Technology Timeline

The goal of this timeline is to illustrate many events that have helped contribute to the modern day Internet. This resource includes events such as significant published works, companies founded, software released, products released, people born. There is a nice article on Wikipedia on the History of the Internet.

1900 (2)

1903 (1)

On December 28th, 1903, John von Neumann was born.

1904 (1)

In 1904, John Ambrose Fleming invented the vacuum tube

1910 (3)

1911 (1)

In 1911, The Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company was founded. This company changed its name to International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) in 1924.

1912 (1)

On June 23rd, 1912, Alan Turing was born.

1916 (1)

On April 30th, 1916, Claude Shannon was born.

1920 (2)

1924 (2)

On December 3rd, 1924, John Backus, creator of the FORTRAN programming language was born.
In 1924, The Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company changed its name to the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM).

1927 (1)

On September 4th, 1927, John McCarthy, creator of the Lisp programming language was born.

1930 (3)

1930 (1)

On May 11th, 1930, Edsger W. Dijkstra, father of distributed computing and his algorithm on graph distance was born.

1934 (1)

On February 15th, 1934, Niklaus Wirth, the creator of the Pascal programming language was born.

1938 (1)

On January 10th, 1938, Donald Knuth, distinguished professor, computer scientist, and author was born.

1940 (4)

1941 (1)

On September 9th, 1941, Dennis Ritchie the co-creator of the C programming language and the UNIX operating system was born.

1942 (1)

On January 1st, 1942, Brian Kernighan, co-creator of the C programming language and the UNIX operating system was born.

1943 (1)

On February 4th, 1943, Ken Thompson, creator of the UNIX operationg system and B programming language was born

1947 (1)

In 1947, The first semi-conductor was created by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley of Bell Labs.

1950 (5)

1950 (2)

On December 30th, 1950, Bjarne Stroustrup, creator of the C++ programming language was born.
On August 11th, 1950, Steve Wozniak, co-found of Apple was born.

1953 (1)

On March 16th, 1953, Richard Stallman, creator of the Free Software Foundation was born.

1954 (1)

On September 27th, 1954, Larry Wall, creator of the Perl programming language was born.

1955 (2)

On October 28th, 1955, Bill Gates, creator of Microsoft was born.
On May 19th, 1955, James Gosling, creator of the Java programming language was born.

1956 (2)

In 1956, Rob Pike, creator of Plan 9 and member of the UNIX team was born.
On January 31st, 1956, Guido van Rossum, creator of the Python programming language was born.

1960 (4)

1960 (0)

1961 (0)

1968 (2)

On July 18th, 1968, Intel was founded.
On November 22nd, 1968, Rasmus Lerdorf, creator of the PHP programming language was born.

1969 (2)

On October 29th, 1969, The first ARPANET link was established between the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the Stanford Research Institute at 22:30 hours.
On December 28th, 1969, Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux operating system was born.

1970 (4)

1971 (1)

On November 3rd, 1971, UNIX was released.

1974 (1)

In 1974, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn authored a paper entitled “A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication” which was the first proposed version of the Internet Protocol (IP) describing many of the aspects in the TCP/IP protocol.

1978 (1)

In 1978, Intel released its first 16-bit processor: the 8086, this processor became the origin of the x86 architecture.

1979 (1)

In 1979, Intel released the successor to the 8086, the 8088. This processor was used in the IBM Personal Computer.

1980 (4)

1980 (1)

In 1980, RFC-760 was published.

1981 (1)

In 1981, RFC-791 was published.

1984 (1)

In October of 1984, RFC-920 was established. Creating the first TLDs: com, edu, gov, mil, org. The .net TLD was added later.

1985 (2)

In January of 1985, The .com TLD was established. The TLD was originally owned by the United States Department of Defense (DoD). The SRI International was contracted to provide maintenance.
On March 15th, 1985, The first .com (symbolics.com) was established.

1990 (9)

1990 (1)

In December of 1990, the first version of WorldWideWeb is released by Tim Berners-Lee for CERN.

1991 (2)

On October 1st, 1991, Network Solutions Inc. (NSI) was awarded the contract of maintaining the .com TLD.
In February of 1991, AOL for DOS was launched.

1993 (2)

On January 1st, 1993, the National Science Foundation (NSF) assumed responsibility of maintenance, as .com was primarily being used for non-defense interests. NSI continued to maintain the TLD.
On January 23rd, 1993, the first version the Mosaic browser is released originally developed by Marc Andreessen. This was a milestone because Mosaic supported graphics and worked on Microsoft Windows as opposed to a POSIX based system.

1994 (5)

On March 14th, 1994, The first version of Linux was released by Linus Torvalds.
In November of 1994, GeoCities was founded.
In 1994, PHP was released.
On July 5th, 1994, Amazon.com was launched.
In 1994,

1995 (8)

In 1995, The NSF authorized NSI to charge an annual registration fee.
On January 18th, 1995, The yahoo.com domain name was registered.
In 1995, Ebay was founded.
In 1995, Apache HTTP Server is released.
On August 16th, 1995, The first version of Internet Explorer was released.
On August 24th, 1995, Windows 95 was released.
On April 23rd, 1995, The first version of Java was released.
On December 4th, 1995, Netscape Navigator 2.0 was released featuring JavaScript developed by Brendan Eich.

1996 (3)

On June 9th, 1996, version 2.0 was released for Linux
In 1996, Sun Microsystems released Java 1.0.
In 1996, MapQuest service is launched.

