Computer History 1960 - 1980
| Year | Event |
| 1960 | 2,000 computers are in use in the United states. |
| 1960 | IBM develops the first automatic mass-production facility for transistors in New York. |
| 1960 | Will Wright is born January 20, 1960. |
| 1960 | IBMs 1400 series machines, aimed at the business market begin to be distributed. |
| 1960 | The first integrated circuits (IC's) begin being sold for $120.00 and are chosen to be used on the Gemini spacecraft. |
| 1960 | The Common Business-Oriented Language (COBOL) programming language is invented. |
| 1960 | Psychologist Frank Rosenblatt creates the Mark I Perception, which has an "eye" that can learn to identify its ABCs. |
| 1960 | NASA launches TIROS, the first weather satellite into space. |
| 1960 | Bob Bemer introduced the backslash. |
| 1960 | Physicist Theodore Maiman creates the first laser May 16, 1960. |
| 1960 | AT&T introduces the dataphone and the first known MODEM. |
| 1960 | RS-232 is introduced by EIA. |
| 1960 | IFIP is founded. |
| 1960 | Digital introduces the PDP-1 the first minicomputer. |
| 1960 | Tim Cook is born November 1, 1960. |
| 1960 | Anders Hejlsberg is born in December of 1960. |
| 1961 | Brendan Eich is born in 1961. |
| 1961 | Hewlett-Packard stock is accepted by the New York Stock Exchange for national and international trading. |
| 1961 | Ed Colligan is born March 4, 1961. |
| 1961 | Leonard Kleinrock publishes his first paper entitled "Information Flow in Large Communication Nets" is published May 31, 1961. |
| 1961 | Fairchild Semiconductor introduces the first commercially available integrated circuits (IC's). |
| 1961 | The first IBM Selectric typewriter is released July 27, 1961. |
| 1961 | General Motors puts the first industrial robot the 4,000 pound Unimate to work in a New Jersey factory. |
| 1961 | Accredited Standards Committee is founded, this committee later becomes the INCITS. |
| 1961 | P.Z. Ingerman develops a thunk. |
| 1961 | ECMA is established. |
| 1961 | The first transcontinental telegraph line began operation October 24, 1961. |
| 1961 | The programming language FORTRAN IV is created. |
| 1962 | Steve Russell creates "SpaceWar!" and releases it in February 1962. This game is considered the first game intended for computers. |
| 1962 | Philippe Kahn is born March 16, 1962. |
| 1962 | Leonard Kleinrock releases his paper talking about packetization. |
| 1962 | AT&T places first commercial communications Satellite, the Telstar I into orbit. |
| 1962 | Paul Baran suggests transmission of data using fixed size message blocks. |
| 1962 | J.C.R. Licklider becomes the first Director of IPTO and gives his vision of a galactic network. |
| 1962 | Philips invents the compact audio cassette tape. |
| 1962 | The NASA rocket, the Mariner II, is equipped with a Motorola transmitter on it's trip to Venus. |
| 1962 | Sharp is founded. |
| 1963 | IEEE is founded. |
| 1963 | The American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) is developed to standardize data exchange among computers. |
| 1963 | Kevin Mitnick is born August 6, 1963. |
| 1963 | Bell Telephone introduces the push button telephone November 18, 1963. |
| 1963 | On December 7, 1963 during a Army-Navy football game on CBS the first instant replay is shown on TV. |
| 1964 | Jeff Bezos is born January 12, 1964. |
| 1964 | Dartmouth Universitys John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz develop Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Language (BASIC) and run it for the first time May 1, 1964. |
| 1964 | Baran publishes reports "On Distributed Communications." |
| 1964 | AT&T starts the practice of monitoring telephone calls in the hopes of identifying phreakers. |
| 1964 | The TRANSIT system becomes operational on U.S. Polaris submarines. This system later becomes known as GPS. |
| 1964 | On April 7, 1964 IBM introduces its System/360, the first of its computers to use interchangeable software and peripheral equipment. |
| 1964 | Leonard Kleinrock publishes his first book on packet nets entitled Communication Nets: Stochastic Message Flow and Design. |
