Computer as
Dream and Reality" was published in 1997 by MIT Press. The birthday in
the movie was 1/12/92.
(SFEC, 1/12/97, p.C14)(SFC, 1/25/97,
p.E1)(SFEC, 3/16/97, Par p.31)(WSJ, 10/3/97, p.A8)
1967 IBM opened a plant in Austin,
Texas, to make Selectric typewriters. The plant moved on to make
mainframe circuit boards, terminals and eventually personal computers.
(Econ, 9/23/06, p.74)
1967 Syukuro Manabe and Richard
Wetherald of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab. in Princeton, New
Jersey, performed one of the first serious computer analysis of the
climate using computers. Later GCMs (global circulation models) reached
wide use.
(NOHY, 3/90, p.59)
1967 Simon Sze and Dawon Kahng,
researchers at Bell Labs in New Jersey, devised a new semiconductor
memory device in which information could be stored and updated, and
which was non-volatile. It retained its contents even after it was
turned off.
(Econ, 3/11/06, Survey p.26)
1968 Jul 15, Intel was founded.
Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore had left Fairchild Semiconductor to form
NM Electronics in Mountain View, Ca. In 1997 Tim Jackson published
"Inside Intel: Andrew Grove and the Rise of the World’s Most Powerful
Chip Company." Grove joined Intel in this year and became its president
in 1979. They bought the rights to the name Intel from Intelco fro
$15,000.
(SFEC,10/26/97, BR p.3)(SFEC,12/21/97, p.A2)(SFC,
10/11/00, p.A6)(SFC, 7/16/03, p.B1)
1968 Jul 18, Intel incorporated.
[see Jul 15]
(MC, 7/18/02)
1968 Dec 9, Doug Engelbart and
researchers at Stanford Research Institute first demonstrated in SF the
computer mouse along with a graphical user interface (gui), display
editing, integrated text and graphics, hyper documents and 2-way
video-conferencing with shared work spaces. In 2001 Thierry Bardini
authored "Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the
Origins of Personal Computing."
(SFC, 12/4/98, p.B2)(SSFC, 1/21/01, BR p.6)(SFC,
12/8/08, p.A1)
1968 Dec, The Cambridge company
Bolt Beranek and Newman won a Dept. of Defense ARPA (Advanced Research
Projects Agency) contract to develop packet switches called Interface
Message Processors (IMP). The project was led by Frank Heart and Robert
Kahn. The first internode was to installed at the Univ. of California
at Los Angeles.
(SFEC, 3/16/97, z1 p.3)(SFC,10/24/97, p.E5)
1968 Jul 15, Intel was founded.
Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore had left Fairchild Semiconductor to form
NM Electronics in Mountain View, Ca. In 1997 Tim Jackson published
"Inside Intel: Andrew Grove and the Rise of the World’s Most Powerful
Chip Company." Grove joined Intel in this year and became its president
in 1979. They bought the rights to the name Intel from Intelco fro
$15,000.
(SFEC,10/26/97, BR p.3)(SFEC,12/21/97, p.A2)(SFC,
10/11/00, p.A6)(SFC, 7/16/03, p.B1)
1968 Jul 18, Intel was
incorporated as N M Electronics (the letters standing for Noyce and
Moore), but quickly changed its name to Intel, formed from the first
syllables of the words integrated and electronics.
(http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_gx5202/is_2004/ai_n19123399)
1968 Barbara Liskov received a
doctorate from Stanford Univ. in computer science, the first such
degree ever awarded to a woman in the US. In 2009 she won the $250,000
Turing computing award from the Association for Computing Machinery for
her work in organizing complex programs and efforts to make software
more resistant to errors and hacking.
(SFC, 3/13/09, p.C3)
1969 Sep 2, The first Internet
message was a packet switch delivered to UCLA from BBN Corp. (Bolt
Beranek and Newman). The 1st 2 machines of ARPANET were connected at
Prof. Len Kleinrock's lab at UCLA. The US Dept. of Defense’s Advanced
Research and Projects Agency (ARPANET) launched a self-healing computer
network with TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol / Internet
Protocol). By the early 1980’s the military component became a separate
network and the true birth of today’s Internet is marked. By 2007 some
university researchers with the federal government's blessing want to
scrap the Internet and start over.
(http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070414/ap_on_hi_te/rebuilding_the_internet_8)(SFEC,
3/16/97, z1 p.3)(CompuServe Mag., 6/95, p.18)(SFC, 8/30/99, p.C10)(SFC,
9/3/99, p.C1)
1969 Ken Thompson (b.1943),
computer scientist at Bell Labs, wrote the first version of the UNIX
operating system on a PDP-7, a $72,000 closet sized DEC computer that
arranged memory in 8,192 18-bit words. UNIX programming language was
created by Bell labs in 1970. Ken Ritchie and others helped develop
Unix. Ritchie later invented the C programming language. Dr. Thompson
wrote C’s predecessor, known as B.
(www.bell-labs.com/history/unix/thompsonbio.html)(SFEC, 1/12/97,
p.B6)(Econ, 6/12/04, p.37)
1969 Intel's 1st product was
a random access memory chip. Marcian Hoff Jr., Stanley Mazor and
Federico Faggin of Intel developed the 4004 chip for a Japanese
customer, Busicom, a calculator manufacturer. Intel acquired the rights
to the chip for $60,000. The 3 men were later inducted into the
National Inventors Hall of Fame in Akron, Ohio, in Sept. 1996. The 4004
packed 2300 transistors onto a single silicon chip.
(SJSVB, 7/8/96, p.12)(TAR, 1996, p.19)(WSJ, 9/22/98,
p.B3)(SFC, 7/16/03, p.B1)
1969 Instinet was founded and
later became owned by Reuters PLC. It became the biggest of the
electronic trading systems for institutional traders.
(Wired, 2/98, p.96)
1969 Honeywell marketed its
kitchen computer for $10,600 in a Niemann-Marcus catalog. Units were
sold to universities as the Honeywell 316.
(WSJ, 10/15/01, p.R23)
1969 Manugistics was founded as a
mainframe time-sharing company. In the 1980s it emerged as leader in
software for managing factories and inventory.
(WSJ, 1/10/00, p.B6)
1970 Jun 30, IBM announced the
System 370 computer.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_370)
1970 Aug, The first all-computer
championship was held in New York and won by CHESS 3.0 (CDC 6400), a
program written by Slate, Atkin and Gorlen at Northwestern University.
Six programs had entered the first Association for Computing Machinery
(ACM) North American Computer Championships. The event was organized by
Monty Newborn. The other programs were DALY CP, J Brit, COKO III,
SCHACH, and the Marsland CP.
(http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lab/7378/comphis.htm)
1970 Oct 19, Amdahl Corp.,
a manufacturer of IBM mainframe compatible products, was formed at
Sunnyvale, California by Dr. Gene Amdahl, a former IBM employee. In
1997 it became a wholly owned subsidiary of Fujitsu.
(www.wordiq.com/definition/Amdahl)
1970 The Palo Alto Research Center
(PARC) of Xerox opened on the outskirts of Palo Alto. George Pake
(1924-2004) ran the center until 1978. It was founded by Dr. Jacob
Goldman.
(www.mit-forum.org.il/2000events/tenyears_eng.htm)(SFC, 10/25/00,
p.D1)(SFC, 3/11/04, p.C5)
1970 Intel Corp. brought out the
1103 DRAM, the world's first commercially produced memory chip and
launched the personal-computer revolution.
(SFEC,10/26/97, BR
p.3)(http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa100898.htm)
1970 The first electronic editing
terminals were used by newspapers.
(SFC, 1/29/00, p.E3)
1970-1980 CAT Scan (Computer Assisted Tomography)
technology was developed.
(MT, 10/94, D. Swanbrow, p.9)
1970s The Dynabook was a CD-ROM
based electronic book. Alan Kay suggested elements of the dynabook in
his 1969 doctoral dissertation at Utah Univ.
(WSJ, 6/15/99, p.A16)(SFC, 10/25/00, p.D1)
1971 Jan, Intel Corp. created the
first microprocessor. The 4004, the world's first microprocessor, is
signed with the initials F.F., for Federico Faggin, its designer. The
4004 was released in 16-pin CERDIP packaging on November 15, 1971.
(www.intel4004.com/)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_4004)
1971 Nov 15, Intel first
advertised its 4004 microprocessor in Electronic News.
(www.intel.com/museum/archives/4004.htm)(SFC,
10/18/96, C9)
1971 Jun, T. Vincent Learson
(1912-1996) became CEO of IBM. He had helped develop the IBM
System/360, one of the first commercially available business computers.
(SFC, 11/5/96, p.A22)
1971 Alan Kay led a team working
on smalltalk, a pioneering object-oriented language at PARC.
(SFC, 10/25/00, p.D1)
1971 The 1st laser printer was
made at Xerox PARC in Palo Alto, Ca.
(SFC, 7/26/04, p.F4)
1971 Ray Tomlinson, computer
engineer, put the @ sign into the first e-mail message sent from one
machine to another at BBN, a computer consulting firm,
tomlinson@bbn-tenexa.
(SFC, 10/23/96, p.B1)(WSJ, 11/16/99, p.A1)
1972 Feb 1, 1st scientific
hand-held calculator, the HP-35, was introduced at $395.
(MC, 2/1/02)
1972 Jul, Robert Metcalf at
Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) combined packet switching from
the Arpanet and single wire broadcasting to lay the foundations for
computer networks. This system was called Ethernet and marked the first
Internet message. The IEEE committee 802.3 later defined the ethernet
standard.
(WSJ,11/14/94, p.R26)(SFEC, 3/28/99, Z1 p.8)(Econ,
6/12/04, p.26)
1972 The term hypervisor
originated in IBM's CP-370 reimplementation of CP-67 for the
System/370, released this year as VM/370. The term hypervisor call
referred to the paravirtualization interface, by which a "guest"
operating system could access services directly from the (higher-level)
control program – analogous to making a "supervisor call" to the (same
level) operating system.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypervisor)
1972 Atari was founded by Nolan
Bushnell, 2 years after he built the first videogame, Computer Space.
He conceived Pong and it was built by Al Alcorn.
(Wired, 10/96, p.168)
1972 Vinton Cerf, hearing-impaired
since birth, developed e-mail-like text messaging protocols for the
Arpanet.
(SFC, 7/26/00, p.D3)
1972 Gary Starkweather at PARC
completed a prototype of the 1st laser printer.
(SFC, 10/25/00, p.D1)
1972 Seymour Cray left Control
Data Corp. and co-founded Cray Research Inc. There he built the Cray-1
and Cray-2 supercomputers. They were used to help the defense system
create sophisticated weapons systems and the oil industry to construct
geologic models for predicting mineral deposits.
(SFC, 9/24/96, p.A6)
1972 Hewlett-Packard introduced
the first scientific handheld calculator, the HP-35, which made the
slide-rule obsolete.
(SFC, 3/3/99, p.A11)
1972 Intel Corp. brought out the
8008 microprocessor, the first to use 8-bit addressing. it had 3,500
transistors.
(TAR, 1996, p.21)
1972 SAP, a German business
software company based in Walldorf, Baden-Wurttemberg, was founded by
Hasso Plattner and 4 other dissidents from IBM.
(Econ, 5/20/06, p.73)(Econ, 10/28/06, p.78)
1972-1994 A computer error miscalculated payments to
695,000 Social Security recipients to a total of $850 million in
retirement benefits over this period.
(SFC, 10/4/96, p.A3)
1973 Bob Metcalf described
ethernet for the 1st time in a patent memo.
(SFC, 10/25/00, p.A16)
1973 Nick Sheridan, a researcher
at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) created the first electronic
letter in history: an X, for Xerox.
(WSJ, 1/4/00, p.B1)
1973 Alto, the 1st complete
computer with a graphical interphase, mouse and ethernet networking,
went live at PARC.
(SFC, 10/25/00, p.D1)
1974 Ted Nelson authored his
manifesto “Computer Lib / Dream Machines,” in which he announced that
computing should be available to all without complication or human
servility being required.
(SSFC, 4/23/05, p.B4)
1974 Josef Raviv (d.1999 at 65)
co-authored the paper: "Optimal Decoding of Linear Codes for Minimizing
Symbol Error Rate." This was the basis for the algorithm known as
backward/forward algorithm, which helped computers understand a human's
natural language.
(SFC, 10/30/99, p.C2)
1974 Intel Corp. introduced the
8080 microprocessor. It became the heart of the first microcomputer,
the 1975 MITS Altair.
(TAR, 1996, p.21)(WSJ, 11/16/98, p.R10)
1974 Motorola helped launch the
smartcard market by building the first smartcard chip with Groupe Bull
of France.
(FT, 3/4/98, p.21)
1974 Tandem Computers was founded.
(SFEM,11/2/97, p.15)
1974 Ronald Aurel Lesea
(1940-2004), violinist and inventor, developed the 1st hand-held
translator. It turned 9 foreign languages into English. His inventions
also included the 1st call-forwarding device for a telephone.
(SFC, 12/6/04, p.B3)
1974 Charles Simonyi at PARC
completed Bravo, the 1st WYSIWYG word processor for Alto.
(SFC, 10/25/00, p.D1)
1975 Mar 5, The Homebrew Computer
Club, founded by peace activist Fred Moore, held its first meeting in
Menlo Park, Ca. It was an outgrowth of the store-front based People’s
Computer Co. The meeting inspired Steve Wozniak (24) to design and
build the first Apple computer.
(SSFC, 4/23/05, p.B1)(Reuters, 9/27/06)
1975 Sep, Byte Magazine began
publishing with the birth of the PC. It was regarded as the most
technically minded of the new computer magazines. Publication was
suspended in 1998.
(WSJ, 5/28/98,
p.B4)(www.vintage-computer.com/byte.shtml)
1975 Gary Kildall, working as a
consultant to Intel, was asked to design and develop a language called
PL/M for the 8080 chip. He wrote a primitive operating system for it
which he called CP/M.
(http://museum.sysun.com/museum/cpmhist.html)
1975 Paul Allen and Bill Gates
began working on the first computer language for personal computers.
Allen became a minority owner with a 35% stake.
(WSJ, 4/4/00, p.A16)(WSJ, 1/22/04, p.A1)
1975 Kurzweil Computer Products
created the Kurzweil Reading machine and the 1st multifont optical
character recognition (OCR) technology.
(SFC, 7/26/00, p.D3)
1975 The MITS Altair 8800 was
introduced by Microinstrumentation & Telemetry Systems of
Albuquerque, N.M. It was sold by mail-order and Bill Gates and Paul
Allen developed the first software program for it.
(WSJ, 11/16/98, p.R10)
1975 PARC engineers demonstrated
an improved user interface using icons and the 1st use of pop-up menus.
(SFC, 10/25/00, p.D1)
1976 Apr 1, Stephen Wozniak and
Steven Jobs founded Apple Computer. They incorporated Jan 3, 1977.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer)
1976 Joseph Weizenbaum wrote
"Computer Power and Human Reason." He described here his program called
ELIZA that demonstrated a conversation between a patient and a computer
posing as a psychiatrist.
(I&I, Penzias, p.144)
1976 Jim Goodnight co-founded
software-maker SAS on the campus of the Univ. of North Carolina. By
2007 the company was a leader in business intelligence software and the
world’s largest privately owned software maker.
(Econ, 12/1/07, p.84)
1976 Intel Corp. began
construction of a plant in Hillsboro, Oregon.
(SFC, 3/12/02, p.B10)
1976 The 6502 microprocessor by
MOS Technologies was introduced and later used in the Apple II personal
computer.
(TAR, 1996, p.22)
1976 Gary Kildall separated out
the parts of CP/M version 1 that addressed the specific format of the
diskettes, and placed them in a separate module he called the BIOS, for
Basic Input/Output System. That way, the system could easily be adapted
to new hardware without having to rewrite or even revise the complex
heart of the software.
(http://museum.sysun.com/museum/cpmhist.html)
1976 The 1st CRAY-1 supercomputer
was installed at Los Alamos Laboratories in New Mexico for a 6-month
trial.
