The sheer power of a smartphone is hard to comprehend, even for a technical geek like me. I used to repair Cray supercomputers back in the day, five ton behemoths that offered unmatched computing power to the scientists who were lucky enough to have access to one. They cost between five and twenty five million dollars each. That phone in your hand that costs you maybe twenty or thirty pounds a month is far more powerful than a Cray supercomputer, and gives you access to every online innovation since the World Wide Web was created.
For example, I remember when Amazon first started selling books online, rivaling the established provider, the Internet Book Shop. I remember when eBay launched and the papers were full of the story of the chap who sold a bucket of water on it. Then there was Netflix, who used to post DVDs out to you. Now they commission mega-budget blockbusters to stream on whatever device you’re using. I remember when a couch-surfing website was launched that sold you the right to literally sleep on someone’s couch. That turned into AirBnB. I used to use Twitter a lot and marveled at how people used it to coordinate revolutions and uprisings. Now I’m on BlueSky. And along with millions of others I had a page on MySpace, although of course I’m on Facebook now. So many memories, what are yours?
Here’s how it all began.
July 1945
Vannevar Bush publishes an essay entitled “As We May Think” in which he described a hypothetical system of information storage and retrieval called “memex.” Memex would allow readers to create personal indexes to documents, and to link passages from different documents together with special markers.
October 1957
The Soviet Union launches “Sputnik” into orbit, and throws the American scientific community into turmoil. President Eisenhower authorizes setting up the Advanced Research Projects Agency, ARPA.
1960
Benjamin Curley develops the first minicomputer, the PDP-1, at Digital Equipment Corporation.
1962
First commercial modems launched by AT&T.; They could transmit data at 300 bits per second (a modern broadband connection can transmit data at 300 billion bits per second!).
August 1962
JCR Licklider proposes a network to enable ARPA researchers and contractors to work together more closely.
1963
Douglas Englebart invents the mouse at the Stanford Research Center.
1964
IBM announces the System 360, the first family of compatible computers.
1965
Ted Nelson presented a paper to the Association of Computer Machinery in which he proposed how elements in one text could be linked to related or identical elements in other texts. He coined the term hypertext, and in 1967 named his system for linking all the world’s documents Xanadu.
1968
September 1969
ARPA sets up ARPANET. It relies on two key technologies devised by Paul Baran, a distributed network and, packet switching which was also independently co-invented by Donald Davies.
March 1972
Ray Tomlinson writes a basic email send and receive program.
September 1973
Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn present a paper outlining Transmission Control Protocol, which was later to become TCP/IP, a key component of the Internet.
January 1975
Altair 8800 becomes the first mass-selling home computer – as a do-it-yourself kit. Paul Allen and Bill Gates write a BASIC compiler for it and other soon-to-be-launched home computers.
1975
John Vittel develops the first all-inclusive email program, providing reply, forward and file capabilities.
1976
Seymour Cray designs and installs the first supercomputer, the Cray-1.
26 March 1976
Queen Elizabeth II sends her first email.
1 April 1976
Steve Jobs and Steve Wosniak launched their new Apple Computer and founded the firm of the same name.
1979
3Com founded by Bob Metcalfe who had invented the Ethernet.
CompuServe become first service to offer email to personal computer users.
27 October 1980
ARPANET halted by an accidental virus.
August 1981
IBM PC launched, running on Microsoft’s MS-DOS operating system.
1983
Sir Clive Sinclair launches the Sinclair Spectrum and achieves sales running at 15,000 units per week in the UK alone, selling millions worldwide.
1985
Microsoft release their Windows operating system, introducing the GUI concept to the mass market.
First domain name registered: symbolics.com.
1986
Commercial companies wooed on to the Internet to share the costs.
1987
UUNET founded.
1989
AOL service launched.
March 1989
Tim Berners-Lee writes a proposal at CERN for sharing files – the World Wide Web.
November 1990
Photoshop released.
September 1993
Mosaic browser released, written by Marc Andreesen and Eric Bina.
April 1994
David Filo and Jerry Yang start Yahoo! as a hobby whilst at Stanford university.
March 1994
Mosaic Communications Corp founded. Later renamed Netscape, they launched their own browser in October 1994. In 1999 they were bought by AOL for $10 billion – a business that had been built on a product that was given away for free.
May 1994
Arizona law firm Canter & Siegel is the first to spam the Internet – they had their account cancelled.
June 1994
AOL provides Internet access to its one million customers who, totally ignorant of Internet etiquette become like a plague. “AOLer” coined as a derogatory term.
July 1994
Amazon launches it’s online bookshop.
March 1995
Tim Berners-Lee held a two day seminar to introduce the WWW to journalists – it was completely unknown to the general public at that time.
Mark Griffin started building websites as a business. The rest is history 🙂
Other memorable computing and Internet related events since:
1995 eBay
1997 Wi-Fi
1997 Netflix
1998 Google
1998 PayPal
2001 Wikipedia
2003 LinkedIn
2003 WordPress
2003 Skype (now sadly defunct)
2003 MySpace
2004 Facebook
2004 Gmail
2005 YouTube
2005 Reddit
2006 Twitter
2007 iPhone
2008 Airbnb
2008 Spotify
2009 Uber
2009 WhatsApp
2010 Pinterest
2010 iPad
2010 Instagram
2013 Ring Doorbell
2016 TikTok
2022 ChatGPT
2023 Bluesky