Technology, Games, and Money
Events · 184
- c. 3000-2000 BCEHistory of Money
Mesopotamian Temples Record Debt on Clay Tablets
In the temple and palace economies of Sumerian cities such as Uruk and Ur, scribes recorded loans, debts, and obligations on clay tablets in cuneiform script. Silver and barley functioned as the standards of value: Mesopotamians made loans of silver or barley at interest rates set by custom and law, typically 20 percent for silver and 30 percent for barley, and the resulting agreements, along with sales contracts, rental agreements, and records of debt, made up a large share of surviving cuneiform tablets. Temples held stores of grain and other goods, and the credit they extended, and the debts they later had to cancel when borrowers could not repay, ran the ancient economy centuries before any coin existed anywhere in the world.
General source · 2 sources - c. 2500 BCE and after (ongoing scholarly debate)History of Money
Barter or Debt: Historians and Economists Split Over How Money Began
Two accounts of money's origin have coexisted in the historical and economic literature for over a century. The commodity-and-barter account, traced to Adam Smith, holds that direct exchange of goods was inconvenient enough that societies converged on a single widely wanted commodity as a medium of exchange, and coinage followed from there. World History Encyclopedia's own account of Mesopotamian trade describes exactly this: 'No monetary system in the form of coinage existed at this point; goods were exchanged for others considered of equal value,' citing a documented exchange of Shuruppak grain for Egyptian gold. The competing credit-and-debt account, developed by economic anthropologists and some economic historians, argues there is no anthropological record of a barter-based society ever converting to money this way, and that the Mesopotamian tablet record instead shows credit, debt, and unit-of-account pricing operating first, with physical coinage a much later, separate development that solved a different problem: making small transactions between strangers who could not extend each other credit.
Reputable source · 2 sources - c. 630-600 BCEHistory of Money
Lydia Strikes the First Coins
In the Anatolian kingdom of Lydia, someone stamped a piece of electrum, a naturally occurring alloy of gold and silver, with a design resembling a signet ring, creating what numismatists recognize as the first true coin. World History Encyclopedia dates this to approximately 630 BCE. Electrum's natural composition varied unpredictably from river to river, which meant its value as currency was inconsistent even after stamping. The Lydian king Alyattes issued electrum coins for roughly the next eighty years, until his son Croesus, who ruled from about 561 to 546 BCE, solved the composition problem by having Lydian metallurgists develop a process for separating electrum into pure gold and pure silver. Croesus became the first ruler to issue coins of guaranteed pure gold, alongside pure silver coins, at a fixed exchange ratio between the two metals, and minting itself progressively became an exclusive function of the state rather than something private parties could do.
Reputable source · 2 sources - c. 500s-400s BCEHistory of Money
Athens Mints the Owl and Funds an Empire
Athens minted its silver tetradrachm bearing the head of the goddess Athena on one face and her owl on the other, drawing on silver mined at the state-owned Laurion mines south of the city. The American Numismatic Society notes examples of these coins have been found used as far away as Afghanistan, and their design remained essentially unchanged for almost two centuries, a stability that made them recognizable and trusted across the Mediterranean and beyond. World History Encyclopedia records that the Athenian owl tetradrachms turn up in archaeological finds in Egypt, Palestine, Arabia, and Bactria, spreading through trade and through Athens's position at the head of the Delian League. Coinage did not fully replace older exchange methods even in the Greek world: for much maritime trade, barter remained common because the relative values of different city-states' coins were often unclear or unstable.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 64-274 CEHistory of Money
Rome Debases the Denarius Into Worthlessness
Rome's silver denarius held a fineness near 98 percent under Augustus, but successive emperors reduced its precious-metal content to cover state expenses without raising taxes directly. World History Encyclopedia records the silver content held roughly steady through Nero's reign but had fallen to about 80 percent fineness by the time of Marcus Aurelius and Commodus a century later, and to about 50 percent under Septimius Severus in the early 200s CE. In 215 CE Caracalla introduced a new coin, the antoninianus, officially valued at two denarii but containing only about 1.5 times the silver, a debasement that itself fed inflation as prices rose to compensate. By the mid-200s CE Rome had effectively abandoned silver coinage altogether, and prices in many parts of the empire rose by roughly 1,000 percent during the resulting collapse of confidence in the currency.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1023/1024 CEHistory of Money
Song China Prints the World's First Government Paper Money
In late Tang times, around 900 CE, merchants in China began trading receipts, called jiaozi, issued by deposit shops in exchange for stored valuables, a way of avoiding the physical burden of transporting large numbers of heavy copper coin strings across long distances. A small group of Sichuan shops first won a government-granted monopoly on issuing these certificates. Columbia University's Asia for Educators project dates the government takeover of the system to the 1020s, specifically 1024, while the Hoover Institution's account places the same handover in 1023; in either year, the Song government took the jiaozi system over directly in the early 1020s and began issuing the world's first government-issued paper money. The innovation solved a genuine practical problem, since copper coins were cumbersome for the volume of commerce that Song China's economy demanded. The system was not permanent: later Song and Yuan dynasty governments repeatedly overprinted paper currency to cover deficits, triggering serious inflation and forcing repeated replacements of one paper currency with another over the following centuries.
