Computers & Society Timeline Outline

Among the First Records of Litigation over an Invention
(1607)

Computing the "Seaman's Bible"
(1766)

The First Commercially Produced Mechanical Calculator
(1820)

Funding Cut Off for the Difference Engine No. 1
(1842)

One of the Most Remarkable Human Computers
(1856)

Passages from the Life of a Philosopher
(1864)

The Earliest Exhibition Exclusively of Scientific Instruments
(1876)

300 Clerks Reviewing 2,500,000 Insurance Policies with 24 Calculators
(1877)

Publication of the Tables of de Prony
(1891)

Robot
(1920)

The Social Security Program Creates a Giant Data-Processing Challenge
(1935 – 1936)

The First Independent Scientific Computing Service
(1937)

Vannevar Bush's "Rapid Selector"
(1938)

The First Demonstration of Remote Computing
(September 11, 1940)

The ENIAC Meets the Public
(February 14, 1946)

Cybernetics: The First Widely Distributed Book on Electronic Computing
(1948)

The First Computer that Could Modify a Stored Program
(January 1948)

The First Popular Book on Electronic Computers
(1949)

Automated Detection and Interception System
(1949)

The Turing Test
(1950)

"Can Man Build a Superman?"
(January 23, 1950)

Simon, the First Personal Computer
(November 1950)

The First OCR System: "GISMO"
(1951)

The First Journal on Electronic Computing
(October 1952)

UNIVAC Predicts the Election of Dwight D. Eisenhower
(November 4, 1952)

First Widely Read English Book on Electronic Computing
(1953)

The First Report on the Application of Electronic Computers to Business
(June 1953)

Coining the Phrase "Social Network"
(1954)

The First Computer to be Sold to a Non-Governmental Customer in the U.S.
(1954)

Satirizing the Role of Automation in Eliminating Jobs, and Librarians
(1957)

There are Forty Computers on American University Campuses
(1957)

The First "Large Scale" Application of Humanities Computing in the U. S.
(1959)

The First Computer Computer Matching Dating Service
(1959)

The First Journal on Computing Changes its Name
(1960)

6000 Computers in U.S., Out of 10,000 Worldwide
(1960)

The First Electronic Learning System
(1960)

Man-Computer Symbiosis
(March 1960)

Computerized Stock-Quotation System
(1961)

Coining the Term "Computer Science"
(1961)

The Largest Archive of Digital Social Science Data
(1962)

The Information Economy
(1962)

Augmenting Human Intellect
(October 1962)

Licklider at the Information Processing Techniques Office, Begins Funding Research that Leads to the ARPANET
(October 1, 1962)

First Use of the Term "Hacker" in the Context of Computing
(November 20, 1963)

The First Online Reservation System
(1964)

Social Security Numbers as Identifiers
(1964)

"Information Overload" Coined
(1964)

Early Home Computer?
(1965)

Email Begins
(1965)

Invasion of Privacy by Computers
(1965)

Origin of the Concept of Technological Singularity
(1965)

Moore's Law
(April 19, 1965)

The First Magazine Cover Designed Using Computer Graphics
(July 1965)

Possibly the First Personal Computer Club
(1966)

The First Hand-Held Electronic Calculator
(1967 – June 25, 1974)

The First Anthology of Research on Humanities Computing
(1967)

35,000 Computers Were Operating in the United States
(1967)

Computer Privacy
(March 1967)

Protecting Security in a Networked Environment
(Circa May – September 1967)

"2001: A Space Odyssey"
(1968)

Invention of the "Smart Card"
(1968 – 1984)

Features of the Future ARPANET
(April 1968)

The First Widely-Attended International Exhibition of Computer Art
(August 2 – October 20, 1968)

The First ATM
(Circa 1969 – 1970)

The First Commercial Online Service
(1969)

First First Digital Sampler in the First Digital Music Studio
(Circa 1969)

Problem with the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer Nearly Prevents the First Moon Walk
(July 21, 1969)

Xerox PARC is Founded
(1970)

First Systematic Review of Computer Security Issues
(February 1970)

The First Commercially Sold Coin-Operated Video Game
(November 1971)

Pong: The First Successful Computer Game
(June 27, 1972)

Probably the World's First Online Community
(1973)

The First Public Computerized Bulletin Board System
(1973)

Invention of the Word "Internet"
(Circa 1973)

Code of Fair Information Practice
(July 1973)

