The history of electronics

314 Pyroelectricity is discovered by Theophrastus

600 B.C.Thales of Miletus writes about amber becoming charged by rubbing – He was describing what we now call static electricity. 600 BC a Greek named Thales discovered static electricity, notion that objects can become electrically charged.600 Electric Charge Thales of Miletus

600 Electric Field Thales of Miletus

1594 Vacuum Evangelista Torricelli

1594 Vacuum Galileo Galilei

1600 English scientist, William Gilbert first coined the term “electricity” from the Greek word for amber. Gilbert wrote about the electrification of many substances in his “De magnete, magneticisique corporibus”. He also first used the terms electric force, magnetic pole, and electric attraction.

1646 Sir Thomas Browne coined the phrase ‘computer’.

1647 Vacuum Blaise Pascal

1650 German physicist Otto von Guericke experimented with generating electricity

1660 A machine was invented by Otto von Guericke that demonstrated static electricity.

1660 Otto von Guericke invented a machine that produced static electricity.

1675 Robert Boyle discovered that electric force could be transmitted through a vacuum and observed attraction and repulsion.

1729 Stephen Gray’s discovery of the conduction of electricity.

1729 The English physicist Stephen Gray discovered electrical conductivity

1733 Charles Francois du Fay discovered that electricity comes in two forms which he called resinous(-)and vitreous(+). Benjamin Franklin and Ebenezer Kinnersley later renamed the two forms as positive and negative.

1745 Capacitor Ewald Georg von Kleist

1745 Cuneus and Muschenbrock, in Leyden (Netherlands), discovered the Leyden jar in 1745.

1745 Georg Von Kleist discovered that electricity was controllable. Dutch physicist, Pieter van Musschenbroek invented the “Leyden Jar” the first electrical capacitor. Leyden jars store static electricity.

1746 Leyden Jar Pieter van Musschenbroek

1747 Benjamin Franklin experiments with static charges in the air and theorized about the existence of an electrical fluid that could be composed of particles. William Watson discharged a Leyden jar through a circuit, that began the comprehension of current and circuit. Henry Cavendish started measuring the conductivity of different materials.

1752 Ben Franklin proved that static electricity and lightning were one of the same. This experiment is known as key tied to a kite string during a thunderstorm.

1752 Ben Franklin studied the properties of electricity by conducting his kite flying experiment

1752 Benjamin Franklin invented the lightening rod – he demonstrated lightning was electricity.

1767 Joseph Priestley discovered that electricity followed Newton’s inverse-square law of gravity.

1780 Galvanic Cell Luigi Galvani

1780 Luigi Galvani erroneously discovers “animal electricity”

1783 Bioelectricity/Bioelectrogenesis Luigi Galvani

1785 Charles Augustus Coulomb (1736-1806) invented the torsion balance in 1785.

1786 Italian physician, Luigi Galvani demonstrated what we now understand to be the electrical basis of nerve impulses when he made frog muscles twitch by jolting them with a spark from an electrostatic machine.

1787 Coulomb’s Law Charles-Augustin de Coulomb

1787 Silicon Antoine Lavoisier

1791 The Chappe brothers, in France, were in their teens and were going to schools some distance apart but visible to each other. They obtained permission to set up a signalling system so they could send messages to each other. Their semaphore system consisted of movable arms on a pole whose positions denoted letters of the alphabet.

1800 Alessandro Volta invented the first electric battery. His name was used in creation of the notion of voltage (volt).

1800 Count Alessandro Volta (1745-1827) announced the results of his experiments investigation Galvani’s claims about the source of electricity in the frog leg experiment.

1805 Electroplating Luigi V. Brugnatelli

1813 Sir Humphry Davy deduced that electrolysis was the action that produced electricity

1816 First energy utility in US founded.

1820 Ampère’s Law André-Marie Ampère

1820 D. F. Arago invented the electromagnet.

1820 Electromagnetic / Magnetic Field Hans Christian Oersted

1820 Hans Christian Oersted (1777-1851) in Denmark demonstrated a relationship between electricity and magnetism by showing that an electrical wire carrying a current will deflect a magnetic needle.

1820 John Daniell invented a cell consisting of copper and zinc plates and copper and zinc sulphate

1820 Relationship of electricity and magnetism confirmed by Hans Christian Oersted who observed that electrical currents effected the needle on a compass and Marie Ampere, who discovered that a coil of wires acted like a magnet when a current is passed thorough it.

1821 First electric motor invented by Michael Faraday.

1821 Samuel Finley Breese Morse (1791 – 1872) brought a practical system of telegraphy to the fore front using electromagnets, and invented the code named after him in 1844.

1821 The principle of electro-magnetic rotation was discovered by which later is essential for developing the electric motor.

1821 Thermo electricity Thomas Johann Seebeck

1822 André Marie Ampère (1775-1836) in France gave a formalized understanding of the relationships between electricity and magnetism using algebra.

1822 Galvanometer Johann S. Schweigger

1823 Gustav Robert Kirchhoff (1824-1887) was a German physicist. He announced the laws which allow calculation of the currents, voltages, and resistance of electrical networks in 1845 when he was only 21.

1825 Electromagnet William Sturgeon

1826 George Simon Ohm (1787-1854) wanted to measure the motive force of electrical currents .

1826 Ohms Law written by Georg Simon Ohm states that “conduction law that relates potential, current, and circuit resistance”

1826 The relationship between power, voltage, current and resistance was defined by Georg Ohm which is now known as Ohms Law.

1827 Joseph Henry’s electromagnetic experiments lead to the concept of electrical inductance. Joseph Henry built one of the first electrical motors.

1827 Michael Faraday (1791-1867). 1827 Faraday postulated that an electrical current moving through a wire creates “fields of force” surrounding the wire. 1821 Faraday built the first electric motor–a device for transforming an electrical current into rotary motion. 1331 Faraday made the first transformer. The unit of capacitance is named after him. Read More on Inventions and Contribution of Michael Faraday to Electronics

1827 Ohm’s Law Georg Simon Ohm

1829 Karl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855) Wilhelm Eduard Weber (1804-1891). Gauss is known as one of the greatest mathematicians of all time. The CGS unit of magnetic field density in named after Gauss. Weber, a German physicist, also established a system of absolute electrical units. The MKS unit of flux is named after Weber.

1830 in Albany, New York. In 1830 he observed electromagnetic induction, a year before Faraday. The unit of induction is named after him.

1831 Michael Faraday led experiments which proved that electricity can be induced by changes in an electromagnetic field (Faraday’s Law) . These experiments about how (electricity) current led to understanding of electrical transformers and motors.

1831 Principles of electromagnetism induction, generation and transmission discovered by Michael Faraday.

1832 Electrolysis Michael Faraday

1832 Heinrich F.E. Lenz (1804-1865), born in the old university city of Tartu, Estonia (then in Russia), was a professor at the University of St. Petersburg who carried out many experiments following the lead of Faraday.

1832 Hippolyte Pixii

1833 Electric Car Thomas Davenport

1833 First Semiconductor Effect is Recorded Michael Faraday describes the “extraordinary case” of his discovery of electrical conduction increasing with temperature in silver sulfide crystals. This is the opposite to that observed in copper and other metals..

1834 Arc Lamp William Edwards Staite

1834 Charles Babbage begins build his “Analytical Engine”, precursor to the computer. It uses read-only memory in the form of punch cards.

1834 Lenz’s Law Heinrich Friedrich Emil Lenz

1834 Michael Faraday also developed the principle of ionic mobility in chemical reactions of batteries.

1835 Relay Joseph Henry

1836 Daniell (Daniel) Cell John Frederic Daniell

1836 Faraday Cage Michael Faraday

1836 John F. Daniell an English chemist, produced a cell that was not subject to polarization.

1837 Computer (Analytical Engine) Charles Babbage

1837 Cooke and Wheatstone obtain a patent on telegraph. Morse publicly demonstrates his telegraph.

1837 First industrial electric motors.

1837 Logic Gate Charles Babbage

1837 The electric motor was invented by Thomas Davenport which s now common in many electrical appliances.

1838 Telegraph Samuel Morse

1839 First fuel cell invented by Sir William Robert Grove, a Welsh judge, inventor and physicist.

1839 Maximum Power Theorem Moritz von Jacobi

1839 Photoelectric Effect Alexandre Edmond Becquerel

1839 William Grove developed the first fuel cell, produced energy using hydrogen and oxygen

1840 Congress was requested to provide funding for a semaphore system running from NYC to New Orleans. Samuel Morse, it is said, advised against funding of this system because of his work on developing the electric telegraph.

1840 Joule’s Law James Prescott Joule

1840 Morse Code Samuel Morse

1840 Potentiometer (Rheostat) Sir Charles Wheatstone

1841 J. P. Joule’s law of electrical heating published.

1842 Fax Machine / Facsimile Alexander Bain

1842 Magnetostriction James Prescott Joule

1843 FAX invented by the Scotch physicist Alexander Bain.

1843 Wheatstone Bridge Sir Charles Wheatstone

1844 Morse demonstrates the electric telegraph. Samuel F.B. Morse demonstrates his telegraph by sending a message to Baltimore from the chambers of the Supreme Court in Washington, DC. The message, “What hath God wrought?” marks the beginning of a new era in communication.

1845 Diamagnetism Michael Faraday

1845 Kirchhoff’s Laws Gustav Kirchhoff

1847 March 3 Birth of Alexander Graham Bell, Edinburgh, Scotland.

1851 There are 51 telegraph companies in operation

1856 James Clerk Maxwell (1831 – 1879) wrote a mathematical treatise formalizing the theory of fields in 1856 On Faraday’s Lines of Force. In the year 1873 Maxwell published Electricity and Magnetism, demonstrating four partial differential equations that completely described electrical phenomena. Read More on Inventions and Contribution of James Clerk Maxwell to Electronics

1856 Western Union formed by six men from Rochester, N.Y. They start an acquisition spree.

1857 Geissler Tube Heinrich Geissler

1858 Burglar Alarm Edwin T. Holmes of Boston begins to sell electric burglar alarms. Later, his workshop will be used by Alexander Graham Bell as the young Bell pursues his invention of the telephone. Holmes will be the first person to have a home telephone. *[Note 1]

1859 Gaston Plante invents lead acid storage battery “wet cell”

1860 29th February Herman Hollerith was born 29th February 1860

1860 Hermann Lud-wig Ferdinand von Helmholtz (1821 – 1894) was an all around universal scientist and researcher.

1861 Both coasts are connected. There are now 2250 telegraph offices in operation nationwide.

1865 Conservation of Electric Charge James Clerk Maxwell

1865 Displacement Current James Clerk Maxwell Distributor Frank Conrad

1865 Electromagnetism James Clerk Maxwell

1865 Maxwell mathematically predicts the propagation of electromagnetic waves through space.

1866 First transatlantic telegraph line successfully laid. Prior to the cable, sending messages between the United States and Europe took 11 days.

1866 Uninterrupted transatlantic communications are established with the successful laying of the first telegraph cable on 27 July.

1867 Gauss’s Law Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss

1867 The first Atlantic cable, promoted by Cyrus Field, was laid on July 27th.

1868 Georges Leclanche invents “single fluid electric generating battery”.using zinc

1870 Thomas Edison invents multiplex telegraphy.

1871 April 1 Bell arrived in Boston to start his work in the teaching of the deaf.

1872 photographs can be viewed by stroboscopic disc.

1872 Western Union buys the telegraph equipment manufacturing firm, Gray & Barton, and renamed it Western Electric.

1873 James Clerk Maxwell wrote equations that described the electromagnetic field, and predicted the existence of electromagnetic waves traveling with the speed of light.

1874 Semiconductor Point-Contact Rectifier Effect is Discovered In the first written description of a semiconductor diode, Ferdinand Braun notes that current flows freely in only one direction at the contact between a metal point and a galena crystal..

1875 Crookes Tube William Crookes

1875 First words transmitted by telephone.

1875 June 2 Bell’s theory of the telephone confirmed by experiment.

1876 Edison invents the electric motor and the phonograph.

1876 First complete sentence transmitted by telephone. First conversation by overhead line, 2 miles Boston to Cambridgeport.

1876 Telephone Alexander Graham Bell

1877 Bell Telephone Company formed, with Alexander Graham Bell as “electrician” and Thomas Watson as “superintendent.”

1877 Loudspeaker Ernst Siemens, Sir Oliver Joseph Lodge

1877 Microphone Emile Berliner

1877 Phonograph Thomas Alva Edison

1877 Western Union has first telephone line in operation between Somerville, MA and Boston.

1878 American Electric and Illuminating (Canada) founded.

1878 Edison Electric Light Co. Edison opens first DC power utility company (US)

1878 First telephone directory, New Haven, CT, and had 21 listings.

1878 January 28 First commercial telephone exchange in the world opened at New Haven, Conn.

1878 Sir William Crookes (1832 – 1919) investigated electrical discharges through highly evacuated “Crookes tubes” in the year 1878.

1878 The Edison Electric Light Co. was founded by Thomas Edison, which after purchasing several patents, began experiments which led to the creation of a long lasting incandescent light bulb which originally lasted for about 40 hours. As of 1880, they were lasting for about 1200 hours.

1878 Thomas Alva Edison (1847 – 1931) In 1878, Edison began work on an electric lamp and sought a material that could be electrically heated to incandescence in a vacuum. 1882 Edison installed the first large central power station on Pearl Street in New York City in 1882; its steam-driven generators of 900 horsepower provided enough power for 7,200 lamps. Read More on Inventions and Contribution of Thomas Alva Edison to Electronics

1879 First commercial power station opens in San Francisco, uses Charles Brush generator and arc lights. First commercial arc lighting system installed, Cleveland, Ohio.

1879 Hall Effect Edwin Hall

1879 Incandescent Light Bulb Thomas Alva Edison

1879 Joseph Wilson Swan (1828 – 1914) Joseph Swan demonstrated his electric lamp in Britain in February

1879 The California Electric Light Company was founded which is known as the first company providing and selling electricity to households in San Francisco.

1879 Thomas Edison demonstrates his incandescent lamp, Menlo Park, New Jersey.

1880 30,872 Bell telephone stations in the United States, Conversation by overhead line, 45 miles Boston to Providence.

1880 American Bell founded, 30,000 phones in use. Bell spoke over a 1300 ft beam of light using his patented Photophone equipment.

1880 First power system isolated from Edison.

1880 In Grand Rapids Michigan: Charles Brush arc light dynamo driven by water turbine used to provide theater and storefront illumination.

1880 Piezoelectricity Pierre Curie, Jacques Curie

1881 Bell Telephone company purchases Western Electric Company.

1881 Conversation by underground cable, 3/4 mile.

1881 Emile Alphonse Faure developed batteries using a mixture of lead oxides for the positive plate

1881 Heinrich Rudolph Hertz (1857 – 1894) was the first person to demonstrate the existence of radio waves.

1881 Mr. Eckert who ran a telephone company in Cincinnati said he preferred the use of females to males as operators. “Their service is much superior to that of men or boys. They are much steadier, do not drink beer nor use profanity, and are always on hand.”

1881 Niagra Falls, New York; Charles Brush dynamo, connected to turbine in Quigley’s flour mill lights city street lamps.

1882 Bell has controlling interest in Western Union and Western Electric.

1882 Electric Distribution System Thomas Alva Edison

1882 The first hydroelectric power station opens in Wisconsin.

1882 The Pearl Street Power Station in New York City was opened by Thomas Edison, which could power about 5,000 lights using direct current (DC). During the same period, the first hydroelectric station was opened in Wisconsin.

1883 The electric transformer is invented. Thomas Edison introduces the “three-wire” transmission system.

1884 An electric alternator for producing alternating current (AC) was invented by Nikola Tesla. During the same period a steam turbine generator was invented by Sir Charles Algernon Parsons.

1884 Conversation by overhead line (hard drawn copper), 235 miles Boston to New York.

1884 George Eastman invents flexible photographic film.

1884 Paul Nipkow obtains a patent in Germany for TV, using a selenium cell and a mechanical scanning disk. First long distance call: Boston to NYC.

1884 September 4 Opening of telephone service between Boston and New York, 235 miles.

1884 Steam turbine invented by Charles Parsons.

1885 March 3 Incorporation of American Telephone and Telegraph Company, New York City.

1885 The Bell Telephone Company formed a new subsidiary, American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T).

1885 Theodore Vail becomes President of AT&T. Leaves in 1887 to go to South America to install electric traction systems.

1886 German scientist, Dr. Carl Gassner Jr. invents the first “dry cell” batteries.

1886 The National Carbon Co. was founded the then Brush Electric Co. executive W. H. Lawrence

1886 William Stanley develops transformer and Alternating Current electric system. Frank Sprague builds first American transformer and demonstrates use of step up and step down transformers for long distance AC power transmission in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. The Westinghouse Electric Company is organized. 40 to 50 water powered electric plants reported on line or under construction in the U.S. and Canada.

1887 Heinrich Hertz shows that electromagnetic waves exist.

1887 Idea of automatic exchange (Russia).

1887 In San Bernadino, California, the High Grove Station, first hydroelectric plant in the West is opened.

1887 Thomas Edison patents motion picture camera.

1888 Edison attempts to record picture photos onto a wax cylinder.

1888 Heinrich Hertz produces radio waves.

1888 Rotating field AC alternator invented by Nikola Tesla.

1889 Almon B. Strowger invents switch having line contacts in circular rows inside a cylinder. Controlled by push buttons on telephone.

1889 Oregon City Oregon, Willamette Falls station, first AC hydroelectric plant.

1889 Single phase power transmitted 13 miles to Portland at 4,000 volts, stepped down to 50 volts for distribution.

1889 Telephone Switching System (Telephone Exchange) Almon Strowger

1890 211,503 Bell telephone stations in the US

1890 Herman Hollerith gets a contract for processing the 1900 census data using punched cards. His firm was eventually named IBM in 1924.

1891 60 cycle AC system introduced in U.S.

1891 Alternator Nikola Tesla

1891 Dickson shoots numerous 15 second motion pictures using Edison’s kineograph, his motion picture camera.

1891 Invention of 1,000 line switch with disc bank having ten concentric rows of line contacts. Not used commercially. Formation of Strowger Automatic Telephone Exchange.

1891 Sir Joseph John Thomson (1856 – 1940) is universally recognized as the British scientist who discovered and identified the electron in the year 1897.

1891 Tesla Coil Nikola Tesla

1892 Conversation by overhead line, 900 miles New York to Chicago.

1892 First commercial Strowger installation; LaPorte, Indiana, USA. Used switcher with 100 line disc type banks.

1892 General Electric Company formed by the merger of Thomson-Houston and Edison General Electric.

1892 October 18 Opening of long distance telephone service, New York to Chicago, 950 miles.

1893 An alternating current (AC) system to light the Chicago World’s Fair was put into place by The Westinghouse Electric Company.