Reputable source · 2 sources - c. 1150-1300 CEHistory of Money
The Knights Templar Run Medieval Europe's First International Money Network
The Knights Templar, a Catholic military order founded around 1119 after the First Crusade, built a network of fortified commanderies stretching from London and Paris to the Levant, and turned it into a financial system. A pilgrim or noble could deposit money or valuables at one Templar house, receive a letter, and later withdraw the equivalent sum at a distant Templar house, so that people no longer had to carry gold across roads full of thieves. The order also held what amounted to current accounts, paying out fixed sums on an account holder's instructions, safeguarded the treasuries of the kings of France, and lent large sums to monarchs. Louis VII of France borrowed so heavily to finance his crusade that he nearly bankrupted the order. The Templars kept detailed records and sent their most active customers statements of account three times a year, and they managed the theological problem of usury by taking their return as fees and exchange margins rather than as openly stated interest.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 13th century CEHistory of Money
Champagne Fairs and Italian Bankers Invent the Bill of Exchange
At the recurring trade fairs of Champagne in northeastern France, protected and made neutral ground by the counts of Champagne, Italian merchant bankers who had settled the fairs by around 1220 developed the bill of exchange as a way to settle international transactions without physically transporting coin. A bill of exchange let a merchant in one city instruct an agent, typically a bank with a branch elsewhere, to pay a named party a set sum in a different city and currency; local banks would notify their foreign branches to honor bills when presented, and the mutual obligations of many merchants could be netted against each other at the fair's closing rather than settled coin by coin. This period also saw the beginnings of double-entry bookkeeping among Italian merchant bankers, a practice historians trace to the same 13th-century northern Italian commercial milieu, though its first known published description would not appear until Luca Pacioli's 1494 treatise.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1397 CEHistory of Money
The Medici Bank Rises on Double-Entry Books and Letters of Credit
Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici moved his family's small banking operation from Rome to Florence in 1397, the year historians treat as the Medici Bank's founding. The bank grew, especially under Giovanni's son Cosimo, into branches across Rome, Venice, Geneva, Lyon, Bruges, and London, serving the Roman Catholic curia as its chief banker and financing trade and rulers across Europe. The Medici, like other Italian merchant banks of the period, used double-entry bookkeeping, recording every transaction as a paired debit and credit, which let them track the health of every branch from Florence, and issued a form of letter of credit that let a customer draw funds in one city against a deposit made in another. History.com notes the family's wealth and political power in Florence grew directly out of this success in banking and commerce. The bank did not survive the century: mismanagement, bad loans to European rulers, and the Medici family's growing preoccupation with politics led to its collapse and closure in 1494.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1494 CEHistory of Money
Luca Pacioli Publishes the First Printed Account of Double-Entry Bookkeeping
Luca Pacioli, a Franciscan friar and mathematician, published Summa de Arithmetica, Geometria, Proportioni et Proportionalita in Venice in 1494. The Smithsonian Libraries note that Pacioli did not invent double-entry bookkeeping himself; Italian merchant bankers, including those at the Champagne fairs and the Medici Bank, had already been using it for roughly two centuries. What Pacioli did was write the first printed description of the system, in a section of the Summa spanning folios 198 to 210, explaining the correct use of ledgers and insisting that a merchant close out each day only once debits and credits agreed. Written in the vernacular rather than scholarly Latin, the Summa made accounting techniques accessible to ordinary merchants rather than restricting them to specialists, and the book survives today in roughly 120 known copies held at institutions including the Vatican Library and the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1545-1600History of Money
Spain's New World Silver Triggers Europe's Price Revolution
Spanish prospectors discovered the Potosi silver deposit at Cerro Rico, in modern Bolivia, in 1545. World History Encyclopedia records that at its peak around 1600 the mines numbered over 600 individual operations and yielded some 9 million silver pesos a year, more than every other silver mine on Earth combined at the time, and that by 1600 Spain had transported roughly 25,000 tons of silver from the Americas to Spain, with silver making up more than 85 percent of annual precious-metal shipments back to the Spanish crown by 1540. This flood of bullion coincided with a sustained rise in prices across 16th-century Europe that historians call the price revolution: commodity prices in Spain rose roughly 400 percent over the century. Economic historians have long debated how much of this inflation the American silver actually caused. Earl Hamilton's classic study attributed the price revolution chiefly to the silver influx, but later research points to population growth, credit expansion, and monetary factors that predate the arrival of large American silver shipments as equally important drivers.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1609History of Money
Amsterdam Founds the Wisselbank, an Early Public Bank
The city of Amsterdam established the Wisselbank, or Bank of Amsterdam, in 1609 to solve a practical crisis: the Dutch Republic had no fewer than fourteen different mints and was awash in foreign and worn coins of uncertain value, which made trade slow and disputes frequent. The Wisselbank let merchants deposit their mixed coin and hold accounts denominated in a single, standardized, stable bank currency, the bank guilder. Account holders could settle payments with one another by having the bank transfer balances between their accounts in its ledgers, a book-entry system that avoided moving physical coin at all. This made large transactions, including the share trading of the Dutch East India Company, far easier, and the bank guilder became a trusted reference currency across Europe. The Wisselbank operated for over two centuries before entering liquidation in 1819, after the founding of a new national central bank.