| 1964 | The first computerized encyclopedia is invented at the Systems Development Corporation. |
| 1964 | Marc Benioff is born September 25, 1964. |
| 1964 | Eric Bina is born in October 1964. |
| 1964 | Tsutomu Shimomura is born October 23, 1964. |
| 1964 | Alan Emtage is born November 27, 1964. |
| 1965 | Robert Scoble is born January 18, 1965. |
| 1965 | Ted Nelson coins the term "hypertext," which refers to text that is not necessarily linear. |
| 1965 | Hypermedia is coined by Ted Nelson. |
| 1965 | Digital Equipment Company's first successful minicomputer, the PDP-8 is introduced. The computer sold for $18,000 and over 50,000 are sold. |
| 1965 | Donald Davies coins the word "Packet." |
| 1965 | Engineers at TRW Corporation develop a Generalized Information Retrieval Language and System that later develops to the Pick Database Management System used today on Unix and Windows systems. |
| 1965 | Michael Dell is born February 23, 1965. |
| 1965 | Millions watch for the first time a space probe crashing into the moon on March 24, 1965. |
| 1965 | Texas Instruments develops the transistor-transistor logic (TTL). |
| 1965 | Lawrence G. Roberts with MIT performs the first long distant dial-up connection between a TX-2 computer n Massachusetts and a Q-32 in California. |
| 1965 | Gordon Moore makes an observation in a April 19, 1965 paper that later becomes widely known as Moore's Law. |
| 1965 | Robert Tappan Morris is born November 8, 1965. |
| 1966 | MITs Joseph Weizenbaum writes a program called Eliza, that makes the computer act as a psychotherapist. |
| 1966 | Lawrence G. Roberts and Tom Marill publish a paper about their earlier success at connecting over dial-up. |
| 1966 | David Filo is born April 20, 1966. |
| 1966 | Stephen Gray establishes the first personal computer club, the Amateur Computer Society. |
| 1966 | Robert Taylor joins ARPA and brings Larry Roberts there to develop ARPANET. |
| 1966 | The programming language BCPL is created. |
| 1967 | IBM creates the first floppy disk. |
| 1967 | The first CES is held in New York from the July 24 to 28, 1967. |
| 1967 | Donald Davies creates 1-node NPL packet net. |
| 1967 | Wes Clark suggests use of a minicomputer for network packet switch. |
| 1967 | The LOGO programming language is developed and is later known as "turtle graphics," a simplified interface useful for teaching children computers. |
| 1967 | Donald Davies creates 1-node NPL packet net. |
| 1967 | Ralph Baer creates "Chase", the first video game that was capable of being played on a television. |
| 1967 | HES is developed at the Brown University. |
| 1967 | Nokia is formed. |
| 1967 | GPS becomes available for commercial use. |
| 1967 | ISACA is established. |
| 1968 | Intel Corporation is founded by Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore. |
| 1968 | Hewlett Packard began marketing the first mass-marketed PC, the HP 9100A. |
| 1968 | The first Network Working Group (NWG) meeting is held. |
| 1968 | Bob Propst invents the office cubicle. |
| 1968 | Larry Roberts publishes ARPANET program plan on June 3, 1968. |
| 1968 | On June 4, 1968 Dr. Robert Dennard at the IBM T.J. Watson Research center is granted U.S. patent 3,387,286 describing a one-transistor DRAM cell. |
| 1968 | First RFP for a network goes out. |
| 1968 | Alan Cox is born July 22, 1968. |
| 1968 | UCLA is selected to be the first node on the Internet as we know it today and serve as the Network Msmnt Center. |
| 1968 | The movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" is released. |
| 1968 | SHRDLU is created. |
| 1968 | Seiko markets a miniature printer for use with calculators. |
| 1968 | Sony invents Trinitron. |
| 1968 | Jerry Yang is born November 6, 1968. |
| 1968 | Douglas Engelbart publicly demonstrates Hypertext on the NLS on December 9, 1968. |
| 1969 | Control Data Corporation led by Seymour Cray, release the CDC 7600, considered by most to be the first supercomputer. |
| 1969 | AT&T Bell Laboratories develop Unix. |