1893 An early form of broadcasting was started in Budapest over 220 miles of telephone wires serving 6000 subscribers who could listen at regular schedules to music, news, stock market prices, poetry readings and lectures.

1893 In Austin, Texas, the first dam designed specifically for hydroelectric power built across Colorado River is completed.

1893 Westinghouse demonstrates “universal system” of generation and distribution at Chicago exposition.

1894 Basic Telephone patents expire; period of intense competition begins.

1894 Invention of gear driven switch with “zither” (piano wire) line banks. Not used commercially. 200 line “zither” board with ratchet drive installed at LaPorte, Indiana, USA.

1895 Curie’s Law Pierre Curie

1895 Ferromagnetism Pierre Curie

1895 First public demonstration of motion pictures displayed in France.

1895 Guglielmo Marconi invented the radio.

1895 Paramagnetism Pierre Curie

1895 The Niagara Falls hydropower station opened in the US.

1895 Third installation at LaPorte, Indiana. Earliest use of switch with semi cylindrical bank and shaft with vertical and rotary motions. Invention of earliest dial type calling device.

1895 X-ray Tube Wilhelm Roengten

1896 First commercial battery for sale. Carbon-zinc battery by National Carbon Company

1896 Invention of selector trunking; first use of dial telephones in large exchange (Augusta, Georgia, USA).

1896 Marconi patents wireless telegraph.

1897 Alternating Current Calculations Charles Proteus Steinmetz

1897 Cathode Ray Tube (CTR) Karl Ferdinand Braun

1897 Charles Proteus Steinmetz (1865 – 1923) discovered the mathematics of hysteresis loss, thus enabling engineers of the time to reduce magnetic loss in transformers.

1897 Development of the Cathode Ray Tube by Ferdinand Braun.

1897 Electron discovered by J. J. Thomson.

1897 Guglielmo Marconi (1874 – 1937) Known as the “father of wireless”, was an Italian national who expanded on the experiments that Hertz did, and believed that telegraphic messages could be transmitted without wires.

1897 Nikola Tesla (1856 – 1943) devised the polyphase alternating-current systems that form the modern electrical power industry. The unit of magnetic field density is named after him.

1898 Biconical Antenna Oliver Lodge

1898 Conrad Hubert invents “electric hand torch” flashlight

1898 Earliest use of relays for switch control instead of direct operation of magnets over line wires. First die cast switch frame.

1898 Ignition Coil Nikola Tesla

1898 Magneto Ignition Robert Bosch

1898 Nathan Stubblefield, combined primary and secondary electric battery

1898 National Carbon Company introduces the first D cell battery

1898 Oudin Coil Paul Marie Oudin Jacques d’Arsonval

1898 Remote Control Nikola Tesla

1898 Spark Plug Nikola Tesla, Richard Simms, Robert Bosch

1899 Hybrid Vehicle Ferdinand Porsche

1899 Name of Bell Telephone Company changed to American Telephone and Telegraph.

1899 Strowger Automatic goes abroad (Berlin, Germany). Earliest use of automatic trunk selection with busy test.

1900 676,733 Bell telephone stations owned and connected.

1900 Basic trunking principles established for large exchanges. Bank terminals moulded in plaster of Paris.

1900 Highest voltage transmission line 60 Kilovolt.

1900 John J. Carty, Chief Engineer of NY Tel (and later AT&T), installs loading coils, invented by Michael Pupin, to extend range and utilizes open wire transposition to reduce crosstalk an inductive pickup from ac transmission lines. AT&T paid Pupin 5,000 for the use of his patent. There are now about 20,000 telcos in business. There are now 856,000 telephones in service.

1900 Thomas Alva Edison invents storage battery

1900 Waldemar Junger and Karl Berg invent nickel-cadmium battery (ni-cad)

1901 Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955) In the year 1905, Einstein elaborated on the experimental results of Max Planck who noticed that electromagnetic energy seemed to be emitted from radiating objects in quantities that were discrete.

1901 Formation of Automatic Electric Company to take over Strowger Automatic Telephone Exchange. Installation at Fall River, Mass., used line banks with fibre insulators and aluminium fillers. First use of “slip multiple.”

1901 Guglielmo Marconi sends first transatlantic wireless signals, 12 December.

1901 Marconi transmits first trans Atlantic radio message (from Cape Cod).

1901 Radio Guglielmo Marconi

1901 Semiconductor Rectifiers Patented as “Cat’s Whisker” Detectors Radio pioneer Jagadis Chandra Bose patents the use of a semiconductor crystal rectifier for detecting radio waves..

1901 Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen (1845 – 1923) discovered X rays, for which he received the first Nobel Prize for physics in 1901.

1902 5-Megawatt turbine for Fisk St. Station (Chicago).

1902 First conversation by long distance underground cable, 10 miles New York to Newark.

1902 First installation in Chicago begun. Earliest use of measured service in automatic exchanges.

1902 Poulsen Arc Radio Transmitter invented.

1903 AIEE Committee on Telegraphy and Telephony formed.

1903 First successful gas turbine (France). World’s first all turbine station (Chicago). Shawinigan Water & Power installs world’s largest generator (5,000 Watts) and world’s largest and highest voltage line—136 Km and 50 Kilovolts (to Montreal). Electric vacuum cleaner. Electric washing machine.

1903 Large Strowger installations placed in service in Grand Rapids, Dayton, Akron, Columbus.

1904 Diode John Ambrose Fleming

1904 First use of multi office trunking, and connections between automatic and manual offices (Los Angeles, Califonia).

1904 John Ambrose Fleming invented the diode rectifier vacuum tube.

1904 Radar (Radio Detection and Ranging) Christian Huelsmeyer

1905 American Electrical Novelty & Mfg. Co renamed The American Ever Ready Company

1905 Earliest extended use of party lines and reverting calls. First system using common battery talking (South Bend, Indiana).

1905 in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan the first low head hydro plant with direct connected vertical shaft turbines and generators is opened.

1905 Marconi patents his directive horizontal antenna.

1905 Sir John Ambrose Fleming (1849 – 1945) made the first diode tube, the Fleming valve in the year 1905.

1906 Conversation by underground cable, 90 miles New York to Philadelphia.

1906 Dr. Lee de Forest reads a paper before an AIEE meeting on the Audion, first of the vacuum tubes that would make long distance radiotelephony possible. Reginald Fessenden broadcasts Christmas Carols on Christmas Eve from Brant Rock, MA.

1906 In Ilchester, Maryland, a fully submerged hydroelectric plant is built inside Ambursen Dam.

1906 Invention of Keith Line Switch, resulting in enormous reduction in cost of automatic boards. First used at Wilmington, Delaware.

1906 Lee deForest invents the vacuum tube.

1906 Vacuum Tube (Audion, Triode) Lee De Forest

1907 Lee De Forest (1873 – 1961) added a grid electrode to Flemings’ valve and created the triode tube, later improved and called the Audion.

1907 Lee De Forest invented the electric amplifier.

1907 The world’s first transatlantic commercial wireless services is established by Marconi with stations at Clifden, Ireland and Glace Bay, Nova Scotia.

1907 Use of cathode ray tube to produce television images.

1908 Geiger Counter Tube Hans (Johannes Wilhelm) Geiger & W. Müller (Mueller)

1909 Electron Charge (Oil-Drop Experiment) Robert Millikan

1909 Invention of out going secondary line switch, resulting in economy of inter office trunks. First used at San Francisco.

1909 Marconi shares the Nobel Prize in Physics, with Karl Ferdinand Braun for their work in the development of wireless telegraphy.

1909 The first pumped storage plant is opened in Switzerland.

1910 5,142,692 Bell telephone stations owned and connected.

1910 Ernest R. Rutherford measured the distribution of an electric charge within the atom.

1910 Neon Lamp, Georges Claude

1910 Peter DeBye in Holland, develops theory for optical waveguides. He was a few years ahead of his time. Interstate Commerce Commission starts to regulate telcos.

1910 Strowger system introduced in Hawaii and Cuba. Earliest use of dialing over toll lines. Introduction of revertive ringing tone.

1910 The first commercial radios are sold by Lee de Forest’s Radio Telephone Company.

1911 Conversation by overhead line, 2,100 miles New York to Denver.

1911 Formation of Automatic Telephone Manufacturing Co., Ltd. For production of Strowger system in England.

1911 Ignition System Charles Kettering

1911 R. D. Johnson invents the differential surge tank and Johnson invents hydrostatic penstock valve.

1911 Superconductivity Heike Kamerlingh Onnes

1911 Using loading coils properly spaced in the line, the transmission distance for telephone reaches from New York to Denver.

1911 Willis Haviland Carrier disclosed his basic Rational Psychrometric Formulae to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. The formula still stands today as the basis in all fundamental calculations for the air conditioning industry.

1912 First Strowger installation in England (Epsom “Official Switch”).

1912 Push-Pull Amplifier Edwin H. Colpitts

1913 Conversation by overhead line, 2,600 miles New York to Salt Lake City. Conversation by underground cable, 455 miles Boston to Washington.

1913 Electric refrigerator is invented. Robert Millikan measured the electric charge on a single electron.

1913 Strowger system introduced in Australia and New Zealand. Development of key type impulse sender, and Simplex dialing on toll lines.

1913 The Kingsbury Agreement. Mr. Kingsbury was an AT&T vice president. In his famous letter to the U.S. Government, AT&T agrees to divest its holdings of Western Union, stop acquisition of other telcos, and permit other telcos to interconnect.

1913 The Kingsbury Commitment precludes un approved expansion, and permits connections to network.

1913 The U.S. Justice Department filed its first antitrust suit against Bell, charging an unlawful combination to monopolize transmission of telephone service in the Pacific Northwest.

1914 Automatic Switches used as traffic distributors in manual exchanges (Indianapolis, Indiana and Defiance, Ohio).

1914 February 26 Boston Washington under ground telephone cable placed in commercial service.

1914 Motorised movie cameras

1914 National Carbon Company buys half interest in The American Ever Ready Company

1914 Regenerative Circuit Edwin Armstrong

1914 The last pole of the transcontinental telephone line is placed in Wendover, Utah, on the Nevada Utah state line.

1914 Underground cables link Boston, NYC and Washington.

1915 Direct telephone communications opened for service at 4pm, EST. Alexander Graham Bell, in NY, greets his former assistant, Thomas Watson, in San Francisco, by repeating the first words ever spoken over a telephone, “Mr. Watson, come here I want you”. Mr. Watson would reply that it would take him a week to get there.

1915 First conversation by transcontinental line, 3,650 miles Boston to San Francisco. Speed transmitted for the first time by radio telephone from Arlington, Va., across the continent to San Francisco, over the Pacific to the Hawaiian Islands, and across the Atlantic to Paris.

1915 January 25 Opening of First Trans continental telephone line, New York to San Francisco, 3600 miles.

1915 October 21 First transmission of speech across the Atlantic by radiotelephone, Arlington, Va., to Paris.

1915 Zener Diode Clarence Melvin Zener

1916 Earliest community automatic exchange network installed in Wisconsin.

1916 Electric power drill, George O Leopold

1917 The Electric ignition system, Arthur Atwater Kent

1917 Crystal Oscillator Paul Langevin France

1917 Hydracone draft tube patented by W. M. White.

1917 National Carbon Co. merged with Union Carbide to form The Union Carbide and Carbon Co

1917 Radio tuners

1917 Rapid expansion in the use of private automatic branch exchanges. Development of remote alarm equipment for unattended exchanges.

1918 Edwin Armstrong develops a receiving circuit the superheterodyne.

1918 First installation using rotary primary line switches (Elyria, Ohio).

1918 The superheterodyne radio circuit

1919 First Strowger board manufactured for Bell System (Norfolk, Virginia).

1919 Radio Corporation of America (RCA) is formed.

1919 The pop up toaster

1920 11,795,747 Bell telephone stations owned and connected.

1920 Beginning of wide spread adoption of Strowger equipment for metropolitan areas both in the U.S. and abroad. First installation of call indicator equipment for automatic manual connections in multi office areas.

1920 Bell introduces its own step by step offices that were previously acquired from Automatic Electric. G. Valensi develops the time domain multiplexing concept.

1920 Federal Power Commission (FPC) is established.

1920 First U.S. station to only burn pulverized coal is opened.

1920 July 16 World’s first radiotelephone service, between Los Angeles and Santa Catalina Island, opened to the public.

1920 The first regular commercial radio broadcasts begin when AM station KDKA of Pittsburgh delivers results of the Harding Cox election to its listeners. Radio experiences immediate success; by the end of 1922, 563 other licensed stations will join KDKA.

1920 The hairdryer

1920 Westinghouse Radio Station KDKA is established (2 November).

1921 April 11 Opening of deep sea cable, Key West to Havana, Cuba, 115 miles.

1921 Armistice Bay exercises at burial of unknown soldier delivered by means of Bell loud speaker and long lines to more than 150,000 people in Arlington, Va., New York and San Francisco.

1921 Beverage Antenna Harold Beverage

1921 Conversation by deep sea cable, 115 miles Key West, Fla., to Havana, Cuba.

1921 First conversation between Havana, Cuba, and Catalina Island by submarine cable, overhead and underground lines and radio telephone distance 5,500 miles. Extension of Boston Philadelphia cable to Pittsburgh total distance 621 miles. President Harding’s inaugural address delivered by loud speaker to more than 100,000 people.

1921 First radio broadcast of a sporting event (Dempsey/Carpentier Heavyweight Championship Prize Fight, 2 July).

1921 The modern lie detector

1921 The Willis Graham Act allows telcos to merge with permission of the States and the Interstate Commerce Commission.

1921 Wirephoto The first electronically transmitted photograph is sent by Western Union. The idea for a facsimile transmission was first proposed by Scottish clockmaker Alexander Bain in 1843.

1922 Alexander Graham Bell dies at his summer home in Beinn Breagh, near Baddeck, Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia (August 2). Telephone service is suspended for one minute (6:25pm 6:26pm) on the entire telephone system in the United States and Canada during the funeral service (4 August).

1922 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is formed. (It would receive it’s Royal Charter in 1927).

1922 Connecticut Valley Power Exchange (CONVEX) starts, pioneering interconnection between utilities.

1922 Electric kettle

1922 Introduction of improved steel wall telephones and improved desk stands (Type 21).

1923 14,050,565 Bell telephone stations owned and connected.

1923 December 22 Opening of Second Trans continental telephone line, southern route.

1923 Electric Guitar Lloyd Loar

1923 First British Post Office announces adoption of Strowger system (with Director) for London.

1923 June 7 Radio broadcasting networks had their beginning with a hook up of four radio stations by long distance telephone lines.

1923 Meetings at New York and Chicago of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE) are linked by long distance lines connected to loudspeakers so that both meetings could follow the same program (14 February).

1923 Patent for the iconoscope, the forerunner of the picture tube.

1923 Self-winding watch

1923 Successful demonstration of transoceanic radio telephony from a Bell telephone station in New York City to a group of scientists and journalists in New Southgate, England.

1924 Directive short wave antenna is developed by Professor Hidetsugu Yagi and his assistant, Shintaro Uda.

1924 Loudspeaker

1924 Television John Logie Baird

1925 Bell Telephone Laboratories founded. 1.5 million dial telephones in service out of 12 million phones in service.

1925 Introduction of the Monophone first hand set telephone of modern type.

1925 Modern day can opener

1925 October 1 Opening of long distance telephone cable, New York to Chicago.

1925 The Combined Line and Recording (CLR) method of handling toll calls over long distances (100 miles or more) is introduced experimentally by Bell Systems. It reduces the handling of toll calls from 13 minutes (in 1920) to 7 minutes.

1926 Baird in Scotland and Jenkins in the U.S. demonstrate TV using neon bulbs and mechanical scanning disks. P.M. Rainey at Western Electric patents the PCM methodology.

1926 Field Effect Semiconductor Device Concepts Patented Julius Lilienfeld files a patent describing a three-electrode amplifying device based on the semiconducting properties of copper sulfide. Attempts to build such a device continue oough the 1930s. .

1926 Fluorescent Lamp Edmund Germer & Friedrich Meyer & Hans J. Spanner

1926 Introduction of the Type 24 Dial – modern, quiet running, long life calling device. Strowger system adopted by Japan.

1926 Tevelox robot

1926 The first public test of radiotelephone service from New York to London.

1926 Yagi-Uda Antenna Shintaro Uda

1927 April 7 First public demonstration of television by Bell System engineers, by wire and radio.

1927 First “Director” installation in London. Introduction of line switch with self aligning plunger.

1927 First public demonstration of long distance transmission of television. Formal opening of telephone service between the US and Mexico, and also, Mexico London, via New York.

1927 January 17 Opening of Third Trans continental telephone line, northern route.

1927 January 7 Opening of transatlantic telephone service between New York and London, 3500 miles.

1927 Talking films begin with Al Jolson in “The Jazz Singer”.

1927 Television Philo Farnsworth demonstrates the first television for potential investors by broadcasting the image of a dollar sign. Farnsworth receives backing and applies for a patent, but ongoing patent battles with RCA will prevent Farnsworth from earning his share of the million dollar industry his invention will create.

1928 A joint meeting of the AIEE and the British IEE is held over radiotelephone channels, with the respective groups assembled in New York and London.

1928 Baird Television Department Company television

1928 Construction of Boulder Dam begins.

1928 Electrolytic Capacitor Julius Edgar Lilienfeld

1928 Federal Trade Commission begins investigation of holding companies.

1928 FET – Field Effect Transistor Julius Edgar Lilienfeld

1928 Zworykin files patents on electronic scanning TV using the iconoscope.

1929 Car Radio Paul Galvin William Powell Lear

1929 December 8 Commercial ship to shore telephone service opened.

1929 U.S. Navy begins use of Strowger equipment. Monophones made available in color.

1930 April 3 Opening of transoceanic telephone service to Argentina, Chile and Uruguay and subsequently to all other South American countries.

1930 AT&T introduces much higher quality insulated wire.

1930 Development of new small switchboards of unit type. Networks of small Strowger exchanges installed in Italy.

1930 Jet engine

1930 RCA conducts black and white broadcasting experiments.

1930 Thermistor Samuel Ruben

1931 “The Theory Of Electronic Semi-Conductors” is Published Alan Wilson uses quantum mechanics to explain basic semiconductor properties. Seven years later Boris Davydov (USSR), Nevill Mott (UK), and Walter Schottky (Germany) independently explain rectification..

1931 AT&T inaugurates the Teletypewriter Exchange Service (TWX) November 21.

1931 Development of Strowger Remote Toll Board. First installed in Elyria, Ohio.

1931 Electric razor

1931 Radio Astronomy While trying to track down a source of electrical interference on telephone transmissions, Karl Guthe Jansky of Bell Telephone Laboratories discovers radio waves emanating from stars in outer space.