Reputable source · 2 sources - mid-17th century CEHistory of Money
London Goldsmiths Invent Fractional-Reserve Banking
London goldsmiths, artisans who worked gold into jewelry and plate and who also traded coin, began accepting deposits of silver and gold for safekeeping in their vaults. Around 1200 CE, deposit transfer as a form of payment had already begun in Italy, but in mid-17th-century London goldsmiths took the practice further: they issued paper receipts against deposited coin, and by the mid-1600s were issuing banknotes and paying interest on deposits to attract more of them. A goldsmith who realized depositors would rarely all demand their coin back on the same day could safely lend out more in banknotes than the gold actually sitting in the vault, collecting interest on those loans, a practice now called fractional-reserve banking. The Mercatus Center's research on this period notes that offering interest is itself evidence depositors understood their funds were being lent onward rather than merely stored, meaning the system developed through open market practice rather than concealment.
General source · 2 sources - 27 July 1694History of Money
The Bank of England Is Founded to Finance a War
England under William III was fighting the costly Nine Years' War against France and could not raise enough money through taxation alone. William Paterson, a Scottish merchant, proposed that a syndicate of investors lend the government 1.2 million pounds at 8 percent annual interest in exchange for a royal charter to operate as a joint-stock bank. Parliament's guarantee of the loan, backed by the taxing power of the nation rather than the word of a king who might renege, made the scheme credible, and the subscription, opened in June 1694, was fully filled within twelve days. The Bank received its royal charter as 'The Governor and Company of the Bank of England' on 27 July 1694 and opened for business in August in the Mercers' Hall in Cheapside, with Sir John Houblon as its first governor. Within weeks the new bank had issued its first handwritten banknotes, promises to pay the bearer a specified sum, which began circulating among London's merchants as a form of currency in their own right.
Reputable source · 2 sources - From 1709 (coke smelting) to 1781 (the Iron Bridge)The Industrial Revolution
Cheap iron: Coalbrookdale and the Iron Bridge
The material foundation of the Industrial Revolution was laid decades before it fully caught fire. According to World History Encyclopedia, the first working blast furnace using coke was used in 1709 at Coalbrookdale in Shropshire, a works owned by the Quaker ironmaster Abraham Darby, replacing the traditional charcoal made from increasingly scarce wood. Coke-fuelled furnaces could reach much higher temperatures than charcoal and did not introduce impurities, which made better iron possible at greater scale and helped fuel the whole revolution. Seventy years later, in the same gorge, the world's first cast iron bridge was built across the River Severn by Darby's descendant Abraham Darby III and opened to the public in 1781, a demonstration of what the new abundant metal could do.
Reputable source · 3 sources - 1717-1870sHistory of Money
Britain Anchors the World to Gold
Britain had operated on an effective silver standard for centuries when Isaac Newton, in his role as Master of the Royal Mint, set the official mint-price ratio between gold and silver in 1717 at a level that, according to the Economic History Association's encyclopedia entry, over-valued gold, and the country drifted onto a de facto gold standard as silver coin was driven out of circulation. Britain made this arrangement official policy in 1774 when the legal-tender status of silver above a certain amount was restricted, and by the classical gold standard's mature form, currency units were defined as a specific weight of gold, gold coin circulated with unlimited legal-tender power, and private bullion could be converted into coin at a fixed mint price. Most of the rest of Europe did not follow for over 150 years: EH.net records that the international rush to the gold standard occurred in the 1870s, when Germany, France, the Scandinavian countries, and other European states adopted it in a short span, generally after major gold discoveries and following Britain's already-established example.
General source · 2 sources - 1720History of Money
The Mississippi and South Sea Bubbles Collapse Within Months of Each Other
In France, the Scottish financier John Law had founded the Banque Generale in 1716, converted it into the state-owned Banque Royale in 1718, and built the Compagnie d'Occident, later the Mississippi Company, around exclusive trading rights to French Louisiana. Law's plan let the French crown retire its public debt by having investors swap government bonds for company shares; the shares rose from about 500 livres in January 1719 to 10,000 livres by December, a rise of some 1,900 percent, before the whole structure collapsed in 1720 as note issuance outran the company's real earnings and inflation set in. In Britain that same year, the South Sea Company, formed in 1711 around a monopoly contract to supply enslaved people to Spanish America, made a similar offer to absorb the national debt in exchange for company shares paying dividends from trade profits. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York's account, the arrangement had 'repackaged' a burdensome public debt 'into a valuable commodity,' and speculative buying pushed the stock price into the hundreds of pounds before it collapsed that autumn, with panic spreading to other London banks including the Sword Blade Bank, which closed its doors in September 1720. Parliament responded with the Bubble Act, restricting the formation of new joint-stock companies without a royal charter.