| 1969 | The first totally artificial heart is placed into Haskell Carp on April 4, 1969 for 64 hours until a donor heart became available. |
| 1969 | Steve Crocker releases RFC #1 on April 7, 1979 introducing the Host-to-Host and talking about the IMP software. |
| 1969 | Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is founded on May 1, 1969. |
| 1969 | Adrian Carmack is born May 5, 1969. |
| 1969 | Gary Starkweather, while working with Xerox invents the laser printer. |
| 1969 | UCLA puts out a press release introducing the public to the Internet on July 3, 1969. |
| 1969 | At 4:17 Eastern Time the Apollo 11 space craft lands on the moon and Neil Armstrong becomes the first human to walk on the moon. |
| 1969 | Intel sells its first commercial product, the 3101 Schottky bipolar 64-bit SRAM chip. |
| 1969 | Ralph Baer files for a US Patent on August 21, 1969 that describes playing games on a television and would later be a part of the Magnavox Odyssey. |
| 1969 | On August 29, 1969 the first network switch and the first piece of network equipment (called "IMP", which is short for Interface Message Processor) is sent to UCLA. |
| 1969 | The first U.S. bank ATM went into service at 9:00am on September 2, 1969. |
| 1969 | On September 2, 1969 the first data moves from UCLA host to the IMP switch. |
| 1969 | Charley Kline a UCLA student tries to send "login", the first message over ARPANET at 10:30 p.m on October 29, 1969. The system transmitted "l" and then "o" but then crashed making today the first day a message was sent over the Internet and the first network crash. |
| 1969 | CompuServe, the first commercial online service, is established. |
| 1969 | Linus Torvalds is born December 28, 1969. |
| 1970 | Western Digital is founded. |
| 1970 | Steve Crocker and UCLA team releases NCP. |
| 1970 | Intel announces the 1103, a new DRAM memory chip containing more than 1,000 bits of information. This chip is classified as random-access memory (RAM). |
| 1970 | The Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) is established to perform basic computing and electronic research. |
| 1970 | The Forth programming language is created by Charles H. Moore. |
| 1970 | Henry Edward Roberts establishes Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) in 1970. |
| 1970 | U.S. Department of Defense develops ada a computer programming language capable of designing missile guidance systems. |
| 1970 | The Sealed Lead Acid battery begins being used for commercial use. |
| 1970 | Jack Kilby is awarded the National Medal of Science. |
| 1970 | Tom Merritt is born June 28, 1970. |
| 1970 | Philips introduces the VCR. |
| 1970 | Centronics introduces the first dot matrix printer. |
| 1970 | Emanuel Goldberg passes away on September 13, 1970 (age 89) |
| 1970 | Tom Anderson is born on November 8, 1970. |
| 1970 | Douglas Engelbart gets a patent for the first computer mouse on November 17, 1970. |
| 1970 | IBM introduces the System/370, which included the use of Virtual Memory and utilized memory chips instead of magnetic core technology. |
| 1971 | Philo Farnsworth passes away. |
| 1971 | The first 8" floppy diskette drive was introduced. |
| 1971 | Ray Tomlinson sends the first e-mail, the first messaging system to send messages across a network to other users. |
| 1971 | The computer gets a voice, as the first computer is demonstrated with a synthesized voice. |
| 1971 | Bob Bemer publishes world's first warning on Year 2000 problem in 1971. |
| 1971 | The first laser printer is developed at Xerox PARC. |
| 1971 | FTP is first purposed April 16, 2012 by Abhay Bhushan of MIT in RFC 114. |
| 1971 | IBM introduces its first speech recognition program capable of recognizing about 5,000 words. |
| 1971 | Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney create the first arcade game called "Computer Space." |
| 1971 | SMC is founded. |
| 1971 | Marc Andreessen is born July 9, 1971. |
| 1971 | Steve Wozniak and Bill Fernandez develop a computer called the Cream Soda Computer. |
| 1971 | Schadt and Helfrich develop twisted nematic. |
| 1971 | Niklaus Wirth invents the Pascal programming language. |