The Privacy Act of 1974
(May 1974)

200,000 Computers are Operating in the U. S.
(1975)

Byte Magazine
(1975)

The First Personal Computer Offered for Sale
(January 1975)

Gates and Allen Officially Found "Micro-Soft" (Microsoft)
(April 4, 1975)

Probably the First Personal Computer Conference
(March 1976)

Foundation of Apple Computer and the Origin of the Name
(April 1, 1976 – December 13, 2011)

The First Personal Computer Sold as a Fully Assembled Product
(1977)

The First Intentional Spam
(May 1, 1977)

The Network Nation
(1978)

Probably the First U. S. Legislation against Computer Crimes
(1978)

The First Dial-UP CBBS
(February 16, 1978)

Compuserve
(1979)

Origins of the Computer History Museum
(September 1979)

IBM Introduces the IBM 5150- The IBM PC
(August 12, 1981)

The First Computer Virus Spread by Floppy Disk
(1982)

William Gibson Coins the Word Cyberspace
(July 1982)

The "Trash" 80: The First Notebook Computer?
(1983)

6,000,000 Personal Computers are Sold in the U.S.
(1983)

The Earliest Fictional Treatment of Word Processing by a Prominent Literary Author
(January 1983)

Free Software
(September 23, 1983)

Cyberspace
(1984)

One of the First Online Communities
(April 1, 1985)

The Free Software Foundation
(October 4, 1985)

Cyberpunk
(1986)

25,000,000 PCs Have Been Sold in the U.S.
(1987)

Foundation of the First Commercial ISP
(May 12, 1987)

"Toward a National Research Telecommunications Network"
(November 1987)

The First Computer-Animated Film to Win an Academy Award
(1988)

The First Operational Online Antiquarian Bookselling Site
(1988)

Boing-Boing
(1988)

The First Computer Worm to Attract Wide Attention
(November 2, 1988)

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is Founded
(1990)

Coalition for Networked Information
(1990)

Berners-Lee Plans the World Wide Web
(November 12, 1990)

The First Web Page
(November 13, 1990)

The First Web Browser and Web Server
(December 25, 1990)

"Clearing the Way for Electronic Commerce"
(1991)

Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility
(March 26 – March 28, 1991)

Berners-Lee Makes Web Server and Web Browser Software Available at No Cost
(August 6, 1991)

One of the First U.S. Cases in Cyberspace Law
(October 29, 1991)

The First Image Posted to the Web
(1992)

The Internet Society
(1992)

There are 50 Web Servers on the Internet
(1992)

341,634 Percent Growth Rate on the Internet
(1993)

Perhaps the First Law Review Symposium Dedicated to Cyberspace
(1993)

Only About 2000 People in China Use the Internet
(1993)

There are 250 Web Servers on the Internet
(1993)

The First Tablet Computer with Wireless Connectivity
(April 1993 – July 1994)

CERN Releases Rights to World Wide Web Software
(April 30, 1993)

The First Commercial Website with the First Online Advertising
(May 1993)

There are 2500 Web Servers and 10,000 Websites
(1994)

Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC)
(1994)

From Webspace to Cyberspace
(1994)

One of the Earliest Guided Tours of the Web
(January 1994)

Selling Wine without Bottles
(March 1994)

The First Internet Cafe
(March 12 – March 13, 1994)

Commercial Spaming Starts with the "Green Card Spam"
(April 12, 1994)

Amazon.com is Founded
(July 1994 – July 1995)

Probably the First For-Profit Social Networking Site
(1995)

There are Approximately 73,500 Servers; WWW is Generally Equated with the Internet
(1995)

The Book and Beyond
(April 7 – October 1, 1995)

The Beginning of the "Dot-Com Bubble"
(August 9, 1995)

There are 100,000 Websites
(1996)

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
(1996)

sixdegrees.com: An Early Social Networking Site
(1997)

There are 1,000,000 Websites
(April 1997)

IBM Deep Blue Defeats Gary Kasparov
(May 11, 1997)

The Cluetrain Manifesto
(1998)

"You've Got Mail"
(1998)

The Digital Millenium Copyright Act
(October 12, 1998)

Computers Have Not Caused a Reduction in Paper Usage or Printing
(1999)

The Matrix
(1999)

"The Internet of Things"
(1999)

Napster is Founded
(June 1, 1999)

