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