(www.cisl.ucar.edu/computers/gallery/cray/cray1.jsp)(WSJ, 3/2/00, p.B8)
1977 Jan 3, Apple Computers
incorporated under Steven Jobs and Steve Wozniak. They produced the
first pre-assembled, mass-produced PC.
(I&I, Penzias, p.182)(WSJ, 1/11/99, p.R42)(MC,
1/3/02)
1977 Apr 14, Computer enthusiasts
gathered for the 1st West Coast Computer Faire at the SF Civic
Auditorium. An estimated 20-30 thousand American homes had computers.
(SFC, 4/12/02, p.G6)
1977 May, Larry Ellison and Robert
Miner founded Oracle Corp. in Belmont, Ca., after they persuaded the
CIA to let them pick up a lapsed contract for a special database
program.
(SFC, 5/20/02, p.A13)
1977 Jan 3, Apple Computers
incorporated under Steven Jobs and Steve Wozniak. In March Apple
produced the Apple II, the first pre-assembled, mass-produced PC.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer)(WSJ,
1/11/99, p.R42)
1977 Jun 5, The first Apple II
personal computers went on sale.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II)
1977 Jun 10, Apple Computer
shipped its 1st Apple II.
(MC, 6/10/02)
1977 Jul 11, The CRAY 1-A was
delivered to the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). This
was Cray Research's first official customer, paying US$8.86 million
($7.9 million plus $1 million for the disks).
(www.cisl.ucar.edu/computers/gallery/cray/cray1.jsp)
1977 Aug 3, Radio Shack issued a
press release introducing the TRS-80 computer. 25 existed and within
weeks thousands were ordered.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80)
1977 CP/M version 2.2 added
expanded disk formatting tables which could allow access to up to 8
(eight) megabytes per drive in up to 8 (eight) total drives. It was
version 2.2 that became the megahit that dominated microcomputing
almost from its outset.
(http://museum.sysun.com/museum/cpmhist.html)
1977 Microsoft was formed as a
partnership.
(WSJ, 4/4/00, p.A16)
1977 John Young succeeded William
Hewlett as President and became CEO in 1978.
(SFC, 3/3/99, p.A11)
1977 Innovations made on the
NASDAQ stock exchange were incorporated into Canada's CATS, Computer
Assisted Trading System. After Canada electronic trading moved to the
Paris Bourse and other exchanges such as Brussels and Madrid.
(Hem, 8/95, p.78)
1977 Xerox PARC in Palo Alto held
a "Futures Day" and demonstrated their Alto personal computer and
mouse.
(WSJ, 3/16/99, p.A24)
1977 Xerox launched its laser
printer.
(WSJ, 3/16/99, p.A24)
1978 Feb 14, G. W. Boone and M.J.
Cochran of Texas Instruments received a patent for their Variable
Function Programmed Calculator.
(www.patents4technologies.com/Historical.htm)
1978 Feb 16, The 1st Computer
Bulletin Board System was Ward & Randy's CBBS in Chicago.
(www.historyoftheinternet.com/chap3.html)
1978 Late Feb, Computers made the
cover of Time.
(TMC, 1994, p.1978)
1978 Jun, Intel introduced the
8086 16-bit HMOS chip.
(SFC, 7/16/03, p.B1)
1978 The "Space Invaders" computer
game became the first video game mega-hit and spurred sales of the
Atari 2600.
(SFC, 7/5/97, p.E1)
1978 Micron Technology was founded
in Boise, Idaho, by 4 engineers: Ward Parkinson, Joe Parkinson, Dennis
Wilson and Doug Pitman. Startup funding to produce memory chips was
provided by Idaho billionaire J.R. Simplot.
(www.micron.com)
1978 Microsoft annual sales topped
$1 million.
(WSJ, 4/4/00, p.A16)
1978 Robert Miner of Oracle Corp.
developed the world's 1st relational database program using IBM's
Structured Query Language.
(SFC, 5/20/02, p.A13)
1979 May 8, Radio Shack released
TRSDOS 2.3.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-DOS)
1979 Sep 24, CompuServe began
operation as the 1st computer information service.
(www.businesshistorybooks.com/Computers.htm)
1979 Nov, The first annual COMDEX
trade show opened in Las Vegas at the MGM Grand. It was a trade show
for business related computer hardware and software. The acronym used
to stand for Computer Dealer Expo, but since 1984, the D has stood for
Distribution.
(Hem, Nov.'95,
p.138)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COMDEX)
1979 Gwen Bell founded the
Computer Museum in Boston. It originally used space in Marlborough,
Mass., and moved to Boston in 1982 when it became a public, nonprofit
educational foundation.
(SFC, 10/18/96, C9)
1979 Jim Ellis (d.2001 at 45) and
Tom Truscott, Duke graduate students, linked computers to share
information and created the Usenet electronic bulletin board.
(SFC, 6/29/01, p.D5)
1979 Steve Jobs and team of Apple
staff visited PARC. They incorporated many of the ideas they saw into
their Lisa and Macintosh computers.
(SFC, 10/25/00, p.D1)
1979 Robert Metcalf of Xerox Corp.
started 3Com Corp. The company specialized in connecting computers
using the Ethernet system, which he helped develop. The early Ethernet
adapters sold for $5000. In 1994 they sold for $100.
(WSJ,11/14/94, p.R26)
1979 Samuel Maslak founded Acuson
Corp. The company was based on the use of ultrasound, which shoots
sound waves into the body, and then converts the echoes to visible
images.
(WSJ, 5/13/96, p.B-3)
1979 Sue Rugge established
Information on Demand in Berkeley, a pioneering full service
information company. It was later acquired by Robert Maxwell and
managed through Pergamon Press. She later authored "The Information
Broker's Handbook."
(SFC, 6/16/99, p.B4)
1979 IBM Corp. adopted the Intel
8088 microprocessor for its new personal computer (PC), which launched
in 1981. DOS, Lotus 1-2-3, and other new software were based on the
8088.
(TAR, 1996, p.25)
1979 The Motorola 68000
microprocessor made its debut. It was chosen to be used in the
Macintosh Computer, which introduced the first graphical user interface.
(TAR, 1996, p.26)
1979 Seagate Corp., a manufacturer
of disk drives, was founded by Alan Shugart and Finis Conner. Shugart
was credited with leading an IBM team that invented the floppy disk.
(SFC, 11/15/99, p.A6)
1979 Roy Trubshow and Richard
Bartle, Univ. of Essex students, created the 1st text-only MUD
(Multi-User Dungeon).
(NW, 11/25/02, p.48)
1980 Apr, Commodore president Jack
Tramiel ordered the development of a computer that could sell for under
$300 US. What had been an oversupply of parts became the VIC-20.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_VIC-20)
1980 May 22, The computer game
Pac-Man was first released in Japan. Pac-Man, with its characters:
Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde, epitomized the arcade games of the 1980s.
(SFC, 7/5/97,
p.E1)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pac-Man)
1980 Jun 25, The Associated Press
chose 11 major newspapers to launch a cooperative experiment to deliver
news electronically to computer-equipped homes.
(SFC, 6/24/05, p.F2)
1980 Jul, Tim Paterson of Seattle
Computer Products completed version 0.10 of QDOS.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Paterson)
1980 Oct 9, 1st consumer use of
home banking by computer at Knoxville, Ten.
(MC, 10/9/01)
1980 Oct, Hambrecht & Quist
took public Apple and Genentech Corp.
(SFC, 6/22/96, p.D1)
1980 Dec 1, IBM delivered its 1st
prototype PC to Microsoft. IBM selected Microsoft to create MS-DOS, the
operating system for its first PC. Steve Ballmer arrived from Proctor
& Gamble as an assistant to Gates. Paul Allen bought the QDOS
operating system (Quick and Dirty Operating System) from a rival
company for $50,000. It was renamed MS-DOS and licensed to IBM. The IBM
5150 PC standardized the marketplace.
(WSJ, 4/4/00, p.A16)(SFEC, 4/16/00, p.B1)
1980 Dec 12, US copyright law was
amended to include computer programs.
(MC, 12/12/01)
1980 Dec 12, Hambrecht & Quist
took Apple Corp. public with 4.6 million shares at $22 per share, which
closed at $29 per share.
(www.macworld.com/2006/03/features/30timeline/index.php)(SFC, 1/24/04,
p.A12)
1980 Dec, Microsoft bought a QDOS
license. The "Microsoft Disk Operating System" or MS-DOS was based on
QDOS, the "Quick and Dirty Operating System" written by Tim Paterson of
Seattle Computer Products, for their prototype Intel 8086 based
computer. QDOS was based on Gary Kildall's CP/M. Paterson had bought a
CP/M manual and used it as the basis to write his operating system in
six weeks. QDOS was different enough from CP/M to be considered legal.
Microsoft bought the rights to QDOS for $50,000, keeping the IBM deal a
secret from Seattle Computer Products.
(WSJ, 4/4/00, p.A16)(WSJ, 1/22/04,
p.A1)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QDOS)
1980 Hewlett-Packard introduced
its first personal computer, the HP-85. Company sales topped $3 billion
and employees numbered 57,000.
(SFC, 3/3/99, p.A11)
1980 IBM went to Digital Research
to license the ubiquitous CP/M for the new IBM-PC, but failed to reach
an agreement with Gary Kildall. IBM soon struck a deal with Microsoft.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QDOS#Reasons_for_QDOS)
1980 The Ctrl-Alt-Delete reboot
command was created by David Bradley, an IBM engineer.
(SFC, 9/7/01, p.B3)
1980 Informix was founded by Roger
Sippl. It was taken over by Phil White in 1989. The company suffered
accounting fraud and illegal insider trading charges in 1997 following
problems with a new multimedia database product.
(SFC, 11/16/99, p.A5)
1980 Iomega, was founded. It
designed and manufactured computer memory storage devices. The company
became public in 1983.
(WSJ, 6/17/96, p.B6)
1980 Tim Paterson wrote QDOS
(Quick and Dirty Operating System), a 16-bit operating system for an
Intel 8086-based computer kit sold by Seattle Computer Products.
(http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa033099.htm)
1980 J.R. Simplot, Idaho potato
tycoon, began serving on the board of startup Micron Technology. He
invested several million dollars into the company, which made memory
chips.
(WSJ, 10/7/04, p.A12)(www.micron.com)
1980 United Telecommunications
under Paul Henson (d. 1997 at 71) began laying the 23,000 mile, first
optical fiber communications network.
(SFC, 4/16/97, p.A21)
1980 Xerox with Intel and Digital
Equipment licensed Ethernet for a nominal fee. It became and remained
an industry standard.
(SFC, 10/25/00, p.D1)
1980 Dr. Fujio Masuoka, a
researcher at Toshiba, filed a patent for a variation on floating-gate
memory. His invention was dubbed flash memory because it allowed entire
sections of memory to be erased quickly.
(Econ, 3/11/06, Survey p.28)
1980s Herwart Holland-Moritz
(d.2001) and other early hackers formed the Chaos Computer Club (CCC).
(SFC, 8/2/01, p.C2)
1981 Apr 24, The IBM Personal
Computer was introduced. IBM had developed a personal computer with a
technical specification other manufacturers could copy. The operating
system was licensed from Microsoft and the microprocessor circuitry
from Intel.
(HN, 4/24/98)(WSJ, 11/16/98, p.R10)(WSJ, 1/11/99,
p.R42)
1981 Apr, Osborne Computer Corp.,
founded by Adam Osborne (1939-2003), launched the 24-pound portable
Osborne 1 for $1,795.
(SFC, 3/28/03,
p.A16)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Osborne)
1981 Apr, Tim Paterson, who wrote
QDOS in 1980, quit Seattle Computer Products and began working at
Microsoft in May. He became best known as the original author of the
popular MS-DOS operating system (1981).
(http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa033099.htm)
1981 Aug 12, IBM introduced the
IBM 5150, better known as the PC, along with PC-DOS version 1.0. The
beige box with 16 kilobytes of memory was priced at $1,565.
(http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa033099.htm)(Econ, 7/29/06,
p.57)
1981 Tracy Kidder published "The
Soul of a New Machine."
(WSJ, 3/4/99, p.A12)
1981 LSI Logic of Milpitas, Ca.,
helped create the market for custom chips used for specific chores.
(WSJ, 9/4/02, p.B9)
1981 In San Jose, Ca., water
supply wells were found to be contaminated due to leaks from Fairchild
and IBM storage tanks used for toxic solvents.
(SFC, 1/30/04, p.E6)
1981 In India N.R. Narayana Murthy
co-founded Infosys Technologies with 6 other software writers including
S. Gopalakrishnan with some 10,000 rupees (about $1000) pooled from
household money. In 1999 it became the first Indian company to list its
shares in the US. Chairman Murthy retired in 2006 with Infosys
employing 58,000 people. His 5.9% stake was valued at $1.2 billion.
(WSJ, 8/21/06, p.B7)(Econ, 10/7/06, Survey
p.9)(SSFC, 6/29/08, p.C1)
1982 Jul, The Timex Sinclair 1000
(TS1000), the first computer produced by Timex Sinclair, a
joint-venture between Timex Corporation and Sinclair Research, was
launched.
(http://oldcomputers.net/ts1000.html)
1982 Aug, Commodore Business
Machines (CBM) released the Commodore 64 for $595.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64)
1982 Dec 26, TIME magazine's Man
of the Year was a computer.
(MC, 12/26/01)
1982 John Walker founded Autodesk.
His AutoCAD computer aided design software was introduced and shipped.
(http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=3235534)
1982 John Warnock and Charles
Geschke founded Adobe Corp., a software company that developed tools
for desktop publishing. In 1993 Adobe introduce the Acrobat software
that allowed documents to appear on computer screen exactly as you
would see them on paper.
(SFC, 5/16/96, p.B1)(Econ, 4/16/05, p.58)
1982 Commodore’s VIC-20,
criticized in print as being underpowered, became the first computer to
sell more than 1 million units and was the best-selling computer of
1982.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_VIC-20)
1982 Compaq Computer was founded
by Rod Canion, Jim Harris and Bill Murto. They designed the company's
product at a local House of Pies.
(SSFC, 10/6/02, p.G1)
1982 Control Video Corp. was
founded as an online video game company. It transformed to Quantum
Computer Services, a private online service for Apple and IBM, and then
became America Online (AOL) in 1989. In 1998 Kara Swisher wrote
"aol.com: How Steve Case beat Bill Gates, Nailed the Netheads, and Made
Millions in the War for the Web.
(SFEC, 8/2/98, BR p.1,8)
1982 Intel introduced the 286
microprocessor, the first to support general protection and virtual
memory. It ran at speeds of 8-12 Mhz and was 6 times more powerful than
the 8086. IBM used the 286 in its fledgling PC and bought a 12%, $250
million stake in Intel to keep it afloat.
(TAR, 1996, p.26)(SFC, 7/18/08, p.C1)
1982 Microsoft was a company in
one building with about 100 employees.
(WSJ, 12/12/95, p.A16)
1982 Silicon Graphics was founded.
It made sophisticated computers for modeling. In 2006 the company filed
for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
(Econ, 7/29/06, p.58)
1982 Sun Microsystems was founded
by tech whiz Andreas Bechtolsheim, CEO Scott McNeally, entrepreneur
Vinod Khosla, and software inventor Bill Joy. The Sun slogan was "the
network is the computer." Khosla later made a fortune as a partner at
the Kleiner Perkins venture capital firm.
(WSJ, 8/11/95, p.B-10)(WSJ, 3/19/97, p.B1)(Econ,
3/25/06, p.72)
1982 John Hopfield, Bell Labs
physicist, reawakened scientific interest in neural networks by finding
a resemblance between their neighbor-pulling-neighbor structure and the
behavior of magnetized atoms in some kinds of crystals..
(I&I, Penzias, p.107)
1982 The computer game "Raiders of
the Lost Arc" was designed for the Atari 2600 platform.
