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Technology - History Timeline

Updated: Monday, June 26, 2000

The interesting thing about technology is how new ideas spread in waves from person to person. As people see the value of new ideas they adopt them and incorporate them into their own lives and work. As communications speed up around the world the spread of ideas speed up and the rate at which good ideas are adopted increase. Also interesting is how rapidly technology and ideas build on each other there seems to be a strong tendency of one set of ideas stimulating other new ideas. This seems to be driven by people trying to constantly improve and do better than previously.

What drives the rate ideas and improvements? Clearly one factor is how great an improvement the new idea is over the existing technology. Another factor is the communications technologies available by which the new ideas can be learned. A third factor is the actual movement of people who have learned a technology from one area to another. In the 18th century the English tried to restrict the spread of their manufacturing technologies by restricting the ability of people who had key knowledge from leaving the country. In the 20th century the US government works to restrict the spread of critical defense and weapon's technologies by restricting the ability of people, with key knowledge, from publishing or communicating anything about their work or from traveling to certain parts of the world as well as restricting where they can work and live.

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John Giudice

Timeline of Technology History

Description of events

Dairy Farming - Art and writing text from the periods indicate that people had learned how to successfully dairy farm. (12)

A few hundred years (3000 BC) later the Sumerians in the Tigris and Euphrates valleys develop the phonetic writing. The exact date of the beginning of Sumerian writing is in doubt.

Medical Sutures - The Egyptians are believed to have begun the use of needle and threads to sew up wounds.

Erasers are put on pencils by Eberhard. (15)

The US government establishes the Library of Congress in Washington D.C., United States.

First photographic negative is developed by chemist Joseph Niepce (France). (15)

The typewriter is invented by Christopher Sholes and is marketed by Remington.

Phonograph - Thomas Edison developed the phonograph for recording and playing back voices and sound. Mr. Edison's photographs used a sound in the air to move a needle that carved a tin cylinder to record the sound. To play back the sound, the needle followed the grove in the tin and the sound was played back. This was the basis for all phonographs until the invention of the audio CD in 1982. (15)

Louis-Paul Cailletet (French) succeeded in creating liquid oxygen.

Some of the first electric appliances were developed. Schuyler Wheeler (US) developed the electric fan. Henry Seeley (US) developed the flatiron.

The dishwashing machine was patented by housewife Josephine Corcoran (American). (15)

The alternating current generator was developed by Nikola Tesla (US). He also developed alternating current electric motors. These have evolved to become the dominate type of electric motor in common use today.

King Gillette developed and successfully marketed the first safety razor for shaving.

Erik Rotheim of Norway invented the aerosol can.

Liquid-fueled rocket - Wernher von Braun (German) lead a team of engineers to develop a liquid fueled rocket that could deliver a war head 200 miles. The rocket was named the V-2 or Vengeance-2 and was used by the German war effort. They launched over 1000 rockets towards London England between September 1944 and March 1945. Each rocket weighed over 12 tons at launch. This was the first ballistic missile used in war. (20)

Fortran - IBM shipped its first copies of Fortran to customers. The work on Fortran was started in 1954 by John Backus (US) because he had recognized that "a half to three-quarters of operating costs of a computer were from programming and testing." (16)

Haloid-Xerox (soon renamed to Xerox Corp.) introduced the 914. The first push button plain xerographic paper copier. This product based on technology developed by Chester Carlson and first demonstrated in 1938. Plain paper coping has transformed the ability of office workers to share and communicate information. It also virtually eliminated carbon paper has a method for offices to produce multiple copies of a typed document. (2)

May 5th - Alan Shepard (US) made the first sub-orbital flight by the US space program. (4)

Intel Corp started - Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore started Intel with $2.5 million in capital. The startup funding was raised in two days. The name Intel stood for "integrated electronics" and they had to buy the rights to the name from a motel chain that had it.

It is estimated that there were some 30,000 computers existing worldwide. Most of these were mainframe processors.

J.C.R. Licklider at ARAP (Advanced Research Project  Agency, DOD) drove ARAP to awarded a contract to Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) to implement an experimental network to link computers at Universities doing research. In September BBN delivered the first computerized network switch (IMP) to UCLA. The second IMP was delivered to Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in October and later to other sites including, UCSB and Univ. of Utah. This is the beginning of the ARPANET and the beginning of the worldwide Internet.  The first ARPANET message between UCLA and Stanford was a remote logon. (1), (9)

Project Gutenberg is begun at the Illinois Benedictine College, with the goal of collecting as many texts as possible in electronic format. These are now freely available over the Internet.

RCA (US) developed the first compact disks.

