Timeline of computing 1950-1979

Estimate that there are 100 computers in the world.

Magnetic core memory developed.

FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslation) development started by John Backus and his team at IBM - continuing until 1957. FORTRAN was the first high-level programming language, still in use for scientific programming. Before being run, a FORTRAN program needs to be converted into a machine program by a compiler, itself a program.

The NORC was built by IBM for the US Navy.

First conference on Artificial Intelligence held at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.

The Bendix G-15 computer was introduced by the Bendix Corporation

Edsger Dijkstra invented an efficient algorithm for shortest paths in graphs as a demonstration of the abilities of the ARMAC computer. The example used was the Dutch railway system. The problem was chosen because it could be explained quickly and the result checked. Although this is the main thing many people will remember Dijkstra for, he also made important contributions to many areas of computing - in particular he should be remembered for his work on problems relating to concurrency, such as the invention of the semaphore.

First dot matrix printer marketed by IBM.

FORTRAN development finished. See 1954.

LISP (interpreted language) developed, Finished in 1960. LISP stands for 'LISt Processing'. Used in A.I. development. Developed by John McCarthy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The integrated circuit invented by Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments. Robert Noyce, who later set up Intel, also worked separately on the invention. Intel later went on to perfect the microprocessor. The patent was applied for in 1959 and granted in 1964. This patent wasn't accepted by Japan so Japanese businesses could avoid paying any fees, but in 1989 - after a 30 year legal battle - Japan granted the patent; so all Japanese companies paid fees up until the year 2001 - long after the patent became obsolete in the rest of the World.

Computers built between 1959 and 1964 are often regarded as 'Second Generation' computers, based on transistors and printed circuits - resulting in much smaller computers. More powerful, the second generation of computers could handle compilers for languages such as FORTRAN (for science) or COBOL (for business), that accepting English-like commands, and so were much more flexible in their applications.

COBOL (COmmon Business-Oriented Language) developed by Grace Murray Hopper as the successor to FLOW-MATIC, finished in 1961.

Minsk mainframe computer development and production started in the USSR. Stopped in 1975.

Algol - first structured, procedural, programming language to be released.

Compiler compiler - The first compiler compiler is released.

CER-10 - vacuum tube-based computer created by Mihajlo Pupin Institute of Serbia, first computer in SFRY.

APL programming language released by Kenneth Iverson at IBM.

ATLAS is completed by the University of Manchester team. This machine introduced many modern architectural concepts: spooling, interrupts, pipelining, interleaved memory, virtual memory and paging. It was the most powerful machine in the world at the time of release.

Work started on the Linc, the brainchild of the M.I.T. physicist Wesley A. Clark in May 1961. It was the first functional prototype of a computer scaled down to be optimized and priced for the individual user. Used for the first time at the National Institutes of Mental Health in Bethesda, Md. in 1963, many consider it to be the first personal computer.

Spacewar!, the first computer game is written by MIT student Steve Russell. The game ran on a DEC PDP-1, competing players fired at each others space ships using an early version of joystick.

The AN/UYK-1 computer was designed with rounded edges to fit through the hatch of Ballistic missile submarines, as part of the first Satellite navigation system, Transit.

Mouse conceived by Douglas Engelbart, not to become popular until 1983 with Apple Computer's Macintosh and not adopted by IBM until 1987 - although compatible computers such as the Amstrad PC 1512 were fitted with mice before this date.

Computers built between 1964 and 1972 are often regarded as 'Third Generation' computers, they are based on the first integrated circuits - creating even smaller machines. Typical of such machines was the IBM System/360 series mainframe, while smaller minicomputers began to open up computing to smaller businesses.

Programming language PL/I released by IBM.

Launch of IBM System/360 - the first series of compatible computers. Over 14,000 were shipped by 1968.

DEC PDP-8 Mini Computer. The first minicomputer, built by Digital Equipment (DEC). It cost $16,000.

Project MAC is started at MIT by J.C.R. Licklider: several terminals all across campus will be connected to a central computer, using a timesharing mechanism. Bulletin boards and email are popular applications.

CER-20 released by Mihajlo Pupin Institute of Serbia as "electronic bookkeeping machine".

Moore's law published by Gordon Moore in the 35th Anniversary edition of Electronics magazine. Originally suggesting processor complexity doubled every year, the law was revised in 1975 to suggest a doubling in complexity every two years.