(SFC, 3/11/03, p.D5)
1982 The computer game "Donkey
Kong" by Nintendo became a hit in America. Nintendo also introduced the
overweight plumber named "Mario."
(SFC, 7/5/97, p.E1)
1982 Flight Simulator 1.0 hit the
market from Microsoft. It was the first flight simulator game.
(USAT, 3/24/99, p.10E)
1982 Rich Skrenta (b.1967), a
freshman in Pennsylvania, developed Elk Cloner as a practical joke. It
was the 1st virus to hit computers worldwide and later became known as
a "boot sector" virus. When it boots, or starts up, an infected disk
places a copy of the virus in the computer's memory. Whenever someone
inserts a clean disk into the machine and types the command "catalog"
for a list of files, a copy gets written onto that disk as well. The
newly infected disk is passed on to other people, other machines and
other locations.
(AP, 9/1/07)(SFC, 9/3/07, p.C3)
1983 Jan 1, TCP/IP became the
standard for Internet protocol.
(SFC, 8/30/99, p.C10)
1983 Mar 8, IBM released PC DOS
version 2.0.
(http://www.e-articles.info/e/a/title/DOS-Versions/)
1983 Oct 20, IBM-PC DOS Version
2.1 was released.
(www.e-articles.info/e/a/title/DOS-Versions/)
1983 Nov 30, Radio Shack announced
the Tandy Model 2000 computer (80186 chip).
(www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lakes/6757/t2kfaq.txt)
1983 Jim and Marie Petcoff founded
the Computer Museum of America at La Mesa in San Diego County. It was
later relocated to Coleman College.
(SFC, 8/5/97, p.A20)
1983 Betty Holberton led a
committee to establish standards for COBOL, the Common Business
Oriented Language for computers.
(WSJ, 11/22/96, p.A12)
1983 Compaq unveiled its 1st
portable computer.
(WSJ, 1/9/02, p.B1)
1983 IBM unveiled its PCJr home
computer.
(WSJ, 1/9/02, p.B1)
1983 The Windows operating system
was first introduced.
(NW, 8/6/01, p.8)
1983 Richard Stallman of MIT
launched the GNU Project (GNU's Not Unix) to create a free version of
the UNIX operating system.
(SFEC, 8/13/00, p.D4)
1983 Optical fibers began to
replace copper cables for transmitting information.
(WSJ, 8/1/97, p.A9C)
1983 John Sculley was recruited
from Pepsico to reorganize Apple Computer Corp.
(I&I, Penzias, p.183)
1983 Fred Cohen, graduate student,
released (in a controlled experiment) the world's first computer virus.
Cohen is generally credited with having coined the term "computer
virus." He later became the security guru at Sandia National
Laboratories in Livermore, Ca.
(Wired, 8/95, p.117)(SSFC, 2/10/02, p.A4)
1983 Mitch Kapor’s Lotus 1-2-3
spreadsheet lured non-techies buy personal computers.
(WSJ, 1/13/06, p.P8)
1983 Paul Mochapetris, an Internet
address system researcher, grouped computers into groups. "Thus .edu
signified a university, .gov indicated a government agency.
Corporations got .com."
(WSJ, 10/11/99, p.B1)
1984 Jan 24, Apple Computer Inc
unveiled its Macintosh personal computer. It included sound-sampling
technology that could play recorded sounds. The CPU had a speed of 8
MHz and 128k of RAM. It sold for $2,495.
(WSJ,11/14/94, p.R26)(WSJ, 3/4/97, p.B1)(SFC,
1/24/04, p.A12)
1984 Apr 1, Stewart Brand and
Larry Brilliant launched the Well (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) in
Sausalito. In La Jolla, Ca., Larry Brilliant, physician and head of
Network Technologies Int'l. in Michigan, pitched the idea for a public
computer conferencing system to Stewart Brand, publisher of the Whole
Earth Catalog. Their meeting led to the 1985 founding of "The Well"
online service that operated as a collection of conferences. It used
the PicoSpan conferencing software. In 2001 Katie Hafner authored "The
Well: A Story of Love, Death and Real Life in the Seminal Online
Community."
(Wired, 5/97, p.100)(SSFC, 5/27/01, DB p.69)
1984 Aug 14, IBM released PC DOS
version 3.0.
(www.islandnet.com/~kpolsson/today/814.htm)
1984 Jeremy Bernstein wrote a book
on Bell Labs titled: "Three Degrees Above Zero." Here he described the
computerized chess program know as Belle.
(I&I, Penzias, p.151)
1984 Michael Moritz authored “The
Little Kingdom: The Private Story of Apple Computer.”
(SSFC, 5/22/05, p.F1)
1984 Tim Berners-Lee, a researcher
at CERN, envisioned a computer system for researchers to share
documents and databases. This grew to become the World Wide Web.
(WSJ, 10/1/99, p.W6)
1984 Doug Lenat founded Cycorp to
develop the Cyc database in an effort to teach a computer common sense.
In 2002 a web link was established to gather data from the public:
www.cyc.com.
(SFC, 6/10/02, p.E1)
1984 Crazy Eddie Inc. went public.
The retail electronics chain grew rapidly and then burned out in 1989
in a scandal of missing inventory, stolen cash and bogus merchandise
bookings. In 1990 assets were frozen and founder Eddie Antar
disappeared under charges of bilking investors out of $74 mil. He was
nabbed in Israel in 1992 and sent to a US prison.
(WSJ, 6/13/96, p.A1,8)
1984 The Dallas Semiconductor
Corp. began operations under Vin Prothro (d.2000 at 58).
(SFC, 11/18/00, p.A24)
1984 Michael Dell (19), a student
at the Univ. of Texas, founded Dell Computer in Austin, Texas.
(SFEC, 3/7/99, p.B9)(SSFC, 4/13/03, p.I1)
1984 John Lasseter left his
animation job at Disney to join George Lucas’ special effects computer
group. The division was purchased in 1986 by Steve Jobs and became
Pixar.
(SFC, 1/25/06, p.C1)
1984 Ray Ozzie left Lotus
Development and founded Iris Associates, which created Lotus Notes, a
collaborative software program. Iris was acquired by Lotus in 1994 and
Lotus was acquired by IBM in 1995. In 2006 Bill Gates named Ozzie to
succeed him as Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Ozzie)
1984 Ted Waitt started Gateway
Computer at his grandmother’s Iowa farmhouse.
(SFC, 5/20/05, p.C2)
1984 Hewlett-Packard introduced
the HP Laser-Jet printer. Company sales passed $6 billion and the
number of workers approached 85,000. HP also introduced a printer using
its ground-breaking thermal inkjet printing technology.
{Computer, USA, Technology}
(SFC, 3/3/99, p.A11)(SFC, 2/22/06, p.C1)
1984 Prodigy was founded as a
joint venture of CBS, IBM and Sears. CBS dropped out in 1986, two years
before the first service called Trintex went online. Its name was
changed to Prodigy in 1989 and went national in 1990. In 1996 it was
sold for less than $200 million to its management, a private group with
backing by the Mexican firm Grupo Carso.
(SFC, 5/13/96, p.A4)(WSJ, 1/22/98, p.B14)
1985 Feb, Steve Wozniak left Apple
Corp. to start his own company making home video products.
(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
1985 Mar, The Well online
conferencing service went live from Sausalito, Ca., with a VAX
computer, 6 modems and 6 phone lines.
(WSJ, 8/5/96, p.B5)(Wired, 5/97, p.106)
1985 Sep, Steven Jobs left Apple
Computer Corp. after losing control over the Macintosh division to
Jean-Louis Gasee, appointed by John Sculley. Jobs went on to start NeXt.
(I&I, Penzias, p.185)(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
1985 Oct 16, Intel introduced its
32-bit 80386 microcomputer chip.
(www.islandnet.com/~kpolsson/micropro/proc1980.htm)
1985 Dec, IBM-PC DOS Version 3.2
was released.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-DOS)
1985 Autodesk went public. The IPO
of 1.6 million shares was at $11.00 per share.
(http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=3235534)
1985 Raymond Portwood Jr. (d.2000
at 66) co-created the Carmen Sandiego computer game for learning
academic subjects.
(SFEC, 7/30/00, p.C12)
1985 The multi-media Amiga
computer was introduced. Commodore sold some 5 million before it filed
for bankruptcy in 1994. A German PC maker bought the company and went
bankrupt. Gateway acquired it in 1997 and sold it in 1999.
(WSJ, 1/3/00, p.A12)
1985 Ted Waitt co-founded Gateway
Computer in an Iowa farmhouse.
(WSJ, 3/1/00, p.A1)
1985 IBM pulled its PCJr computer
from the market.
(WSJ, 1/9/02, p.B1)
1985 Navigation Technologies
(NavTech) was started by Russell Shields. It grew to become one of the
premier suppliers of digital-map databases in the world.
(Wired, Dec., '95, p.96)
1985 Nintendo Co. of Japan
launched its first home video game console: the Nintendo Entertainment
System.
(Hem, 4/96, p.29)
1985 Parametric Technology, an
industrial design software firm, was founded by Samuel Geisberg, a
former mathematics professor at Leningrad State Univ.
(WSJ, 5/27/97, pB6)
1985 Steve Case founded Quantum
Computer Services, the predecessor to America Online (AOL).
(WSJ, 1/11/00, p.B1)
1985 In Russia Alexander Pajitnov,
a computer programmer, invented the game "Tetris" on an old Electronica
60 computer. He gave up the rights to the game to the State for ten
years.
(SFC, 7/7/96, C5)
1986 Jan, The first PC virus,
called Brain, was discovered in the wild. Though it achieved fame
because it was the first of its type, the virus was not widespread as
it could only travel by hitching a ride on floppy disks swapped between
users. The first virus to hit computers running a Microsoft Corp.'s
operating system (DOS) came when two brothers in Pakistan wrote a boot
sector program now dubbed "Brain," purportedly to punish people who
spread pirated software.
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4630910.stm)(AP, 9/1/07)
1986 Mar 13, Microsoft Corp., an
11-year-old company, went public with 2.5 million shares and rose from
$21 to $28 on opening day. Its revenues for the year were $197 million
and it employed 1,153 people.
(Wired, 12/98, p.196)(WSJ, 4/4/00, p.A16)
1986 Mar, Oracle Corp. sold 1
million shares in its 1st public stock offering. Sales this year
reached $55.4 million.
(SFC, 5/20/02, p.A13)
1986 The US Computer Fraud and
Abuse Act was created. Under the act the release of a computer virus
was illegal, but the construction of such viruses was not.
(WSJ, 3/31/05, p.B1)
1986 Beny Alagem, a former Israeli
tank driver, founded Packard Bell Electronics, a small computer
manufacturer. He bought the old Packard Bell name and marketed his
computers under the old name.
(WSJ, 3/26/96, p.A-1)
1986 Finis Connor left Seagate and
founded Connor Peripherals.
(WSJ, 1/20/02, p.B4)
1986 Phillip W. Katz (d.2000 at
37) founded PKWare, a maker of compression software later known as
PKZip.
(WSJ, 6/19/00, p.A1)
1986 Steve Jobs purchased the
computer graphics division of Lucasfilm for $10 million and started his
own company called Pixar.
(SFC, 1/25/06, p.C1)
1986 Dr. Nathan Myhrvold, founder
and president of Dynamical Systems, sold his software firm to Microsoft
and joined Microsoft, where he spent the next 14 years.
(Econ, 10/22/05, Survey p.9)
1987 Mar 2, The Macintosh II
computer was introduced. The 1st color Mac had a CPU speed of 16 MHz
and sold for $3,898.
(SFC, 1/24/04,
p.A12)(www.applematters.com/index.php/section/history/2006/03/02/)
1987 Apr 2, IBM announced the
upcoming release of the PS/2 and OS/2 computers featuring the Microsoft
MS OS/2 and Windows 2.0 computer operating systems.
(Wired, 12/98,
p.196)(http://pages.prodigy.net/michaln/history/pr/87apr_m3592.html)
1987 Apr 17, President Reagan
slapped $300 million in punitive duties on imported Japanese computers,
television sets and power tools, in retaliation for Japan's alleged
violation of a computer chip trade agreement.
(AP, 4/17/97)
1987 Apr, PeopleSoft Corp., a
personnel-management software firm, was founded by David A. Duffield
and 7 former employees of Integral Systems, which Duffield had founded
in 1972. PeopleSoft went public in 1992. In 1995 it established its
headquarters in Pleasanton. CEO Craig Conway was fired in 2004 and a
takeover by Oracle seemed imminent.
(SFC, 11/18/99, p.A14)(SFC, 10/2/04, p.C1)
1987 Jul 30, Microsoft acquired
Forethought, the developer of PowerPoint, for $14 million. Microsoft
created its own version 3 years later. Robert Gaskins had engaged
Dennis Austin to do the initial programming for PowerPoint 1.0 for Macs.
(Wired, 12/98, p.196)(WSJ, 6/20/07, p.B1)
1987 Sep 8, Microsoft shipped its
first CD ROM application, MS Bookshelf.
(Wired, 12/98, p.196)
1987 Oct 6, Microsoft announced
its first Windows application, Excel.
(Wired, 12/98, p.196)
1987 Oct, NEC contacted all its
customers about a potential problem in a disk controller that occurred
during multitasking. Potential consequences included loss of data.
(WSJ, 11/5/99, p.B5)
1987 M.I.T. Press published "A Few
Good Men from Univac." It was a history of the computer.
(WSJ, 11/22/96, p.A12)
1987 Dr. Fujio Masuoka, a
researcher at Toshiba, invented another type of flash memory that could
be produced more cheaply and in denser arrays. This came to be called
NAND flash.
(Econ, 3/11/06, Survey p.28)
1987 Tera Computer was founded by
Jim Rottsolk and Burton Smith.
(WSJ, 3/2/00, p.B8)
1988 Mar 17, Apple filed suit
against Microsoft, alleging copyright infringement in the Windows GUI.
(Wired, 12/98, p.196)
1988 Apr, Microsoft surpassed
Lotus to become the number one computer software vendor.
(Wired, 12/98, p.196)
1988 Nov 2, A computer worm, named
Morris, unleashed by a Cornell University graduate student began
replicating, clogging thousands of computers around the country, but
causing no real damage. The virus infected an estimated 6,000
university and military computers over the Internet.
(AP, 11/2/98)(SFC, 9/3/07, p.C3)
1988 Microsoft revenues rose to
$590 million with 2,793 employees.
(Wired, 12/98, p.197)
1988 In Canada Claude Comair, a
Lebanese-born, computer animation specialist, founded the DigiPen
Institute of Technology in Vancouver. It taught students fundamentals
of video game development and in 1996 moved to Seattle.
(WSJ, 10/13/98, p.A1)
1988 Linksys was founded to
provide networking for homes and small offices. It was purchased by
Cisco in 2003.
(WSJ, 1/21/02, p.A1)
1988 Nintendo of Japan launched
its Nintendo Power magazine aimed at boys 8-15 years old. It claims a
subscription based circulation of 1 million.
(Hem, 4/96, p.30)
1988 Mauritius formed a National
Computer Board to spur technology.
(SFC, 10/28/02, p.E6)
1989 Mar, The first versions of
HTML that launched the Web appeared. Tim Berners-Lee invented the World
Wide Web.
(SFEC, 3/15/98, p.W26)(SFEC, 5/30/99, Z1 p.4)
1989 Jun 5, Microsoft created its
Multimedia Division.
(Wired, 12/98, p.197)
1989 Nov 6, Word Perfect 5.1 was
released.
(www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/chronology.html)
1989 Nov 13, IBM and Microsoft
expanded their partnership and agreed to develop software for MS-DOS,
MS OS/2, and MS LAN.
(Wired, 12/98, p.197)
1989 The National Computer
Security Association (NCSA) was founded.
(Wired, 10/96, p.88)
1989 Seymour Cray formed a new
supercomputer company, Cray Computer Corp.
(WSJ, 3/2/00, p.B8)
1989 Creative Labs introduced the
SoundBlaster sound card that became a standard in personal computers.