The first Email message was sent over the ARPANET by Ray Tomlinson (US) at BBN. He first had to figure out how to separate the Email user name from the machine address. Tomlinson looked over the keyboard and decided to use the @ key because it was a unique character that could not ever be in a user's name and it meant "at". (1)

The ARPANET (Internet) had grown to 20 nodes. (9)

Public key cryptography was introduced by Whitefield Diffie and Martin Hellman. (6) This form of cryptography requires two keys to encrypt or decrypt information. One key is shared publicly to everyone and the other key kept private. Without both keys the information can not be used. This technology was a critical enabler for the development of PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) the first publicly available fairly strong encryption technology.

April 12th - The first space shuttle was launched. The ship was piloted by John Young. (4)

Audio CD - Sony and Philips develop the Audio CD for music and records. The CD holds up to 74 minutes of music. It is said that this size was established so a complete recording of Beethoven's 5th or 9th symphony can be recorded on one CD. Sony's chairman, at that time, was a very big Beerhoven fan.

CD-ROM - Parke Lightbown builds a computer application that runs from a computer-based version of the compact disc. Until this point the CD's had only been used for music.

November - MS Windows 1.0 - Microsoft shipped its first Windows product as a step up from character based MS DOS. The product had been announced in October 1983. The product had to work on PC's with 256KB memory and dual floppy disks (5.25" - 360KB). This was the typical PC used at that time.

April - Intel introduces the 80486 microprocessor. This 1.18 M transistor, 20 MIPS processor becomes highly successful for the new generation on PC. This is the first microprocessor to offer a built it math coprocessor. (8)

The PC industry shipped some 21M PC's (world-wide) during the year. (8)

Microsoft introduced Windows 3.1 to the market. Pervious versions of Windows had been market failures and Windows 3.1 addressed many of the problems, to become the leading high volume user interface for PC's. Windows 3.1 built on a number of ideas used in the Apple Mac. Microsoft licensed technologies from Apple for this new version. (8)

The World Wide Web was developed by the efforts of Tim Berners-Lee and physics researchers at CERN (European Laboratory for Particle Physics) in Geneva Switzerland. Their goal was to allow non-technical users to access data and information from online systems without the need to learn specialized commands and instructions. Tim Berners-Lee developed some of the core technology for the World Wide Web (URL's, HTML, HTTP) as an easy way to share information across different computers. (9)

Linux - Linus Torvalds (Finland) developed a Unix like kernel operating system for the Intel 386 (with 4MB of RAM). He was an undergraduate student at the University of Helsinki. Linux was released posted on the Internet for the public world to use with a copyleft license. This allowed everyone to use it at no charge, but all improvements had to be given back to the community of users and developers. The software 1991 only ran on Intel systems. (13)

The PC industry shipped some 32M PC's (world-wide) during the year. (8)

The Internet was opened up to commercial business over the Internet. Prior to this point the Internet was only suppose to be used research and educational uses. (9)

The first graphical web browser, Mosaic, is developed by a small team at the University of Illinois. (1)

March - Intel introduces the Pentium processor. The initial Pentium chips supported some 75 MIPS of processing power. (8)

Intel and Hewlett Packard form a partnership to build an generation of 64 bit computing, Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing (EPIC) based on technologies from both companies. This is the product family that later has become Intel's IA-64 family of processors. (The first processor based on this technology is expected in mid year 2000.) (5)

August 24, Microsoft introduces Windows 95 for the Intel PC family of computers.

Linux - Support is now provided for Digital Alpha processors and Hewlett Packard systems. (13)

IBM's Deep Blue computer defeats the world chess champion, Gary Kasparov in a match. This is the first time a chess playing computer has been able to defeat a world champion chess player. (8)

International Data Corp. estimated that as of May 1998 there were 92M Internet users and there were some 528M URL's on the Internet with some 120M devices connected to the Internet. (3)

The PC industry is expected to ship some 100M PC's (world-wide) during the year. (8)

October - John Glenn returned to Earth orbit for 7 days as part of a US Space Shuttle mission. John Glenn was the first US astronaut to orbit the Earth and at 70, is the oldest man to orbit the earth.

IDC's estimate of Web users is now at 97.3 million and is forecasting that it will grow to 131.4M in 1999.

British scientists have successfully cloned 5 piglets from one adult pig. This is a major breakthrough in cloning since their techniques seemed to be much more repeatable than the first efforts at cloning mammals.

June 22 - Water on Mars - NASA announced that based on a new study  using high resolution photographs from the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft, scientist have spotted gullies and trenches and fanlike deltas that could have been carved by fast-moving water flowing down cliffs and the steep walls of craters. That liquid water once existed on Mars is generally accepted by scientists, but Michael Malin said his new study suggests strongly that water flowed on the Red Planet very recently and, perhaps, even now. He bases this on photos showing gullies and rills the look very much like similar water-carved features on Earth. (22)

June 26 - Map of the Human Genome - Detailed mapping of the human genome has been completed by teams around the world. This map provides a detailed look at some 90% of the human genome. Scientists will be able to use this map to find and sequence genes.