| 1971 | Intel with the help of Ted Hoff introduces the first microprocessor, the Intel 4004 on November 15, 1971. The 4004 had 2,300 transistors, performed 60,000 operations per second (OPS), addressed 640 bytes of memory, and cost $200.00. |
| 1971 | First edition of Unix released November 03, 1971. The first edition of the "Unix PROGRAMMER'S MANUAL [by] K. Thompson [and] D. M. Ritchie." It includes over 60 commands like: b (compile B program); boot (reboot system); cat (concatenate files); chdir (change working directory); chmod (change access mode); chown (change owner); cp (copy file); ls (list directory contents); mv (move or rename file); roff (run off text); wc (get word count); who (who is one the system). The main thing missing was pipes. |
| 1972 | Erik Selberg is born in 1972. |
| 1972 | Evan Williams is born March 31, 1972. |
| 1972 | Intel introduces the 8008 processor on April 1, 1972. |
| 1972 | The first video game console called the Magnavox Odyssey is demonstrated May 24, 1972 and later released by Magnavox and sold for $100.00 USD. |
| 1972 | ARPA is renamed to DARPA. |
| 1972 | The programming language FORTRAN 66 is created. |
| 1972 | Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs invents the C programming language. |
| 1972 | Edsger Dijkstra is awarded the ACM Turning Award. |
| 1972 | The compact disc is invented in the United States. |
| 1972 | Cray Research Inc. is founded. |
| 1972 | Atari releases Pong, the first commercial video game on November 29, 1972. |
| 1972 | First public demo of ARPANET. |
| 1972 | Whetstone is first released in November 1972. |
| 1972 | Fletcher Jones passes away November 7, 1972 (Age: 41) |
| 1972 | Norm Abramson' Alohanet connected to ARPANET: packet radio nets. |
| 1973 | The architecture used with the CP/M operating system becomes the standard for the next eight years until MS-DOS is introduced. |
| 1973 | Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn design TCP during 1973 and later publish it with the help of Yogen Dalal and Carl Sunshine in December of 1974 in RFC 675. |
| 1973 | Howard H. Aiken passes away march 14, 1973. |
| 1973 | Larry page is born March 26, 1973. |
| 1973 | ARPA deploys SATNET the first international connection. |
| 1973 | Alexey Andreevich Lyapunov passes away in 1973. |
| 1973 | Dr. Martin Cooper makes the first handheld cellular phone call to Dr. Joel S. Engel April 3, 1973. |
| 1973 | Robert Metcalfe creates the Ethernet at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) on May 22, 1973. |
| 1973 | The first VoIP call is made. |
| 1973 | IBM introduces its 3660 Supermarket System, which uses a laser to read grocery prices and UPC bar codes. |
| 1973 | Interactive laser discs make their debut. |
| 1973 | The first Landsat satellite is launched July 23, 1973. |
| 1973 | Chris Pirillo is born July 26, 1973. |
| 1973 | The ICCP is founded. |
| 1973 | Sergey Brin is born August 21, 1973. |
| 1973 | U.S. Patent 3,906,166 is filed October 17, 1973 for a radio telephone system, which helps paves the way for what we know today as a cell phone. |
| 1973 | Judge awards John Vincent Atanasoff as the inventor of the first electronic digital computer on October 19, 1973. |
| 1974 | Jeri Ellsworth is born in 1974. |
| 1974 | Christopher Stone is born March 10, 1974. |
| 1974 | Intel's improved microprocessor chip is introduced April 1, 1974, the 8080 becomes a standard in the computer industry. |
| 1974 | The U.S. government starts its antitrust suit against AT&T and doesn't end until 1982 when AT&T agrees to divest itself of the wholly owned Bell operating companies that provided local exchange service. |
| 1974 | John Draper aka Captain Crunch discovers a breakfast cereal children's whistle creates a 2600 hertz tone. Using this whistle and a blue box he's able to successfully get into AT&T's phone network and make free calls anywhere in the world. |
| 1974 | The first Toshiba floppy disk drive is introduced. |
| 1974 | Vannevar Bush passes away June 28, 1974. |
| 1974 | The IBM MVS operating system is introduced. |