Fuzzy logic designed by Lofti Zadeh (University of California, Berkeley), it is used to process approximate data - such as 'about 100'.

BESM-6 mainframe computer was designed in the USSR.

BASIC programming language (Beginners All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) developed at Dartmouth College, USA, by Thomas E. Kurtz and John Kemeny. Not implemented on microcomputers until 1975. This was the first language designed to be used in a time-sharing environment, such as DTSS (Dartmouth Time-Sharing System), or GCOS.

Packet switching, funded by ARPA was developed. This makes reliable computer networking possible. The first computer-to-computer login does not occur until November 21, 1969, between Stanford and UCLA.

The first supercomputer, the Control Data CDC 6600, was developed.

Hewlett-Packard entered the general purpose computer business with its HP-2115 for computation, offering a computational power formerly found only in much larger computers. It supported a wide variety of languages, among them BASIC, Algol, and FORTRAN.

CER-200 released by Mihajlo Pupin Institute of Serbia

Development on the programming language Pascal started, to be finished in 1971. Based on Algol. Developed by Niklaus Wirth as a pedagogical tool. It was not widely used until 1984 when Borland introduced Turbo Pascal.

CER-22 - first transistor-based computer created by Mihajlo Pupin Institute of Serbia, SFRY.

Intel founded by Robert Noyce and a few friends.

LOGO programming language developed by Seymour Papert and team at MIT.

Douglas Engelbart demonstrates interactive computing at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco: mouse, on-screen windows, hypertext and full-screen word processing.

ARPANET started by the United States Department of Defense for research into networking. It is the original basis for what now forms the Internet. It was opened to non-military users later in the 1970s and many universities and large businesses went on-line.

The first Request for Comments, RFC1 published. The RFCs (network working group, Request For Comment) are a series of papers which are used to develop and define protocols for networking; originally the basis for ARPANET, there are now thousands of them applying to all aspects of the Internet. Collectively they document everything about the way the Internet and computers on it should behave, whether it's TCP/IP networking or how email headers should be written there will be a set of RFCs describing it.

Introduction of RS-232 (serial interface) standard by EIA (Electronic Industries Association).

Data General shipped a total of 50,000 Novas at $8000 each. The Nova was one of the first 16-bit minicomputers and led the way toward word lengths that were multiples of the 8-bit byte. It was first to employ medium-scale integration (MSI) circuits from Fairchild Semiconductor, with subsequent models using large-scale integrated (LSI) circuits. Also notable was that the entire central processor was contained on one 15-inch printed circuit board.

First dynamic RAM chip introduced by Intel. It was called the 1103 and had a capacity of 1 K-bit, 1024 bits.

Development of UNIX operating system started. It was later released as C source code to aid portability, and subsequently versions are obtainable for many different computers, including the IBM PC. It and its clones (such as GNU/Linux) are still widely used on network servers and scientific workstations. Originally developed by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie.

Forth programming language developed. A simple, clean, stackbased design, which later inspired PostScript and the Java virtual machine.

Steve Geller, Ray Holt and a team from AiResearch and American Microsystems completed development of a flight data processor for the US Navy's F-14A Tomcat fighter jet. The processor used LSI chips to produce a fast, powerful, and rugged programmable computer that fitted into the very tight space restrictions of the aircraft.

CTC creates the Datapoint 2200, a mass-produced programmable terminal. Its multi-chip CPU provided the basis for the Intel 8008; a monitor and tape drives were built-in, and the entire system fit the approximate footprint of an IBM Selectric typewriter. Users quickly began to use the system as a standalone computer; the unit is the earliest known which strongly resembles the personal computers of the 1980s and beyond.

Development of Pascal finished - see 1967.

Ray Tomlinson develops the first program that can send email messages from one computer to another.

First microprocessor, the 4004, developed by Marcian E. Hoff for Intel, was released. It contains the equivalent of 2300 transistors and was a 4 bit processor. It is capable of around 60,000 instructions per second (0.06 MIPS), running at a maximum clock speed of 740 kHz.

Texas Instruments releases the first easily portable electronic calculator.

HRS-100, a hybrid computer system, released by Mihajlo Pupin Institute of Serbia

Atari founded by Nolan Bushnell, who designed pong (see also 1972).