1932 Development of unattended private automatic branch exchanges. Two line Monophones introduced.

1932 Electric can opener

1932 Fuel Cell Francis Thomas Bacon

1932 Gustav Tauschek invents drum memory in Austria.

1933 Edwin Armstrong demonstrates frequency modulation (FM) to Sarnoff.

1933 FM Radio Edwin Howard Armstrong

1933 Meissner Effect Walter Meissner, Robert Ochsenfeld

1933 New small private automatic exchanges introduced.

1933 Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) established.

1933 The Teasmade

1934 Congress passes Communications Act of 1934, with a goal of universal service at reasonable charges as its key tenet. The FCC was formed.

1934 Introduction of new self contained desk Monophone molded in bakelite (Type 34A3).

1934 Tape Recorder (magnetic) Semi Joseph Begun

1934 Zippo lighter

1935 Answering Machine Willy Müller

1935 April 25 First around the world telephone conversation by wire and radio.

1935 First telephone call around the world. About 6700 telcos in operation.

1935 New “all positions” transmitter. New bakelite wall Monophone (Type 35A5).

1935 Radar

1935 The first around the world telephone conversation takes place. (April 25)

1935 The first night baseball game in major leagues is played made possible by electric lighting.

1935 The Public Utility Holding Company Act is passed. The Federal Power Act is passed. The Securities and Exchange Commission is established. The Bonneville Power Administration is established.

1935 The Roosevelt Administration passed the “New Deal” legislation designed to regulate public utilities and bring electricity to rural America.

1935 Western Union’s “Telefax” begins operating. Telefax sent telegrams, manuscripts, line drawings, maps and page proofs for magazines.

1936 287 Kilovolt line runs 266 miles to Boulder (Hoover) Dam.

1936 April 30 Invention of coaxial cable is announced at a joint meeting of the American Physical Society and the IRE.

1936 BBC begins regular television service.

1936 First television broadcast made available in London.

1936 First voice recognition machine

1936 Highest steam temperature reaches 900 degrees Fahrenheit vs. 600 degrees Fahrenheit in early 1920s.

1936 Konrad Zuse applies for a patent for his mechanical memory to be used in his computer. This computer memory is based on sliding metal parts.

1936 Small, compact community automatic exchanges introduced.

1936 The Rural Electrification Act is passed.

1937 Bell introduces the Model 300 improved handset.

1937 December 8 Opening of Fourth Transcontinental telephone line. In the USA

1937 Differential Amplifier Otto Herbert Schmitt

1937 Dirt Devil

1937 Klystron Tube Russell Varian & Sigurd Varian & William Hansen

1937 Radio Telescope Grote Reber

1937 Seven hour radio broadcast of the coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth of England.

1938 Bell introduces crossbar central office switches.

1938 Initial proposal for color TV broadcast made by George Valensi.

1938 Schottky Diode Walter H. Schottky

1938 The power of radio is demonstrated by Orsen Wells with the broadcast of “War of the Worlds”. This causes telephone traffic to peak in nearly all cities and on long distance lines.

1938 Walkie Talkie Henryk Magnuski

1939 1st January Hewlett Packard Founded

1939 Helicopter

1939 Helmut Schreyer invents a prototype memory using neon lamps.

1939 WU introduces coast to coast fax service. John Atanasoff and Clifford Berry invent the first electronic computer at the University of Iowa. In 1973 a judge ruled in a patent infringement suit that their research was the source of most of the ideas for the modern computer.

1940 Color Television Peter Goldmark, Alfred Schroeder

1940 Discovery of the p-n Junction Russell Ohl discovers the p-n junction and photovoltaic effects in silicon that lead to the development of junction transistors and solar cells..

1940 FM Police Radio Communications begin in Hartford, CT, USA

1940 June 24 Television transmitted over coaxial cable from Convention Hall in Philadelphia to television studio in Radio City, New York.

1940 Modern colour television

1940 Semiconductor Russell S. Ohl

1940 Walkie Talkie Al Gross

1941 Artificial heart

1941 CPU (Central Processing Unit) Relay Konrad Zuse

1941 Konrad Zuse in Germany develops the first programmable calculator using binary numbers and boolean logic.

1941 Semiconductor diode rectifiers serve in WW II Techniques for producing high purity germanium and silicon crystals are developed for wartime radar microwave detectors..

1941 Solar Cell (Silicon) Russell Ohl

1941 The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor affects the telephone system of the United States by causing tremendous traffic peaks in all cities, and an increase from 100 to 400 percent in long distance telephoning which already is at a record high of 3 million messages. (The United States would again experience this phenomenon in 2001, during the 11 September attacks.) Radar successfully detects the attack on Pearl Harbor, but the warnings are ignored.

1942 December 21 Opening of first all cable transcontinental telephone line with completion of buried cable, connecting existing cable systems of East and West.

1942 Samuel Ruben and Philip Rogers Mallory developed the mercury cell.

1942 The Atanasoff-Berry Computer has 60 50-bit words of memory in the form of capacitors mounted on two revolving drums. For secondary memory it uses punch cards.

1942 The Atanasoff-Berry Computer is completed

1942 The first section of telephone line is completed along the Alcan Highway, from Edmonton, Alberta, to Dawson Creek, British Columbia. The Alcan Highway begins at Dawson Creek.

1942 The turboprop engine

1943 August 22 First equipment for the dialling of called telephone numbers in distant cities directly by the operator placed in service in Philadelphia.

1943 Construction of a telephone line from Calcutta, India to Kunming, China, along Stilwell Road, begins at Ledo, Assam.

1943 Philadelphia is the last city to have telephone service supplied by different local carriers (until the recent deregulatory moves by Congress and the FCC.) Western Union and Postal Telegraph permitted to merge.

1943 The First Computing Journal

1943 The Slinky

1944 A telephone submarine cable is laid across the English Channel.

1944 Kidney dialysis machine

1944 The first Colossus is operational at Bletchley Park.

1945 AT&T lays 2000 miles of coax cable. Arthur C. Clarke proposes communications satellites.

1945 Clock radio

1945 Microwave Oven Percy LaBaron Spencer

1945 There were fewer than 7,000 working TV sets in the USA and only nine stations on the air three in New York, two each in Chicago and Los Angeles, and one each in Philadelphia and Schenectady, N.Y.

1945 Western Union installs the first commercial radio beam system.

1946 AT&T has 8 VF channels on microwave from Catalina Island to Los Angeles. Raytheon has a microwave link transmitting audio from WQXR in NYC to Boston.

1946 AT&T televises Army Navy game in Philadelphia and transmits it to NYC

1946 Disposable nappy

1946 ENIAC, short for Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer was announced

1946 FCC’s Recording Devices Docket required telcos to furnish connecting arrangements for conversation recorders. The use of “beep tones” required when conversations are recorded.

1946 February 12 New York Washington co axial cable circuits opened for television transmission on an experimental basis.

1946 Glow Plug Ben Shereshaw, Ray Arden

1946 June 17 Opening of experimental mobile radiotelephone service in St. Louis.

1946 Mobile telephone service is placed into commercial use in St. Louis, Missouri. The beam travelling wave tube is announced by Bell Telephone Laboratories. This tube is an important amplifier for broadband communication.

1946 Photovoltaic Cell (Solar Cell) Russell Ohl

1947 August 15 Opening of commercial telephone service for passengers on certain trains running between New York and Washington, D.C

1947 ENIAC, one of the world’s first digital computers, is turned on after a memory upgrade. It will remain in continuous operation until October 2, 1955.

1947 Frederick Viehe of Los Angeles, applied for a patent that uses magnetic core memory. Magnetic drum memory is independently invented by several people.

1947 Invention of the Point-Contact Transistor John Bardeen & Walter Brattain achieve transistor action in a germanium point-contact device in December 1947..

1947 Kenwood food mixer

1947 Telcos install nationwide numbering plan. Bell Telephone Laboratories has a 96 channel PCM experimental system working between Murray Hill, N.J. and NYC and quickly discovers the need for repeaters for long distance service.

1947 The Transistor is invented

1947 The Williams tube won the race for a practical random-access memory

1947, October 14, when Yeager flew the X-1 over Rogers Dry Lake in Southern California. The X-1 was lifted to an altitude of 25,000 feet by a B-29 aircraft and then released through the bomb bay, rocketing to 40,000 feet and exceeding 662 miles per hour

1948 Citizens’ Band Radio (CB) Al Gross

1948 Conception of the Junction Transistor William Shockley conceives an improved transistor structure based on a theoretical understanding of the p-n junction effect..

1948 First pager

1948 IBM´s Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator was built

1948 Invention of the telephone junction transistor.

1948 Random Access Storage Device For Computer England by Freddie William’s team

1948 The European Transistor Invention Herbert Mataré & Heinrich Welker independently create a germanium point-contact transistor in France.

1948 The Hush A Phone case had its beginning. The Hush A Phone Corp. had developed and was marketing a cup like device placed on a phone’s mouthpiece to increase privacy of conversations. The Bell System complained to the FCC about this “foreign attachment.”

1948 Transistor Radio demonstrated By Bell Labs

1949 Bell Labs publishes Shannon’s seminal theory of relay logic so important in the development of modern computers.

1949 EDSAC performed its first calculations

1949 Jay Forrester conceives the idea of magnetic core memory as it is to become commonly used, with a grid of wires used to address the cores. The first practical form manifests in 1952-53 and renders obsolete previous types of computer memory.

1949 Justice Department files antitrust suit against AT&T. The Department wanted Bell to divest Western Electric, and to separate regulated monopoly services and unregulated equipment supply, among other actions.

1949 Lew Urry developed the small alkaline battery at the Eveready Battery Company laboratory

1949 October 17 Dialling of transcontinental telephone calls by operators started with the joining of toll dialling networks on East and West coasts.

1949 Pager Al Gross

1949 Photo-Pac disposable camera

1949 The Manchester Mark 1 Computer fully operational ( Ferranti / British Government / Freddie William’s team

1949 The volume of telephone calls reaches 180 million a day!

1949 Theories for self-replicating programs are first developed.

1950 75% of telephones lines are party lines.

1950 Alkaline batteries

1950 Canadian, John Hopps invention of the world’s first cardiac pacemaker. His device was far too large to be implanted inside of the human body. It was an external pacemaker.

1950 Ferranti Ltd. completes the first commercial computer with 256 40-bit words of main memory and 16K words of drum memory. Only eight were sold.

1950 Sept. 30 Television network facilities extended to include 72 television stations in 42 cities, making television available to one half the population of the nation.

1950 Zuse sold first Z4 computer

1951 Development of Zone Refining William Pfann and Henry Theurer develop zone refining techniques for production of ultra-pure semiconductor materials..

1951 First Grown-Junction Transistors Fabricated Gordon Teal grows large single crystals of germanium and works with Morgan Sparks to fabricate an n-p-n junction transistor..

1951 Jay Forrester files a patent for matrix core memory.

1951 Power steering

1951 The world’s first commercially available computer The Ferranti Mark 1 Released

1952 Bell Labs Licenses Transistor Technology Bell Labs technology symposia and licensing of transistor patents encourages semiconductor development. .

1952 Full Spectrum Lighting John Ott

1952 Grace Hopper completes the A-0 Compiler

1952 Heinz Nixdorf founded Nixdorf Computer

1952 SAGE modem

1952 The EDVAC computer is completed with 1024 44-bit words of ultrasonic memory. A core memory module is added to the ENIAC computer.

1952 The first database was implemented on RCA’s Bizmac computer. Reynold Johnson, an IBM engineer, developed a massive hard disk consisting of fifty platters, each two feet wide, that rotated on a spindle at 1200 rpm with read/write heads. These were called “jukeboxes”.

1952 Transistorized Consumer Products Appear Semiconductors appear in battery-powered hearing aids and pocket radios where consumers are willing to pay a premium for portability and low power consumption..

1953 At MIT, Jay Forrester installed magnetic core memory

1953 Black box flight recorder

1953 Darlington Pair Sidney Darlington (Bell Laboratories)

1953 John Pierce proposes deep space communication.

1953 Samuel Ruben improved the alkaline manganese battery

1953 The first 345 Kilovolt transmission line is laid.

1953 The first nuclear power station ordered.

1953 Transistorized Computers Emerge A transistorized computer prototype demonstrates the small size and low-power advantages of semiconductors compared to vacuum tubes..

1954 Diffusion Process Developed for Transistors Following the production of solar cells using high-temperature diffusion methods, Charles Lee and Morris Tanenbaum apply the technique to fabricate high-speed transistors..

1954 First pocket practical transistor radio available to buy the ” Regency TR-1? from Texas Instruments goes on sale for .95 equiv. 0 at todays value.

1954 Gerald Pearson , Daryl Chapin , and Calvin Fuller invent the first solar battery or solar cell

1954 Jack Tramiel starts Commodore

1954 Regency pocket radio

1954 Silicon Transistors Offer Superior Operating Characteristics Morris Tanenbaum fabricates the first silicon transistor at Bell Labs but Texas Instruments’ engineers build and market the first commercial devices..

1954 The Atomic Energy Act of 1954 allows private ownership of nuclear reactors.

1954 The first high voltage direct current (HVDC) line (20 megawatts/1900 Kilovolts, 96 Km).

1954 The Mallory Battery Company introduced alkaline manganese cells in a new size, the AAA.

1954 US Air Force’s SAGE system sets precedent for computer communications, including use of modems.

1955 According to Ken Krechmer, A.W. Morten and H.E. Vaughan describe the development of a real modem in their BSTJ paper, Transmission of Digital Information over Telephone Circuits.

1955 An Wang was issued U.S. patent #2,708,722 with 34 claims for magnetic memory core.

1955 Breathalyser

1955 Development of Oxide Masking Carl Frosch and Lincoln Derick grow a silicon dioxide film on wafers to protect their surface and allow controlled diffusion into the underlying silicon..

1955 ENIAC is retired

1955 May Reynold Johnson at IBM develops the first disk drive.

1955 Photolithography Techniques Are Used to Make Silicon Devices Jules Andrus and Walter Bond adapt photoengraving techniques from printing technology to enable precise etching of diffusion “windows” in silicon wafers..

1955 Recorded announcements of disconnected and changed numbers begin to be used in some small dial offices.

1955 Russell S. Ohl developed a wafer of silicon that produced free electrons

1955 Transistor Radio Richard C. Koch (Industrial Development Engineering Associates)

1956 Antitrust suit settled with Consent Decree. This decree permits AT&T to retain Western Electric Co., requires AT&T to stay within a particular market, and dictates non exclusive patent licenses.

1956 AT&T’s Consent Decree. In 1949, the Department of Justice wanted AT&T to divest itself of Western Electric. The court ignored the Department of Justice’s request. Instead, as the result of the Consent Decree, AT&T got to keep WE; however, it could only stay in the field of telecommunications and it had to license its patents to others.

1956 Behind the air hearing aid

1956 Eveready Battery Company develops the 9-volt battery

1956 First production hard disk created by IBM the “IBM 305? storing five megabytes

1956 Francis Thomas Bacon developed the hydrogen – oxygen fuel cell

1956 IBM brings out the Magnetic Disk Memory

1956 IBM ships the first hard drive, the RAMAC 305, which holds 5MB of data at ,000 a megabyte. It is as big as two refrigerators and uses 50 24-inch platters. (For the full story and interviews with key players, read ” The Hard Drive Turns 50 .”)

1956 Silicon Comes to Silicon Valley Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory develops Northern California’s first prototype silicon devices while training young engineers and scientists for the future Silicon Valley..

1956 The Bell System and the British Post Office inaugurates service on a transatlantic telephone cable, TAT 1. The 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics is awarded to the inventors of the transistor: Dr. Walter H. Brattain, Dr. John Bardeen and Dr. William Shockley.

1956 The first in the ear hearing aids appeared about.

1956 The Hush A Phone case was decided in favour of Hush A Phone Corp. It establishes that harmless non Bell equipment may be attached to the network.

1957 Casio digital watch

1957 FORTRAN-1 is formally published

1957 November 3, Sputnik 2, carrying the dog Laika for 7 days in orbit, is launched by the U.S.S.R., and remains in orbit until April 13, 1958.

1957 October 4, Sputnik 1, the first man made object to orbit the Earth, is launched by the U.S.S.R., and remains in orbit until January 4, 1958.

1957 October 4, the Russians launched the first satellite, Sputnik.

1957 Soviet Union launches Sputnik, humanity’s first artificial satellite, on October 5. (note date conflicts with date above)

1957 The USSR launches Sputnik, the first artificial earth satellite. In response, the United States forms the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) within theDepartment of Defense (DoD) to establish US lead in science and technology applicable to the military.

1958 12nd September Jack Kilby created the first integrated circuit

1958 All semiconductor “Solid Circuit” is demonstrated Jack Kilby produces a microcircuit with both active and passive components fabricated from semiconductor material. .

1958 Jack St. Clair Kilby developed the integrated circuit while at Texas instruments in Dallas in 1958

1958 January 31, Explorer 1, the first U.S. satellite in orbit, lifts off at Cape Canaveral using a modified ABMA JPL Jupiter C rocket. It carries a scientific experiment of James A. Van Allen, and discovers the Earth’s radiation belt.

1958 March 17, Vanguard 1 satellite is launched into orbit, and continues to transmit for 3 years.

1958 March 5, Explorer 2 is launched by a Jupiter C rocket, and fails to reach orbit.

1958 May 15, Sputnik 3 is launched by the U.S.S.R.

1958 October 1, N.A.S.A. is founded, taking over existing National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics.

1958 October 11, Pioneer 1, U.S. IGY space probe, launched to a height of 70,700 miles.

1958 Pacemaker

1958 Silicon Mesa Transistors Enter Commercial Production Fairchild Semiconductor produces double-diffused silicon mesa transistors to meet demanding aerospace applications..

1958 Silicon-Controlled Rectifier (SCR) General Electric (GE)

1958 The MicrochipCo-Invented Independently by Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor

1958 Tunnel Diode (Esaki) Leo Esaki (Sony)

1958 Tunnel Diode Promises a High-Speed Semiconductor Switch Leo Esaki’s novel device is an example of many celebrated semiconductor breakthroughs that do not sustain their early promise as they are overtaken by competing technologies..

1959 AT&T introduces the TH 1 1860 channel microwave system. The FCC’s Above 890 MHz Decision allowed private microwave systems.

1959 Black and Decker cordless drill

1959 Eveready Battery Company introduces the first commercially available alkaline battery.

1959 IBM ships the first 1401 Data Processing System using Solid-state devices including transistors and the new generation of IBM Hard Discs.

1959 In the Above 890 ruling, the FCC makes available portions of the radio spectrum to private microwave systems.

1959 Invention of the “Planar” Manufacturing Process Jean Hoerni develops the planar process to solve reliability problems of the mesa transistor, thereby revolutionizing semiconductor manufacturing..

1959 January 2, Luna 1, first man made satellite to orbit the moon, is launched by the U.S.S.R.

1959 March 3, Pioneer 4, fourth U.S. IGY space probe was launched by a Juno II rocket, and achieved an earth moon trajectory, passing within 37,000 miles of the moon. It then fell into a solar orbit, becoming the first U.S. sun orbiter.