Sim Wong Hoo was the founder of Creative Tech. He later authored
"Chaotic Thoughts from the Old Millennium."
(WSJ, 3/4/97, p.B1)(WSJ, 3/6/00, p.B1)
1989 Jeff Hawkins developed
software for the GridPad, the first computer was a pen-based interface.
(Econ, 3/8/08, TQ p.31)
1989 Hewlett-Packard acquired
Apollo Computer and moved into the workstation market.
(SFC, 3/3/99, p.A11)
1989 Intel shipped the first 486
microprocessor, an enhanced version of the 386. It held more than 1
million transistors and included a built-in floating point unit and 8K
of internal RAM.
(TAR, 1996, p.28)
1989 Nintendo Co. of Japan
launched its Game Boy product, a portable, hand-held game system with
interchangeable game packs. The game was designed by Gunpei Yokoi
(d.1997 at 56).
(Hem, 4/96, p.29)(SFC, 10/11/97, p.A19)
1989 Ralph Merkle, computer
scientist at Xerox PARC, evaluated intellectual processing power 3
different ways. An average of his methods indicated that the brain runs
about 1 quadrillion operations per second. With computing power
doubling every 18 months, he reasoned that hardware would catch up with
brainpower around 2020.
(Wired, 8/96, p.204)
1989 Jack Jewell at Bell Labs
figured out how to make vertical cavity surface emitting lasers
practical. They were first described by Prof. Kenichi Iga at the Tokyo
Institute of Tech. in the late 1970s. They became fabricated like
computer chips were capable of transmitting data at 6 Gbps.
(Wired, 2/98, p.77)
1989 The Univ. of Phoenix enrolled
8 students in the world's first online campus.
(http://www.uopphx.edu/online).
(LT, 9/30/96, p.76)
1989 IBM scientists used 35 xenon
atoms to spell out the company name on a nickel surface. This
demonstrated the possibility of the positional control of atoms and the
future road of nanotechnology.
(SFC, 7/19/99, p.A8)
1990 May 22, Microsoft released
Windows 3.0.
(www.guidebookgallery.org/guis/windows/win30)
1990 Jun 3, Robert Noyce (b.1927),
co-inventor of the integrated circuit, co-founder and 1st CEO of Intel
Corp. (1968), died at age 62. In 2005 Leslie Berlin authored “The Man
Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley.
(www.ieee.org/organizations/history_center/legacies/noyce.html)(SSFC,
7/10/05, p.E1)
1990 Jun, The FTC launched a probe
into possible collusion between Microsoft and IBM.
(Wired, 12/98, p.197)
1990 Oct, At the 13th National
Computer Security Conference in Washington, DC, Dorothy Demming
presented her paper "Concerning Hackers Who Break into Computers." In
1995 she published a postscript denounced the group.
(Wired, 9/96, p.221)
1990 John Hennessey, the founder
of MIPS Computer Systems, authored the textbook "Computer Architecture:
A Quantitative Approach."
(SFC, 4/4/00, p.A13)
1990 The Joshi computer virus
began forcing users of infected machines to type "Happy Birthday Joshi"
to recapture control of their machines.
(Sp., 5/96, p.70)
1990 Lawrence G. Lawler (d.1997 at
56) was awarded the President's Award for Outstanding Service to the
US. He was an FBI agent and helped create the National Crime
Information Center, a computer system that linked law enforcement
agencies.
(SFC, 3/26/97, p.C3)
1990 Fore Systems Inc. of
Warrendale, Pa. introduced the first ATM (asynchronous transfer mode)
hardware for computer networks. It allowed data to be transferred at
2.5 billion bits per second. It was already being adopted by the phone
companies and cable-TV operators. It was founded by 4 teachers and
researchers and went public in 1994.
(WSJ,11/14/94, p.R27)(WSJ, 5/14/97, p.A1)
1990 Microsoft revenues hit $1.183
billion with 5,635 employees.
(Wired, 12/98, p.197)
1990 Prof. David Patterson began
writing about IRAM, intelligent random access memory, the possibility
of including memory into the design of microprocessors. He originated
the concept of RISC, reduced instruction set computing.
(WSJ, 8/28/98, p.B1)
1990 Computers used to store files
for the World Wide Web were given the prefix "www."
(WSJ, 10/11/99, p.B1)
1990 A digital method for
transmitting TV pictures was invented.
(WSJ, 4/10/00, p.B2)
c1990 Paul Mockapetris created the
domain-name system of the Web.
(WSJ, 1/08/00, p.B1)
1990s In the early 1990s
truckloads of foreign waste computer equipment began to be trucked in
to Guiyu, China. Salvaging operations soon caused fish to disappear and
the drinking water to go foul.
(SFC, 3/1/02, p.B3)
1991 Jan 9, Microsoft announced
Excel 3.0
(Wired, 12/98, p.197)
1991 Apr 22, Intel released 486SX
chip.
(MC, 4/22/02)
1991 May 13, Apple released
Macintosh System 7.0.
(SS, Internet, 5/13/97)
1991 Jun 11, Microsoft released MS
DOS 5.0.
(http://tinyurl.com/rkbnf)
1991 Jul 3, Former corporate
enemies Apple Computer and IBM publicly joined forces in a broad pact
to swap technologies and develop new machines. Plans eventually led to
the PowerPC processors.
(AP, 7/3/01)(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
1991 Aug, James Gossling developed
his new computer language called Oak. It was to be the progenitor of
the new Java software for the Internet by Sun Microsystems.
(Wired, Dec. '95, p.238)
1991 Gordon Bell, architect of
DEC's VAX minicomputer, authored "High Tech Ventures: The Guide to
Entrepreneurial Success."
(SFC, 9/10/98, p.B3)
1991 John Detwiler, brokerage
executive, founded Computers for Schools in San Diego.
(SFC, 11/14/96, p.B1)
1991 Al Gore as US Senator held
hearings that led to the passage of the National High-Performance
Computer Technology Act. It boosted federal support of the Internet by
about $1 billion a year.
(Wired, Dec. '95, p.154)
1991 The FTC began to investigate
claims that Microsoft had monopolized the market for PC operating
systems.
(WSJ, 4/4/00, p.A16)
1991 Cambridge Univ. scientists
set up a video to monitor their coffee pot in the Trojan Room and
spawned the Web cam revolution. In 2001 Spiegel Online paid $4,750 for
the $70 coffee pot.
(SFC, 8/15/01, p.B3)
1991 Bruce Katz, the founder of
Rockport Shoes, bought half of the Sausalito online community called
the Well.
(SFC, 4/8/99, p.B1)
1991 The computer game character
Sonic, the hedgehog, was introduced by Sega.
(SFC, 7/5/97, p.E1)
1991 Microsoft introduced its
Windows 3.1 operating system.
(WSJ, 11/16/98, p.R10)
1991 Quantum Computer Services
changed its name to America Online.
(WSJ, 1/11/00, p.B1)
1991 Digital Lightwave was founded
by MIT researcher Brian Zwan. The company went public in 1997.
(WSJ, 1/10/00, p.A14)
1992 Jan 12, HAL, the
Heuristically Programmed Algorithmic Computer, from the 1968 Arthur C.
Clark and Stanley Kubrick movie and book, “became operational” at the
HAL plant in Urbana, Illinois. [1997 article claimed 1/12/97 as
birthdate] The book "HAL’s Legacy: 2001’s Computer as Dream and
Reality" was published in 1997 by MIT Press. The birthday in the movie
was 1/12/92.
1992 Mar 6, Personal computer
users braced for a virus known as "Michelangelo," set to trigger on
March 6, but only scattered cases of lost files were reported. The
Michelangelo computer virus threatened computer systems around the
world. It was designed to lodge itself into a corner of the system and
infect any floppies put into the system, and to eventually mangle the
hard drive.
(Sp., 5/96, p.68)(AP, 3/6/02)
1992 Apr 6, Microsoft released
Windows 3.1.
(www.microsoft.com/presspass/legal/poole.mspx)
1992 Apr 15, Court threw out
Apple's lawsuit against Microsoft.
(www.abo.fi/~adeheer/students/itlekt1e.)
1992 Neal Stephenson published
"Snow Crash." It focused on new technology and depicted a virtual bar
for Avatars and an all-knowing Librarian that answers all spoken
questions with educated, plain-English answers.
(WSJ, 11/16/98, p.R12)
1992 Carol Bartz (48) became
chairwoman of the board and CEO of Autodesk, a company that pioneered
the market for computer-aided design.
(Econ, 6/3/06,
p.64)(www.thetech.org/revolutionaries/bartz/)
1992 Network Solutions won a
government contract to be the exclusive registrar of Internet addresses.
(WSJ, 11/5/99, p.B5)
1992 Jeff Hawkins and Donna
Dubinsky launched a company to produce a hand-held computer they called
the Palm, which began sales in 1996.
(WSJ, 8/8/00, p.A1)
1992 Lewis Platt was named
president and CEO of Hewlett-Packard.
(SFC, 3/3/99, p.A11)
1992 America Online (AOL), a
popular Internet company, went public.
(WSJ, 5/24/99, p.R8)
1992 The Moving Picture Experts
Group finalized a standard for squeezing audio into relatively small
computer files. It was called MPEG-1 Layer 3 and became known as MP3.
(WSJ, 6/20/00, p.B1)
1993 Jan 19, IBM announced a $4.97
billion loss for 1992, which was at that time the largest single-year
corporate loss in United States history.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibm)
1993 Jan, Wired Magazine in SF
published its first issue under Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalf as a
bimonthly with 12 employees. The 1st issue featured a cover story on
the military's use of computer war simulations and sold 100,000 copies.
In 1998 the monthly magazine was sold to S.I. Newhouse's Advance
Publications for $90 million. Before the end of the year it became a
monthly. In 2003 Gary Wolf authored "Wired: A Romance," the story of
Wired and its 1996 IPO.
(SFEC, 1/18/98, p.C1)(SFEC, 5/10/98, p.B1)(SFC,
6/7/99, p.E1)(WSJ, 7/9/03, p.D8)
1993 Feb, Apple shipped its 10
millionth Mac computer.
(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
1993 Apr, Louis Gerstner became
the CEO of IBM. In 2001 Gerstner received British knighthood (K.B.E.),
Knight of the British Empire.
(SFC, 9/7/01, p.B1)
1993 Mar 22, Intel introduced its
Pentium processor (80586): 64 bits-60 MHz-100+ MIPS.
(www.intel.com/pressroom/kits/quickreffam.htm#pentium)
1993 Mar 22, Microsoft began
shipping its Encarta encyclopedia on CD-ROM. It had licensed content
from Funk & Wagnalls after being rebuffed by Britannica.
(Wired, 12/98, p.198)(WSJ, 3/18/09, p.A13)
1993 May 24, Microsoft launched
Windows NT.
(Wired, 12/98, p.198)
1993 Jun, Michael Spindler
replaced John Sculley as CEO of Apple Comp.
(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
1993 Aug 21, The US Justice Dept.
took over the FTC investigation into the business practices of
Microsoft Corp.
(WSJ, 11/8/99, p.A30)
1993 Sep 30, MS Dos 6.2 was
released.
(MC, 9/30/01)
1993 Oct, John Sculley left Apple
Corp. A.C. Markkula became chairman.
(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
1993 John Hennessey, the founder
of MIPS Computer Systems, authored the textbook "Computer Organization
and Design: The Hardware/Software Interface."
(SFC, 4/4/00, p.A13)
1993 Guillermo Gaede, an Intel
engineer, used his computer to tap into plans for the Pentium & 486
chip manufacturing process and video taped the information. He sent the
info his former employer Advanced Micro Devices who notified federal
authorities. He claimed to have been double-crossed by the FBI and also
to have passed info from AMD to Cuba, China, North Korea and Iran. He
was arrested in Phoenix on Sep 23, 1995.
(SFC, 6/25/96, p.A23)
1993 The computer game "Mortal
Combat" sparked a controversy in Congress over video game violence.
(SFC, 7/5/97, p.E1)
1993 The computer game "Myst"
swept the US with its eerie puzzle plot.
(SFC, 7/5/97, p.E1)
1993 Mark Weiser (d.1999 at 46)
performed as a drummer with the band "Severe Tire Damage." The group
was made up of computer researchers and the band was the first to
perform live over the Internet. Weiser was called "the father of
ubiquitous computing" for spreading his belief that computer technology
could be incorporated unobtrusively into all facets of everyday life.
(SFC, 5/1/99, p.A17)
1993 Microsoft Windows users
topped 25 million.
(WSJ, 4/4/00, p.A16)
1993 Apple Chairman John Sculley
introduced the Newton MessagePad, the first personal digital assistant.
The device was terminated in 1998.
(SFC, 2/28/98, p.D1)
1993 The graphics chip company
nVidea (Nvidia) was founded in Santa Clara, Ca.
(WSJ, 3/17/03, p.B1)(SFC, 12/2/06, p.C2)
1993 Arthur Hair received a patent
titled "Method for Transmitting a Desired Digital Video or Audio
Signal." He and Scott Sander then launched Sightsound.com to build a
market for transmitting music and video over the internet.
(WSJ, 5/7/99, p.B1)
1993 Joseph Paul Jernigan, a
convicted murderer, was executed in Huntsville, Texas. He donated his
body to medical research and it was quick frozen, sliced, photographed
and computer enhanced and used to make the 1997 CD Body Voyage.
(SFEC, 3/30/97, BR. p.9)
1994 Mar, Apple Corp. introduced
the Power Macintosh. It used the PowerPC chip co-developed with IBM. It
was able to run both Apple and Microsoft software.
(Hem, Mar. 95, p.89)(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
1994 Apr 4, Jim Clark and Marc
Andreeson founded Mosaic Communications Corp., the predecessor of
Netscape Communications.
(WSJ, 11/25/98, p.B1)
1994 Apr, Charles H. Ferguson
started Vermeer Technologies. It developed Front Page, the first
software program to allow people to develop a Web site without
mastering a programming language. He sold the company to Microsoft
after 20 months for $133 million.
(WSJ, 12/15/99, p.A20)
1994 Spring, David Filo and Jerry
Yang, graduates students of Stanford Univ., started a guide to their
favorite sites on the Internet: Jerry and David's Guide to the World
Wide Web." They later named the site Yahoo: "Yet Another Hierarchical
Officious Oracle."
(WSJ, 3/6/00, p.B1)(SFC, 7/18/00, p.A8)
1994 Jul 11, Gary Kildall (52),
pioneer software writer, died in Monterey, Ca.
(www.maxframe.com/kildallr.htm)
1994 Jul 15, Microsoft Corp.
reached a settlement with the Justice Department, promising to end
practices it used to corner the market for personal computer software
programs. In a consent decree with the Justice Dept. Microsoft agreed
to change contracts with PC makers and other software companies ending
the government's antitrust investigation.
(AP, 7/15/99)(WSJ, 4/4/00, p.A16)
1994 Aug 31, In the London Intel
Speed Chess Grand Prix a Pentium computer beat world chess champ Gari
Kasparov.
(www.correspondencechess.com/campbell/apctcol/c9411.htm)
1994 Sep, Apple Corp. announced
that it would allow other companies clone the Mac.
(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
1994 Nov 28, Mosaic changed its
name to Netscape Communications.
(WSJ, 4/21/99, A1)
1994 Dec 12, IBM stopped shipments
of personal computers with Intel's flawed Pentium chip, saying the
processor's problems were worse than earlier believed.
(AP, 12/12/99)
1994 Dec 20, Intel announced it
would replace all flawed Pentium computer chips.
(AP, 12/20/04)
1994 Dec, Power Computer of
Milpitas, Ca., announced plans to build Mac clones.
(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
1994 Rob Glaser, a former
Microsoft executive, founded RealNetworks.
(SFC, 10/12/05, p.C2)
1994 Richard Lipton, Princeton
computer scientist, published a paper on molecular computing titled:
"Speeding to Computation via Molecular Biology."
