Academic Decathlon 2023-2024: Social Science Timeline

1837

1837

Charles Babbage requests (and is denied) funding from the British government to build his Analytical Engine.

1843

Ada Lovelace, as part of a lengthy essay about the Analytical Engine, writes an algorithm that is credited as the first computer program.

1860s

The first telegraph networks are established in Great Britain.

1874

Remington sells the first commercially successful typewriters, invented by Christopher Sholes.

1889

Herman Hollerith creates punched card machines to tabulate the 1890 U.S. Census.

1924

The Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company is renamed "International Business Machines" (IBM).

1931

Vannevar Bush invents the Differential Analyzer, a mechanical computer for solving differential equations.

1936

In his paper "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem", Alan Turing describes a theoretical model of computation that is still studied today.

1941

In Germany, Konrad Zuse constructs the Z3 machine, an early electronic digital computer.

1942

John Atanasoff and Clifford Berry invent a device later known as the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC).

April 9, 1943

John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert receive approval from the U.S. Army to build the ENIAC, the world's first electronic, programmable, general-purpose computer.

September 2, 1945

Japan signs a peace treaty, formally ending World War II.

February 15, 1946

The ENIAC is formally unveiled with much publicity.

1947

The transistor is invented, allowing computers to become smaller and more reliable.

December 1948

The first commercial computer company, the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, is incorporated.

November 4, 1952

Dwight D. Eisenhower's landslide victory in the 1952 U.S. presidential election is predicted on live television by a UNIVAC computer.

1953

The first installation of "core memory" is done on the Whirlwind computer.

April 1957

The first version of FORTRAN, the first widely used high-level programming language, is released.

1960

COBOL, a programming language intended for business applications, is released.

November 1961

CTSS, the first timesharing system, is installed at MIT.

1963

SAGE, the first real-time computer air defense surveillance system, is fully deployed at an estimated cost of $8 billion.

1963

Ted Nelson coins the term hypertext.

April 7, 1964

The IBM System/360 computer family is announced.

May 1, 1964

The BASIC programming language is invented by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz at Dartmouth College.

1964

After ten years of development, SABRE, the first computer-based airline reservations system, becomes fully operational.

March 22, 1965

The highly influential DEC PDP-8 minicomputer is announced.

October 1969

The Arpanet, the forerunner of the Internet, is created with four nodes: the University of California Los Angeles, Stanford Research Institute, the University of California Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah.

January 1970

The PDP-11 is announced. It becomes the best-selling minicomputer of all time and lays the architectural foundation for personal computers.

1970

Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie create the first version of the Unix operating system at AT&T Bell Labs.

1972

The C programming language is created at AT&T Bell Labs, as the implementation language for Unix.

October 19, 1973

Judge Earl Larson invalidates the ENIAC patent, placing the invention of the computer in the public domain.

January 1975

The Altair 8800 personal computer is featured on the cover of Popular Electronics magazine, sparking the interest of Harvard student Bill Gates.

July 1975

Microsoft releases its first product, a version of BASIC for the Altair 8800.

1977

Three highly influential home computers are released: the Apple II, Commodore PET, and TRS-80. In contrast to many other microcomputers of that time, these three required very little configuration to get up and running.

December 1979

Steve Jobs visits Xerox PARC and learns about the Graphical User Interface (GUI) invented there.

July 27, 1980

Microsoft purchases 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products for $50,000, which became the basis for MS-DOS.

April 27, 1981

In an attempt to commercialize the GUI, Xerox announces the Star computer.

August 12, 1981

IBM announces the IBM Personal Computer, made mostly of third-party hardware and software.

1982

The French government distributes Minitel terminals to thousands of families and businesses, thus creating the first widespread national online service.

August 1982

The Commodore 64, the best-selling personal computer of all time, is released.

November 1982

Compaq reverse-engineers the IBM BIOS and releases a 100 percent compatible PC clone.

January 24, 1984

Apple releases the Macintosh computer, introducing the GUI to a much wider audience than before.

September 17, 1985

Steve Jobs is forced out of Apple. He goes on to found a new computer company, NeXT.

November 20, 1985

Microsoft releases version 1.0 of the Windows operating system.

May 22, 1990

Microsoft announces version 3.0 of the Windows operating system. This is the first release of Windows that was considered good enough to be a competitive threat to the Macintosh.

December 1990

Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, creates the world's first website, "info.cern.ch", at CERN, in Switzerland.

September 17, 1991

Linus Torvalds creates the first version of his open-source Unix clone, Linux. It is soon adopted as the kernel for the GNU operating system.

April 22, 1993

Version 1.0 of Mosaic, the first widely used graphical web browser, is released.

January 1994

Jerry Yang and David Filo form Yahoo, a popular online directory of web pages.

July 5, 1994

Jeff Bezos founds Amazon.com as an online bookstore.

January 23, 1996

The Java programming language is released. It is rapidly adopted by universities for teaching computer science.

February 7, 1997

Apple acquires NeXT, bringing Steve Jobs back to the company he founded.

March 10, 1997

Announcement of the Palm Pilot, an influential Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) that supports a simple form of handwriting recognition

August 15, 1998

Apple releases the first generation of iMac computer.

September 4, 1998

Google is founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

June 28, 2001

Judge Thomas P. Jackson declares Microsoft a monopoly and orders it to be split into two companies. This order was later appealed and softened.

October 23, 2001

Apple releases the iPod, a popular portable music player.

July 2002

Amazon launches Amazon Web Services (AWS), one of the first providers of "cloud computing".

February 4, 2004

Mark Zuckerberg launches Facebook from his dorm room at Harvard.

January 9, 2007

Apple releases the iPhone.

September 2008

The first commercial Android-based smartphone, the HTC Dream, is released.

October 31, 2008

Satoshi Nakamoto publishes a paper describing blockchain and bitcoin.

January 20, 2010

Apple releases the iPad, quickly establishing a mass market for large-screen handheld "tablet" computers.

June 2012

Tesla announces the Model S electric car, which has been described by CEO Elon Musk as "a very sophisticated computer on wheels."

March 2014

Facebook acquires Oculus, a maker of virtual reality (VR) headsets.

2020

The COVID-19 pandemic forces many universities and workplaces to use remote communication technology such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams.

April 5, 2021

The U.S. Supreme Court rules that Google's use of the Java API in the Android operating system does not violate copyright.