1959 October 4, Luna 3 translunar satellite is launched, orbiting the moon and photographing 70 percent of the far side of the moon.

1959 Practical Monolithic Integrated Circuit Concept Patented Robert Noyce builds on Jean Hoerni’s planar process to patent a monolithic integrated circuit structure that can be manufactured in high volume..

1959 Robert Norton Noyce (1927 – 1990) also developed the integrated circuit with a more practical approach to scaling the size of the circuit. He became a founder of Fairchild Semiconductor Company in 1957.

1959 September 12, Luna 2 is launched, impacting on the moon on September 13 carrying a copy of the Soviet coat of arms, and becoming the first man made object to hit the moon.

1959 Silicon Transistor – 1 Transistor

1959 The Xerox 914 is the first office copier for sale

1960 April 1, Tiros 1, the first successful weather satellite, is launched by the U.S.

1960 AT&T installs first electronic switching system in Morris, IL. There are now 3299 telephone companies.

1960 August 18, Discoverer XIV launches the first U.S. camera equipped Corona spy satellite.

1960 DEC released its first mini computer PDP-1

1960 ECHO I communications satellite is launched on 12 August. Provides first satellite television broadcast of 1962.

1960 Epitaxial Deposition Process Enhances Transistor Performance Development of thin-film crystal-growth process leads to transistors with high switching speeds..

1960 First nickel-cadmium rechargeable battery system is developed by Waldmar Junger in Sweden.

1960 First Planar Integrated Circuit is Fabricated Jay Last leads development of the first commercial IC based on Hoerni’s planar process and Noyce’s monolithic approach..

1960 Laser is invented.

1960 Metal Oxide Semiconductor (MOS) Transistor Demonstrated John Atalla and Dawon Kahng fabricate working transistors and demonstrate the first successful MOS field-effect amplifier..

1960 Miniature silver-oxide or “button batteries” are developed for hearing aides and watches.

1960 SI Electricity/Magnetism Units 11th General Conference on Weights and Measures

1960 Stereos/hi-fis

1961 1st December Minivac 601 Computer Launched

1961 April 12, Vostok 1 is launched by the U.S.S.R., carrying Cosmonaut Yuri A. Gargarin, the first man in space. He orbits the Earth once.

1961 August 6, Vostok 2 is launched by the U.S.S.R., carrying Cosmonaut Gherman Titov, the first day long Soviet space flight.

1961 Bell Telephone Labs release design information for the touch tone dial to Western Electric.

1961 Compactron General Electric (GE)

1961 Dedicated Semiconductor Test Equipment Enters Commercial Market Semiconductor and independent vendors build dedicated test equipment for high-ughput manufacturing..

1961 IBM invents heads for disk drives that “fly” on a cushion of air or on “air bearings.”

1961 Kodak Instamatic

1961 May 5, Mercury Freedom 7 carries Alan B. Shepard,Jr., the first U.S. Astronaut into space, in a suborbital flight.

1961 Silicon Transistor Exceeds Germanium Speed Computer architect Seymour Cray funds development of the first silicon device to meet the performance demands of the world’s fastest machine..

1962 “Packet switching is the breaking down of data into datagrams or packets that are labeled to indicate the origin and the destination of the information and the forwarding of these packets from one computer to another computer until the information arrives at its final destination computer. This was crucial to the realization of a computer network. If packets are lost at any given point, the message can be resent by the originator.”

1962 Aerospace systems are first the applications for ICs in computers The size, weight, and reduced power consumption of integrated circuits compared to discrete transistor designs justify their higher cost in military and aerospace systems..

1962 Baran’s finished document described several ways to accomplish this. His final proposal was a packet switched network.

1962 Cassette Tape Philips Company

1962 Comsat formed. American Broadcasting Company requests FCC to allow domestic satellites to distribute TV programs. Approximately 10,000 computers are in service.

1962 December 14, U.S. Mariner 2, the first successful planetary spacecraft, flies past Venus, and enters a solar orbit.

1962 Digital Camera NASA

1962 February 20, Mercury Friendship 7 lifts off with John H. Glenn, Jr., the first American in orbit, and orbits the Earth three times.

1962 Global Positioning System (GPS) U.S. Department of Defense (DOD)

1962 July 10, Telstar 1, U.S. satellite, beams the first live transatlantic telecast.

1962 LED

1962 May 24, Mercury Aurora 7 is launched with M. Scott Carpenter, making three orbits.

1962 RAND Paul Baran, of the RAND Corporation (a government agency), was commissioned by the U.S. Air Force to do a study on how it could maintain its command and control over its missiles and bombers, after a nuclear attack. This was to be a military research network that could survive a nuclear strike, decentralized so that if any locations (cities) in the U.S. were attacked, the military could still have control of nuclear arms for a counter-attack.

1962 United States Congress passes the Communications Satellite Act. T1 carrier is put into commercial service. The first transatlantic transmission of a TV signal via the TELSTAR satellite. (July 11). EES™ Electronic Switching Systems is introduced.

1963 BBN develops the first modem.

1963 CMOS (Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor) Frank Wanlass (Fairchild Semiconductor)

1963 Complementary MOS Circuit Configuration is Invented Frank Wanlass invents the lowest power logic configuration but performance limitations impede early acceptance of today’s dominant manufacturing technology. .

1963 Computer Mouse Prototype invented by Douglas Engelbart and Bill English, It was more than 20 years later that the public first gained any idea of how it could and would be used when it appeared in the Apple Macintosh in 1984

1963 Douglas Engelbart Invents the Mouse

1963 IBM comes up with the first removable hard drive, the 1311, which has six 14-inch platters and holds 2.6MB.

1963 June 16, Vostok 6 carries Soviet Cosmonaut Valentia Tereshkova, the first woman in space and orbits the Earth 48 times.

1963 June, Martin Schmidt interprets the behavior of 3C 273 the first known quasar.

1963 Microwave Communications Inc. (MCI) filed an application with the FCC to offer specialized voice and data services over a microwave system it wanted to build between Chicago and St. Louis.

1963 Standard Logic IC Families introduced Diode Transistor Logic (DTL) families create a high-volume market for digital ICs but speed, cost, and density advantages establish Transistor Transistor Logic (TTL) as the most popular standard logic configuration by the late 1960s..

1963 The Clean Air Act is passed.

1963 The Telefunken ‘mouse’

1963 Triac (TRIode for Alternating Current) General Electric (GE)

1964 7th April IBM releases the System 360 range of commercial computers

1964 An improved stock ticker tape machine (designed, developed and manufactured by Teletype Corporation) is placed into service at the New York Stock Exchange. The ticker, which transmits stock prices to brokerage houses nearly twice as fast as the previous system, has a capacity of ten million shares a day without incurring delays. (June 22). IEEE Group on Communication Technology is formed. (July 1.)

1964 BASIC (Beginners’ All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code), an easy to learn high level programming language is introduced.

1964 Duracell brand alkaline batteries introduced by the Mallory Battery Company

1964 First Commercial MOS IC Introduced General Microelectronics uses a Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor (MOS) process to pack more transistors on a chip than bipolar ICs and builds the first calculator chip set using the technology..

1964 Hybrid Microcircuits Reach Peak Production Volumes Multi-chip SLT packaging technology developed for the IBM System/360 computer family enters mass production. .

1964 IBM announces the System/360. . Many consider this Computer to be one of the most important steps forward in Computer design for business users due to it’s design concept allowing for companies to start with a cheap basic model and then upgrade to larger systems as their needs increased ( Many will quote the IBM/360 as the first true mainframe and it achieved fantastice success helping to make IBM dominent in the Computer industry for many years.

1964 IBM releases its famous Model 360 computer that eventually led to 0 billion in sales over its life cycle. George Heilmeier, at RCA’s research labs, invents the liquid crystal display. Douglas Englebart at SRI patented the idea of the mouse.

1964 July 31, U.S. Ranger 7 relays the first close range photographs of the Moon.

1964 Sony introduces the first VCR Home Video Recorder

1964 The First Widely-Used Analog Integrated Circuit is Introduced David Talbert and Robert Widlar at Fairchild kick-start a major industry sector by creating commercially successful ICs for analog applications..

1965 “Moore’s Law” Predicts the Future of Integrated Circuits Fairchild’s Director of R & D predicts the rate of increase of transistor density on an integrated circuit and establishes a yardstick for technology progress..

1965 AT&T introduces stored program controlled switching. There are now 2421 telephone companies.

1965 Commodore Business Machines (CBM) is founded.

1965 Compact Disc (CD) James T. Russell

1965 December 15, American astronauts Walter Schirra, Jr. and Thomas Stafford in Gemini 6 make the first space rendezvous with Gemini 7.

1965 December 4, Gemini 7 is launched carrying Frank Borman and James A. Lovell, Jr., making 206 orbits around Earth and proving a trip to the Moon possible.

1965 July 14, U.S. Mariner 4 returns the first close range images about Mars.

1965 June 3, Edward White II makes the first U.S. space walk from Gemini 4. Duration is 22 minutes.

1965 K. C. Kao and G. A. Hackham publish influential paper on fiber optics. The first commercial communications satellite, Early Bird, later named Intelsat 1, is launched into orbit from Cape Kennedy. The 85 pound satellite is a synchronous satellite, matching the earth’s rotation to hover over the same spot all the time. (April 6). The Soviet Union launches its first communications satellite and carried out transmissions of television programs. The satellite is named “Molniya 1”, which translates to “Lightning 1”. (April 23).

1965 Large Computers Demand Specialty Integrated Circuits Burroughs and RCA announce the first mainframe computer families based on monolithic integrated circuit technology..

1965 March 18, The first space walk is made from Soviet Voskhod 2 by Cosmonaut Alexei A. Leonov. Duration is 12 minutes.

1965 March 23, First manned flight of the Gemini program, Gemini 3 carrying Virgil I. Grissom and John W. Young. Made three orbits around the earth.

1965 March 24, Ranger 9 transmits high quality images of the moon, many of which were shown live in the first television spectacular about the moon.

1965 November 16, Soviet Venus 3 is launched, becoming the first craft to impact Venus on March 1, 1966.

1965 Package is the First to Accommodate System Design Considerations The Dual In-line Package (DIP) format significantly eases printed circuit board layout and reduces computer assembly cost..

1965 Read-Only-Memory is the First Dedicated IC Memory Configuration Factory-programmable read-only-memories (ROMs) generate the first integrated circuit random access memory applications..

1965 Sony introduces the first Betamax video recorder

1965 The Northeast Blackout occurs, New York state, portions of seven neighbouring states, and parts of eastern Canada are plunged into darkness. The Great Northeast Blackout began at the height of rush hour, delaying millions of commuters, trapping 800,000 people in New York’s subways, and stranding thousands more in office buildings, elevators, and trains

1965 Y. Hatano’s pedmoter

1966 August 14, U.S. Lunar Orbiter 1 enters moon orbit, and takes the first picture of the Earth from the distance of the moon.

1966 Computer Aided Design Tools Developed for ICs IBM engineers pioneer computer-aided electronic design automation tools for reducing errors and speeding design time..

1966 El-Gi 01:12 Ferrari radio controlled car

1966 February 3, Soviet Luna 9 is the first spacecraft to soft land on the moon.

1966 Hewlett-Packard releases their HP2116A real-time computer with 8K of memory. The newly formed Intel starts sell a semiconductor chip with 2,000 bits of memory.

1966 IBM introduces the first drive using a wound-coil ferrite recording head.

1966 June 2, Surveyor 1 is the first U.S. spacecraft to soft land on the Moon.

1966 Lawrence G. Roberts of MIT publishes “Towards a Cooperative Network of Time Shared Computers” which outlines the ARPANET plan. Worldwide direct telephone dialling has its first public demonstration, a call from Philadelphia to Geneva, Switzerland. (June 15).

1966 March 1, Soviet Venera 3 impacts on Venus, the first spacecraft to reach another planet. It fails to return data.

1966 March, Soviet Luna 10 is the first spacecraft to orbit the moon.

1966 Semiconductor RAMs Developed for High-Speed Storage Sixteen-bit bipolar devices are the first ICs designed specifically for high speed read/write memory applications..

1966 Suggestions made by Kao and Hockham that optical fiber could be used for long distance transmission

1966 The hand-held pocket calculator was invented at Texas Instruments in 1966

1966 Tom Carter sues AT&T to permit connection of his phone patch. Court remands the case to FCC. (One writer stated Tom Carter filed for .25 million damages and received 0K. His original complaint had been filed in 1958.)

1967 Application Specific Integrated Circuits employ Computer-Aided Design Automated design tools reduce the development engineering time to design and deliver complex custom integrated circuits..

1967 April 23, Soviet Soyuz 1 is launched, carrying Vladimir M. Komarov. On April 24 it crashed, killing Komarov, the first spaceflight fatality.

1967 Atari: As a young engineering student at the University of Utah, Nolan Bushnell liked to sneak into the computer labs late at night to play computer games on the university’s million mainframes.

1967 Barclays Bank in the UK claims to have installed the first cash dispenser

1967 Larry Roberts at the Advanced Research Projects Agency publishes a paper proposing ARPANET.

1967 October 18, Venera 4 sends a descent capsule into the Venusian atmosphere, returning data about its composition.

1967 Polaroid

1967 Turnkey Equipment Suppliers Change Industry Dynamics Third-party vendors develop specialized knowledge of semiconductor fabrication and emerge as vendors of process technology and turnkey manufacturing facilities..

1968 9th December Douglas C. Engelbart publicly demonstrates the mouse

1968 ARPA awarded the ARPANET contract to BBN. BBN had selected a Honeywell minicomputer as the base on which they would build the switch. The physical network was constructed in 1969, linking four nodes University of California at Los Angeles, SRI (in Stanford), University of California at Santa Barbara, and University of Utah. The network was wired together via 50 Kbps circuits.

1968 Bell System adopts the use of “911” as a nationwide emergency telephone number (January 12). Huntington, Indiana became the first U.S. city served by the Bell System to receive the new universal emergency telephone number “911”. March 1.

1968 December 21, Apollo 8 is launched with Frank Borman, James A. Lovell, Jr. and William A. Anders, the first Apollo to use the Saturn V rocket, and the first manned spacecraft to orbit the Moon, making 10 orbits on its 6 day mission.

1968 Dedicated Current Source IC Integrates a Data Conversion Function The precision manufacturing requirements of combining analog and digital capability on one chip made them one of the last product areas to yield to monolithic solutions..

1968 FCC starts proceeding to set aside spectrum for land mobile communications.

1968 FCC’s Carterfone decision permits interconnections of non Bell equipment to telephone lines.

1968 October 11, Apollo 7 is the first manned Apollo mission with Walter M. Schirra, Jr., Donn F. Eisele, and Walter Cunningham. It orbited the earth once.

1968 Robert Dennard invented ram: random access memory

1968 September 15, Soviet Zond 5 is launched, the first spacecraft to orbit the Moon and return.

1968 Silicon Gate Technology Developed for ICs Federico Faggin and Tom Klein improve the reliability, packing density, and speed of MOS ICs with a silicon-gate structure. Faggin designs the first commercial silicon-gate IC – the Fairchild 3708..

1968 Smoke detector

1968 The North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC) is formed.

1968 USPTO grants patent 3,387,286 to IBM’s Robert Dennard for a one-transistor DRAM cell. DRAM stands for Dynamic RAM (Random Access Memory) or Dynamic Random Access Memory. DRAM will become the standard memory chip for personal computers replacing magnetic core memory.

1969 16th October DEC PDP-15 Introduced

1969 18th December Plessey buys out Ferranti’s numerical Control Interests

1969 29th October ARPANET launch the world’s first successful packet-switched wide area computer network

1969 ARPANET begins 4 node operation (UCLA, Stanford Research Institute (SRI), UC Santa Barbara and University of Utah.

1969 August 5, Mariner 7 returns high resolution images of the Martian surface, concentrating on the southern hemisphere.

1969 Creation of ARPANET, the predecessor of the Internet

1969 FCC asks National Academy of Science to recommend an interconnection policy. The Department of Defence initiates the ARPANet, which led to the development of Internet. Initially computers at Stanford University and UCLA are connected.

1969 Honeywell releases the H316 “Kitchen Computer”

1969 In its MCI decision, the commission authorizes MCI to build and operate private line facilities between St. Louis and Chicago.

1969 Intel announces a 1 kilobit RAM chip

1969 Intel begin as chip designers and produce a 1 KB RAM chip, the largest memory chip todate. Intel soon switch to being notable designers of computer microprocessors.

1969 January, Soyuz 4 & 5 perform the first Soviet spaceship docking, transferring Cosmonauts between vehicles.

1969 July 20, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, Jr. make the first manned soft landing on the Moon, and the first moonwalk, using Apollo 11.

1969 July 31, Mariner 6 returns high resolution images of the Martian surface, concentrating on the equatorial region.

1969 Schottky-Barrier Diode Doubles the Speed of TTL Memory & Logic Design innovation enhances speed and lowers power consumption of the industry standard 64-bit TTL RAM architecture. Is quickly applied to new bipolar logic and memory designs..

1969 The National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 is passed.

1969 TTL Quad Gate – 16 Transistors

1969 UNIX is developed by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs

1969 Van de Graaf Generator Robert Jemison Van de Graaff

1969 Very Large Scale Integrated Circuits (VLSI) Carver Mead

1969 Video and Audio are transmitted back from the first Moon landing (July 20). UNIX Operating System is developed.

1970 12nd November Univac 1110 is introduced

1970 April 11, Apollo 13 is launched, suffering an explosion in its SM oxygen tanks. Its Moon landing is aborted, and the crew, James A. Lovell, Jr., John L. Swigert, Jr. and Fred W. Haise, Jr., return safely.

1970 AT&T introduces its ESS#2 electronic switch. Intel introduces its popular 4004 4 bit microprocessor which starts the evolution of Intel”s famous line of 386, 486 and Pentium processors. There are now 1841 telephone companies. AT&T permitted to sell its teletype (TWX) service to Western Union.FCC approves the Domestic Satellite Order (which was nine years in the making).

1970 Bell Telephone Labs release design information to Western Electric for the production of Modular Telephone Cords and Jacks.

1970 Corning Glass demonstrate highly transparent fibres, and Bell Laboratories demonstrates semiconductor lasers that could operate at room temperature; these demonstrations help establish the feasibility of fibre optic communications.

1970 December 15, Soviet Venera 7 is the first probe to soft land on Venus, transmitting for 23 minutes.

1970 Digital thermometer

1970 Electronic Ignition Chrysler Corporation

1970 General Digital Corporation – renamed Western Digital in 1971 is founded in California USA

1970 Intel releases the 1103 chip, the first generally available DRAM memory chip.

1970 June Xerox opens the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)

1970 Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) James Fergason

1970 Magnetohydrodynamics Hannes Alfvén

1970 MOS Dynamic RAM Competes with Magnetic Core Memory on Price The Intel i1103 Dynamic RAM (DRAM) presents the first significant semiconductor challenge to magnetic cores as the primary form of computer memory..