(Wired, 8/95, p.166)
1994 Marvin Minsky wrote in a
Scientific American article that: "In the end we will find ways to
replace every part of the body and brain and thus repair all the
defects and injuries that make our lives so brief."
(Hem., 2/96, p.95)
1994 Lou Montulli, computer
programmer at Netscape, invented "cookies" to help enable purchasing
products from a Web site.
(WSJ, 2/28/00, p.B1)
1994 Scientists at Carnegie Mellon
Univ. created a search engine. Rights were bought by CMGI Inc., an
Internet venture fund, and Lycos was formed in 1995.
(SFC, 3/29/00, p.D3)
1994 The first Internet stock
trade was completed by K. Aufhauser & Co., later part of Ameritrade
Holding Corp.
(WSJ, 6/2/99, p.C1)
1994 Compaq became No. 1 in PC
sales.
(WSJ, 1/9/02, p.B1)
1994 Bruce Katz, the founder of
Rockport Shoes, bought the 2nd half of the Sausalito online community
called the Well for a reported $1 million.
(SFC, 4/8/99, p.B1)
1994 Britannica posted a web site
for its reference work.
(WSJ, 4/22/99, A1)
1995 Jan, Jed Katz and Phil Marcus
founded Rent Net, a computerized listing of available rental units
across the US. Its web address was:
http://www.rentfacts.com
(SFC, 5/12/96, p.E-6)
1995 Apr 1, Aaron, a
computer-driven robot will begin painting a new 25 sq. ft canvas on a
daily basis. It is designed and programmed by Harold Cohen, a San Diego
computer scientist. The event is scheduled to start in Boston at 300
Congress St. and go to May 29.
(WSJ, 3/28/95, p.A-24)
1995 Apr, Progressive Networks
unveiled RealAudio software to stream music bit by bit over the WWW.
(WSJ, 6/20/00, p.B1)
1995 Aug 9, Netscape
Communications went public and was valued at $2.2 billion. In 1999 Jim
Clark and Owen Edwards authored "Netscape Time: The Making of the
Billion-Dollar Start-Up That Took on Microsoft."
(WSJ, 11/25/98, p.B1)(SFEC, 6/27/99, BR p.6)
1995 Aug 24, Microsoft Corporation
began selling its highly publicized Windows 95 personal computer
software. The Windows 95 operating system was priced at $89 for an
upgrade.
(WSJ, 4/4/00, p.A16)(AP, 8/24/00)
1995 Sep 13, The FBI made at least
a dozen arrests, capping a nationwide two-year investigation of
pedophiles and pornographers using the America Online computer network.
(AP, 9/13/00)
1995 Sep 23, Guillermo Gaede, an
Intel engineer, was arrested in Phoenix. He had used his computer to
tap into plans for the Pentium & 486 chip manufacturing process and
video taped the information in May 1993. He sent the info to his former
employer Advanced Micro Devices who notified federal authorities. He
claimed to have been double-crossed by the FBI and also to have passed
info from AMD to Cuba, China, North Korea and Iran.
(SFC, 6/25/96, p.A23)
1995 Sep, The US government came
up with a new proposal security in computer communications, dubbed by
critics as Clipper II.
(Wired, 9/96, p.224)
1995 Nov 20, Salon produced its
1st online issue. Salon.com was founded in SF as an online publisher by
former staffers of the SF Examiner. The company purchased the Sausalito
online community Well in 1999 from Bruce Katz, the founder of Rockport
Shoes. In June 1999 it became a public corporation with an IPO at
$10/share.
(SFC, 4/8/99, p.B1)(SFEC, 6/27/99, p.B1)(SFC,
7/28/00, p.A19)
1995 Nov, Microsoft released
Internet Explorer 3.0 and gave it away for free in a challenge to
Netscape's Navigator browser.
(WSJ, 4/4/00, p.A16)
1995 Dec 7, Bill Gates announced
Microsoft's Internet counterattack [on Netscape and the browser market].
(WSJ, 11/25/98, p.B1)
1995 Bill Gates, head of Microsoft
Corp., authored “The Road Ahead.”
(Econ, 6/28/08, p.78)
1995 David Packard authored his
treatisse "The HP Way."
(SFC, 3/3/99, p.A11)
1995 The first Electronic
Entertainment Expo for the computer and video game industry was held.
(SFC, 6/18/97, p.B1)
1995 Gil Amelio took over Apple
Computer. He lasted until 1997 when Steve Jobs came back to the
company. In 1998 Amelio published "On the Firing Line: My 500 Days at
Apple," written with William L. Simon.
(WSJ, 7/2/98, p.A20)
1995 The Knowledge Universe
company, a conglomerate of educational companies, was founded in Menlo
Park with some $750 million from investment banker Michael Milken, his
brother Lowell and Larry Ellison of Oracle Corp.
(SSFC, 8/5/01, p.E1)
1995 Pierre Omidyar founded eBay
as a site for auctioning items. It also helped his fiancée trade
her Pez dispensers. In 2002 Adam Cohen authored "The Perfect Store," a
chronicle of the rise of eBay.
(WSJ, 6/25/02, p.D9)
1995 Michael Wood of Orinda
founded Leapfrog Enterprises. In 1997 it came under the wing of
Knowledge Universe.
(SSFC, 8/5/01, p.E1)
1995 Cray Computer filed for
Chapter 11.
(WSJ, 3/2/00, p.B8)
1995 IBM acquired Lotus and its
corporate groupware for $3.5 billion.
(SFC, 11/30/98, p.E3)
1995 Intel unveiled the universal
serial bus (USB) technology.
(SFC, 12/13/99, p.B3)
1995 Samsung bought AST. They sold
it for a loss in 1999.
(WSJ, 12/6/04, p.B1)
1995 US Robotics bought Palm Inc.
(WSJ, 6/5/03, p.B1)
1995-1997 In Brazil Rodrigo Baggio organized
efforts to provide computer education to the children of Rio's slums.
He formed the Committee for Computer Science Democratization, which had
opened schools in 32 Rio slums over the last 2 years.
(SFC, 7/7/97, p.A8)
1996 Feb 10, World chess champion
Garry Kasparov lost the first game of a match in Philadelphia against
an I-B-M computer dubbed "Deep Blue."
(AP, 2/10/01)
1996 Feb 17, World chess champion
Garry Kasparov beat IBM supercomputer "Deep Blue," winning a six-game
match in Philadelphia.
(AP, 2/17/98)
1996 Feb, Gilbert Amelio took over
as chairman and CEO of Apple Corp. Markkula became vice-chairman and
Michael Spindler left the company.
(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
1996 Feb, Kevin Mitnick,
33-year-old computer wizard, was arrested in Raleigh, N.C. with the
help of computer security expert Tsutomu Shimomura. Mitnick was accused
of breaking into the systems of software companies and attacking the
computers of Internet service providers (ISPs). In 1999 he admitted
breaking in to computer systems at Sun Microsystems and Motorola where
he stole software and installed programs that caused millions of
dollars in damage. He was ordered to pay token restitution of $4,125
and was prohibited from any access to computers and the Internet for 3
years following his release.
(SFC, 9/28/96, p.A3)(SFC, 8/10/99, p.A3)
1996 Mar 26, David Packard,
co-founder of Hewlett-Packard Co., died. In a 1988 letter to his
children he declared that the David & Lucille Packard Foundation's
highest priority must be to reduce world-wide population growth.
(WSJ, 3/27/96, p.A-1)(WSJ, 3/6/98, p.)
1996 Spring, Yahoo went public at
$13 per share and quickly rose to $33 in its 1st day of trading.
(WSJ, 3/6/00, p.B1)
1996 Apr, The web site DJ.com
launched RealAudio's technology to broadcast 24 channels of music over
the web. The site was later renamed Spinner.com.
(WSJ, 6/20/00, p.B1)
1996 May 25, In the US Pastors for
Peace called off a hunger strike after reaching a deal with the
Treasury Dept over 395 impounded old computers that were destined for
medical clinics in Cuba. The computers were given over to the General
Board of Church and Society of the United Methodist Church. The board
agreed not to ship the computers without a license, and that if no
license could be issued to donate the computers for charitable purposes
in the US.
(SFC, 5/26/96, p.A-10)
1996 May, The government released
a draft proposal on computer security that was dubbed Clipper III.
(Wired, 9/96, p.226)
1996 Jun 10, Intel released its
200 Mhz Pentium chip.
(www.intel.com/pressroom/kits/quickreffam.htm)
1996 Jul 4, Hot Mail, a free
internet E-mail service began.
(Maggio)
1996 Aug 13, Microsoft released
Internet Explorer 3.0.
(http://docs.yahoo.com/docs/pr/release33.html)
1996 Aug 20, In Germany officials
arrested 2 businessmen suspected of smuggling computer technology to
Libya that could be used to make lethal nerve gas.
(WSJ, 8/20/96, p.A1)
1996 Sep 5, Computer scientists
found the largest known prime number while testing a Cray T94 computer
system. It has 378,632 digits and can be expressed as two to the
1,257,787th power minus 1.
(WSJ, 9/5/96, p.A6)
1996 Dec 13, Trade ministers from
28 countries meeting in Singapore endorsed a U.S.-crafted trade pact to
abolish import duties on computers, software and other high-tech
products.
(AP internet 12/13/97)
1996 Dec 16, Intel announced the
world's fastest computer capable of 1 trillion operations per second.
(SFC, 12/17/96, p.C1)
1996 Dec, Apple Comp. hired
co-founder Steve Jobs as a consultant and purchased his NeXt Software
Inc. for $430 million.
(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
1996 Super Mario 64 showed the
capabilities of the new Nintendo 64 computer game machine.
(SFC, 7/5/97, p.E3)
1996 The $1.6 billion FLAG project
(Fiber-Optic Link Around the Globe) was completed for transmission of
data from Europe to the Far East. Neil Tagare pushed the project with
financial assistance from Nynex.
(SFC, 3/15/99, p.B7)
1996 David Warthen founded Ask
Jeeves Inc., a company devoted to scouring the Net for data based on
simple questions. www.ask.com
(WSJ, 4/8/99, p.B9)
1996 NEC bought Packard Bell. It
later exited the US retail PC market.
(WSJ, 12/6/04, p.B1)
1996 Toshiba Corp. invested $3
million in Lexar Media under the premise of supplying flash cards for
Lexar’s high-speed controller.
(SSFC, 4/3/05, p.B3)
1997 Mar 2, Saudi Arab billionaire
Prince al-Waleed bin Talal acquired 5% of Apple.
(SC, 3/2/02)
1997 Mar, Apple Corp. announced it
would lay off 4,100 workers.
(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
1997 Apr 8, Microsoft Corp
released Internet Explorer 4.0.
(http://tinyurl.com/dax6p)
1997 Jul, Apple released its
newest Mac operating system, OS 8.
(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
1997 Aug 6, Ending years of
impassioned rivalry, Apple Computer and Microsoft agreed to share
technology in a deal giving Microsoft a stake in Apple's survival.
Microsoft announced that it would buy $150 million in non-voting Apple
stock.
(SFC, 8/7/97, p.A1)(AP, 8/6/98)
1997 Sep, IBM announced copper
connections on silicon transistors instead of aluminum.
(SFC, 11/30/98, p.E3)
1997 Sep, Steve Jobs was named
interim CEO of Apple Corp. Jobs dropped the term interim in 2000.
(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)(Econ, 6/9/07, p.80)
1997 Oct 20, The US government
alleged that Microsoft's bundling of its browser into the operating
system violates a 1995 consent decree.
(WSJ, 11/25/98, p.B1)
1997 Nov 20, It was reported that
Lucent Tech.'s Bell Labs has developed a new tiny transistor that is 5
times faster and 1/4th the size of commercially available transistors.
(WSJ, 11/20/97, p.B4)
1997 Dec 11, A US federal judge
ordered Microsoft not to bundle IE4 in Windows.
(MC, 12/11/01)
1997 Dec 31, Intel cut the price
of Pentium II-233 MHz from $401 to $268.
(MC, 12/31/01)
1997 Dec 31, Microsoft bought the
Hotmail E-mail service.
(MC, 12/31/01)
1997 Dec, Michael Robertson
launched a web site called MP3.com as a repository for music in the MP3
format.
(WSJ, 6/20/00, p.B1)
1997 Scott Kurnit founded
About.com, a web site for information originally known as the Mining
Company.
(WSJ, 7/7/99, p.A23)
1997 Acer bought the PC unit of
Texas Instruments. It later exited the US retail PC market.
(WSJ, 12/6/04, p.B1)
1997 Silicon Graphics bought Cray
Research.
(WSJ, 3/2/00, p.B8)
1997 3Com bought US Robotics.
(WSJ, 6/5/03, p.B1)
1997 Seymour Cray (71) died from
injuries from a car accident.
(WSJ, 3/2/00, p.B8)
1998 Jan 22, Microsoft under court
pressure signed an agreement giving PC makers the freedom to install
Windows 95 without an Internet Explorer icon.
(WSJ, 11/8/99, p.A30)
1998 Mar 19-25, CeBIT, the world's
largest exhibition for information and communications, was held in
Hanover, Germany. 600,000 visitors were expected.
(FT, 3/4/98, p.IT4)
1998 May, Federal and state
regulators filed an antitrust suit against Microsoft accusing it of
using illegal actions to destroy competition.
(WSJ, 4/4/00, p.A16)
1998 May, Apple Corp. introduced
the iMac. The $1,300 computer housed in translucent plastic had a 233
MHz G3 processor.
(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
1998 Jun, An appeals court panel
ruled in favor of Microsoft and considered Internet Explorer and
Windows and integrated product.
(WSJ, 4/4/00, p.A16)
1998 Jun, Microsoft released
Windows 98 with an upgrade price of $109.
(WSJ, 4/4/00, p.A16)
1998 Aug 23, Retailers began
marketing computers with the new 450 MHz Intel Pentium II.
(SFC, 8/25/98, p.D3)
1998 Aug, F. Thomson Leighton and
Daniel Lewin founded Akamai based on technology they had developed at
MIT in 1995. Their main product, FreeFlow - a system that routed
Internet traffic - began selling in April 1999. Lewin (31) was aboard
AA Flight 11 on Sep 11, 2001, and died when hijackers crashed the plane
into the WTC.
(WSJ, 12/8/99, p.C28)(SFC, 9/14/01, p.A29)
1998 Sep, Diamond Multimedia
introduced the Rio, a Walkman-like portable player for MP3 files.
(WSJ, 6/20/00, p.B1)
1998 Oct, The US Congress passed
the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in an effort to protect
writers and artists from piracy in the free-for-all world of Net music.
(WSJ, 6/20/00, p.B1)(SFC, 8/13/01, p.D1)
1998 Oct, The board of directors
for ICANN was seated. The Clinton administration created ICANN, the
Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers. It had been run by Jon
Postel (d.1998), director of the Computer Networks Division at
Information Sciences Institute at the Univ. of Southern Calif.
(WSJ, 11/5/99, p.B5)(SFEC, 7/30/00, p.B6)
1998 Nov 13, The globe.com,
founded by Tod Krizelman and Stephen Paternot, went public and leaped
from $9 to $97 a share. In 2001 Paternot authored "A Very Public
Offering."
(WSJ, 5/2/01, p.A17)(WSJ, 8/27/01, p.A13)
1998 Nov 21, Isao Okawa, chairman
of CSK Corp., and Sega Enterprises, donated $27 million to MIT for the
creation of a center for children founded on the belief that new
digital technology will drive fundamental changes in education.
(SFC, 11/23/98, p.A5)
1998 Nov 23, Nintendo began
distributing its video game "Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time." It was
designed for the new 64-bit Nintendo player and quickly sold out.
(SFC, 11/23/98, p.E1)(WSJ, 12/3/98, p.B1)
1998 Nov 23, It was reported that
American Online planned to purchase Netscape Communication for about $4
billion in stock.
(SFC, 11/23/98, p.A1)
1998 Nov, IBM unveiled a disk
drive capable of holding 25 gigabytes of data.
(SFC, 11/30/98, p.E1)
1998 Dec 3, Digital MP3
file-squishing technology was reported as a threat to recording
industry.