Pong released - widely recognised as the first popular arcade video game. It was invented by Atari's founder, Nolan Bushnell, and briefly became popular. However its lack of excitement or variation meant it never captivated players like Space Invaders (1978) or other arcade games of the 1980s.

Computers built after 1972 are often called 'fourth generation' computers, based on LSI (Large Scale Integration) of circuits (such as microprocessors) - typically 500 or more components on a chip. Later developments include VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) of integrated circuits 5 years later - typically 10,000 components. The fourth generation is generally viewed as running right up until the present, since although computing power has increased the basic technology has remained virtually the same.

C programming language developed at The Bell Laboratories in the USA by Dennis Ritchie (one of the inventors of the Unix operating system), its predecessor was the B programming language - also from Bell. It is a very popular language, especially for systems programming - as it is flexible and fast. C was considered a refreshing change in the computing industry because it helped introduce structured programming. The successor to C, C++, was introduced in the 1980s, and in turn helped usher in the era of Object oriented programming.

First handheld scientific calculator released by Hewlett-Packard, the engineer's slide rule is at last obsolete.

8008 microprocessor released by Intel.

The first international connections to ARPANET are established. ARPANET later became the basis for what we now call the Internet.

Norsk Data launches the Nord-5, the first 32-bit supermini computer.

Development of the TCP/IP protocol suite by a group headed by Vinton Cerf and Robert E. Kahn. These are the protocols used on the internet.

Prolog developed at the University of Luminy-Marseilles in France by Alain Colmerauer. It introduced the new paradigm of logical programming and is often used for expert systems and AI programming.

The TV Typewriter, designed by Don Lancaster, provided the first display of alphanumeric information on an ordinary television set. It used $120 worth of electronics components. The original design included two memory boards and could generate and store 512 characters as 16 lines of 32 characters. A 90-minute cassette tape provided supplementary storage for about 100 pages of text.

Ethernet developed, this became a popular way of connecting PCs and other computers together - to enable them to share data, and devices such as printers. A group of machines connected together in this way is known as a LAN.

CLIP-4, the first computer with a parallel architecture.

MCM/70, the first personal computer to be commercially released, by Micro Computer Machines in Canada. Although it incorporated a plasma display, was programmable in the high level language APL, and weighed just 20 pounds, it failed commercially.

Introduction of the 8080. An 8 Bit Microprocessor from Intel. Arguably this microprocessor started the microprocessor revolution. First in the line of processors that lead to the currently most used processor architecture, the 80X86 (and pentium) series. It ran at a clock frequency of 2 MHz and did 0.64 MIPS.

Motorola announces the MC6800 8 Bit Microprocessor. It is more easy to implement than the 8080 because it only needs a single power supply to operate and does not need support chips. Unlike the 8080 it is sold not as much as a general purpose "number cruncher / computer" CPU core but more as a control processor for industrial control and as a peripheral processor.

Motorola engineers Chuck Peddle and Bill Mensch leave after completing work on the Motorola 6800 CPU and join MOS Technology, Inc.

The MITS Altair 8800, the third commercially available personal computer, is released. In December 1974, an article in Popular Electronics invited people to order kits for the computer. Despite the limited memory (256 bytes) and limited processing power, around 200 were ordered on the first day. 10,000 were shipped at a kit price of $397 each.

The Altair was the first computer designed with an "open" architecture, based on the S-100 expansion bus. The Altair also inspired the software development efforts of Bill Gates and Paul Allen, who developed a full-featured Basic interpreter for the machine, and then formed Microsoft in order to market it.

First microcomputer implementation of BASIC by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, it was written for the MITS Altair - the first personal computer - this led to the formation of Microsoft later in the year.

Unix marketed (see 1970).

Norwegian company Mycron releases its MYCRO-1, the first single-board computer.

Formation of Microsoft by Bill Gates and Paul Allen.

MOS Technology, Inc. releases their 6501 CPU. It is pin compatible with the Motorola 6800, which soon starts a lawsuit against MOS Technology. The 6501 is withdrawn from sale soon after and replaced with the 6502 which is now 6800 pin-incompatible. The 6502 becomes one of the most popular CPUs for the next 10 years.

IBM 5100 released.

Zilog is founded by ex-Intel employees.