Reputable source · 2 sources - The canal boom, about 1750 to 1830The Industrial Revolution
Canals carry the revolution's heavy goods
Before steam locomotives, the cheapest way to move heavy goods like coal and iron across Britain was by water. World History Encyclopedia records that the boom in coal production drove a massive expansion of the canal system from 1750, connecting the major rivers and their tributaries, because canal transport cost around half as much as moving goods by road. The growth was enormous: by 1830, England and Wales had 3,876 miles of inland canals, up from 1,399 miles in 1760. Canal boats were slow, around 3 miles per hour, but they could haul bulk cargo cheaply and reliably in a way roads could not.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1764 to 1779The Industrial Revolution
Spinning goes mechanical: the jenny and the water frame
The Industrial Revolution's leading edge was cotton, and its breakthrough was spinning. In 1764 in Lancashire, James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny, a frame of multiple spindles that let one worker spin eight cotton threads at once, and which he soon improved to spin 120 at a time, where a spinning wheel had managed one. In 1769 Richard Arkwright patented the water frame, which used rollers to produce a stronger, finer yarn and, crucially, was powered by a water wheel, so it could run continuously. Arkwright's water-powered mill at Cromford became the model for the modern factory system. Samuel Crompton's spinning mule of 1779 combined the strengths of both.
Reputable source - Patented 5 January 1769; in production from 1775The Industrial Revolution
Watt's steam engine puts power anywhere
Steam power existed before James Watt, in Thomas Newcomen's engines that pumped water out of mines, but it was hopelessly inefficient. On 5 January 1769, Watt was granted a patent titled a new method of lessening the consumption of steam and fuel in fire-engines, for his separate condenser: by keeping the hot cylinder and the cool condenser apart, the cylinder no longer had to be reheated every stroke. The Science Museum calls it the greatest single improvement ever made to the steam engine, and says engines using it burned about two-thirds less coal. From 1775, in partnership with the Birmingham industrialist Matthew Boulton, Watt turned the design into a practical, widely sold product.
Reputable source · 2 sources - November 21, 1783History of Aviation
Pilatre de Rozier Makes the First Human Flight
On November 21, 1783, Jean-Francois Pilatre de Rozier went aloft in a Montgolfier hot air balloon in front of a crowd at the Chateau de la Muette in the Bois de Boulogne, becoming the first human being to make a free flight, after weeks of tethered test ascents. He was soon joined in the basket by the Marquis d'Arlandes, and the pair flew across Paris for roughly 25 minutes, covering about 9 kilometers before landing safely beyond the city's edge.
Primary source · 2 sources - September 19, 1783History of Aviation
A Sheep, a Duck, and a Rooster Fly Over Versailles
Paper manufacturers Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Etienne Montgolfier had already sent an unmanned balloon over a mile into the air above Annonay in June 1783. On September 19, in front of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette at the Palace of Versailles, they launched a second balloon, a cotton and paper craft roughly 18.5 meters tall named Le Reveillon, carrying a sheep, a duck, and a rooster in a basket tied beneath it. At the blast of a cannon at 1pm the balloon rose and traveled about 3.5 kilometers before landing safely eight minutes later. All three animals survived the flight.
Primary source · 2 sources - Rainhill Trials 1829; railway opened 15 September 1830The Industrial Revolution
The railway age begins
In October 1829, at the Rainhill Trials near Liverpool, a competition was held to choose the locomotive for a new railway, and the winner was the Rocket, designed by Robert Stephenson and entered with his father George Stephenson, the line's engineer. On 15 September 1830 the Liverpool and Manchester Railway opened, the first inter-city line worked entirely by steam locomotives, carrying both passengers and freight. It was an immediate success, soon carrying more than a thousand passengers a day, and it let people travel between the two cities and back in a single day, something the era of horse-drawn coaches had made impossible.
Reputable source · 2 sources The 1833 Factory Act confronts the human cost
Industrial progress had a price paid largely by children. Tens of thousands of children worked in Britain's textile mills, often for long hours in dangerous conditions. After years of campaigning, Parliament passed the Factory Act of 1833, which the National Archives describes as a turning point because, unlike earlier toothless laws, it was actually enforced. It banned the employment of children under nine in textile mills, limited the hours older children could work, required some schooling for the youngest workers, and, decisively, created a small government inspectorate of factories with the power to enter mills and impose penalties.
Reputable source · 2 sourcesBabbage conceives the Analytical Engine
Charles Babbage had already spent years on the Difference Engine, a mechanical calculator meant to print error-free mathematical tables. In 1834, with that project stalled, Babbage conceived a far more ambitious machine, later called the Analytical Engine. It borrowed the punched-card system from the Jacquard loom, which used cards to control weaving patterns, and applied the same idea to computation. The design split the machine into a 'Store,' where numbers and intermediate results were held, and a separate 'Mill,' where arithmetic was carried out, the same store-and-process split every computer still uses. It could perform all four arithmetic functions, and Babbage's notes describe conditional branching and looping (iteration) even though he had no name for these ideas yet.
Reputable source · 2 sources- August 1843The Internet and Computing
Ada Lovelace publishes the first algorithm
Ada Lovelace translated an Italian engineer's French-language memoir on Babbage's Analytical Engine and, at Babbage's suggestion, added her own notes. Her notes ran three times longer than the original memoir and were published in 1843. The last of them, known as Note G, laid out a step-by-step sequence of operations for the Analytical Engine to compute Bernoulli numbers, a set of numbers used in mathematical series. It is the first published description of a stepwise procedure written for a machine to execute. Lovelace also went beyond the arithmetic Babbage had in mind, writing that the Engine 'might act upon other things besides number' and could, in principle, compose music.