(SFC, 12/3/98, p.A1)
1998 Dec 3, In Vienna 33 nations
signed the Wassenaar Arrangement limiting arms exports. The agreement
included export controls on the most powerful data-scrambling
technologies.
(SFC, 12/4/98, p.B2)
1998 Dec 4, The first PC for the
car, made by Clarion Co., went on sale for $1,299. It use a Microsoft
operating system and responded to voice commands to change radio
stations and CDs, check e-mail, and use global positioning.
(SFC, 12/5/98, p.D1)
1998 Dec 7, South Carolina ended
its participation in the antitrust case against Microsoft.
(SFC, 11/6/99, p.A3)
1998 Dec 18, The new electronic
Rocket Book by NuvoMedia weighed 22 ounces and stored 10 books.
(WSJ, 12/18/98, p.W15)
1998 Sergey Brin, a Russian
immigrant, and Larry Page of Stanford Univ. raised $1 million and
launched the Google search engine in Menlo Park, Ca. By 2003 over 200
million searches were logged daily. In 2004 Google filed for IPO.
Google's core search technology patent, owned by Stanford, was set to
expire in 2011.
(SSFC, 11/9/03, p.I1)(WSJ, 4/30/04, p.A1)
1998 Michael Dell (33) of the Dell
Computer Company recorded personal holdings of $7.22 billion.
(SFEC, 3/7/99, p.B9)
1998 Jeff Hawkins, Donna Dubinsky
and Ed Colligan left Palm, a unit of 3Com, to create Handspring.
(WSJ, 6/5/03, p.B1)
1998 VMware was founded by Mendel
Rosenblum with assistance by his wife Diane Greene, who later became
chief executive. The company developed computer virtualization software
that allowed multiple servers to be consolidated into a single machine.
It accomplished this be developing a small program called a hypervisor,
which controls how access to a computer’s processors and memory is
shared. In 2004 it was later acquired by EMC.
(Econ, 1/19/08, p.74)(www.vmware.com/company/)(Econ,
7/5/08, p.78)
1998 A brain implant let a
paralyzed stroke victim move a cursor on a computer screen to point out
simple phrases. [see Apr 13, 2004]
(SFC, 4/14/04, p.C8)
1998 Cybernetics Prof. Kevin
Warwick had a chip implanted into his arm for 9 days to monitor his
body's electrical signals and transmit results to a computer. He
followed up with a more sophisticated chip in 2000.
(SFC, 4/3/00, p.E16)
1999 Jan, Shawn Fanning (18), a
computer science student at Boston's Northeastern Univ., wrote Napster,
a software program to share music files over the Internet.
(SFC, 3/3/00, p.A7)
1999 Feb 22, IBM planned to unveil
a new microchip that included both logic functions and memory functions.
(SFC, 2/22/99, p.B2)
1999 Feb 22, 3Com planned to
unveil 2 new PalmPilot devices. The Palm V weighed in at 4 oz, and the
Palm IIIx personal display assistant (PDA) was a upgrade to the Palm
III with more memory and better display.
(SFC, 2/22/99, p.B3)
1999 Feb 25, The FCC ruled that
connecting to the internet constitutes a long-distance call.
(WSJ, 2/26/99, p.B3)
1999 Feb 26, Intel's new Pentium
III began appearing in low priced PCs.
(WSJ, 2/26/99, p.B3)
1999 Mar 18, The 3rd annual
Webbies was held at the Herbst Theater under the direction of Tiffany
Schlain (28).
(SFC, 3/13/99, p.A17)
1999 Mar 29, The Melissa computer
virus, first reported Mar 26, was spreading and infecting E-mail in
tens of thousands of computers. In Dec. David L. Smith, a New Jersey
programmer, pleaded guilty to creating the virus and spreading it
through a sex Web site. It was reported to have caused $80 million in
damage.
(SFC, 3/29/99, p.A3)(SFC, 12/10/99, p.B1)
1999 Mar, Pokemon Blue and Pokemon
Red from Nintendo of America were the top selling video games.
(USAT, 3/24/99, p.10E)
1999 Apr, The film "Pi" became the
first film sold by download from Sightsound.com.
(WSJ, 5/7/99, p.B1)
1999 May 6, A US appeals court
ruled that government restrictions on the export of encryption software
violated free speech.
(WSJ, 5/7/99, p.A1)
1999 Jun 6, The Worm.Explore.Zip
virus was first detected in Israel. The virus was disguised a an e-mail
attachment and destroyed files when opened.
(SFEC, 6/13/99, p.A6)
1999 Jun 11, The FBI was seeking
the creator of Worm.Explore.Zip, a file-destroying computer virus which
had hit some of the nation's biggest corporations.
(AP, 6/11/00)
1999 Jun 15, The US Senate passed
legislation protecting companies from lawsuits stemming from Year 2000
computer problems.
(SFC, 6/16/99, p.A1)
1999 Jun 23, House Republicans
unveiled their "e-Contract," a pitch to the high-tech community that
included a promise to keep the Internet free.
(SFC, 6/24/99, p.A1)
1999 Jun, Microsoft annual
revenues hit $19.75 billion.
(WSJ, 4/4/00, p.A16)
1999 Jul 19, Carleton "Carly"
Fiorina (44) was named the new president and CEO of Hewlett Packard Co.
She was brought over from Lucent Tech. and became the 3rd woman running
a Fortune 500 company. In 2003 George Anders authored "Perfect Enough,"
a look at HP and Fiorina's efforts. In 2003 Peter Burrows authored
"Backfire," a look at Fiorina's past work.
(SFC, 7/20/99, p.A1)(WSJ, 2/7/03, p.W12)
1999 Jul, Apple corp. introduced a
mobile Macintosh, the iBook. The laptop was priced at $1,599 and had a
233 MHz G3 processor.
(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
1999 Aug 18, Ramos Horta of
Indonesia, 1996 Nobel Prize winner, warned the government that computer
hackers would wreak electronic mayhem on the country if voting in the
East Timor referendum is hampered.
(SFC, 8/18/99, p.D10)
1999 Sep 16, The White House said
it would allow US firms to export computer encryption technology.
(SFC, 9/17/99, p.A1)
1999 Oct 6, SanDisk issued a press
release announcing plans to jointly manufacture flash memory chips with
Toshiba Corp.
(SSFC, 4/3/05, p.B3)
1999 Oct 6, Jon Lech Johansen (15)
of Norway released DeCSS, a program that allows users to copy DVDs onto
computer hard disks.
(WSJ, 10/13/05,
p.A8)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS)
1999 Oct 25, Intel introduced its
code-named Coppermine chip as the new Pentium III with speeds up to 500
megahertz. The internal circuitry was squeezed to .18 micron.
(SFC, 10/25/99, p.B1)
1999 Nov 5, US Judge Thomas
Penfield Jackson ruled in a finding of fact that Microsoft Corp. is a
monopoly and has wielded its power to stifle competition.
(SFC, 11/6/99, p.A1)
1999 Nov 11, The computer virus
dubbed Bubbleboy was reported to spread through electronic mail without
attachments.
(WSJ, 11/11/99, p.A1)
1999 Oct 21, Organizers called for
a "Jam Echelon Day," an effort to overload US National Security Agency
(NSA) supercomputers with e-mail containing words such as "bomb."
Echelon was a worldwide surveillance network run by the NSA and
partners in Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
(SFEC, 11/14/99, p.A7)
1999 Nov 29, A company called C3D
planned to demonstrate discs holding 140 gigabytes of data, over 200
times the capacity of a CD-ROM.
(SFC, 11/29/99, p.C1)
1999 Nov 30, It was reported that
the EU passed the Electronic Signature Directive, a law that gave legal
status to digital signatures.
(WSJ, 12/1/99, p.A24B15)
1999 Dec 6, AT&T agreed in
principle to give competing Internet providers access to its high-speed
cable lines.
(SFC, 12/6/99, p.A3)
1999 Dec, The recording industry
filed a copyright infringement suit against Napster.
(WSJ, 6/20/00, p.B1)
1999 Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of
the World Wide Web, authored "Weaving the Web."
(WSJ, 10/1/99, p. W6)
1999 Po Bronson authored "The
Nudist on the Late Shift: and Other True Tales of Silicon Valley."
(SFC, 7/2/99, p.C1)
1999 The book "Dealers of
Lightning: Xerox Park and the Dawn of the Computer Age" by Michael
Hiltzik was about the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.
(WSJ, 3/16/99, p.A24)(SFEC, 8/1/99, BR p.9)
1999 David A. Kaplan authored "The
Silicon Boys," a history of the companies and characters who began
Silicon Valley.
(WSJ, 7/1/99, p.A21)
1999 Michael Lewis authored "The
New New Thing," a book about Silicon Valley as well as a character
study of Jim Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics, Netscape and Healtheon.
(SFC, 10/27/99, p.B1)
1999 Michael S. Malone authored
"Infinite Loop: How Apple, the World's Most Insanely Great Computer
Company Went Insane."
(SFEC, 4/18/99, BR p.9)
1999 The book "The Visionary
Position" by Fred Moody" was about the development of virtual reality
in Seattle in the mid 1990s. It focused on the Human Interface
Technology Laboratory (HIT) founded by Tom Furness.
(WSJ, 3/4/99, p.A12)
1999 Anthony B. and Michael C.
Perkins authored "The Internet Bubble." The founding editors of Red
Herring and Red Herring Online believed that Internet stocks were
overvalued.
(WSJ, 11/1/99, p.A52)
1999 Gary Rivlin authored "The
Plot To Get Bill Gates: An Irreverent Investigation of the World's
Richest Man… and the People Who Hate Him."
(SFEC, 8/15/99, BR p.6)
1999 Jerre Stead, CEO of Ingram
Micro, authored "Soaring with the Phoenix: Renewing the Vision,
Reviving the Spirit and RE-Creating the Success of Your Company."
Ingram was the largest distributor of computer products and services
and a new CEO was sought to replace Stead later in the year.
(WSJ, 9/9/99, p.A1)
1999 William Bennett, former US
education secretary under Pres. Reagan, began opening cyber charter
schools.
(SSFC, 8/31/03, p.A23)
1999 CollabNet launched
Subversion, a collaborative platform for programmers.
(Econ, 3/8/08, TQ p.19)
1999 IBM abandoned the retail PC
business.
(WSJ, 1/9/02, p.B1)
1999 Nokia, Matsushita, Motorola
and Psion PLC formed a joint venture named Symbian to devise a new
operating system called Epoc to run on cellular phones. Microsoft
countered with a joint venture with Ericsson of Sweden.
(WSJ, 12/9/99, p.A3)
1999 Pyra software company
released Blogger for free. It allowed users to set up a Weblog, a
simple personal web site program. By 2002 some 500,000 weblogs were on
the Internet.
(NW, 8/26/02, p.42)
1999 In Russia legislation was
passed that created SORM-2, a Russian acronym for the system of
Operative and Investigative procedures. It required every Internet
service provider to install monitoring equipment that allowed access by
Russian security agencies.
(SFC, 3/11/00, p.A1)
1999 South Korea initiated OPEN
(Online Procedures Enhancement for Civil Applications), an
Internet-based anti-graft program.
(SFC, 11/23/01, p.D6)
2000 Jan 1, In California the
Uniform Electronic Transactions Act became law. It validated all
transactions formed, transmitted and recorded electronically, with
certain exemptions.
(SFEC, 1/2/00, p.B1)
2000 Jan 7, Pres. Clinton
announced a $91 million program to protect computer security as part of
the 2001 fiscal budget.
(SFC, 1/800, p.A1)
2000 Jan 13, Bill Gates stepped
down as CEO of Microsoft and handed the leadership over to Steve
Ballmer.
(SFC, 1/14/00, p.A1)
2000 Jan 19, Transmeta Corp.
leaders unveiled a pair of new microprocessors named Crusoe designed
for hand-held Internet-access devices.
(SFC, 1/20/00, p.B2)
2000 Jan 20, It was reported that
the number of Internet users in China had more than doubled over the
last 6 months from 4 to 8.9 million, most of them young single men.
(SFC, 1/20/00, p.C16)
2000 Jan 26, In China the State
Bureau of Secrecy issued a 20-article circular that banned discussion
of state secrets on the Internet, in e-mail, and in chat rooms or
bulletin boards. Content and service providers were also required to
undergo a "security certification" prior to operation.
(SFC, 1/27/00, p.A1)
2000 Feb 3, The Ford Motor Co.
said it would provide new PCs and a printer with Internet access to its
300,000 employees at $5 per month over 3 years.
(SFC, 2/5/00, p.A1)
2000 Feb 4, Delta Air Lines said
it would provide new PCs and Internet access to its 72,000 employees at
$12 per month over 3 years.
(SFC, 2/5/00, p.A1)
2000 Feb 4, The Sims, a new game
from SimCity creator Will Wright, was released to retail sales.
(SFC, 2/5/00, p.B1)
2000 Feb 7, An apparent team of
computer hackers shut the Yahoo web site down with a
"denial-of-service" attack that mimicked millions of phantom users.
(SFC, 2/8/00, p.A1)
2000 Feb 8, Net hackers shut down
at least 4 popular Web sites including Amazon.com, eBay, CNN.com and
buy.com with "denial of service attacks."
(SFC, 2/9/00, p.A1)(AP, 2/8/01)
2000 Mar 2, Gov. Angus King
announced that he would like to give every 7th grader in Maine (17,000
students) a laptop computer, regardless of whether they have a computer
at home.
(SFC, 3/3/00, p.A2)
2000 Mar 3, It was reported that
student use of Napster software to download music files from the
Internet was clogging up university networks and causing officials to
block or limit access to the site.
(SFC, 3/3/00, p.A1)
2000 Mar 27, Cisco Systems passed
Microsoft as the most valuable company in the world.
(SFC, 3/28/00, p.A1)
2000 Mar, Palm separated from 3Com
with an IPO offering.
(WSJ, 6/5/03, p.B1)
2000 Mar, Tera Computer bought the
Cray Research business from Silicon Graphics and changed its name to
Cray Inc.
(WSJ, 3/2/00, p.B8)
2000 Apr 3, It was reported that 6
prestigious int'l. universities and cultural institutions planned to
sell knowledge and education over the Internet via the Fathom Web site.
(SFC, 4/3/00, p.A5)
2000 Apr 3, Judge Thomas Penfield
Jackson ruled that Microsoft violated the Sherman Act by tying its
Internet browser to its operating system. The Nasdaq plunged 349 points
while the Dow rose 300.
(SFC, 4/4/00, p.A1)
2000 Apr 5, The Netscape 6 browser
was introduced.
(WSJ, 4/5/00, p.B1)
2000 Apr 14, Phillip W. Katz,
founder of compression software PKWare, died at age 37 from chronic
alcoholism.
(WSJ, 6/19/00, p.A1)
2000 Apr 28, The US Justice Dept.
and 17 states filed to split Microsoft Corp. into 2 corporations.
(SFC, 4/29/00, p.A1)
2000 May 4, The e-mail virus "I
Love You" bug hit millions of computers around the world. It was
considered the most virulent, most damaging ($2.6 bil), most costly and
most rapidly spread virus to date.
(SFC, 5/5/00, p.A1)(SFC, 5/6/00, p.A1)
2000 May 18, Another computer
virus, described as a complex polymorph, began to spread around the
world.
(SFC, 5/19/00, p.A1)
2000 May 26, The "Killer Resume"
computer virus began to circulate.
(SFC, 5/27/00, p.A1)
2000 May 28, Donald W. Davies, who
helped pioneer packet switching, died in London at age 75.
(WSJ, 6/1/00, p.A1)
2000 Jun 4, It was reported that
IBM planned to build the "Blue Gene" computer over the next five years
to model the way human proteins fold into shapes that give them unique
biological properties.
(SFEC, 6/4/00, p.A12)
2000 Jun 5, Computer rebels
planned to launch a data haven, an independent colony in cyberspace,
based on the island of Sealand, a WW II military fortress 6 miles off
the coast of England.