1997 (5)

In 1997, The United States Department of Commerce (USDOC) assumed all administration of the gTLD. NSI continued to provide the operations and maintenance.
In 1997, RFC-2068 was published by Tim Berners-Lee establishing the first version of the HTTP protocol.
In 1997, GoDaddy is founded.
In 1997, Netflix is founded.
In 1997, AOL Instance Messenger (AIM) was released.

1998 (4)

In 1998, Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is created.
In 1998, Google is founded.
In 1998, PayPal is founded.
On June 25th, 1998, Windows 98 was released.

1999 (5)

In January of 1999, the phrase “Web 2.0” was first used by Darcy DiNucci.
On August 23rd, 1999, Blogger was released.
In 1999, The first version of VMware was released.
On January 20th, 1999, version 2.2 was released for Linux.
On June 1st, 1999, the first version of Napster was released.

2000 (10)

2000 (3)

On March 14th, 2000, FreeBSD released an update to the chroot program called jail.
On September 14th, 2000, Windows ME was released.
In 2000, The Pandora streaming radio service launched.

2001 (4)

On January 15th, 2001, Wikipedia was launched.
On March 23rd, 2001, VMware released the first version of their server platform ESXi (at that time it was ESX).
On August 24th, 2001, Windows XP was released.
On January 4th, 2001, version 2.4 was released for Linux.

2002 (1)

In 2002, The Namespaces feature was released in the 2.4.19 version of the Linux kernel.

2003 (4)

On May 27th, 2003, the first version of WordPress was released.
On October 2nd, 2003, the first version of the Xen hypervisor was released.
On December 17th, 2003, version 2.6 was released for Linux.
On August 29th, 2003, the first version of Skype was released.

2004 (3)

On February 4th, 2004, facebook.com was launched.
On April 1st, 2004, Gmail began as a private beta.
On September 30th, 2004, J2SE 5.0 was released.

2005 (5)

In 2005, The Ajax technique for web design was first being utilized.
On February 14th, 2005, YouTube was launched.
On June 23rd, 2005, Reddit is launched.
In 2005, Lenovo acquires the personal computer business of IBM.
On February 8th, 2005, the first version of the Google Maps website was launched.

2006 (9)

This year in many ways is one of the more significant events that let to cloud computing.

In March of 2006, Twitter was launched.
On March 9th, 2006, the first version of Google Docs was released.
In 2006, Intel and AMD introduced limited hardware virtualization support.
In November of 2006, Windows Vista was released.
In November of 2006, In November 2006, Google acquires YouTube.
In 2006, SELinux was present in the 2.6.24 version of the Linux kernel.
On December 11th, 2006, Java SE 6 was released.
On March 14th, 2006, AWS S3 was first released to the general public
On August 25th, 2006, AWS EC2, VPC was first released to the general public.

2007 (3)

On June 29th, 2007, the first iPhone is released.
In 2007, Netflix began an on-demand video streaming service.
On November 19th, 2007, the first Amazon Kindle was released.

2008 (3)

In 2008, The cgroups feature was released in the 2.6.24 version of the Linux kernel.
On September 23rd, 2008, Google Maps was released for Android and iOS.
On September 2nd, 2008, the first version of Google Chrome was released.

2009 (3)

On July 22nd, 2009, Windows 7 was released.
In 2009, First version of Angry Birds is released.
In March of 2009, Uber was founded.

2010 (10)

2010 (1)

On September 2nd, 2010, AWS IAM was released to the general public.

2011 (5)

On February 9th, 2011, Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) was released.
On June 15th, 2011, Google releases its first Chromebook.
On July 22nd, 2011, version 3.0 was released for Linux.
On July 28th, 2011, Java SE 7 was released.
On November 19th, 2011, Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) was released.

2012 (2)

On July 9th, 2012, Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) was released.
On October 26th, 2012, Windows 8 was released.

2013 (3)

On October 31st, 2013, Android 4.4 (Kit Kat) was released.
On March 13th, 2013, Docker was first released.
In 2013, The FIDO alliance was founded. FIDO, standing for “Fast IDentity Online” was dedicated to improve security standards specifically for user authentication.

2014 (2)

On March 18th, 2014, Java SE 8 was released.
On November 13th, 2014, Released as a preview

2015 (4)

On July 29th, 2015, Windows 10 was released.
On November 3rd, 2015, Android 5.0 (Lollipop) was released.
On April 9th, 2015, AWS Lambda was released to the general public
On April 9th, 2015, AWS ECS was released to the general public

2016 (1)

On August 22nd, 2016, Android 7.0 (Nougat) was released.

2017 (2)

On August 21st, 2017, Android 8.0 (Oreo) was released.
On September 21st, 2017, Java SE 9 was released.

2018 (2)

In December of 2018, Facebook was caught selling user’s private data.
In September of 2018, Java 10 was released

2019 (2)

In 2019, Something..
In March of 2019, Java 12 was released

2020 (3)

2020 (1)

In March of 2020, Java 12 was released

2021 (4)

In September of 2021, Java SE 17 was released
On October 5th, 2021, Windows 11 was released
On October 31st, 2021, Linux 5.15 (LTS) was released
On October 26th, 2021, GitHub Copilot released

2022 (5)

In March of 2022, Go 1.18 released, Go now supports generics!
On January 9th, 2022, Linux 5.16 released
On March 20th, 2022, Linux 5.17 released
On May 22nd, 2022, Linux 5.18 released
On June 23rd, 2022, Amazon CodeWhisperer released