Reputable source · 2 sources - By the 1851 censusThe Industrial Revolution
A nation moves to the cities
The Industrial Revolution did not just change how things were made; it changed where people lived. World History Encyclopedia records that between 1750 and 1851 Britain's population rose from about 6 million to 21 million, and London's grew from 959,000 in 1801 to more than 3 million. The 1851 census revealed a threshold moment: for the first time, more people lived in towns and cities than in the countryside. Life in the cities that had grown up around factories and coalfields was often cramped, with many families sharing the same rooms and suffering from pollution, poor sanitation, and crime.
Peer-reviewed · 3 sources George Cayley Flies the First Manned Glider
Sir George Cayley, an English baronet who had studied flight scientifically since the 1790s, spent decades working out that a flying machine needed separate systems for lift, propulsion, and control, a fixed-wing concept he had set out in writing as early as 1799. In 1853 he built a full-scale glider and flew it across Brompton Dale near his estate in Yorkshire, with his coachman, John Appleby, on board as a reluctant passenger, in what is described as the first recorded flight of a fixed-wing aircraft carrying an adult.
General source · 2 sourcesHollerith's punched-card tabulator wins the census contract
The 1880 US census had taken more than eight years to fully tabulate by hand, and the Census Bureau ran a competition to find a faster method for 1890. Herman Hollerith, a former Bureau employee, won it with a machine that read data punched as holes in paper cards. Operators pushed spring-loaded pins through the card; where a hole let a pin pass through, it dipped into a small cup of mercury below and completed an electrical circuit, which advanced a dial on the tabulator counting that category. An average operator could process about 7,000 cards a day, roughly ten times faster than tallying by hand.
Reputable source · 2 sources- 1891-1896History of Aviation
Otto Lilienthal Logs Nearly 2,000 Glider Flights
Between 1891 and 1896 the German engineer Otto Lilienthal built and flew a series of 16 different glider designs, launching first from a springboard in his own backyard and later from an artificial 50-foot hill he built near Berlin so he could launch regardless of wind direction. Over five years he made an estimated 2,000 glide flights and accumulated about five hours of total time in the air, a figure later calculated by Wilbur Wright, reaching distances up to 250 meters. On August 9, 1896, a glider stalled in the Rhinow Hills; Lilienthal fell 50 feet, broke his back, and died the next day in a Berlin hospital.
General source · 2 sources - 1901-1906 (rival claims)History of Aviation
Disputed Claims to the First Flight
Two other names are regularly raised against the Wright brothers' claim to first flight. Gustave Whitehead, a German immigrant living in Bridgeport, Connecticut, claimed to have flown as early as August 14, 1901, more than two years before Kitty Hawk, but left no surviving photographs, later saying his pictures of the flight had not come out, and no other physical or documentary evidence has settled the question in his favor. Alberto Santos-Dumont, a Brazilian aviator working in France, made fully documented, witnessed flights of 60 and 220 meters in 1906, which some in Brazil credit as the true first flight because his aircraft took off under its own power without the rail-and-headwind assist the Wrights used at Kitty Hawk.
Reputable source · 2 sources - December 17, 1903History of Aviation
The Wright Brothers Achieve the First Powered, Controlled Flight
At 10:35am on December 17, 1903, Orville Wright piloted the Wright Flyer 120 feet across the sand at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in a flight that lasted 12 seconds and reached a top speed of 6.8 miles per hour. The brothers, bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio, made three more flights that day, the longest covering 852 feet in 59 seconds with Wilbur at the controls, before gusty winds tipped the Flyer over after the last landing and wrecked it beyond repair. The key breakthrough behind the flight was not the engine but three-axis control, a system of wing-warping and rudder and elevator surfaces that let a pilot steer and balance the aircraft, a problem the brothers had spent several prior years solving through their own glider tests building on Lilienthal's published data.
Primary source · 2 sources - July 25, 1909History of Aviation
Bleriot Crosses the English Channel
On July 25, 1909, French aviator Louis Bleriot flew his Bleriot XI monoplane, powered by a 25-horsepower three-cylinder Anzani engine, from a beach near Calais to Northfall Meadow near Dover Castle, covering roughly 36 kilometers in a little over 30 minutes. He beat two rival aviators to the crossing, Hubert Latham, whose Antoinette IV had gone down in the sea on July 19 after an engine failure mid-Channel, and Charles de Lambert. The flight won Bleriot the Daily Mail's 1,000-pound prize for the first aircraft crossing of the Channel in either direction.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1914-1918History of Aviation
The Royal Flying Corps Turns the Sky Into a Battlefield
Britain's Royal Flying Corps entered the war in August 1914 with 179 airplanes and 1,244 officers and men, initially used for artillery spotting and photographic reconnaissance for the army on the ground. That reconnaissance work gradually pulled RFC pilots into aerial battles with German aircraft doing the same job, and fighter squadrons were formed specifically to protect observation planes and attack enemy aircraft. By 1916, dedicated fighter planes, pilots, and squadrons had become their own branch of military aviation, and pilots who shot down five or more enemy aircraft earned the title of ace, a term French newspapers borrowed from card games to describe pilots like Adolphe Pegoud. On April 1, 1918, the RFC merged with the Royal Naval Air Service to form the Royal Air Force, the world's first independent air force, which by early 1919 had grown to roughly 4,000 aircraft and 114,000 personnel.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1918-1926History of Aviation
Barnstormers and Airmail Pilots Turn Aviation Into a Livelihood
The U.S. Post Office launched scheduled airmail service between New York and Washington, D.C. on May 15, 1918, at first flown by Army pilots and from August 1918 onward by newly hired civilians; the network reached Chicago in 1919, Omaha in 1920, and San Francisco by September 1920. Flying open-cockpit biplanes in all weather, pilots faced brutal odds, 34 airmail pilots died between 1918 and 1927. At the same time, former wartime pilots and surplus Curtiss Jenny biplanes fueled a barnstorming boom, with pilots touring small towns to perform stunts, race, and sell rides to paying passengers who had never seen an airplane up close. The Contract Air Mail Act of 1925 (the Kelly Act) then let the Post Office hand its routes to private companies, and by 1927 commercial airlines had taken over all U.S. airmail delivery.