(SFEC, 6/4/00, p.A4)
2000 Jun 9, The FBI began
discussions on the "Serbian Badman Trojan: computer virus disguised as
a movie clip and embedded in some 2000 commercial and home computers.
(SFC, 6/9/00, p.A7)
2000 Jun 10, The
single-elimination contest for battling robots, Battlebots San
Francisco, was held at the Festival Pavilion of Fort Mason in SF.
(SFEC, 6/11/00, p.D1)
2000 Jun 16, The US Senate passed
a bill to allow e-signatures for online contracts. Pres. Clinton said
he would sign the bill.
(SFC, 6/17/00, p.A3)
2000 Jun 30, Pres. Clinton signed
legislation for "digital signatures."
(WSJ, 7/3/00, p.A1)
2000 Jun, Handspring went public.
(WSJ, 6/5/03, p.B1)
2000 Jul 21, It was reported that
computers at Los Alamos simulated a nuclear blast in 3 dimensions for
the 1st time.
(WSJ, 7/21/00, p.A1)
2000 Jul 26, Napster Inc. was hit
with a preliminary injunction to halt all illegal song swapping over
the Internet.
(SFC, 7/27/00, p.A1)
2000 Oct 10, The Nobel Prize in
physics was awarded to Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments, co-inventor of
the computer chip, Herbert Kroemer (72) of UC Santa Barbara and Zhores
Alferov (70) of Russia for work in high-speed transistors and tiny
lasers.
(SFC, 10/11/00, p.A1,6)
2000 Nov 20, Intel planned to
introduce the Pentium 4 microprocessor with speeds of 1.4 and 1.5 GHz.
(SFC, 11/18/00, p.D1)
2000 Dec 8, Richard Clarke, top
cyberspace official of the US National Security Council, warned that
several nations had already created information-warfare units for
disrupting computer networks.
(SFC, 12/9/00, p.A3)
2000 Peter Wayner authored "Free
For All: How Linux and the Free Software Movement Undercut the
High-Tech Titans."
(WSJ, 7/26/00, p.A24)
2000 Data centers consumed .6% of
the world’s electricity. By 2005 this reached 1%.
(Econ, 5/24/08, p.19)
2000 The government of Estonia
decided to go paperless and conduct as much business as possible online.
(NW, 5/13/02, p.72)
2001 Jan 8, Advanced Micro Devices
announced its new 850 MHz Duron chip.
(WSJ, 1/09/01, p.B7)
2001 Mar 19, Palm unveiled its
m500 line but wasn't able to ship in volume until May.
(WSJ, 9/7/01, p.A1)
2001 Mar, Apple Corp. introduced
the Mac OS X.
(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
2001 May 29, Intel unveiled its
new 64-bit processor, the Itanium, previously known under the code name
Merced. A 2nd generation of the chip, code-named McKinley, was planned
for 2002. The project was a joint venture with HP.
(WSJ, 5/29/01, p.A1)(Econ, 2/28/04, p.63)
2001 May 31, Microsoft released
its new Office XP for Windows software.
(SFC, 5/31/01, p.C1)
2001 May, Apple Corp. announced
plans to open 25 retail stores.
(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
2001 Jun 11, It was reported that
Intel researchers had developed tiny silicon transistors that would
allow production of chips with 1 billion transistors by 2007.
(SFC, 6/11/01, p.D1)
2001 Jun 28, A US federal appeals
court reversed the order to breakup Microsoft Corp. into two parts.
(SFC, 6/29/01, p.A1)
2001 Jul 19, The Code Red computer
worm began hitting Internet-connected computers, exploiting a flaw in
Microsoft software. This was among the first network worms to spread
rapidly because it required only a network connection, not a human
opening an attachment.
(SFC, 7/30/01, p.D1)(SFC, 9/3/07, p.C3)
2001 Jul 23, The US Pentagon shut
down public access to its web sites due to a computer worm called the
Code Red worm. It defaced web sites with the words "Hacked by Chinese."
(SFC, 7/24/01, p.A2)
2001 Jul 30, Intel rolled out its
new Pentium III-M processor based on .13 micron chip technology.
(SFC, 7/31/01, p.E3)
2001 Aug 2, Houston launched
SimHouston, a program to provide each of its 1.8 million residents with
free e-mail accounts and access to word processing software.
(SFC, 8/21/01, p.C1)
2001 Aug 26, IBM computer
scientists reported that they had constructed a working logic circuit
within a single molecule of carbon fiber known as a carbon nanotube.
(SSFC, 8/26/01, p.A20)(SFC, 8/27/01, p.D1)
2001 Aug 27, Intel unveiled a
2-GHz Pentium 4 chip.
(SFC, 8/27/01, p.D1)
2001 Aug 27, Michael Dertouzos,
MIT computer scientist, died at age 64. His books included ""The
Unfinished Revolution: Human Centered Computers and What They Can Do
For Us." He also helped drive the creation of the WWW Consortium to
ensure uniformity on the Web.
(SFC, 8/31/01, p.A24)
2001 Aug 28, Gateway, the nation's
No. 4 manufacturer of personal computers, said it was laying off 4,700
employees, 25% of its global work force, because of an increasingly
bleak market.
(AP, 8/28/02)
2001 Sep 3, Hewlett-Packard
announced plans to buy Compaq Computer in a $25 billion stock swap. The
bid was expected to eliminate as many as 15,000 jobs.
(SFC, 9/4/01, p.A1)(SFC, 9/5/01, p.A1)
2001 Sep 6, The US Justice Dept.
and 18 states dropped efforts to breakup Microsoft Corp.
(SFC, 9/7/01, p.A1)
2001 Sep 18, The new computer
worm, W32.Nimda, struck the Internet.
(SFC, 9/19/01, p.D1)
2001 Sep, Larry Ellison of Oracle
Corp. advocated a national ID card system and said Oracle software
could be used.
(SFC, 5/20/02, p.A13)
2001 Oct 9, Pres. Bush appointed
Richard Clarke as special adviser for cyberspace security.
(SFC, 10/10/01, p.A4)
2001 Oct 17, Researchers at
Lucent's Bell Labs reported the development of a tiny new transistor
made of a simple cluster of organic molecules.
(SFC, 10/18/01, p.D2)
2001 Oct 25, Microsoft introduced
its new Windows XP operating system.
(SFC, 10/26/01, p.B1)
2001 Nov 8, Scientists from Lucent
Technologies' Bell Labs issued a report on "nanotransistors," so tiny
that 10 million could fit on the head of a pin.
(SFC, 11/9/01, p.A19)
2001 Nov 14, The Microsoft Xbox, a
video game player, went on sale for $299.
(SFC, 11/14/01, p.D1)
2001 Nov, The US and some 2 dozen
other nations signed a broad accord known as the Convention on
Cybercrime developed by the Council of Europe.
(WSJ, 12/3/01, p.B1)
2001 Dec 4, The "Goner" computer
worm was reported spreading worldwide disguised as a screen saver.
(SFC, 12/5/01, p.B1)
2001 Dec 8, Israeli police
arrested 3 teenagers for creating and spreading the "Goner" computer
worm.
(SSFC, 12/9/01, p.A18)
2001 Dec 11, US Federal agents
carried out dozens of raids and seized computers in some 27 cities and
21 states suspected of pirating software over the Internet. The "Warez"
network of software pirates was targeted.
(SFC, 12/12/01, p.A3)
2001 M. Mitchell Waldrop authored
"The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made
Computing Personal," a history of the personal computer.
(SSFC, 8/26/01, DB p.78)
2001 Jimmy Wales (35), a retired
futures and options trader, founded Wikipedia, an Internet encyclopedia.
(SFC, 12/6/05, p.A10)
2002 Jan 28, Palm Inc. introduced
its $449 i705 handheld computer with wireless e-mail and message
service.
(SFC, 1/28/02, p.E1)
2002 Jan, Apple Corp. introduced a
line of iMacs with a swiveling flat screen on a circular base
containing an 800 MHz G4 processor. It was priced at $1,799.
(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
2002 Mar 14, It was reported that
scientists had developed a brain implant that allowed monkeys to
control a computer cursor by thought alone.
(SFC, 3/14/02, p.A2)
2002 Mar 19, Carly Fiorina, head
of Hewlett-Packard, claimed victory by a slim margin in a proxy battle
to buy Compaq Computer. Some $180 million was reportedly spent in
the effort to win votes.
(SFC, 3/20/02, p.A1,21)
2002 Nov 19, The US Dept. of
Energy awarded IBM a contract to develop a 100 teraflop computer (ASCI
Purple), the estimated speed of the human brain. This followed the
recent development of a Japanese NEC computer that was clocked at 36.5
teraflops, trillions of floating point operations a second, more than 4
times the fastest US computer. Completion was expected in 2004.
(WSJ, 11/19/02, p.B1)
2002 Lou Gerstner (60), former CEO
of IBM, authored, "Who Says Elephants Can't Dance," an account of his
leadership at IBM.
(SFC, 11/18/02, p.E1)
2002 David Sheff authored "China
Dawn," a close-up look at the young men building Internet
infrastructure in China.
(WSJ, 3/12/02, p.A24)
2002 IBM stopped making desktop
computers and sold manufacturing operations to a contract manufacturer.
(WSJ, 1/8/02, p.AB1)
2003 Jan 16, Microsoft announced
its 1st dividend along with a stock split.
(SFC, 1/17/03, p.A1)
2003 May, Munich, Germany, ousted
Microsoft from 14,000 government computers in favor of Linux.
(Econ, 9/13/03, p.59)
2003 Jun 2, PeopleSoft announced
an agreement to buy J.D. Edwards for $1.7 billion.
(SFC, 12/14/04, p.D1)
2003 Apr, Apple Corp. launched its
iTunes music store to provide downloadable music for its iPod.
(Econ, 7/8/06, p.70)
2003 Jun 4, Palm Inc. said it
would buy rival Handspring in a stock deal valued at $195 mil.
(SFC, 6/5/03, p.B1)(WSJ, 6/5/03, p.B1)
2003 Jun 6, Oracle issued a $5.1
billion hostile takeover bid for PeopleSoft at $16 per share.
(SFC, 12/14/04, p.D1)
2003 Jun 23, Apple Computer Inc.
introduced new Macintosh computers that use its "G5" microprocessor, a
design by IBM Corp. that can handle twice as much data at once as
traditional PC microchips.
(Reuters, 6/23/03)
2003 Sep 12, A climate prediction
experiment, expected to involve two million people around the world,
was launched. The program, downloaded from (www.climateprediction.net)
and ran on an ordinary desktop or laptop computer.
(Reuters, 9/11/03)
2003 Sep 23, Advanced Micro
Devices (AMD) introduced 64-bit computing for PC users. The 1st new
chip is the AMD Athalon 64 Processor 3200+, which runs at 2 GHz.
(SFC, 9/23/03, p.B1)
2003 Oct, Apple Corp. introduced a
Windows version of the Mac music jukebox software, iTunes.
(SFC, 1/24/04, p.A12)
2003 Nov 9, Endpcnoise.com
(http://www.endpcnoise.com), a Vancouver, Washington-based custom
outlet, was reported to specialize in creating nearly silent PCs. These
PCs can drop their noise levels to 25 or 26 decibels, while a human's
lowest hearing threshold is generally considered to be about 20
decibels. A busy road is about 80 decibels and a quiet bedroom at night
is about 30 decibels.
(Reuters, 11/9/03)
2003 Nov 20, Advanced Micro
Devices said it would build $2.4 billion chip factory in Germany
to produce microprocessors on 300-mm silicon wafers.
(SFC, 11/21/03, p.B1)
2003 Dec 18, RealNetworks filed a
federal anti-trust suit against Microsoft, alleging it has tried to use
it monopoly power in PC operating systems to unlawfully dominate the
digital media market. A settlement was reached in 2005.
(SFC, 10/12/05, p.C2)
2003 David Kushner authored
"Masters of Doom," an account of how John Carmack and John Romero
created the computer games "Doom" and "Quake."
(WSJ, 5/6/03, p.D5)
2004 Feb 9, Culturecom Holdings
Ltd. of Hong Kong unveiled a DVD player and word-processing device
built with chips developed by Chinese computer scientist Chu Bong-foo.
Chu found a way to put Asia characters in position to command binary
code.
(WSJ, 2/9/04, p.A1)
2004 Mar 16, Japan's Toshiba Corp
said that Guinness World Records had certified its stamp-sized hard
disk drives (HDDs) as the smallest in the world. The 0.85-inch HDDs,
unveiled in January, have storage capacity of up to four gigabytes and
will be used in products such as cellphones and digital camcorders.
(AP, 3/16/04)
2004 Mar 24, EU regulators slapped
a $613 million anti-trust fine against Microsoft.
(WSJ, 3/23/04, p.A3)(SFC, 3/25/04, p.C1)
2004 Apr 2, Sun Microsystems
announced that Microsoft would pay it nearly $2 billion to settle a
legal dispute. Sun also announced layoffs of 3,300 and a business
partnership with Microsoft.
(SFC, 4/3/04, p.A1)
2004 Apr 3, Techies organized a
flash mob to create a supercomputer at UCSF's Koret Gym. 669 computers
were hooked together, but the fastest speed, 180 gigaflops, was
achieved with just 256. The world's fastest computer was Japan's $400
million Earth Simulator running at 35 teraflops, or 35,000 gigaflops.
(SSFC, 4/4/04, p.B1)
2004 Apr 12. Microsoft reported
that it agreed to pay $440 million to settle a broad patent suit with
InterTrust. It covered the protection of digital content against
unauthorized copying.
(WSJ, 4/12/04, p.A3)
2004 Apr 13, The FDA approved a
clinical trial by Cyberkinetics on implants in humans for a
brain-computer interface.
(SFC, 4/14/04, p.C8)
2004 Jun 22, Microsoft received
patent #6,754,472 for “a method and apparatus for transmitting power
and data using the human body.”
(Econ, 7/3/04, p.66)
2004 Sep 28, IBM Corp. claimed
unofficial bragging rights as owner of the world's fastest
supercomputer. IBM said its still-unfinished BlueGene/L System, named
for its ability to model the folding of human proteins, can sustain
speeds of 360 teraflops. A teraflop is 1 trillion calculations per
second. BlueGene/L reached full capacity in 2005
(AP, 9/29/04)(SFC, 9/29/04, p.C1)(SFC, 8/29/05, p.E1)
2004 Oct 14, Google Inc.
introduced a program that quickly scours hard drives for documents,
e-mails, instant messages and past Web searches.
(AP, 10/14/04)
2004 Dec 7, IBM and China’s Lenovo
Group planned a joint PC venture. Lenovo was expected to pay some $2
billion for a majority share of IBM’s PC business. Lenovo announced a
$1.75 billion cash and stock deal to acquire a majority interest in
IBM’s PC business.
(WSJ, 12/7/04, p.A3)(SFC, 12/8/04, p.A1)
2004 Dec 13, Google announced
plans to digitally scan the book collections of 5 major libraries,
including the Univ. Michigan, Stanford, Harvard, NY Public Library and
Oxford, which agreed to books published before 1900.
(SFC, 12/14/04, p.A1)
2004 Dec 13, Oracle Corp. raised
its takeover bid for bitter rival PeopleSoft Inc. by 10 percent and
sealed a $10.3 billion deal that will create the world's second largest
maker of business applications software.
(AP, 12/13/04)(SFC, 12/14/04, p.A1)
2004 Dec 16, Symantec agreed to
acquire Veritas Software.
(SFC, 12/17/04, p.D1)
2004 A system named Red Storm was
scheduled for completion using AMD chips in a $90 million Cray
supercomputer for Sandia National Labs.
(SFC, 10/22/02, p.D1)
2004 Mark Shuttleworth of South
Africa began funding the Ubuntu project, which made a user-friendly
version of Linux, an open source operating system.
(Econ, 6/9/07, TQ p.33)
2005 Jan 1, A new California law
took effect levying a surcharge on computer sales to defray recycling
costs.