The Size of the Internet in 2000
(2000)

Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace
(2000)

Over 10,000,000 Domain Names Have Been Registered
(February 2000)

Climax of the Dot-Com Bubble
(March 10, 2000)

There are 20,000,000 Websites on the Internet.
(September 2000)

Safeguarding Internet Security in China
(December 28, 2000)

The Future of Ideas: The Fate of Commons in a Connected World
(2001)

Conflicts between Androids and Men
(2001)

The Wikipedia Begins
(January 15, 2001)

An Injunction Against Napter to Prevent Trading of Copyrighted Music
(March 5, 2001)

Size of the Internet in 2002
(2002)

Minority Report
(2002)

How Much Information?
(2003)

Second Life is Launched
(2003)

Privacy of Medical Records and Electronic Data
(April 14, 2003)

MySpace is Founded
(August 2003)

Metroblogging
(November 2003)

World Summit on the Information Society
(December 10 – December 12, 2003)

The First U.S. Standards for Sending Commercial E-Mail
(December 16, 2003)

800,000,000 People are Using the Internet
(2004)

2,350,000 U.S. Students in Online Learning
(2004)

Facebook
(February 4, 2004)

There are 50,000,000 Websites on the Internet
(May 2004)

8,000,000 U.S. Blogs
(November 2004)

Use of Internet in China
(2005)

"From Gutenberg to the Internet"
(2005)

"Broadcast Yourself"
(February 2005)

Development and State Control of the Chinese Internet
(April 14, 2005)

Wikimania!
(August 4 – August 8, 2005)

The Amazon Mechanical Turk
(November 2, 2005)

Massively Distributed Collaboration
(November 9, 2005)

The Growing Field of Internet Marketing
(2006)

The Highest Price Paid for a Domain Name
(January 16, 2006)

File-Sharing Exceeds Sales of Digital Music Downloads
(January 22, 2006)

On the Origins of the ENIAC
(February 14, 2006)

Crowdsourcing
(June 2006)

100,000,000 Users Within Three Years
(August 9, 2006)

Web-Footed?
(September 2006)

More than 100,000,000 Websites
(November 1, 2006)

The Importance of Social Networking on the Internet
(December 16, 2006)

Information is Expanding 10X Faster than Any Product on this Planet
(February 2007)

In 2007 There Were 12,000,000 U.S. Blogs
(February 2007)

Apple Introduces the iPhone
(June 29, 2007)

The World Wide Telecom Web for Illiterate Populations
(August 2007)

Gaining 100,000,000 New Accounts in One Year
(September 7, 2007)

The Thinnest Notebook Computer
(January 15, 2008)

About 200 Million People in the U.S. Have Broadband Connections
(May 2008)

"Computer Criminal Number One"
(August 5, 2008)

181,277,835 Active Websites
(September 2008)

The Leading Classified Advertising Service
(September 2008)

First Reported Case of ZZZ-Mailing
(December 15, 2008)

"The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age"
(2009)

"Readability" is Launched
(2009)

China Becomes the Top User of the Internet
(January 14, 2009)

Towards the Open Advancement of Question Answering Systems
(April 22, 2009)

Kickstarter.com is Launched
(April 28, 2009)

The Death of Michael Jackson Impacts the Internet
(June 25, 2009)

1.7 Billion Internet Users
(September 30, 2009)

World Texting Competition is Won by Koreans
(January 14, 2010)

Introduction of Apple's iPad
(January 27, 2010)

Facebook has 400,000,000 Users
(February 4, 2010)

"The Data-Driven Life"
(April 20, 2010)

Cell Phones Are Now Used More for Data than Speech
(May 13, 2010)

After Five Years, More Than Two Billion Views Per Day
(May 16, 2010)

Data on Mobile Networks is Doubling Each Year
(August 1, 2010)

"Every Two Days We Create as Much Information as We Did up to 2003"
(August 4, 2010)

"The Social Network"
(October 1, 2010)

Towards a New Digital Legal Information Environment
(November 9, 2010)

The Wikileaks U. S. Diplomatic Cables Leak
(November 28 – December 8, 2010)

The Website of MasterCard is Hacked by Wikileaks Supporters
(December 8, 2010)

The Digital Public Library of America
(December 13, 2010)

Culturomics Introduced by the Cultural Observatory
(December 16, 2010)

Founder of Wikileaks to Publish his Autobiography
(December 27, 2010)