1970 November 17, Luna 17 lands on the moon, with the first automatic robot, Lunokhod 1. Driven by a five man team on earth, traveled over surface for 11 days.

1970 September 12, Soviet Luna 16 is launched, conducting the first successful return of lunar soil samples by an automatic spacecraft.

1970 The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is formed. The Water and Environmental Quality Act is passed. The Clean Air Act of 1970 is passed.

1971 15th November Intel Introduces the World’s First EPROM

1971 15th November Intel Launches the First Microprocessor – The 4004

1971 8? Floppy Disk Drives Introduced

1971 April 19, Salyut 1 space station is launched by the U.S.S.R. It remains in orbit until May 28, 1973.

1971 Busicom LE-120A Handy pocket calculator

1971 EPROM (Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory) Dov Frohman (Intel)

1971 Intel releases the 1101 chip, a 256-bit programmable memory, and the 1701 chip, a 256-byte erasable read-only memory (EROM).

1971 Intel releases world’s first microprocessor, the 4004.

1971 January 31, Apollo 14 moon mission is launched by the U.S. with the legendary Alan Shepard, along with Stuart Roosa and Edgar Mitchell on board. They land in the planned Apollo 13 site, the Fra Mauro highlands, which they explore with the help of a two wheeled cart that permits the transport of a significantly greater quantity of lunar material than previous missions. Shepard becomes the first man to hit a golf ball on the moon.

1971 July 30, Apollo 15 astronauts David Scott and James Irwin drive the first moon rover. The next year, Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt drives a similar rover.

1971 June 6, Soyuz 11 carried Cosmonauts G.T. Dobrovolsky, V.N. Volkov, and V.I. Patsayev to Salyut 1, the first manned occupancy of an orbital station. However, on June 29, the Cosmonauts died upon Soyuz 11’s reentry.

1971 May 30, The United States launches Mariner 9, which becomes the first spacecraft to survey Mars from orbit.

1971 Microprocessor Integrates CPU Function onto a Single Chip Intel engineers, led by Federico Faggin, implement Ted Hoff’s architectural concept to create the first commercial microprocessor family with the central processing unit (CPU) integrated onto a single chip. .

1971 November 13, American Mariner 9 (launched May 30, 1971) is the first spacecraft to orbit another planet, Mars. Over the next year, it maps 100 percent of the Martian surface.

1971 Reusable Programmable ROM Introduces Iterative Design Flexibility Dov Froman’s ultra-violet light erasable ROM design offers an important design tool for the rapid development of microprocessor-based systems, called an erasable, programmable read-only-memory or EPROM..

1971 Texas Instruments releases the first pocket calculator

1971 The Intelsat IV communications satellite goes into commercial operation. Initially it has 830 circuits in service and linked ground stations in 15 countries. The DUV (Data Under Voice) is introduced. It permits signals to “hitch hike” on existing microwave radio systems by using the lower end of the frequency band not normally used for voice. Ray Tomlinson writes the first email program. The “@” sign is used for the first time in an email address.

1971 Video Cassette Recorder (VCR) Sony

1972 ARPANET was currently using the Network Control Protocol or NCP to transfer data. This allowed communications between hosts running on the same network.

1972 Atari Pong Introduced As an Arcade Game In A Large Box finding a place alongside traditional Pinball Machines

1972 Clive Sinclair reintroduces the first pocket calculator

1972 December, Scientists designate Cignus X 1 as the first probable black hole.

1972 First scientific hand-held calculator (HP-35) introduced (price 5).

1972 IEEE Communications Society is established on 1 January. Jon Postel writes the specifications for Telnet. IEEE Proceedings publishes its first issue on computer communications. Guest Editors are Paul Green and Robert Lucky. A demonstration of the ARPANET at the 1972 IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications.

1972 January 1972 Hewlett-Packard introduces the HP-35

1972 July 15, Pioneer 10 becomes the first man made object to travel through the asteroid belt.

1972 March 2, Pioneer 10 is launched on an Atlas/Centaur/TE364 4 towards Jupiter by the U.S., designed to familiarize alien life with humans. It returns the first close up images of Jupiter in 1973.

1972 Multi socket power plug

1972 The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was renamed The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (or DARPA)

1972 The Clean Water Act of 1972 is passed. Surface water quality protection is passed in the United States

1972 The first e-mail program was created by Ray Tomlinson of BBN.

1973 22nd May Bob Metcalfe invents the Ethernet

1973 6th September Britain exports more computing equipment than it imports

1973 April 5, Pioneer 11 is launched on an Atlas/Centaur/TE364 4, flying past Jupiter in 1974, and Saturn in 1979, where it discovers new rings.

1973 Bell Telephone Labs released design information to Western Electric for production of the Com Key 416, the first KTU less key system which was less susceptible to damage caused by lightning storms.

1973 Cell Phone Martin Cooper

1973 Development began on the protocol later to be called TCP/IP, it was developed by a group headed by Vinton Cerf from Stanford and Bob Kahn from DARPA. This new protocol was to allow diverse computer networks to interconnect and communicate with each other.

1973 George Gray of the University of Hull invented the first stable liquid crystal displays, later to be used in mobile phone displays.

1973 IBM announces the 3340, the first modern “Winchester” hard drive, which has a sealed assembly, lubricated spindles, and low-mass heads!

1973 May 14, Skylab Workshop is launched by the U.S., and maintained by three crews.

1973 May 25, First crew to Skylab, Skylab 2, are launched, repairing damage incurred to Skylab during its launch.

1973 November 3, American Mariner 10 is launched, on the first dual planet mission. Over the next year, it returned photographs of Venus and Mercury.

1973 Peter Wright of the University of Sheffield put forward the first example of a solid polymer electrolyte, starting a new field of research into solid state batteries for mobiles.

1973 Robert Metcalfe invents Ethernet at Xerox PARC. Ethernet uses a cable rather than a radio channel as the transmission medium. The “Touch a matic” telephone is introduced. It can automatically dial a call anywhere in the U.S. at the touch of a single button. Its solid state memory allows dialing up to 32 pre coded telephone numbers. Construction of a new, high capacity coaxial cable system, called L5, is completed between Pittsburgh and St. Louis. It has the capacity of carrying 108,000 simultaneous telephone conversations, three times the capacity of any previous system. File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is introduced.

1973 The Ethernet

1974 Breville sandwich maker

1974 CPU (Central Processing Unit) PC Intel The 8080

1974 December 26, Soviet Salyut 4, civilian space station, is launched. It remains in orbit until February 2, 1977.

1974 Digital Watch is First System-On-Chip Integrated Circuit The Microma liquid crystal display (LCD) digital watch is the first product to integrate a complete electronic system onto a single silicon chip, called a System-On-Chip or SOC..

1974 First domestic satellites in operation. AT&T introduces the digital subsriber loop. BBN opens the first public packet switched network. Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn discuss connecting networks together to form an “internet”. They collaborate in creating aTransmission Control Protocol (TCP). The Department of Justice files its antitrust suit against AT&T. The Consent Decree, resulting therefrom, required AT&T to divest itself of the 24 Bell Operating Companies by 1984. Value added (packet switched networks) come on the scene.

1974 First Use of term Internet by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn in paper on Transmission Control Protocol.

1974 General-Purpose Microcontroller Family is Announced A single-chip calculator design emerges as the TMS 1000 micro-control unit or MCU, a concept that spawned families of general-purpose digital workhorses that power the tools and toys of the developed world..

1974 Intel receives a U.S. patent for a “memory system for a multichip digital computer”.

1974 June 24, Soviet Salyut 3, their first military space station, is launched. It remains in orbit until January 1975.

1974 May 17, NASA launches the first Synchronous Meteorological Satellite, SMS 1.

1974 Scaling of IC Process Design Rules Quantified IBM researcher Robert Dennard’s paper on process scaling on MOS memories accelerates a global race to shrink physical dimensions and manufacture ever more complex integrated circuits..

1974 The first use of UPC or Universal product Code BAR CODE UPC scanner ( 1952 for first bar code use but not UPC ) or the standard used today

1974 The Z-80, 8 bit processor is designed by Zilog Corp

1974 Touch Screen Technology Sam Hurst

1974 Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn publish “A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection”, in IEEE Communications Magazine, which outlines design of a Transmission Control Program (TCP). The term “Internet” is used for the first time. Western Union launches Westar, the nation’s first domestic communications satellite. New York Telephone inaugurated Dial A Joke, an addition to the recorded announcement field. During the first month of operation, more than 100,000 calls a day are made to the number.

1974 Xerox Palo Alto Research Center designed the Alto

1975 15th September Microsoft Founded

1975 1st January MITS Altair launched on the cover of Popular Electronics magazine

1975 3rd March 1st meeting of the Hombrew Club

1975 Bell Telephone Laboratories released production design information to Western Electric for electronic key systems.

1975 Brown’s Ferry nuclear accident occurs.

1975 Cray-1 , the first commercially developed supercomputer, invented by Seymour Cray Installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory the next year

1975 July, American Apollo (18) and Soviet Soyuz 19 dock, the first international spacecraft rendezvous.

1975 Kodak digital camera

1975 October, Soviet Venera 9 and 10 send the first pictures of the Venusian surface to Earth.

1975 Personal consumer computer Altair released, it uses Intel’s 8-bit 8080 processor and includes 1 KB of memory. Later in the same year, Bob Marsh manufacturers the first Processor Technology’s 4 kB memory boards for the Altair.

1975 Steven Sasson, an engineer at Eastman Kodak creates the first working Digital Camera

1975 Summary: There are now 1618 telcos and 140 million phones in the U.S. Bell companies supply 85% of the lines; GTE: 10%. Smallest telco had 19 subscribers. About this time the last manual telco switchboard in Maine is retired.

1975 The Microcomputer Altair 8800 is released

1975 The name “Micro-soft” (for microcomputer software) and Microsoft becomes a registered trademark

1976 1st April Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs and Ronald Wayne Found Apple Computer Inc.

1976 April Apple 1 Released

1976 Dr. Robert M. Metcalfe develops Ethernet, which allowed coaxial cable to move data extremely fast. This was a crucial component to the development of LANs.

1976 Ink Jet Printer Technology Created

1976 July 20, Pictures of the Martian surface are taken by Viking 1, the first U.S. attempt to soft land a spacecraft on another planet.

1976 June 22, Soviet military space station Salyut 5 is launched, remaining in orbit until August 8, 1977.

1976 Lithium batteries

1976 Matsushita introduces the VHS home video cassette recorder to compete with Sony’s Beta max system.

1976 September 3, Viking 2 lands on Mars on the Plain of Utopia, where it discovered water frost.

1976 Seymour Cray (1925 – 1996) Also known as “The Father of the Supercomputer”, along with George Amdahl, defined the supercomputer industry in the year 1976.

1976 The Department of Defense began to experiment with the TCP/IP protocol and soon decided to require it for use on ARPANET.

1976 The packet satellite project went into practical use. SATNET, Atlantic packet Satellite network, was born. This network linked the United States with Europe. Surprisingly, it used INTELSAT satellites that were owned by a consortium of countries and not exclusively the United States government.

1976 UUCP (Unix-to-Unix CoPy) developed at AT&T Bell Labs and distributed with UNIX one year later.

1976 Warner Communications buys Atari from Bushnell for million.

1977 5th June The Apple II launched

1977 Atari Games Console 2600

1977 August September, Voyagers 1 and 2 leave Earth to meet with Jupiter in 1979 and Saturn in 1980.

1977 Mattel Electronic Football

1977 September 29, Soviet Salyut 6 space station is launched. Its crews include members from Czechoslovakia, Poland, GDR, Bulgaria, Hungary, Vietnam, Cuba, Mongolia, and Romania.

1977 The Department of Energy (DOE) is formed.

1977 The first Apple II computers went on sale

1977 The Microcomputer Kit 14, or MK14 was introduced by Science of Cambridge for UK£39.95.

1977 The New York City blackout occurs.

1977 Voyager spacecraft is launched. Sends back signals from Jupiter (1979 1980), Saturn (1981), Uranus (1986) and Neptune (1989). Bell Laboratories announces the development of the MAC 8, a microprocessor suited for a wide range of telecommunications applications.

1978 5th December Acorn Computers Ltd formed in Cambridge, UK

1978 Bell Labs launched a trial of first commercial cellular network

1978 Commission rejects telephone companies’ request for the Primary Instrument Concept in which all subscribers would be required to have at least one phone provided by the telephone company.

1978 December, Two Pioneer spacecraft reach Venus. One drops four probes into the atmosphere, while the other maps the surface.

1978 First RAID (Redundant Arrays of Independent Disks) technology patent is filed.

1978 November, The Einstein Observatory begins its 30 day mission.

1978 PAL User-Programmable Logic Devices Introduced John Birkner and H. T. Chua of Monolithic Memories develop easy-to-use programmable array logic (PAL) devices and tools for fast prototyping custom logic functions..

1978 Space Invaders Launches Craze for Computer Video Games

1978 TAT 1, the world’s first transoceanic telephone cable was retired (November 27). TCP split into TCP and IP.

1978 The first computer BBS bulletin board system is created

1978 The Power Plant and Industrial Fuel Use Act limits the use of natural gas in electric generation (repealed 1987).

1978 The Public Utilities Regulatory Policies Act (PURPA) is passed, and ends utility monopoly over generation.

1978 Victor HR-3300REK – first UK VHS video recorder

1979 1st January Microsoft moves from Albuquerque, New Mexico to Bellevue, Washington

1979 8-Bit Microprocessor – 4500 Transistors

1979 A 62,000 mile microwave telecommunications system is completed within Saudi Arabia.

1979 A group headed by Al Shugart founds disk-drive manufacturer Seagate Technology.

1979 First thin film transistor made from amorphous silicon at the University of Dundee, used in top end phone displays.

1979 IBM’s 3370 uses seven 14-inch platters to store 571MB, the first drive to use thin-film heads.

1979 IBM’s 62 PC, “Piccolo,” uses six 8-inch platters to store 64MB.

1979 June Apple 2+ Launched

1979 Nov. The Atari 400 and 800 were announced in December 1978, though they didn’t actually start shipping until late in 1979.

1979 Seagate introduces the ST-506 drive and interface, which is then used in all early microcomputer implementations.

1979 September 1, Pioneer 11 reaches Saturn, flying to within 13,000 miles and taking the first close up photographs.

1979 Single Chip Digital Signal Processor Introduced Bell Labs’ single-chip DSP-1 Digital Signal Processor device architecture is optimized for electronic switching systems..

1979 Sony introduces the Sony Walkman costing 0.00

1979 Texas Instruments Speak and Spell

1979 The Creation of BITNET, by IBM, “Because its Time Network”, introduced the “store and forward” network. It was used for email and listservs.

1979 The Three Mile Island nuclear accident occurs.

1979 USENET (the decentralized news group network) was created by Steve Bellovin, a graduate student at University of North Carolina, and programmers Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis. It was based on UUCP.

1979 Walkman RCA / Sony

1980 29th January Sinclair ZX80 Launched

1980 AT&T introduces the DataSpeed 40, a forerunner of the current generation “smart terminals” having the capability of doing various forms of data processing rather than serving solely as input terminal to a computer. This led to the Computer II Decision which came up with a binary test: Was the device for “basic” service; or was it for “enhanced” service? Enhanced services had three subdivisions: Protocol conversion, data processing, and information retrieval. All of this led to the Computer III Decision and the Open Network Architecture concept in 1989. Digital local offices and optical fiber transmission being deployed. Switching System #7 is being gradually deployed.

1980 Digital Equipment Corporation, Intel and Xerox introduce the DIX standard for Ethernet

1980 First available Domestic Camcorders available in Japan

1980 First use of the “900” number.

1980 IBM introduces the first gigabyte hard drive. It is the size of a refrigerator, weighs about 550 pounds, and costs ,000.

1980 June The Apple 3 was announced

1980 Release of Pac-Man arcade game

1980 Seagate releases the first 5.25-inch hard disk.

1980 Sinclair ZX80 Introduced: February British company Sinclair released their ZX80 computer in for 9.95. It is considered to be the world’s first computer for under 0, at least that’s what Sinclair Research Ltd stated in all of their ads

1980 Sony Walkman

1980 The first U.S. windfarm is opened.

1980 The Pacific Northwest Electric Power Planning and Conservation Act establishes regional regulation and planning.

1981 12nd August IBM introduces personal computer with Microsoft’s 16-bit operating system, MS-DOS 1.0

1981 13rd August IBM announced that it was launching a personal computer using an Intel 8088

1981 25th June Microsoft incorporates

1981 Apple Viruses 1, 2, and 3 are some of the first viruses “in the wild,” or in the public domain. Found on the Apple II operating system, the viruses spread through Texas A&M via pirated computer games.

1981 April 12, The first manned mission of the Space Transportation System (STS 1), Columbia , is launched.

1981 Bell Telephone Labs design of a network embedded database of Personal Identification Numbers (PINs) for calling card customers to be accessed by public telephones over Signalling System 7. (Today, improved architectures of this kind underlie all Intelligent Network services.)

1981 December 20, The ESA launches a fourth Ariane rocket.

1981 Docket 81 216, the “Omnibus Docket” was so called because it contained about two dozen items, including make busy, digital systems, more on premises wiring, party lines, reducing dc on hook resistance requirements and many more. It took several years to clear all of these items. Hayes introduces its landmark 300 bps modem. IBM introduces its PC in August 1981.

1981 Epson HX-20 – the world’s first laptop

1981 First cellular mobile telephone service is offered, in Saudi Arabia and Scandinavia. A new telephone service, DIAL IT® allowed a caller to listen to the voice communications between the Space Shuttle Columbia and the ground command center.

1981 IBM in US launches it’s first IBM PC which uses Microsoft Software MS DOS

1981 June 19, The European Space Agency launches its third Ariane rocket.

1981 MS-DOS released by Microsoft

1981 National Science Foundation created backbone called CSNET 56 Kbps network for institutions without access to ARPANET. Vinton Cerf proposed a plan for an inter-network connection between CSNET and the ARPANET.

1981 PURPA ruled unconstitutional by Federal judge.

1981 Shugart Associates joins NCR to develop an intelligent disk drive interface called the Shugart Associates Systems Interface (SASI), a predecessor to SCSI (Small Computer System Interface).