(Econ, 1/29/05, p.60)
2005 Jan 11, LeapFrog Enterprises
displayed a $99 digital pen that talks, corrects spelling and answers
math problems. Sales were to begin in the Fall.
(WSJ, 1/12/05, p.B1)
2005 Feb 1, HP researchers
introduced groundbreaking nanotechnology that could replace traditional
transistors on computer chips.
(SFC, 2/1/05, p.A1)
2005 Feb 1, Sun Microsystems began
selling information technology on a pay-per-use basis offering
customers access to computing power for $1 per hour.
(SFC, 2/1/05, p.A1)
2005 Feb 7, IBM, Toshiba and Sony
disclosed the architectural design of a new, jointly developed,
multi-core processor called the Cell.
(Econ, 2/12/05,
p.77)(www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS2972427392.html)
2005 Feb 14, The annual RSA
Conference opened in SF. RSA stands for Riverst, Shamir, and Adelman --
three Israelis who played a fundamental role in developing the PKI
infrastructure. The RSA show remains a fundamental gathering for the
cryptographic community.
(IHub, 2/14/05)
2005 Feb 17, ChoicePoint Inc., a
national provider of identification and credential verification
services, said it will send an additional 110,000 statements to people
informing them of possible identity theft after a group of
well-organized criminals was able to obtain personal information on
almost 140,000 consumers through the company. In 2006 ChoicePoint
agreed to pay $15 million to settle FTC charges that consumer privacy
rights were violated in the DB theft.
(http://money.cnn.com/2005/02/17/technology/personaltech/choicepoint/)(SFC,
1/27/06, p.D3)
2005 Feb 26, Jef Raskin (61),
computer pioneer, died in Pacifica, Ca. he led the shift to a graphical
interface with Apple’s Macintosh.
(WSJ, 3/1/05, p.A1)
2005 Mar 9, Information broker
LexisNexis reported that thieves hacked into records and stole personal
data on some 310,000 US individuals.
(SFC, 4/13/05, p.A4)
2005 Mar 24, A California jury
ordered Toshiba Corp. to pay an additional $84 million in punitive
damages to Lexar Media, Inc. one day after a 381 million award for
breach of fiduciary duty. The total damages of $465 million was the
largest IP verdict in California history.
(SSFC, 4/3/05, p.B1)
2005 Apr 29, Apple began selling
the Tiger operating system, OS X version 10.4, for the Mac computer.
(SFC, 4/30/05, p.C1)
2005 May 31, Advanced Micro
Devices (AMD) introduced its 1st PC microprocessors with a dual-core
chip design, the Athlon 64 X2.
(SFC, 5/31/05, p.C4)
2005 Jun 8, Seagate introduced a
disk drive for notebook computers that stores 160 gigabytes of data. It
used new technology called perpendicular recording.
(WSJ, 6/9/05, p.B7)
2005 Jun 6, IBM and Ecole
Polytechnique of Lausanne, Switz., announced a partnership to begin
building a computer model of the human brain.
(Econ, 6/11/05, p.75)
2005 Jun 11, It was reported that
the latest flash drives can store 4 gigabytes of data.
(Econ, 6/11/05, TQ p.13)
2005 Jun 22, The IBM BlueGene/L
System at Lawrence Livermore National Lab., a computer with 62,000
microprocessors, was crowned king among supercomputers at a conference
in Germany.
(SFC, 6/22/05, p.C1)
2005 Jul 19, Computer and printer
maker Hewlett-Packard Co. said it will cut 14,500 jobs and overhaul its
retirement program in a restructuring plan designed to save $1.9
billion annually.
(AP, 7/19/05)
2005 Aug 29, A Connecticut man
known on the Internet as "illwill" pleaded guilty in Manhattan federal
court to charges relating to the theft of the source code to Microsoft
Corp.'s Windows operating software, considered among the company's
crown jewels. William Genovese, Jr. (28) admitted selling the source
code for Windows 2000 and Windows NT 4.0. On January 27, 2006, he was
sentenced to 2 years in jail.
(AP,
8/29/05)(www.usdoj.gov/criminal/cybercrime/genovesePlea.htm)
2005 Sep 7, Apple Computer Inc.
Chief Executive Steve Jobs introduced a long-anticipated music-playing
cell phone and surprised the faithful with a new pencil-thin iPod.
(AP, 9/8/05)
2005 Nov 22, Microsoft released
its Xbox 360 videogame console.
(WSJ, 11/22/05, p.A1)
2005 George Gilder authored “The
Silicon Eye: How a Silicon Valley Company Aims to Make All Current
Computers, Cameras, and Cell Phones Obsolete.” It was a history of the
Foveon imaging chip, which began development under Carver mead and his
associates in the 1980s with neural networks.
(WSJ, 5/3/05, p.D8)
2005 Jeffrey S. Young authored
“iCon - Steve Jobs: The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business.”
(SSFC, 5/22/05, p.F1)
2005 Intel planned to complete a
new $375 million chipset assembly plant in Chengdu, China.
(SFC, 5/31/05, p.C1)
2005 Microsoft released MSN
Search, powered by its own internally developed search engine. MSN had
previously relied on Yahoo for its search function.
(SFC, 2/2/08, p.C1)
2005 Microsoft acquired Groove
Networks along with its creator Ray Ozzie.
(Econ, 6/28/08, p.78)
2006 Mar 9, Microsoft Corp. took
the wraps off its mysterious Project Origami, unveiling a computer
that's about the size of a large paperback book but runs a full version
of the Windows XP operating system.
(AP, 3/9/06)
2006 Apr 5, Apple Corp. introduced
free software to allow users of its latest Mac models to run MS
Windows.
(Reuters, 4/5/06)(WSJ, 4/6/06, p.B1)
2006 Jun 15, Bill Gates (50)
announced that he would hand over his role as chief architect of
Microsoft to Ray Ozzie (50).
(Econ, 6/24/06, p.75)
2006 Jun 29, The US government
announced it had recovered a stolen laptop computer and hard drive with
sensitive data on up to 26.5 million veterans and military personnel.
(AP, 6/29/07)
2006 Jul 27, Intel introduced a
new line of microprocessors called Core 2 Duos. New features included
higher performance and lower power consumption.
(SFC, 7/28/06, p.D1)
2006 Jul 27, Sharman Networks
Ltd., the company behind Kazaa file-sharing software, said it will
redesign its software and pay over $115 million in penalties to leading
music and movie companies.
(SFC, 7/28/06, p.D3)
2006 Nov 14, Intel launched its
first computer chips with four processing cores.
(www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2058457,00.asp)
2006 Nov 30, Microsoft Corp.
released Windows Vista for businesses. This was the 1st major upgrade
to its operating system in 5 years. Release for retail customers was
set for Jan 30.
(SFC, 12/1/06, p.D1)
2006 Dec 11, Scientists from IBM,
Macronix and Qimonda said they developed a material that made
"phase-change" memory 500 to 1,000 times faster than the commonly-used
"flash" memory, while using half as much power.
(AFP, 12/11/06)
2006 Dec 12, Online political
groups, the Campaign to Defend the Constitution and the Christian
Alliance for Progress, demanded that Wal-Mart dump Left Behind: Eternal
Forces, a new computer game in which players must either kill or
convert non-Christians.
(SFC, 12/12/06, p.A1)
2006 Dec 12, Alan Shugart, disk
drive pioneer, died in Monterey, Ca. Shugart led a team of IBM
engineers in 1969 that developed the floppy disk and went on to found
Shugart Associates. In 1979 he co-founded Seagate Technology.
(SFC, 12/14/06, p.B5)
2006 Adam Greenfield authored
“Everywhere: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing.”
(Econ, 4/28/07, SR p.18)
2007 Jan 5, Hitachi announced the
1st 1-terrabyte hard drive, eclipsing Seagate’s 750 gigabyte drives.
(SFC, 1/5/07, p.C1)
2007 Jan 9, Steve Jobs introduced
the iPhone at the annual Macworld Expo in SF. The 4GB version would be
sold for $499. Apple dropped the word “Computer” from its name.
(SFC, 1/10/07, p.C1)(WSJ, 1/11/07, p.C1)
2007 Jan 22, Intel and Sun
Microsystems announced a major partnership under which Sun would begin
selling business computers running on Intel’s Xeon microprocessors,
while Intel will endorse and support sun’s Solaris operating system.
(SFC, 1/23/07, p.D3)
2007 Jan 26, Intel said it will
begin using a new material on its next generation of chips making them
more energy efficient. IBM also announced changes in its chip-making
processes.
(SFC, 1/27/07, p.A1)
2007 Jan 30, The Windows Vista
computer operating system from Microsoft went on sale in the consumer
retail market.
(SFC, 1/30/07, p.C1)
2007 Feb 11, Intel introduced a
new super-processor at the opening of an int’l conference of chip
scientists. The processor would be able to perform over 1 trillion
mathematical calculations per second (teraflop), but commercial use
would not be available for 5 years.
(SFC, 2/12/07, p.A9)
2007 Feb 13, In Canada D-Wave
Systems, based in Burnaby near Vancouver, announced the existence of
the world’s first practical quantum computer.
(Econ, 2/17/07, p.81)
2007 Mar 17, John Backus (b.1924),
programmer, died in Oregon. His development of the Fortran programming
language in the 1950s changed how people interacted with computers and
paved the way for modern software. Fortran, short for Formula
Translation, reduced the number of programming statements necessary to
operate a machine by a factor of 20. The Association for Computing
Machinery gave Backus its 1977 Turing Award, one of the industry's
highest accolades. Backus also won a National Medal of Science in 1975
and got the 1993 Charles Stark Draper Prize, the top honor from the
National Academy of Engineering.
(AP, 3/20/07)
2007 Mar 26, Intel Corp. announced
it will build a $2.5 billion chip factory in China, giving the US
company a bigger presence in the booming Chinese market and boosting
Beijing's efforts to attract high-tech investment. Intel also unveiled
a prototype chip that uses optical connections to increase speed.
Products using the technology were expected to appear within 3 years.
(AP, 3/26/07)(WSJ, 3/26/07, p.B6)
2007 Apr 4, Apple updated its
desktop Mac Pro computers adding two new 3.0GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
processors, bringing 8-core processing to the Mac. The new machines can
run the 3.0GHz Intel Xeon processors and are available as build to
order options.
(www.macworld.com/news/2007/04/04/eightcore/index.php)
2007 May 30, Microsoft introduced
a computer designed like a table with a touch-screen called Surface. It
was aimed for use in hotels and casinos.
(WSJ, 5/30/07, p.B1)
2007 Aug 3, Lenovo Group Ltd. said
it will sell a basic personal computer aimed at China's vast but poor
rural market and priced as low as $199.
(AP, 8/3/07)
2007 Aug 27, In South Africa
Hewlett-Packard became the first multinational to be exempted from
selling 30 percent of its business in South Africa to black investors.
Under an agreement reached with the government, the company will
instead invest millions of dollars in a new business institute to
provide training for 1,800 students over the next six years.
(AFP, 8/27/07)
2007 Aug 27, Taiwan's leading
computer vendor Acer Inc moved to substantially boost its market share
by acquiring US rival Gateway amid a major consolidation among the
world's top computer companies. Acer said it would pay $710 million for
Gateway.
(AP, 8/27/07)(Econ, 9/1/07, p.60)
2007 Dec 6, IBM reported that it
has made a breakthrough in converting electrical signals into light
pulses that brings closer the day when supercomputing, which now
requires huge machines, will be done on a single chip.
(Reuters, 12/6/07)
2007 Dec 14, Asus Technology of
Taiwan unveiled a $299 version of Eee PC, a 2-pound laptop for kids
that stores data on flash memory.
(SFC, 12/14/07, p.D1)
2007 Ian Ayres authored “Super
Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart,” a look
at how computers have enabled automatic processes to surpass human
experts in numerous fields.
(Econ, 9/15/07, p.103)
2008 Feb 4, Intel said it has
built a new chip with a record 2 billion transistors. Its new quad-core
Itanium processor will operate at frequencies up to 2 gigahertz.
(SFC, 2/5/08, p.C2)
2008 Feb 12, European Union
antitrust regulators raided Intel Corp. and computer resellers
searching for evidence that they may have broken cartel or monopoly
rules.
(AP, 2/12/08)
2008 Feb 15, It was reported that
a new computer virus called Mocmex, identified as a Trojan Horse from
China, had been discovered in digital photo frames. It recognized and
blocked antivirus software from over 100 security vendors and collected
passwords for online games.
(SFC, 2/15/08, p.C1)
2008 Feb 27, The EU fined
Microsoft Corp. $1.3 billion for charging rivals too much for software
information. The fine is the largest ever for a single company and the
first time the EU has penalized a business for failing to obey an
antitrust order.
(AP, 2/27/08)
2008 Feb 27, Germany's highest
court found that government surveillance of personal computers violates
the individual right to privacy. German investigators said this will
restrict their ability to pursue terrorists.
(AP, 2/27/08)
2008 Mar 5, Joseph Weizenbaum
(b.1923), a computer programmer who helped advance artificial
intelligence only to become a critic of the technology later in his
life, died. He was a professor at MIT when in 1966 he introduced ELIZA,
named for Eliza Doolittle, the heroine of "My Fair Lady." The program
allowed a person to "converse" with a computer, using what the person
said to create the computer's reply.
(AP, 3/13/08)(WSJ, 3/15/08, p.A6)
2008 Apr 8, IBM began shipping
high-end computers built around the Power6 processor, the fastest chip
to date.
(SFC, 4/9/08, p.C1)
2008 Apr 21,
It was reported that the 4th generation Oqo Model 02 personal
computer, which weighed one pound and clipped onto a belt, was
available for a starting price of $1,300. It had been developed over
the last 8 years in SF in a venture begun by former Apple and IBM
engineers.
(SFC, 4/21/08, p.D1)
2008 Apr 30, Scientists at
Hewlett-Packard said they have discovered a fourth basic type of
electrical circuit that could lead to a computer you never have to boot
up. The three fundamental elements of a passive circuit included
resistors, capacitors and inductors. In the 1970s Leon Chua of the
University of California at Berkeley, theorized there should be a
fourth called a memory resistor, or memristor, which remembers the
direction and the amount of charge that flows through it.
(Reuters, 5/1/08)
2008 May 30, A jury in Syracuse,
NY, found Hewlett-Packard guilty of infringing a patent for data
processing held by Cornell Univ. and ordered the company to pay Cornell
$184 million.
(SFC, 6/4/08, p.C5)
2008 Jul 25, Randy Pausch (47), a
Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist, died at his home in
Virginia. His "last lecture" in September 2007, about facing terminal
cancer, has become an Internet sensation and a best-selling book.
(AP, 7/25/08)
2008 Sep 7, In London an urgent
inquiry was underway after a disc containing the personal details of
5,000 justice staff went missing in yet another embarrassing data loss
blunder. Private contractor EDS told the Prison Service in July that
the hard drive had gone astray. The missing disc was last seen in July
2007.
(AP, 9/7/08)
2008 Sep 7, South Korean police
arrested four people over the theft of data on 11 million customers of
a local oil refiner in what is being called the country's largest-ever
data leak.
(AFP, 9/7/08)
2008 Sep 23, Portugal's Socialist
government began the roll-out of 500,000 ultra-cheap laptops for school
children in a program that the government said could be extended to
Venezuela. While the Magellan computer will be assembled in Portugal by
a company called JP Sa Couto, it is based on Intel's Classmate PC, a
cheap computer that has been adopted in various formats in countries
such as Brazil and Indonesia.
(Reuters, 9/23/08)
2009 Jan 8, Dell Inc. announced
that it is moving its Irish manufacturing operations to Poland by 2010,
as part of a cost cutting measure that will result in the loss of some
1,900 Irish jobs.
(WSJ, 1/9/09, p.B4)
2009 Jan 21, Intel said it will
close several older factories displacing some 5-6 thousand workers in
reaction to a sharp drop in demand for its computer chips.
(WSJ, 1/22/09, p.B1)
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