Facebook is the Most Searched for and Most Visited Website in America
(December 29, 2010)

The Smartphone Becomes the CPU of the Laptop
(January 2011)

More than Ten Billion Apps are Downloaded from the Apple App Store
(January 22, 2011)

The New York Times Recommendations Service
(January 31, 2011)

Confession: A Roman Catholic iPhone App
(February 2011)

42.3% of the U.S. Population Uses Facebook
(February 2011)

4.3 Billion IP Addresses Have Been Allocated
(February 3, 2011)

Worldwide Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information
(February 10, 2011)

IBM's Watson Question Answering System Defeats Humans at Jeopardy!
(February 14 – February 16, 2011)

Two Billion People Now Use the Internet Regularly
(February 17, 2011)

The U. S. National Broadband Map
(February 17, 2011)

Four Phases of Government Internet Surveillance and Censorship to Date
(February 25, 2011)

The Environmental Impacts of eBooks and eBook Readers
(March 2011)

Koomey’s Law of Electrical Efficiency in Computing
(March 2011)

The Impact of Automation on Legal Research
(March 4, 2011)

The Impact of Artificial Intelligence and Automation on Jobs
(March 6, 2011)

Walmart Buys Kosmix.com, Forming @WalmartLabs
(April 18, 2011)

Microsoft Acquires Skype for $8.5 Billion
(May 2011)

In May 2011 Netflix was the Largest Source of Internet Traffic in North America
(May 2011)

McKinsey Report on the Impact of the Internet on Growth, Jobs, and Prosperity
(May 2011)

The Expanding Digital Universe: Surpassing 1.8 Zetabytes
(June 2011)

FaceBook Serves a Trillion Page Views in June 2011
(June 2011)

Digital Democracy is Not So Democratic
(June 10, 2011)

New Corporation Sells MySpace for $545 Million Loss
(June 29, 2011)

How Search Engines Have Become a Primary Form of External or Transactive Memory
(July 14, 2011)

Google Agrees to Acquire Smart-Phone Maker Motorola Mobility
(August 15, 2011)

Free Online Artificial Intelligence Course Attracts 58,000 Students
(August 15, 2011)

Toward Cognitive Computing Systems
(August 18, 2011)

Michael Hart, Father of eBooks & Founder of Project Gutenberg, Dies
(September 6, 2011)

Amazon Introduces the Kindle Fire
(September 28 – November 14, 2011)

Steve Jobs Dies
(October 5, 2011)

Digital Books Represent 25% of Sales of Some Categories of Books but Less than 5% of Childrens' Books
(November 20, 2011)

Rapid Growth of the Digital Textbook Market in the U.S.
(November 23, 2011)

Google Maps 6.0 for Android Introduces Indoor Maps and a "My Location" Feature
(November 29, 2011)

More than 10 Billion Android Apps Downloaded
(December 6, 2011)

100 Million Words Translated per Week by Google Translate
(December 8, 2011)

More than One Trillion Videos Were Played Back on YouTube in 2011
(December 20, 2011)

Sales of eBook Readers in 2011
(January 5, 2012)

Transforming Google into a Search Engine that Understands Not Only Content but People and Relationships
(January 10, 2012)

Technological Unemployment: Are Robots Replacing Workers?
(January 23, 2012 – January 13, 2013)

Nearly 50% of U.S. Mobile Subscribers Own Smartphones
(March 29, 2012)

Harvard & M.I.T. to Offer Free Online Courses
(May 2, 2012)

Online Advertising is Expected to Surpass Print Advertising
(October 2012)

2.5 Quintillion Bytes of Data Each Day
(October 23, 2012)

Windows 8, With Touch Screen Features, is Released
(October 26, 2012)

$2.6 Billion Spent on Ads on Phones and Tablets in 2012
(October 29, 2012)

Coursera Enrolls Nearly Two Million Students from 196 Countries in Online Courses within its First Year
(November 20, 2012)

eBook Reading Jumps; Print Book Reading Declines
(December 17, 2012)

"Libraries Have Shifted from Warehouses of Books & Materials to Become Participatory Sites of Culture and Learning"
(December 28, 2012)

"Information Technology Dividends Outpace All Others"
(January 11, 2013)

The Pew Internet Report on Library Services in the Digital Age
(January 22, 2013)

On the Twentieth Anniversary CERN Restores the First Website
(April 30, 2013)