Apple Computer, Inc. founded, to market the Apple I single-board computer designed by Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. It uses the MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor.

First laser printer introduced by IBM - the IBM 3800. The first colour versions came onto the market in 1988.

Introduction of 8085 chip. An improved version of the 8080, with a superset of the 8080s instruction set (only a couple of extra instructions). Single 5V power supply (while the 8080 needed several different voltages).

Z80 chip released by Zilog, and the basis for the computer boom in the early 1980s. It was in fact a much improved 8080 chip. CP/M was originally written for the 8080, but many implementations, as well as software like Wordstar and dBase II - were written for the Z80. It formed the basis for many home computers like the Tandy TRS-80 of 1977, the Sinclair ZX Spectrum of 1982 and many others.

MOS Technology, Inc introduces the KIM-1 microcoputer system as a demonstrator for its 6502 CPU. The KIM-1 will later form the basis for one of the first home computers, the Commodore PET.

Cray-1, the first commercially developed supercomputer, was invented by Seymour Cray, who left Control Data in 1972 to form his own company. This machine was known as much for its horseshoe-shaped designas it was for being the first super to make vector processing practical. 85 were shipped at a cost of $5 million each.

Commodore buys MOS Technology, Inc in a stock trade. MOS is valued at $12 million. Chuck Peddle joins Commodore as chief engineer. With the purchase of MOS, Commodore begins work on the Commodore PET.

Commodore introduces its KIM-1 based Commodore PET. It has 4KB RAM, integrated cassette deck and 9" monochrome monitor.

Apple II computer introduced. It had an open architecture, used color graphics, and had an elegantly designed interface to a floppy disk drive. It also had the first "killer app" of the business world -- the VisiCalc spreadsheet program.

Tandy brought out the TRS-80 with "Level I BASIC". Although the TRS-80 had a primitive 4K BASIC (a stripped down version of the public domain "Li-Chen Wang Basic") and abysmal graphics it still became a bestseller quickly.

Heathkit made the H8 Home computer kit available. It was based on an Intel 8080a processor and shiped with HDOS a Heathkit Disk Operating System and Benton Harbor BASIC. It was a kit.

Tandy upgraded the TRS-80 with a much improved Microsoft 8K "Level II BASIC", and an "expansion interface" which added 32KB RAM, A floppy disk and a printer interface. With these extras the TRS-80 became a viable small business computer.

Introduction of 8086 by Intel, the first commercially successful 16 bit processor. It was too expensive to implement in early computers, so an 8 bit version was developed (the 8088), which was chosen by IBM for the first IBM PC. This ensured the success of the x86 family of processors that succeeded the 8086 since they and their clones are used in every IBM PC compatible computer.

The available clock frequencies were 4.77, 8 and 10 MHz. It has an instruction set of about 300 operations. At introduction the fastest processor was the 8 MHz version which achieved 0.8 MIPS and contained 29,000 transistors.

Arcade Video game 'Space Invaders' released, starting a video game craze. In 1979 Atari's Asteroids proved incredibly popular. By 1982 many of the 'classics' had been released.

Ada programming language introduced by Jean Ichbiah and team at Honeywell for the US Department of Defense.

Introduction of 8088, a step down from the 8086 as it contains just an 8-bit data bus - but this make it cheaper to implement in computers.

Commodore PET released in the United Kingdom. Based on a 1 MHz 6502 processor it displayed monochrome text and had just 8 KB of RAM. Priced £569. For £776 you could purchase a version with 16 KB of RAM, while for £914 you could get a 32 KB of RAM.

Compact disc was invented.

The 68000 Microprocessor launched by Motorola, the first of the 68k family. 5+ years later it was used in machines such as the Apple Macintosh, the Atari ST and the Commodore Amiga.

Shortly after the release of V7 Unix, which included UUCP, a protocol for communication over standard telephone lines, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis created Usenet, a global discussion group system. Nowadays, it uses Internet protocols and is still popular.

Four disgruntled Atari programmers leave and form Activision, the first third-party video game software publisher. Activision promotes both the game and the programmer, changing the way software is marketed.

IBM saw its computer market dominance being eaten into by the new personal computers, such as the Apple II and the Commodore PET. IBM therefore started work on their own personal computer. When finished, this computer was released as the IBM PC on 12 August 1981