| 1974 | A commercial version of ARPANET known as Telenet is introduced and considered by many to be the first Internet Service Provider (ISP). |
| 1974 | IBM develops SEQUEL, which today is known as SQL today. |
| 1974 | IBM introduces SNA. |
| 1974 | Charles Simonyi coins the term WYSIWYG. |
| 1974 | Altair 8800 kits start going on sale December 19, 1974. |
| 1975 | Bill Gates and Paul Allen Establish Microsoft April 4, 1975. |
| 1975 | Christopher Strachey passes away May 18, 1975. |
| 1975 | Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and Monte Davidoff announce Altair BASIC. |
| 1975 | MITS ships one of the first PCs, the Altair 8800 with one kilobyte (KB) of memory. The computer is ordered as a mail-order kit for $397.00. |
| 1975 | A flight simulator demo is first shown. |
| 1975 | Paul Allen and Bill Gates write the first computer language program for personal computers, which is a form of BASIC designed for the Altair. Gates later drops out of Harvard and founds Microsoft with Allen. |
| 1975 | Molly Wood is born May 23, 1975. |
| 1975 | Marissa Mayer is born May 30, 1975. |
| 1975 | Xerox exits the computer market on July 21, 1975. |
| 1975 | The Byte Shop, one of the first computer stores, open in California. |
| 1975 | The IBM 5100 becomes the first portable computer, which was released on September 1975. The computer weighed 55 pounds and had a five inch CRT display, tape drive, 1.9MHz PALM processor, and 64KB of RAM. |
| 1975 | EPSON enters the US market. |
| 1975 | Bram Cohen is born October 12, 1975. |
| 1975 | IMS Associates begin shipping its IMSAI 8080 computer kits on December 16, 1975. |
| 1976 | On February 3, 1976 David Bunnell publishes an article by Bill Gates complaining about software piracy in his Computer Notes Altair newsletter. |
| 1976 | Intel introduces the 8085 processor on March 1976. |
| 1976 | Steve Wozniak designs the first Apple, the Apple I computer in 1976, later Wozniak and Steve Jobs co-found Apple Computers on April Fools day. |
| 1976 | The first 5.25-inch floppy disk is invented. |
| 1976 | Microsoft introduces an improved version of BASIC. |
| 1976 | The First Annual World Altair Computer convention and first convention of computer hobbyists is held in New Mexico on March 26, 1976. |
| 1976 | The term meme is first defined in the book The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. |
| 1976 | The first Public Key Cryptography known as the Deffie-Hellman is developed by Whitfield Deffie and Martin Hellman. |
| 1976 | The Intel 8086 is introduced June 8, 1976. |
| 1976 | Amber MacArthur is born June 27, 1976. |
| 1976 | Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak demonstrate the first Apple computer at the Home Brew Computer Club. |
| 1976 | The NASA Viking 2 lands on Mars September 3, 1976 and transmits pictures and soil analysis. |
| 1976 | Professor at Bowling Green State University first uses the term 'Computer Ethics'. |
| 1976 | The original Apple computer company logo of Sir Isaac Newton sitting under an apple tree is replaced by the well known rainbow colored apple with a bite out of it. |
| 1976 | Matrox is founded. |
| 1976 | DES is approved as a federal standard in November 1976. |
| 1976 | Jack Dorsey is born November 19, 1976. |
| 1976 | Microsoft officially drops the hyphen in Micro-soft and trademarks the Microsoft name November 26, 1976. |
| 1976 | In December of 1976 Bill Gates drops out of Harvard to devote all his time to Microsoft. |
| 1977 | Apple Computer becomes Incorporated January 4, 1977 |
| 1977 | Ward Christansen develops a popular modem transfer modem called Xmodem. |
| 1977 | Apple Computer Inc., Radio Shack, and Commodore all introduce mass-market computers. |
| 1977 | Kevin Rose is born February 21, 1977. |
| 1977 | Derek Gehl is born March 10, 1977. |
| 1977 | The First West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco's Brooks Civic Auditorium is held on April 15, 1977. |
| 1977 | Peter G. Neuman coins the term peopleware. |
| 1977 | Apple Computers Apple II, the first personal computer with color graphics is demonstrated. |