General source · 2 sources - 1921-1923 (peak 1923)History of Money
German Hyperinflation Destroys the Papermark
After the First World War, the Weimar Republic owed enormous reparations, fixed at 132 billion gold marks, and rather than raise the money through taxes it increasingly paid its bills by printing paper currency. Between December 1921 and July 1922 the Reichsbank's holdings of domestic bills rose more than sixfold, and by May 1922 only about a fifth of government income came from taxes, the rest from freshly printed money. When France and Belgium occupied the industrial Ruhr region in January 1923 over unpaid reparations, the government printed still more to support striking workers, and the currency collapsed. The exchange rate ran from thousands of marks to the dollar to, by November 1923, roughly four trillion marks to the dollar. Prices doubled within hours, workers were paid twice a day so wages could be spent before they lost value, and the crisis ended only with the introduction of a new currency, the Rentenmark, on November 15, 1923.
General source · 2 sources - May 20-21, 1927History of Aviation
Charles Lindbergh Flies Solo Across the Atlantic
Charles Lindbergh, previously a contract airmail pilot, took off from Roosevelt Field, New York, on May 20, 1927, in the Ryan NYP Spirit of St. Louis, a custom single-engine monoplane powered by a 223-horsepower Wright J-5C engine, designed by Donald Hall under Lindbergh's direct supervision. Thirty-three and a half hours and 3,610 miles later, Lindbergh landed at Le Bourget Field outside Paris, completing the first solo, nonstop flight across the Atlantic, and was met by a crowd estimated at 100,000 people.
General source · 2 sources - 1929-1939History of Money
The Great Depression Splits Economists Over What a Currency Crisis Really Is
The U.S. stock market crashed in October 1929, and the downturn spread into a global economic crisis compounded, according to the U.S. State Department's Office of the Historian, by a German economic slump and financial difficulties in France and Great Britain that together produced a genuine global financial crisis. The gold standard, which had been reinstated in various forms after the First World War, introduced what the State Department's account calls inflexibility into domestic and international financial markets, since countries could not freely expand their money supply without risking their fixed gold convertibility. Economists have never fully agreed on why a stock crash turned into a decade-long depression. Monetarists, following Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz, argue the Federal Reserve's failure to expand the money supply and stop bank panics turned a normal recession into a catastrophe; Keynesian explanations instead emphasize a collapse in investment and aggregate spending; and later research by economists including at the NBER has argued that adherence to gold-standard orthodoxy itself, not merely a monetary policy mistake, was what transmitted and deepened the crisis across countries.
Reputable source · 2 sources - May 20-21, 1932History of Aviation
Amelia Earhart Flies Solo Across the Atlantic
On May 20, 1932, the fifth anniversary of Lindbergh's crossing, Amelia Earhart took off from Harbor Grace, Newfoundland, alone in a red Lockheed Vega, intending to fly to Paris. Icing on the wings, a leaking fuel tank, and a cracked engine manifold forced her to divert, and after just over 14 hours in the air she landed in a farmer's field near Londonderry, Northern Ireland, reportedly asking the first person she met, where am I. The flight made her the first woman to fly solo and nonstop across the Atlantic and only the second person after Lindbergh to do so.
Primary source · 2 sources - December 17, 1935History of Aviation
The Douglas DC-3 Makes Air Travel Practical
The Douglas Sleeper Transport, prototype of what became the DC-3, made its first flight on December 17, 1935, the 32nd anniversary of the Wright brothers' flight, after American Airlines president C.R. Smith persuaded Donald Douglas to design a sleeper aircraft to replace the airline's aging biplanes. The 21-seat DC-3 variant that followed let airlines fly coast to coast with only three refueling stops, cutting a cross-country trip to about 15 hours where earlier travel had required daytime flights mixed with overnight trains. Early U.S. carriers ordered more than 400 DC-3s, and KLM Royal Dutch Airlines put the type into service on its Amsterdam to Sydney route, the world's longest scheduled air route at the time, in 1936.
General source · 2 sources - 30 November 1936The Internet and Computing
Turing describes the universal machine
Alan Turing published 'On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem' in the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, in installments dated 30 November and 23 December 1936. He was attacking a question posed by mathematician David Hilbert: whether a single mechanical procedure could decide, for any statement in formal logic, if it was provable. Turing answered by inventing an idealized device, an 'automatic machine' that reads and writes symbols on an infinite tape one cell at a time, following a fixed table of rules. He then described a 'universal machine' that could read a description of any other such machine off the tape and imitate it exactly, showing that one general-purpose device could in principle run any computation.