1981 Sinclair ZX81 Computer Lanuched

1981 The term INTERNET first mentioned

1981 The The Commodore VIC-20 was the first inexpensive color computer available, costing less than 0. It can only display 22 characters of text per line, so its use for business applications is minimal, but people loved it for games

1982 23rd April Sinclair launches the ZX Spectrum computer

1982 April 19, Soviet Salyut 7 space station is launched.

1982 August, Voyager 2 completes its flyby of Saturn.

1982 First CD player Made By Sony goes on sale in Japan

1982 January 8 Antitrust suit dropped after AT&T accepts government’s proposal.

1982 January 8 Antitrust suit dropped after AT&T accepts government’s proposal.

1982 January, The Commodore 64 price at US5 during the Commodore 64’s lifetime, 17 million units were sold

1982 March 1, Venera 13 lands on Venus, and provides the first Venusian soil analysis.

1982 May 13, Soviet Cosmonauts Anatoly N. Berezovoi and Valentin V. Lebedev are launched in Soyuz T 5 to rendezvous with Salyut 7, the first team to inhabit the space station. They return to Earth in Soyuz T 7, setting a (then) duration record of 211 days.

1982 November 11, The space shuttle Columbia’s fifth mission, its first operational one, begins, deploying two satellites. Crew: Vance Brand, Robert Overmyer, Joseph Allen, and William Lenoir.

1982 Sony Watchman – CD player

1982 The first full colour two way video teleconferencing service is offered. The development of TFM (Time Frequency Multiplexing).

1982 Times man of The Year is THE COMPUTER

1982 U.S. Supreme Court upholds legality of PURPA in FERC v. Mississippi (456 US 742).

1982 Western Digital announces the first single-chip Winchester hard drive controller (WD1010).

1983 Apple introduced its Lisa

1983 April 4, The space shuttle Challenger lifts off for its first mission (STS 6) and has the first American space walk in nine years. Crew: Paul Weitz, Karol Bobko, Donald Peterson, and Story Musgrave.

1983 ARPANET officially changes to use the Internet Protocol, creating the Internet.

1983 Commodore 64 arrived

1983 Fred Cohen, while working on his dissertation, formally defines a computer virus as “a computer program that can affect other computer programs by modifying them in such a way as to include a (possibly evolved) copy of itself.”

1983 IBM releases the IBM PC XT

1983 In the CBEMA Decision, an outgrowth of the Computer II Decision, the Commission requires telcos to publish a “Network Disclosure” statement providing information of interconnection and operability requirements for new services. Carolyn Doughty, Bell Telephone Laboratories, files a patent on Caller ID.

1983 Internet Activities Board (IAB) was created in 1983.

1983 January Apple Lisa Launched

1983 January November, The Infra-red Astronomical Satellite finds new comets, asteroids, galaxies, and a dust ring around the star Vega that may be new planets.

1983 June 19, Sally K. Ride is the first U.S. woman to travel in space, on Challenger mission STS 7.

1983 Licences were granted to Cellnet and Vodafone to provide national cellular radio networks in the UK.

1983 Lotus 1-2-3 is released

1983 Microsoft Word is first released

1983 November 28, The space shuttle Columbia carries the ESA Spacelab 1 into orbit (STS 9). Its crew includes Ulf Merbold, A German and first ESA member in space..

1983 October 10, Soviet Venera 15 returns the first high resolution images of the Venus polar area, and compiled a thermal map of most of the northern hemisphere.

1983 On January 1st, every machine connected to ARPANET had to use TCP/IP. TCP/IP became the core Internet protocol and replaced NCP entirely.

1983 Rodime releases the first 3.5-inch hard drive; the RO352 includes two platters and stores 10MB.

1983 Swatch introduce their first watches

1983 The Cleaved Coupled Cavity (C3) laser was introduced. The single frequency tunable laser emitted a light so pure that over a billion bits of information per second could be sent through a glass fiber. (April). The first commercial cellular phone system is introduced in Chicago. (October 13).

1983 The first hand held mobile phone becomes commercially available

1983 The University of Wisconsin created Domain Name System (DNS). This allowed packets to be directed to a domain name, which would be translated by the server database into the corresponding IP number. This made it much easier for people to access other servers, because they no longer had to remember numbers.

1984 13rd April First ARM Processors Powered Up

1984 Annapolis, N.S., tidal power plant—first of its kind in North America (Canada) opened.

1984 Apple Computers releases the Macintosh personal compututer. It is the first computer that came with 128KB of memory. The one-megabyte memory chip is developed.

1984 August 30, The third space shuttle, Discovery, lifts off on it’s maiden voyage (STS 41D). Crew: Henry W. Hartsfield, Michael L. Coats, Richard Mullane, Steven Hawley, Judith A. Resnik, and Charles D. Walker.

1984 December, Soviet/International Vega 1 & 2 are launched, dropping probes into Venus’ atmosphere before continuing to Halley’s Comet.

1984 Digital TAD (Telephone Answering Device) Kazuo Hashimoto

1984 February 3, Bruce McCandless takes the first untethered space walk using MMU from the space shuttle Challenger (STS 41B).

1984 January 1984 Apple launches Macintosh 128K

1984 July 17, launch of Soyuz T 12 carrying Svetlana Savitskaya, who becomes the first woman to walk in space.

1984 October 5, launch of space shuttle Challenger mission STS 41G carrying the first crew with two women aboard Sally Ride and Katherine Sullivan. Sullivan becomes the first American woman to walk in space.

1984 October, Salyut 7’s cosmonauts L. D. Kizim, V. A. Solovyov, and O. Y. Atkov set a (then) 237 day record in space. They arrive at Salyut 7 in Soyuz T 10 and depart in Soyuz T 11

1984 September 1984 Macintosh 512K Launched

1984 Sony Discman

1984 Sony makes the first 3 1/2? computer disk Which will replace the older style floppy disks

1984 The ARPANET was divided into two networks MILNET and ARPANET. MILNET was to serve the needs of the military and ARPANET to support the advanced research component, Department of Defense continued to support both networks.

1984 The first Apple Macintosh goes on sale

1984 Upgrade to CSNET was contracted to MCI. New circuits would be T1 lines,1.5 Mbps which is twenty-five times faster than the old 56 Kbps lines. IBM would provide advanced routers and Merit would manage the network. New network was to be called NSFNET (National Science Foundation Network), and old lines were to remain called CSNET.

1984 Western Digital makes the first Winchester hard drive controller card for the IBM PC/AT.

1985 20th November Microsoft Windows was launched

1985 24th September Steve Jobs founds NeXT Computers Inc.

1985 April 29, The Challenger carries the ESA Spacelab 3 into orbit (STS 51B).

1985 Citizens Power, first power marketer, goes into business.

1985 Comedian Ernie Wise made the UK’s first mobile phone call across the Vodafone network.

1985 Control Data, Compaq Computer, and Western Digital collaborate to develop the 40-pin IDE interface. IDE stands for Intelligent Drive Electronics, more commonly known as Integrated Drive Electronics.

1985 Imprimis integrates the first hard drive controller into a drive.

1985 January 8, The Sakigake probe is launched by Japan’s Institute of Space and Aeronautical Science, becoming the first interplanetary probe as it rendezvous with Halley’s Comet.

1985 July 2, The European Space Agency launches the Giotto spacecraft from an Ariane rocket. It encounters Halley’s Comet in 1986, and Comet P/Grigg Skjellerup in 1992.

1985 Microsoft Corporation releases the first version of Windows, Windows 1.0.

1985 October 3, The fourth space shuttle Atlantis takes off on its first mission (STS 51J). Crew: Karol J. Bobko, Ronald J. Grabe, Robert A. Stewart, David C. Hilmers, and William A. Pailes.

1985 October Spacelab D1, the first joint German/ESA mission, is flown. Its crew consists of two German DARA astronauts, and Danish Wubbo Ockels of the ESA.

1985 Quantum introduces the Plus Hardcard, which allows the addition of a hard drive without an available bay or a separate controller card.

1985 The first .Com domain name, symbolics.com, is registered by the Symbolics corporation. However, .edu domains, for educational institutions, still predominate over the commercial .com ones

1985 The Leatherman appeared

1985 The National Science Foundation began deploying its new T1 lines, which would be finished by 1988.

1985 Western Digital produces the first ESDI (Enhanced Small Device Interface) controller board, which allows larger capacity and faster hard drives to be used in PCs.

1986 13th March Microsoft stock goes public

1986 26th February Microsoft moves to corporate campus in Redmond, Washington

1986 April, Astronomers find that our galaxy is smaller than they thought and the Sun is 23,000 light years from it’s center.

1986 Bose noise cancelling headphones

1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident (USSR) occurs.

1986 EMAP ( Internet Mail Access Protocol ) defined for e-mail transfer

1986 February 20, The core unit of Soviet space station Mir is launched.

1986 High-Temperature Superconductivity Johannes Bednorz, Karl Müller

1986 IBM unveils the PC Convertible, the first laptop computer the 5140 “Convertible”

1986 January 1986 Apple Macintosh Plus launched

1986 January 28, The space shuttle Challenger explodes shortly after liftoff of mission STS 51L.

1986 January, Voyager 2 flies past Uranus.

1986 March, Astronomers discover an invisible gravity source that splits a quasar’s light.

1986 March, Spacecraft from the U.S.S.R, Japan, and Western Europe fly by Halley’s Comet on it’s 30th recorded appearance.

1986 The 386 series of microprocessor introduced by Intel.

1986 The Internet Engineering Task Force or IETF was created to serve as a forum for technical coordination by contractors for DARPA working on ARPANET, US Defense Data Network (DDN), and the Internet core gateway system.

1986 The official SCSI spec is released; Apple Computer’s Mac Plus is one of the first computers to use it.

1986 Two programmers named Basit and Amjad replace the executable code in the boot sector of a floppy disk with their own code designed to infect each 360kb floppy accessed on any drive. Infected floppies had “© Brain” for a volume label.

1987 2nd April Windows 2 was launched

1987 BITNET and CSNET merged to form the Corporation for Research and Educational Networking (CREN), another work of the National Science Foundation.

1987 December Cosmonaut Yuri V. Romanenko returns from space station Mir, having arrived there from Soyuz TM 2, and sets a (then) space endurance record of 326 days.

1987 Digital Light Processing (DLP) Larry Hornbeck, William E. Nelson

1987 February 25, Supernova 1987A blazes into view.

1987 March 1987 Macintosh II released

1987 Sony super VHS camcorder

1987 The Lehigh virus, one of the first file viruses, infects command.com files.

1987 William E. Nelson

1988 Connor introduces the first 1-inch-high 3.5-inch hard drive, which is still the common form factor. Before this, hard drives were either full height or half-height.

1988 Digital mobile phones

1988 MacMag and the Scores virus cause the first major Macintosh outbreaks.

1988 One of the most common viruses, Jerusalem, is unleashed. Activated every Friday the 13th, the virus affects both .exe and .com files and deletes any programs run on that day.

1988 Prairie Tek releases the 220, the first 2.5-inch hard drive designed for the burgeoning notebook computer market; it uses two platters to store 20MB.

1988 Soon after the completion of the T1 NSFNET backbone, traffic increased so quickly that plans immediately began on upgrading the network again.

1988 The Chernobyl virus spreads quickly via .exe files. As the notoriety attached to its name would suggest, the virus is quite destructive, attacking not only files but also a certain chip within infected computers.

1988 The first major computer virus infects computers connected to the Internet.

1988 The NeXT (68030 CPU) computer is introduced after two years of research

1988 Two California teenagers infiltrate and take control of more than 500 military, government, and private sector computer systems.

1988 Western Digital buys the disk-drive assets of Tandon Corporation with an eye to manufacturing IDE drives.

1989 32-Bit Microprocessor – 3,100,000 Transistors

1989 First release of Microsoft Office. which was a bundle of Microsoft’s office applications, such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel , Dependent on the Version you purchased would depend on which applications were included

1989 January Apple introduces one of its best Macintosh products MacIntosh SE /30

1989 July 12, Soviet/International Phobos 2 launched, which orbits Mars to study its surface, atmosphere and magnetic field.

1989 May 4, Space Shuttle Atlantis is launched (STS 30), deploying the spacecraft Magellan.

1989 Nintendo begin selling the Game Boy in Japan

1989 October 18, U.S. launches the Galileo spacecraft from Shuttle Atlantis flight STS 34, which took infra-red images of Venus, and images of the asteroid Ida, before continuing to Jupiter.

1989 September Apple Macintosh Portable Released

1989 The 486 series of microprocessor introduced by Intel.

1989 The Energizer Bunny starts “going and going”

1989 The first of 24 satellites of the Global Positioning System is placed into orbit

1989 University of Cambridge teams file a patent on light emitting polymers, new materials for displays.

1989 World Wide Web

1990 22nd May Microsoft launches Windows 3.0

1990 A 16 megabit chip is shown for the first time

1990 April 24, Space Shuttle Discovery launches on STS 31, deploying the Edwin P. Hubble Space Telescope (HST) astronomical observatory.

1990 April 5, U.S. Pegasus rocket is deployed from a B 52 bomber, and launched the Pegsat satellite in the first demonstration of the Pegasus launch vehicle.

1990 August, U.S. spacecraft Magellan arrives at Venus, where for the next year it took radar images of the surface.

1990 Clean Air Act amendments mandate additional pollution controls.

1990 First rechargeable lithium battery produced.

1990 Merit, IBM and MCI formed a not for profit corporation called ANS, Advanced Network & Services, which was to conduct research into high speed networking. It soon came up with the concept of the T3, a 45 Mbps line. NSF quickly adopted the new network and by the end of 1991 all of its sites were connected by this new backbone.

1990 Microsoft Releases Windows 3.0

1990 Nintendo Game Boy

1990 October 6, Space Shuttle Discovery launches the Ulysses spacecraft with two upper stages, on mission STS 41. Ulysses flies toward Jupiter, to be slingshot towards the sun, to obtain data from high solar latitudes.

1990 Symantec launches Norton AntiVirus, one of the first antivirus programs developed by a large company.

1990 Tim Berners-Lee and CERN in Geneva implements a hypertext system to provide efficient information access to the members of the international high-energy physics community.

1990 Western Digital introduces its first 3.5-inch Caviar IDE hard drive.

1990 While the T3 lines were being constructed, the Department of Defense disbanded the ARPANET and it was replaced by the NSFNET backbone. The original 50Kbs lines of ARPANET were taken out of service.

1991 April 5, Space Shuttle Atlantis carries the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory into orbit. This new space telescope, built by NASA, was the first to provide an all sky continuous survey in the gamma ray and X ray spectra.

1991 CSNET (which consisted of 56Kbps lines) was discontinued having fulfilled its important early role in the provision of academic networking service. A key feature of CREN is that its operational costs are fully met through dues paid by its member organizations.

1991 February 7, Salyut 7 falls from orbit and burns up over Argentina.

1991 IBM introduces the 0663 Corsair, the first disk drive with thin film magnetoresistive (MR) heads. It has eight 3.5-inch platters and stores 1GB. (The MR head was first introduced on an IBM tape drive in 1984.)

1991 Integral Peripherals’ 1820 Mustang uses one 1.8-inch platter to store 21MB.

1991 Internet is made available to unrestricted commercial use and number of computers on the net reaches 1 million

1991 June 5, Shuttle Columbia carries the Spacelab SLS 1 into orbit, to conduct investigations into the effects of weightlessness on humans. (STS 40)

1991 Linus Torvalds from Finland releases Linux version 0.02

1991 Microsoft Releases MS Dos 5.0

1991 Nintendo SNES

1991 October Apple releases the PowerrBook 100

1991 Sega Game Gear Handheld

1991 Super Nes

1991 Tequila is the first widespread polymorphic virus found in the wild. Polymorphic viruses make detection difficult for virus scanners by changing their appearance with each new infection.

1991 The first call on a commercial GSM (Global Standard for Mobile Communications)phone is made.

1991 The GSM Mobile Phone network is opened in Europe

1991 The NSF established a new network, named NREN, the National Research and Education Network. The purpose of this network is to conduct high speed networking research. It was not to be used as a commercial network, nor was it to be used to send a lot of the data that the Internet now transfers.

1991 Britian’s Tim Berners-Lee introduces the web browser. called WorldWideWeb

1992 1300 viruses are in existence, an increase of 420% from December of 1990.

1992 Cambridge Display Technology is founded by University of Cambridge and seed venture capital.

1992 February 8, Spacecraft Ulysses flies around Jupiter, on its way to the sun.

1992 Hewlett-Packard’s C3013A Kitty Hawk drive uses two 1.3-inch platters to store 2.1GB.

1992 Internet Society is chartered.

1992 May 2, Space Shuttle Endeavour lifts off on its first mission (STS 49), repairing the Intelsat VI satellite. Crew: Daniel C. Brandenstein, Kevin P. Chilton, Richard J. Hieb, Bruce E. Melnick, Pierre J. Thout, Kathryn C. Thornton, and Thomas D. Akers.

1992 NSFNET backbone upgraded to T3 (44.736Mbps)

1992 Palm Pilot

1992 Seagate comes out with the first shock-sensing 2.5-inch hard drive.

1992 Seagate is first to market with a 7200-revolutions-per-minute hard drive, the 2.1GB Barracuda.

1992 September 25, Mars Observer lifts off, the first American probe to Mars in 17 years, since Viking 2. This probe is intended as an orbital mapper to study the red planet’s atmosphere, surface, and geological make up. The spacecraft functions well during its cruise to Mars, then all contact was lost on August 21, 1993, three days before orbital insertion.

1992 The Dark Avenger Mutation Engine (DAME) is created. It is a toolkit that turns ordinary viruses into polymorphic viruses. The Virus Creation Laboratory (VCL) is also made available. It is the first actual virus creation kit.

1992 The first lithium batteries are commercially available. Powerful AA-size batteries

1992 The first text message is sent in the UK.

1992 The National Energy Policy Act is passed.

1992 World-Wide Web released by CERN.

1993 19th January IBM Announces a loss of .97m for 1992

1993 August Apple Newton Message Pad announced

1993 December 2, Space Shuttle Endeavour launches on STS 61, making the first on orbit service of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST).

1993 Dyson vacuum cleaner

1993 InterNIC created by NSF to provide specific Internet services directory and database services (by AT&T), registration services (by Network Solutions Inc.), and information services (by General Atomics/CERFnet).

1993 Marc Andreessen and NCSA and the University of Illinois develops a graphical user interface to the WWW, called “Mosaic for X”.

1993 The Pentium microprocessor introduced by Intel.

1993 The World Wide Web was born at CERN

1993 Windows NT 3.1 released by Microsoft

1994 David Filo and Jerry Yang start creating Their Own Personal Guide To The Internet which transforms to become Yahoo

1994 December 9, Asteroid XM1 passes within 65,000 miles of Earth.

1994 Digital cordless telephone /Mega Drive

1994 February, A Russian Cosmonaut, Sergei Krikalev, flies on board the U.S. space shuttle Discovery for the first time (STS 60).

1994 First Virtual, the first cyberbank, opens.

1994 Good Times email hoax tears through the computer community. The hoax warns of a malicious virus that will erase an entire hard drive just by opening an email with the subject line “Good Times.” Though disproved, the hoax resurfaces every six to twelve months.