| 1977 | ARCNET the first commercially network is developed |
| 1977 | Zoom Telephonics is founded. |
| 1977 | Commodore announces that the PET (Personal Electronic Transactor) will be a self-contained unit, with a CPU, RAM, ROM, keyboard, monitor and tape recorder all for $495.00 |
| 1977 | Microsoft sells the license for BASIC to Radio Shack and Apple and introduces the program in Japan. |
| 1977 | Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope is released May 25, 1977. |
| 1977 | Apple releases the Apple II series of computers June 10, 1977. |
| 1977 | Chad Hurley is born July 21, 1977. |
| 1977 | Tandy announces it will manufacture the TRS-80 Model 1, the first mass-produced computer on August 3, 1977. This computer is commonly referred to as the Trash 80. |
| 1977 | Frederic Williams passes away August 11, 1977 (Age: 66) |
| 1977 | NASA Voyager 1 is launched into space September 5, 1977. This spacecraft is the farthest man-made object in space. |
| 1977 | BSD is introduced. |
| 1978 | Dan Bricklin creates VisiCalc. |
| 1978 | The first BBS is put online February 16, 1978. |
| 1978 | TCP splits into TCP/IP driven by Danny Cohen, David Reed, and John Shoch to support real-time traffic. This allows the creation of UDP. |
| 1978 | Epson introduces the TX-80, which becomes the first successful dot matrix printer for personal computers. |
| 1978 | OSI is developed by ISO. |
| 1978 | Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle create the first MUD. |
| 1978 | The first spam e-mail was sent by Gary Thuerk in May 1, 1978 an employee at Digital who was advertising the new DECSYSTEM-2020, 2020T, 2060, AND 2060T on ARPAnet. |
| 1978 | Microsoft introduces a new version of COBOL. |
| 1978 | Louise Joy Brown born July 25, 1978, becomes the first human baby born as a result of using in vitro fertilization (IVF). |
| 1978 | The 5.25-inch floppy disk becomes an industry standard. |
| 1978 | In June of 1978 Apple introduces Apple DOS 3.1, the first operating system for the Apple computers. |
| 1978 | Ward Christensen and Randy Seuss have the first major microcomputer bulletin board up and running in Chicago. |
| 1978 | ETA is founded. |
| 1978 | Steve Chen is born in 1978. |
| 1978 | John Shoch and Jon Hupp at Xerox PARC develop the first worm. |
| 1979 | Jawed Karim is born in 1979. |
| 1979 | Robert Williams of Michigan became the first human to be killed by a robot at the Ford Motors company on January 25, 1979. Resulting in a $10 million dollar lawsuit. |
| 1979 | Software Arts Incorporated VisiCalc becomes the first electronic spreadsheet and business program for PCs. |
| 1979 | Epson releases the MX-80 which soon becomes an industry standard for dot matrix printers. |
| 1979 | SCO is founded. |
| 1979 | Sierra is founded. |
| 1979 | The Intel 8088 is released on June 1, 1979. |
| 1979 | Bit 3 is founded. |
| 1979 | Texas Instruments enters the computer market with the TI 99/4 personal computer that sells for $1,500. |
| 1979 | Hayes markets its first modem that becomes the industry standard for modems. |
| 1979 | Atari introduces a coin-operated version of Asteroids. |
| 1979 | More than half a million computers are in use in the United States. |
| 1979 | 3COM is founded by Robert Metcalfe. |
| 1979 | Oracle introduces the first commercial version of SQL. |
| 1979 | The programming language DoD-1 is officially changed to Ada. |
| 1979 | The Motorola 6800, an 8-bit processor is released and is later chosen as the processor for the Apple Macintosh. |
| 1979 | Phoenix is founded. |
| 1979 | VMS is introduced. |
| 1979 | CompuServe becomes the first commercial online service offering dial-up connection to anyone September 24, 1979. |
| 1979 | Usenet is first started. |
| 1979 | A technology consulting firm in Washington D.C. known as Network Solutions is established. |
| 1979 | Bit 3 is established. |
| 1979 | Seagate is founded. |
| 1979 | Saitek is founded |
| 1979 | Oracle is founded. |
| 1979 | Novell Data System is established as an operating system developer. Later in 1983 the company becomes the Novell company. |