Reputable source · 2 sources - September 14, 1939History of Aviation
Igor Sikorsky Flies the First Practical Helicopter
On September 14, 1939, engineer Igor Sikorsky piloted his VS-300 on its first tethered flight at the Vought-Sikorsky plant in Stratford, Connecticut, hovering for about 10 seconds while under cable restraint. Sikorsky continued refining the design over the following months, and on May 13, 1940, he flew the VS-300 free of its tether for the first time. The aircraft used a single main lifting rotor with a separate vertical tail rotor to counteract torque, a configuration that solved the control problems that had defeated earlier helicopter experiments.
Primary source · 2 sources McCulloch and Pitts model the neuron as a logic gate
Warren McCulloch, a neurophysiologist at the University of Illinois, and Walter Pitts, a largely self-taught logician, published 'A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity' in the Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics. They argued that because a neuron either fires or does not, its all-or-none behavior can be treated with propositional logic. They showed that a network of these simplified neurons, wired together with weighted connections, could compute any expression that logic itself could express, and that for any such logical statement a net could be built to match its behavior. There was no learning rule and no hardware; it was a mathematical proof that logic and neural wiring could be made equivalent.
Primary source · 2 sources- 1942-1945History of Aviation
Strategic Bombing Becomes a Central Weapon of War
The U.S. Army Air Forces and Britain's RAF Bomber Command both built massive strategic bombing fleets during World War II aimed at destroying Axis industry and morale, and formalized their cooperation at the January 1943 Casablanca Conference into what became known as the Combined Bomber Offensive, a round-the-clock campaign against occupied Europe running from 1942 to 1945. The two air forces used different methods: RAF crews flew at night and conducted area bombing of entire cities, while the USAAF flew B-17 and B-24 bombers by day and pursued precision bombing of factories and infrastructure using the Norden bombsight. The human cost was severe on both sides: American losses exceeded 27,000 killed in action, RAF Bomber Command lost more than 55,000 men, and the campaign killed more than 305,000 Germans and displaced 7.5 million more.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 5 February 1944The Internet and Computing
Colossus breaks the Lorenz cipher at Bletchley Park
British telephone engineer Tommy Flowers spent eleven months designing and building Colossus at the Post Office Research Station in Dollis Hill, London, to help break the German Lorenz cipher (codenamed 'Tunny' by the British), used for high-level communications between Hitler and his generals. Colossus was delivered to Bletchley Park in late 1943 and early 1944 and was working by early February 1944. It used about 2,500 vacuum tubes to test possible cipher-wheel settings electronically, far faster than the manual methods that had taken four to six weeks per message. By the end of the war, ten Colossus machines and the 550 people operating them had decrypted 63 million characters of high-grade German communications.
Reputable source · 2 sources - July 26, 1944History of Aviation
The Jet Engine Reaches Combat in the Messerschmitt Me 262
British engineer Frank Whittle and German engineer Hans von Ohain developed jet engines independently and almost simultaneously in the 1930s; von Ohain received his jet engine patent on November 10, 1935, and his engine first ran successfully in a test rig in March 1937, narrowly ahead of Whittle's April 1937 test run. Von Ohain's engine powered the Heinkel He 178, which flew on August 27, 1939, becoming the world's first jet aircraft to fly, days before Germany invaded Poland. Germany pushed the technology into combat first: the Messerschmitt Me 262, powered by Junkers Jumo 004 engines, entered operational service on July 26, 1944, becoming the first operational jet fighter in history and shooting down more than 500 Allied aircraft before the war's end, despite engines that typically lasted only 10 to 25 hours before burning out.
General source · 2 sources - July 1944History of Money
Bretton Woods Ties the World's Currencies to Gold Through the Dollar
As the Second World War neared its end, delegates from 44 nations, 730 people in all, met at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, for the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference in July 1944. U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. presided, and John Maynard Keynes of the British delegation led the commission that designed what became the World Bank. The conference produced the Articles of Agreement for two new institutions: the International Monetary Fund, tasked with overseeing a system of fixed exchange rates centered on the U.S. dollar and gold and providing short-term financial help to countries facing balance-of-payments trouble, and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, later known as the World Bank, responsible for financing postwar reconstruction and the development of poorer countries. Under the resulting system, the U.S. dollar was pegged to gold at 35 dollars per ounce, and every other member currency was pegged to the dollar, creating a system of fixed exchange rates anchored, at one remove, to gold.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 30 June 1945The Internet and Computing
Von Neumann's EDVAC report describes the stored-program computer
While ENIAC was still being built, mathematician John von Neumann joined the Moore School team and, in an incomplete 101-page document circulated on 30 June 1945, wrote the first widely-read description of a stored-program computer: a machine holding both its instructions and its data in one memory, encoded in the same binary form, so it could read, and even modify, its own program while running. This is the design later called the 'von Neumann architecture,' still the basic layout of most computers today. The report drew on discussions von Neumann had with Eckert, Mauchly, and Herman Goldstine, but named only von Neumann as author when it circulated.