1994 January 25, U.S. launches Clementine, a new DOD satellite that performs a lunar mapping mission using advanced ballistic missile defence technologies. It suffers a malfunction on May 10, 1994, ending its mission.

1994 Jeff Bezos founds Amazon as an Online Bookstore

1994 Netscape Communications Corporation is founded

1994 Netscape Navigator released quickly becoming market leader for browsing the web

1994 No major changes were made to the physical network. The most significant thing that happened was the growth. Many new networks were added to the NSF backbone.Hundreds of thousands of new hosts were added to the INTERNET during this time period.

1994 October 12, Spacecraft Magellan enters the atmosphere of Venus, burning up following the completion of its mapping mission.

1994 Pizza Hut offers pizza ordering on its Web page.

1994 September 13, Spacecraft Ulysses reaches a maximum Southern latitude of 80.2 degrees at the sun, proceeding towards the Northern latitudes, maintaining an orbital period of six years.

1994 Western Digital develops Enhanced IDE, an improved hard drive interface that breaks the 528MB-throughput barrier. EIDE also allows for attachment of optical and tape drives.

1994 Worlds First Satellite Digital Television Service Launched

1995 annual fee is imposed on domains, excluding .edu and .gov domains which are still funded by the National Science Foundation.

1995 24th August Microsoft launches Windows 95

1995 Craig Newmark creates craigslist to allow free online classified advertisements

1995 December 7, The Galileo spacecraft arrives at Jupiter, performing an orbit while dropping a probe into the atmosphere, and putting a satellite into orbit, which will spend the next two years orbiting the planet.

1995 DVD, optical disc storage media format, is announced.

1995 February 6, Space shuttle Discovery maneuvers to within 37 feet of Russian space station Mir, in preparation for a shuttle Mir docking (STS 63). This is the first shuttle mission to be flown by a female pilot.

1995 June 26, Space Shuttle Atlantis rendezvous with Russian space station Mir during a ten day mission on STS 71. Cosmonauts are transferred to and from Atlantis, and Astronaut Norman Thagard is returned from Mir, having arrived on Soyuz TM 21, and making a new American space endurance record of 115 days.

1995 March 22, Cosmonaut Valeriy Polyakov returns to Earth after a 438 day mission aboard Russian space station Mir, setting a new space endurance record.

1995 Microsoft Launches MSN for online services and ISP

1995 November 12, Space Shuttle Atlantis lifts off on mission STS 74, making the second docking with Russian space station Mir. It delivers two solar arrays, and a docking module for future Shuttle dockings.

1995 PlayStation 1

1995 September Pioneer 11 ceases making scientific observations, its power source nearly depleted.

1995 SMS, the Short Message Service was launched commercially enabling short text messages to be exchanged between mobiles.

1995 The National Science Foundation announced that as of April 30, 1995 it would no longer allow direct access to the NSF backbone. The National Science Foundation contracted with four companies that would be providers of access to the NSF backbone (Merit). These companies would then sell connections to groups, organizations, and companies.

1995 Windows 95 released by Microsoft

1995 Word Concept becomes one of the most prevalent viruses in the mid-1990s. It is spread through Microsoft Word documents.

1996 Apple Computer buys the NeXT

1996 Ask Jeeves formed.

1996 Audio Highway – world’s first MP3 player

1996 Baza, Laroux (a macro virus), and Staog viruses are the first to infect Windows 95 files, Excel, and Linux respectively.

1996 eBay is founded by Jeff Skoll and Pierre Omidyar

1996 Ebay the online auction and shopping website, where people buy and sell goods and services worldwide.

1996 February 17, NASA launches the first in the Discovery series of spacecraft, the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) spacecraft, aboard a Delta II 7925 8 rocket.

1996 February 8, Thomas Reiter becomes the first European Space Agency astronaut to make two spacewalks (both from the Russian Mir space station). His previous spacewalk was on October 21, 1995, and lasted 5 hours 11 minutes.

1996 IBM stores 1 billion bits per square inch on a platter.

1996 In 12 months number of Internet host computers goes from 1 million to 10 million

1996 Internet Explorer 3 web browser released

1996 March 22, Space Shuttle Atlantis lifts off on STS 76, performing the third docking with Space Station Mir. Astronaut Shannon Lucid was left on Mir, becoming the first female Astronaut to crew a Space Station.

1996 November 19, Space Shuttle Columbia lifts off on its 21st space flight, setting a new shuttle in space endurance record of almost 18 days. This flight carries Story Musgrave, at that time the oldest man to fly in space at 61 years of age.

1996 Seagate introduces its Cheetah family, the first 10,000-rpm hard drives.

1996 September 26, Space Shuttle Atlantis touches down after mission STS 79. It brings back Shannon Lucid, who becomes the longest US astronaut in space, and the longest female astronaut in space.

1996 Windows NT 4.0 released by Microsoft

1997 April 4, Space Shuttle Columbia lifts off for the shortest shuttle flight in 12 years (four days). The flight is cut short due to a failure of one of the spacecraft’s three fuel cells.

1997 August 7, Soyuz TM26 arrives at Mir with a relief crew. The fresh Russian crew, along with Michael Foale, undertake seven internal and external spacewalk missions over a six month period in order to repair the crippled station. During the repairs, the station has a near collision with an abandoned satellite (MSTI 2), which speeds past to within 500 meters of Mir.

1997 August 7, Space Shuttle Discovery lifts off for a 12 day mission to deploy and retrieve the Crista Spas 2 satellite, which studied the Earth’s middle atmosphere. This flight also tested various infra red and ultraviolet instrumentation, and tested the Japanese robot arm to be used for the International Space Station.

1997 February 10, Soyuz TM25 lifts off to dock with the Mir space station. New Russian crew members Vasily Tsibliyev and Alexander Lazutkin relieve Russians Korzun and Kaleri for the beginning of an eventful and difficult tour of duty. Before the resident crew leaves, a fierce fire breaks out on board which is contained and put out before serious damage is done. After the old crew leaves, an attempt to re dock with the Progress supply freighter fails, with the freighter just missing collision with Mir. These events are followed by failures of the electrolysis oxygen generators and the station’s attitude control system.

1997 February 11, Space Shuttle Discovery lifts off on the second maintenance mission for the Hubble Space Telescope, installing a new spectrograph, infrared camera, new guidance sensors, a new computer and data recorder, and repairing the telescope’s insulation.

1997 IBM introduces the first drive using giant magneto resistive (GMR) heads, the 16.8GB Deskstar 16GP Titan, which stores 16.8GB on five 3.5-inch platters.

1997 Internet Explorer version 4 released

1997 ISO New England begins operation (first ISO). New England Electric sells power plants (first major plant divestiture).

1997 January 12, Space Shuttle Atlantis lifts off for the fifth docking with the Mir space station, and Jerry Linenger replaces John Blaha as the American crew member.

1997 July 1, Space Shuttle Columbia lifts off again to complete the flight aborted in April. The shuttle is outfitted with Spacelab, set up as a microgravity science laboratory, with 33 different experiments, that fills the cargo bay.

1997 July 4, Mars Pathfinder becomes the first probe to successfully land on Mars since Viking 2 in 1976. It is also the first planetary probe to include a separate roving robot probe (Sojourner) since the Soviet Union’s Luna 21 in 1973.

1997 June 27, NEAR (Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous) probe passes the asteroid Mathilde on its way to meeting up with 433 Eros.

1997 March 31, After 25 years of operation, routine telemetry and ground control with Pioneer 10 is terminated. The probe at that moment is 6.7 billion miles from Earth, travelling at 28,000 miles per hour. In two million years, it will reach the red giant Aldeberan in the constellation of Taurus.

1997 May 17, Space Shuttle Atlantis performs its sixth docking with Mir. Jerry Linenger is relieved by Michael Foale as the American crew member on Mir. Atlantis returned to Earth on May 24th and Mir continued with its troubles. On June 24th, the crew attempts a test with a new docking system to dock with a Progress freighter. The failure of the new system results in the collision of the freighter into Mir, causing a serious air leak and damage to the electrical power of the station.

1997 Microsoft becomes the worlds most valuable company valued at 1 billion dollars

1997 Motorola StarTac

1997 November 19, Space Shuttle Columbia lifts off with three American astronauts, one Japanese, and the first Ukrainian astronaut, Leonid Kadenyuk. This mission, mostly dedicated to science and the testing of new space technologies, releases one free flying satellite.

1997 October 15, launch of the double probe Cassini/Huygens, aimed at Saturn. This is probably the most ambitious and complex unmanned planetary project ever attempted, costing more than .5 billion and involving 17 nations and hundreds of scientists from the U.S. and Europe. It carries a sophisticated camera package and 11 other instruments aimed at performing 19 experiments on the ringed planet. It will arrive at Saturn in 2004, will orbit Saturn up to 60 times sending back close up photographs of Saturn’s rings and its 18 moons. Cassini also carries a separate probe, Huygens. This probe will be dropped through the atmosphere of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan.

1997 September 12, Mars Global Surveyor arrives at Mars and begins the process of adjusting its highly elliptical orbit into a circular one using aerobraking friction with the top of the Martian atmosphere to slow the craft down. Taking about 2,000 images of the planet, this probe shows the entire life of a dust storm, evidence of Martian streams, ponds, oceans, and underground water drainage systems.

1997 September 27, Space Shuttle Atlantis performs its seventh docking with Mir to support the repair & upgrade process, and bringing additional experiments for the space station.

1997 zon.com, an online bookseller, goes public

1998 25th June Microsoft launches Windows 98

1998 Apple Computer unveils the iMac.

1998 April 17, Space Shuttle Columbia lifts off on a 16 day mission, its 25th. The mission is dedicated to the study of the effects of weightlessness on the human neurological system, with the astronauts serving as both researchers and experimental subjects.

1998 August Apple Release the iMac

1998 California opens market and ISO. Scottish Power (UK) to buy Pacificorp, first foreign takeover of US utility. National (UK) Grid then announces purchase of New England Electric System.

1998 Currently harmless and yet to be found in the wild, StrangeBrew is the first virus to infect Java files. The virus modifies CLASS files to contain a copy of itself within the middle of the file’s code and to begin execution from the virus section.

1998 December 11, Mars Climate Orbiter is launched by NASA, with the objective of studying Martian weather. The probe is lost as it approaches Mars on September 23, 1999, due to an error in propulsion software, using English instead of metric units. The probe passes too close to Mars and burns up in the atmosphere.

1998 December 23, NEAR space probe flies to within 2400 miles of the asteroid 433 Eros, taking 222 photographs of nearly two thirds of its surface. A software problem prevents the spacecraft from going into orbit around the asteroid, but a second engine burn on January 3, 1999 brings the spacecraft back to Eros in February of 2000.

1998 December 4, Space Shuttle Endeavour lifts off on its thirteenth space flight, with the International Space Station’s second module, Unity. This module provides the docking ports and connections for every other docked module.

1998 February 14, The four satellites Globalstar 1, 2, 3, and 4 are the first in Globalstar’s planned 44 satellite constellation of medium Earth orbit (~900 miles altitude) communications satellites for providing voice and data links worldwide from both remote and home telephones. This system is planned as a direct competitor to Iridium’s cluster, which began launching in May of 1997.

1998 IBM announces its Microdrive , the smallest hard drive to date. It fits 340MB on a single 1-inch platter.

1998 January 22, Space Shuttle Endeavour lifts off to rendezvous with Mir, the eight U.S. docking with the Russian space station and the first by a shuttle other than Atlantis.

1998 January 7, Lunar Prospector is the first NASA mission to the Moon in 25 years, and the first dedicated to lunar research since Apollo 17 in 1972. The spacecraft is placed in lunar orbit to make a careful spectroscopic analysis of the entire lunar surface, including its North and South poles, and soon confirms what the Department of Defense Clementine mission had found in 1994 that trapped within some of the craters at the Moon’s two poles is about 6.6 trillion tons of permanently frozen water ice.

1998 July 3, Japan launches the Nozomi probe to Mars, the first planetary mission by a country other than the U.S. or the Soviet Union/Russia. Using a combination of lunar gravity, Earth gravity, and rocket burns, Nozomi is scheduled to arrive at Mars in December 2003.

1998 June 2, Space Shuttle Discovery lifts off on a 10 day mission, its 24th and the last shuttle docking with Mir.

1998 Nintendo Game Boy Color Handheld

1998 November 20, the first component of the International Space Station, Zarya, is launched on a Russian rocket. This Russian built, U.S. financed module provides communications, electrical power, and attitude control for the station until the arrival of the third module (Zvezda, in July 2000).

1998 October 24, NASA launches Deep Space 1, a technology test spacecraft which evaluates a dozen advanced spacecraft engineering designs, from mirror enhanced solar panels to the first use of an ion engine to leave Earth orbit and rendezvous with the asteroid Braille.

1998 October 29, Space Shuttle Discovery lifts off with John Glenn aboard, first American to orbit Earth and at 77, the oldest man to fly in space. The flight is the last purely scientific shuttle flight, focusing on astronomy, life sciences, and materials. One satellite is deployed, one is released and retrieved. Most subsequent shuttle flights are ferry and construction flights for the International Space Station.

1998 October 3, Launched by the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office, the Space Technology EXperiment (STEX) satellite tests 29 new spacecraft designs, including an almost four mile long tether, advanced solar panels, and an ion engine test.

1998 Panasonic portable DVD player

1998 The Search Engine Google is founded.

1998 Windows 98 released by Microsoft

1999 Bluetooth announced.

1999 Bubble Boy is the first worm that does not depend on the recipient opening an attachment in order for infection to occur. As soon as the user opens the email, Bubble Boy sets to work.

1999 December 19, Space Shuttle Discovery lifts off for the third maintenance mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. They perform three space walks, installing six new gyroscopes, a new guidance sensor, a new computer, a voltage/temperature kit for the spacecraft’s batteries, a new transmitter, a new solid state recorder, and thermal insulation blankets.

1999 DVR by TiVo

1999 Electricity marketed on Internet.

1999 February 20, the Russian Soyuz TM29 lifts off for the Mir space station. This is scheduled to be the final mission to Mir, and when the crew of TM29 departs Mir in August of 1999, they leave the space station empty for the first time in almost exactly 10 years.

1999 February 7, The NASA satellite Stardust lifts off for a rendezvous with the Comet Wild 2 in January of 2004.

1999 FERC issues Order 2000, promoting regional transmission

1999 Internet Explorer version 5 released

1999 January 3, Mars Polar Lander lifts off on its ill fated mission to Mars. This NASA probe is to land within about 600 miles of the Martian South Pole, along with dropping two surface penetrating darts. Contact with the probe is lost on December 3, 1999 as it is descending through the Martian atmosphere and it is never heard from again, the first failure of a U.S. planetary soft landing in 30 years.

1999 July 23, Space Shuttle Columbia lifts off, carrying the Chandra X Ray Observatory into orbit.

1999 July 28, Deep Space 1 flies to within 16 miles of the asteroid Braille and continues on its course to rendezvous with Comet Wilson Harrington in January 2001.

1999 May 27,Space Shuttle Discovery lifts off for the International Space Station. They bring supplies and perform a spacewalk of nearly eight hours to install two exterior cranes, along with a variety of tools and equipment for future astronaut use. They deploy the satellite Starshine for studying atmospheric density changes.

1999 My Space was officially introduced to the Internet

1999 November 19, China launches Shenzhou, the first unmanned test of their manned capsule.

1999 Pyra Labs launches Blogger as a free Blogging Service charging for additional premium features

1999 The “Melissa” e-mail virus, infects more than 1 million computers worldwide causing more than million in damage, clogging up E-Mail Systems around the world

1999 The first mobiles able to send email and use the web were launched.

1999 The initial release of Napster

1999 The Melissa virus, W97M/Melissa, executes a macro in a document attached to an email, which forwards the document to 50 people in the user’s Outlook address book. The virus also infects other Word documents and subsequently mails them out as attachments. Melissa spread faster than any previous virus, infecting an estimated 1 million PCs.

1999 The Millennium bug is taken seriously

1999 The year 2000 problem known as the Y2K problem and the millennium bug was the most important thing on most companies minds in 1999. Critical industries (such as electricity or financial) and government functions could stop working at 12:00 AM, January 1, 2000. This fear was fuelled by the press coverage and other media speculation, as well as corporate and government reports. All over the world companies and organizations checked and upgraded their computer systems.

1999 Tristate is the first multi-program macro virus; it infects Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files.

2000 “Distributed denial-of-service” attacks by hackers knock Yahoo, eBay, Amazon, and other high profile web sites offline for several hours.

2000 17th February Microsoft launches Windows 2000

2000 64-Bit Microprocessor – 592,000,000 Transistors

2000 April 4, Soyuz TM30 lifts off on a return mission to Mir, reversing Russia’s actions of the previous year to shut the space station down. The idea is to re open the space station for commercial operations, including a Mir version of the Survivor TV show. The cosmonauts remain until mid June, and two Progress freighters are flown up (one in April, one in October) before financial support disappears and the venture falls through.

2000 December 1,Space Shuttle Endeavour lifts off on a 12 day mission to the ISS. They install the first set of ISS’s solar panels and radiators for removing heat.

2000 February 11, Space Shuttle Endeavour lifts off to carry out the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission, cosponsored by NASA and the National Imagery and Mapping Agency. A large radar antenna in the payload bay and a smaller element deployed on a 60 meter boom work together in the synthetic aperture mode to produce the effect of a much larger antenna. The mission produces a three dimensional map of about 80% of the world’s landmass.

2000 February 14, NEAR (Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous) probe settles into orbit around the asteroid 433 Eros, producing a series of stunning close up images. Ground controllers start tightening its orbit for an eventual soft impact with the tumbling, potato shaped asteroid.

2000 First camera phone reached the market

2000 Five mobile phone operators were granted UK licences to provide third generation (3G) services.

2000 Following the fear and uncertainty about the millennium bug the world did not end, transportation, governments and business all went OK with just a few minor glitches on January 1st

2000 January 3, the Galileo space probe safely completes its encounter with Jupiter’s ice moon, Europa, at an altitude of 343 km. Later in the year, on May 30, Galileo flies by Jupiter’s largest moon Ganymede at an altitude of 808 km.

2000 July 12, the Zvezda service module for the International Space Station (ISS) is launched from Russia on a Proton rocket. The automated docking of this unit with the first linked pair of modules already in orbit Zarya and Unity allows the U.S. to start a series of space shuttle launches to add American built components, which will be followed by laboratory modules from Europe and Japan. Zvezda will act as the control centre and living quarters for the initial space station crews.

2000 Maxtor buys competitor Quantum’s hard drive business. At the time, Quantum is the number-two drive maker, behind Seagate; this acquisition makes Maxtor the world’s largest hard drive manufacturer.

2000 May 19, Space Shuttle Atlantis lifts off for the International Space Station for maintenance on the crane and a faulty antenna, installation of a Russian boom arm, handrails and upgrades to the ventilation system, and delivery of new batteries, supplies and equipment.

2000 November 1 Sony announces the development of Ultra Density Optical (UDO), a bluelaser optical disc format proposed to replace magnetooptical discs.

2000 October 11, Space Shuttle Discovery lifts off on a 14 day mission to install the Z1 segment, the first piece of the space station truss, and a third docking port (PMA 3) for the Unity adapter. They also test the new ‘SAFER’ spacesuit backpack propulsion units.

2000 October 31, the Expedition One crew is launched on a Soyuz transport to become the first crew of the ISS.

2000 Seagate produces the first 15,000-rpm hard drive, the Cheetah X15 .

2000 September 8, Space Shuttle Atlantis lifts off on a 12 day mission to outfit the ISS, completing the installation of the Zvezda module.

2000 The “Stages” virus, disguised as a joke email about the stages of life, spreads across the Internet. Unlike most previous viruses, Stages is hidden in an attachment with a false “.txt” extension, making it easier to lure recipients into opening it. Until now, it has generally been safe to assume that text files are safe.

2000 The Dot Com Bubble Bursts and thousands of DotComs go bust

2000 The Love Bug, also known as the ILOVEYOU virus, sends itself out via Outlook, much like Melissa. The virus comes as a VBS attachment and deletes files, including MP3, MP2, and .JPG. It also sends usernames and passwords to the virus’s author.

2000 The Trek Tech/IBM – flash drive

2000 W97M.Resume.A, a new variation of the Melissa virus, is determined to be in the wild. The “resume” virus acts much like Melissa, using a Word macro to infect Outlook and spread itself.

2001 17th October Apple Launches a New Music Device – The iPod

2001 Apple Computer releases the iPod.

2001 Apple iPod

2001 April 19, Space Shuttle Endeavour lifts off for the ISS on a construction mission. The crew will install the mobile robotic arm on the station (Canadarm 2) and supply the Destiny laboratory module with new experiments, using the Rafaello logistics module.

2001 April 28, Soyuz spacecraft TM 32 lifts off for the ISS with the first space tourist, business executive Dennis Tito, who pays the Russians million for the ride.

2001 April 7, the 2001 Mars Odyssey probe is launched on a trajectory for Mars orbit to be achieved in October, with a mission similar to that of the Mars Climate Orbiter launched December 1998. Mars Odyssey successfully enters Mars orbit on October 24th.

2001 August 10, Space Shuttle Discovery lifts off for the ISS with the Leonardo laboratory module and SimpleSat, an experimental low cost astronomical telescope.

2001 December 5, Space Shuttle Endeavour is launched carrying the Raffaello logistics module back to the ISS with new supplies.

2001 February 14, NEAR soft impacts on the asteroid 433 Eros, at 2 m/s. Signals continue to be received from the probe hours after the landing, confirming its survival.

2001 February 7, Space Shuttle Atlantis lifts off for the ISS, carrying the U.S.’s Destiny laboratory module. In three space walks the astronauts install Destiny, a grappler for the station’s robotic arm, and radio antennae.

2001 January 9, the first launch of the “true” millenium is Chinese, with the second test flight of the manned Shenshou spaceship, reported to be carrying a monkey, a dog, and a rabbit.

2001 July 12, Space Shuttle Atlantis lifts off in the pre dawn darkness for the ISS with the Joint Airlock which will enable space walks to be performed directly from the space station itself (I am there to watch the launch!).

2001 June 30, NASA’s Microwave Anisotropy Probe (MAP) is launched on a trajectory for a gravity boost past the moon to a position 1.5 million km outside Earth’s orbit. From that position it is to measure cosmic background radiation from the dark extragalactic sky.

2001 March 23, fifteen years after its first launch, and after nearly 10 years of continuous occupation by astronauts, the Mir space station is de orbited, breaking up in the atmosphere and impacting in the Pacific Ocean.

2001 March 8, Space Shuttle Discovery is launched on a 14 day ISS construction mission. In two spacewalks the astronauts install new equipment including the Leonardo logistics module, built by the Italian Space Agency to move racks of experimental equipment to the ISS, docking to the station as the equipment is used & transferred, then carrying equipment back in the shuttle after use.

2001 Microsoft releases Windows XP

2001 Napster is closed down by court order following an injunction on behalf of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA),

2001 October 16, Galileo completes another flyby of Jupiter’s moon Io, passing only 181 km from Io’s south polar region.

2001 Peter Bruce’s group at the University of St Andrews discovered a crystalline polymer electrolyte, starting a new research direction for solid state batteries.

2001 September 22, Deep Space 1 successfully completes its flyby of comet 19P/Borrelly.

2001 Shortly after the September 11th attacks, the Nimda virus infects hundreds of thousands of computers in the world. The virus is one of the most sophisticated to date with as many as five different methods of replicating and infecting systems. The “Anna Kournikova” virus, which mails itself to persons listed in the victim’s Microsoft Outlook address book, worries analysts who believe the relatively harmless virus was written with a “tool kit” that would allow even the most inexperienced programmers to create viruses. Worms increase in prevalence with Sircam, CodeRed, and BadTrans creating the most problems. Sircam spreads personal documents over the Internet through email. CodeRed attacks vulnerable webpages, and was expected to eventually reroute its attack to the White House homepage. It infected approximately 359,000 hosts in the first twelve hours. BadTrans is designed to capture passwords and credit card information.

2001 Wikipedia, a Wiki free content encyclopaedia, goes online

2002 7th November Microsoft and partners launch Tablet PC

2002 A demonstration by Seagate yields a perpendicular magnetic recording areal density of 100 gigabits per square inch.

2002 Among its many 2002 technology accomplishments, Seagate successfully demos Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording. HAMR records magnetically using laser-thermal assistance and ultimately aims to increase areal density by more than 100 times over 2002 levels.

2002 August 29 Toshiba and NEC propose to the DVD Forum the nextgeneration optical disc format that will become HD DVD.

2002 Author of the Melissa virus, David L. Smith, is sentenced to 20 months in federal prison. The LFM-926 virus appears in early January, displaying the message “Loading.Flash.Movie” as it infects Shockwave Flash (.swf) files. Celebrity named viruses continue with the “Shakira,” “Britney Spears,” and “Jennifer Lopez” viruses emerging. The Klez worm, an example of the increasing trend of worms that spread through email, overwrites files (its payload fills files with zeroes), creates hidden copies of the originals, and attempts to disable common anti-virus products. The Bugbear worm also makes it first appearance in September. It is a complex worm with many methods of infecting systems.

2002 February 19 Led by Sony, nine of the world’s largest electronics companies unveil plans for Bluray Disc.

2002 Microsoft Xbox Released

2002 October 1 Prototypes of both formats are unveiled at Japan’s Ceatec exhibition. Sony, Panasonic, Sharp, Pioneer and JVC showed prototype Bluray Disc recorders while Toshiba showed a prototype under the name Advanced Optical Disc (AOD).

2002 PlayStation 2

2002 Seagate scores another first with the Barracuda ATA V Serial ATA hard drive .

2002 The Creative Zen digital audio players released

2003 24th April Microsoft launches Windows Server 2003

2003 April 10 Sony puts on sale in Japan the world’s first Bluray Disc recorder, the BDZS77. It’s based on a 23Gbyte cartridge version of the BDRE disc and costs ¥450,000 (US,815 at the time). The machine and a later model from Panasonic lack support for prerecorded movies that will launch later and prove an expensive early step into nextgeneration video.

2003 April 7 Sony announces its Bluray Discbased Professional Disc format for data archiving applications.

2003 August 14 Electricity Failure major blackout occurred which affected most of Eastern Canada as well as most of the Eastern United States.

2003 Blackberry 6210

2003 December 9 Disney announces support for Bluray Disc.

2003 February 13 Licensing of Bluray Disc begins. Player makers pay US,000 to license Bluray while the contentprotection system license carries a 0,000 annual fee and additional charge of

.10 per player. Media makers pay ,000 annually and
.02 per disc for the copy protection system.

2003 Google Aquires Pyra Labs and Blogger

2003 IBM sells its Data Storage Division to Hitachi, thus ending its involvement in developing and marketing disk drive technology.

2003 In January the relatively benign “Slammer” (Sapphire) worm becomes the fastest spreading worm to date, infecting 75,000 computers in approximately ten minutes, doubling its numbers every 8.5 seconds in its first minute of infection. The Sobig worm becomes the one of the first to join the spam community. Infected computer systems have the potential to become spam relay points and spamming techniques are used to mass-mail copies of the worm to potential victims.

2003 January 12 Hewlett Packard and Dell put their support behind Bluray Disc.

2003 June 10 The first commercial version of HD DVDROM is approved by the DVD Forum.

2003 May 28 Mitsubishi Electric joins the Bluray Disc group.

2003 November 29 Paramount Pictures, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros. Pictures, HBO and New Line Cinema announce support for HD DVD.

2003 Official Launch Of Myspace as a Social Networking Site

2003 Phillips incorporates light emitting polymers made by CDT into a mobile phone.

2003 September 21 Sony announces the PlayStation 3 will use Bluray Disc.

2003 Western Digital introduces the first 10,000-rpm SATA hard drive, the 37GB Raptor, which is designed for the enterprise, but which gamers quickly learn is a hot desktop performer in dual-drive RAID setups.

2003 WordPress Launches as a personal publishing system ( Blog )

2004 20th July Microsoft returns billion to shareholders

2004 An estimated one million computers running Windows are affected by the fast-spreading Sasser computer worm in May. Victims include businesses, such as British Airways, banks, and government offices, including Britain’s Coast Guard. The worm does not cause irreparable harm to computers or data, but it does slow computers and cause some to quit or reboot without explanation. The Sasser worm is different than other viruses in that users do not have to open a file attachment to be affected by it. Instead, the worm seeks out computers with a security flaw and then sabotages them. An 18-year-old German high school student confessed to creating the worm. He’s suspected of releasing another version of the virus.

2004 In January a computer worm, called MyDoom or Novarg, spreads through emails and file-sharing software faster than any previous virus or worm. MyDoom entices email recipients to open an attachment that allows hackers to access the hard drive of the infected computer. The intended goal is a “denial of service attack” on the SCO Group, a company that is suing various groups for using an open-source version of its Unix programming language. SCO offers a 0,000 reward to anyone giving information that leads to the arrest and conviction of the people who wrote the worm.

2004 January 7 Toshiba unveils its first prototype HD DVD player at CES. The player includes backwards compatibility with DVD.

2004 Mobile voice and data revenues, at £12.3 billion, overtook fixed line voice revenues.

2004 Oracle Components Ltd is incorporated, http://www.oraclecomponents.co.uk/

2004 Samsung OLED TV

2004 The first 0.85-inch hard drive, Toshiba’s MK2001MTN, debuts. It stores 2GB on a single platter.

2005 April 21 Sony and Toshiba begin discussions on the possibility of a single format. The talks ultimately go nowhere.

2005 August 18 Lions Gate Home Entertainment and Universal Music Group decide to back Bluray Disc.

2005 Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim create the online Video Sharing Site Youtube

2005 December 16 HewlettPackard decides to drop exclusive support for Bluray Disc and back both formats.

2005 Google indexes over 8 billion pages

2005 January 7 Backers of both formats promise players and movies in North America by the end of the year something that never materialized.

2005 March 24 Talk and hope of a common format as Ryoji Chubachi, then Sony’s presidentelect, says: “Listening to the voice of the consumers, having two rival formats is disappointing and we haven’t totally given up on the possibility of integration or compromise.”

2005 March saw the world’s first cell phone virus: Commwarrior-A. The virus probably originated in Russia, and it spread via text message. In the final analysis, Commwarrior-A only infected 60 phones, but it raised the specter of many more—and more effective—cell phone viruses.

2005 Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz begin running The Facebook Social Networking Site Fulltime ( Facebook was earlier called thefacebook )

2005 October 3 Paramount Home Entertainment says it will offer movies on both HD DVD and Bluray Disc.

2005 September 27 Microsoft Corp. and Intel Corp. put their weight behind HD DVD.

2005 Toshiba introduces its MK4007 GAL, which stores 40GB on one 1.8-inch platter, fielding the first hard drive using perpendicular magnetic recording.

2005 Xbox 360

2006 25th June Microsoft announces Bill Gates transition

2006 Cornice and Seagate each announce a 1-inch hard drive that holds 12GB. 2000 October 5 Sony and Pioneer unveil DVR Blue at Japan’s Ceatec show. The format would go on to form the basis for first generation Bluray Disc BDRE.

2006 December 29 Hackers report success in breaking through part of the AACS copy protection that’s on both HD DVD and Bluray Disc.

2006 Google purchases YouTube for US.65 billion in stock

2006 Jack Dorsey Creates the Online micro-blogging service Twitter

2006 January 4 Bill Gates announces at CES that Microsoft will offer an addon HD DVD drive for the Xbox 360 console.

2006 March 10 Bluray Discsupporter LG Electronics surprises the industry with news that it’s developing an HD DVD drive.

2006 March 31 Toshiba launches the world’s first HD DVD player, the HDXA1. It cost ¥110,000 (US6 at the time) in Japan.

2006 Nintendo releases the Wii in North America with an MSRP of US9.99

2006 November 11 Sony’s PlayStation 3, which packs a Bluray Disc drive, goes on sale in Japan.

2006 SanDisk Micro SD Card

2006 Seagate completes the acquisition of Maxtor, further narrowing the field of hard drive manufacturers.

2006 Seagate releases the Barracuda 7200.10 , at 750GB the largest hard drive to date.

2006 Seagate’s Momentus 5400.3 notebook hard drive is the first 2.5-inch model to use perpendicular magnetic recording, which boosts its capacity up to 160GB.

2006 The one billionth song is purchased from Apple iTunes.

2006 Western Digital launches its 10,000-rpm Raptor X SATA hard drive, boosting its capacity to 150GB and placing a flashy transparent window that allows specially designed computer cases to showcase its inner workings.

2007 30th January Microsoft launches Windows Vista and Office 2007

2007 Apple Introduces The iPhone

2007 Apple Introduces The new Itouch with built in WiFi and touch screen

2007 Apple iPhone

2007 April 17 Sales of HD DVD players in North America hit 100,000 since launch.

2007 August 1 Microsoft cuts the price of its HD DVD player for the Xbox 360 from US9 to US9 and starts offering five free movies.

2007 August 20 Paramount and Dreamworks Animation both drop Bluray Disc in favor of HD DVD.

2007 Following it’s introduction in late 2006 Nintendo Wii with it’s motion sensitive controllers is the game system in demand.

2007 January 7 Seeking to end the battle, LG Electronics unveils a dualformat player, while Warner Bros. shows a prototype disc that holds both an HD DVD and Bluray Disc layer so is compatible with players for both formats.

2007 November 11 Sony begins selling a lower cost version of the PlayStation 3.

2007 November The price of Toshiba HD DVD players drops to US0 with rebates as the holiday shopping season begins.

2007 September 13 Sony says it will use Bluray Disc in all highdef video recorders in Japan.

2007 WiTricity Marin Solja?i?

2008 Apple sells the new ultra-thin MacBook Air notebook that is less than an inch thick and turns on the moment it’s opened.

2008 Beats by Dre

2008 February 11 NetFlix and BestBuy say they will phase out HD DVD.

2008 February 15 WalMart, the world’s largest retailer, says it will phase out HD DVD by June.

2008 February 16 Japanese public broadcaster NHK reports Toshiba has halted production of HD DVD players. Several additional local media reports confirm and The Nikkei business daily says Toshiba has decided to stop developing the format any further.

2008 First discovered in November, the Conficker virus is thought to be the largest computer worm since Slammer of 2003. It’s estimated that the worm infected somewhere between nine and 15 million server systems worldwide, including servers in the French Navy, the UK Ministry of Defense, the Norwegian Police, and other large government organizations. Since it’s discovery, at least five variants of the virus have been released. Authorities think that the authors of Conficker may be releasing these variants to keep up with efforts to kill the virus.

2008 January 14 Toshiba cuts the price of HD DVD players with the HDA3 seeing a retail price of US0.

2008 January 4 Warner Bros. drops its bombshell: it will stop issuing HD DVD movies in the coming months and rely exclusively on Bluray Disc. In response the HD DVD Promotion Group cancels its CES news conference.

2008 January 6 Akio Ozaka, head of Toshiba America Consumer Products, says at CES: “We remain firm in the belief that HD DVD is the format best suited to the wants and needs of consumers.” In response Sony CEO Howard Stringer, with a grin on his face, says “All of us at Sony are feeling blue today.”

2008 Microsoft attempts to buy Yahoo for .6bn

2008 The HD player war comes to an end

2009 Charles Kao, widely regarded as the “Father of Fiber Optic Communications”, invented fiber optics in Harlow Essex, is awarded half of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics for “groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication”.

2009 Microsoft launches it’s new search Engine Bing

2009 Twitter was created

2010 Flipboard

2010 Looxcie

2010 Kickstarter

2010 Square lets anyone process credit cards

2010 Sony Alpha A55 Camera

2010 Amtrak’s Beef-Powered Train

2010 Google’s Driverless Car

2010 Martin Jetpack

2010 Edison2

2010 Antro Electric Car

2010 Electric-Car Charging Stations

2010 The Straddling Bus

2010 Road-Embedded Rechargers

2010 Terrafugia Transition

2010 The Plastic-Bottle Boat

2010 Health & Medicine

2010 The Malaria-Proof Mosquito and The Mosquito Laser

2010 NeoNurture Incubator

2010 eLegs Exoskeleton

2010 EyeWriter

2010 Bioengineering

2010 First Synthetic Cell

2010 Lab-Grown Lungs

2010 3-D Bioprinter

2010 Faster-Growing Salmon

2010 Deep Green Underwater Kite

2010 Body Powered Devices

2010 Power-Aware Cord

2010 Bloom Box

2010 The (Almost) Waterless Washing Machine

2010 BioCouture

2010 Spray-On Fabric

2010 The Plastic-Fur Coat

2010 Woolfiller

2010 The Deceitful Robt

2010 The English-Teaching Robot

2010 Lifeguard Robot

2010 Sarcasm Detection

2010 Super Super Soaker

2010 Less Dangerous Explosives

2010 The X-51A WaveRider

2010 X-Flex Blast Protection

2010 Iron Man Suit

2010 The Andriod Mobile phone is launched

2010 Apple iPad

2010 Apple launches its new Ipad, selling over 3 million per month

2010 Microsoft launces the Xbox Kinetic

2010 sony launch the PS3 move

2011 Kindle Fire

2012 Electronic Cotton, Researchers in the US, Italy and France have invented transistors made from cotton fibers

2012 Nexus 7

2013 Microsoft Xbox one

2013 Sony PlayStation 4

2014 Samsung Galaxy 5s

2014 Apple iphone 6

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