Primary source · 2 sources - 15 February 1946 (public dedication)The Internet and Computing
ENIAC runs at the University of Pennsylvania
J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly led a team at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering building ENIAC, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, starting in 1943 to calculate artillery firing tables for the Army. It first ran in late 1945 and was formally dedicated on 15 February 1946. Using more than 17,000 vacuum tubes as electronic switches, ENIAC could execute conditional branches, letting it change its calculation path based on prior results, an 'if this, then that' capability that made it reprogrammable rather than fixed to one task. Reprogramming meant physically rewiring plugboards and setting switches, which could take days, but the machine itself performed calculations thousands of times faster than any electromechanical predecessor.
Peer-reviewed · 2 sources - 25 January 1947 (patent filed)History of Video Games
Physicists build the Cathode-Ray Tube Amusement Device
Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann, engineers at Allen B. DuMont Laboratories in Passaic, New Jersey, filed a patent on 25 January 1947 for a 'cathode-ray tube amusement device.' The player turned two knobs to steer a dot of light, standing in for a missile, across an oscilloscope screen toward a fixed target pattern held over the glass, mimicking the radar displays Goldsmith had worked on during the war. The patent, US 2,455,992, was granted 14 December 1948, the first ever issued for an electronic game. DuMont never manufactured it beyond a handmade prototype, and the device was never sold.
Primary source · 2 sources - October 14, 1947History of Aviation
Chuck Yeager Breaks the Sound Barrier
On October 14, 1947, U.S. Air Force Captain Chuck Yeager piloted the rocket-powered Bell X-1, named Glamorous Glennis, to Mach 1.06 over the Mojave Desert, becoming the first pilot to exceed the speed of sound in level flight. The X-1 was air-launched from the bomb bay of a Boeing B-29 at 20,000 feet, then climbed under its own rocket power to 42,000 feet for the test run; the flight, the ninth powered flight of the X-1 program, lasted 14 minutes from release to landing and by Yeager's own account produced no buffet or shock, just an instrument that briefly, in his phrase, went completely screwy. The achievement was not made public until June 10, 1948, nearly eight months later.
Primary source · 2 sources - 16 December 1947The Internet and Computing
Bell Labs demonstrates the point-contact transistor
At Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, physicists John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, working under William Shockley, had spent weeks trying to build a solid-state amplifier out of semiconductor material instead of a fragile, power-hungry vacuum tube. On 16 December 1947, their work culminated in the first successful semiconductor amplifier: two closely spaced gold contacts, held in place by a plastic wedge, touching the surface of a small slab of high-purity germanium. Voltage applied to one contact modulated the current flowing through the other, amplifying the input signal up to 100 times. They demonstrated the device to Bell Labs leadership on 23 December 1947.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 8 February 1950History of Money
Diners Club Issues the First General-Purpose Credit Card
According to HISTORY, businessman Frank McNamara was dining with clients at Major's Cabin Grill in New York City in 1949 and realized he had left his wallet behind, an embarrassment that reportedly inspired him to design a card that business travelers could use to charge meals across many different restaurants rather than carrying store-specific charge accounts. McNamara, together with Ralph Schneider and Matty Simmons, founded Diners Club, and the first card charge was made at that same restaurant on 8 February 1950. The Diners Club card, printed on cardboard, was the first multipurpose charge card not tied to any single retailer: cardholders paid an annual fee of five dollars and carried no interest charge, while participating businesses paid Diners Club between 7 and 10 percent of each purchase. Within its first year the club had grown to some 10,000 members among New York's business elite, with 28 restaurants and two hotels accepting the card, and the concept expanded through the 1950s into hotels, retail stores, and airlines, reaching acceptance abroad by mid-decade.
Reputable source · 2 sources Turing proposes the Imitation Game
In 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence,' published in the philosophy journal Mind, Alan Turing set aside the question 'Can machines think?' as too bound up in ambiguous definitions, and replaced it with the imitation game. An interrogator exchanges typewritten messages with two hidden respondents, one human and one machine, and must decide which is which. Turing proposed that if a machine could make the interrogator guess wrong about as often as a human competitor would, that performance should count as thinking, regardless of what is happening inside the machine. He devoted much of the paper to answering objections to this standard, including arguments from consciousness, mathematical limits, and the claim that machines could never do anything genuinely new.
Primary source · 2 sources- 12 May 1951History of Video Games
Nimrod plays Nim at the Festival of Britain
For the Festival of Britain's Exhibition of Science in South Kensington, London, the computer maker Ferranti built a special-purpose machine to play Nim, an ancient game where players remove matches from piles trying to force the other player to take the last one. Australian engineer John Bennett suggested the project, and Raymond Stuart-Williams built the machine, which debuted on 12 May 1951. Nimrod was enormous, mostly filled with vacuum tubes and the light bulbs that displayed the game state, with the actual logic circuitry taking up only a small fraction of its volume. Ferranti later took it to the Berlin International Show before dismantling it.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 14 June 1951The Internet and Computing
UNIVAC I ships to the Census Bureau
Eckert and Mauchly, the engineers behind ENIAC, began building UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer) in 1948 through their own company, later acquired by Remington Rand. On 14 June 1951, officials from the Census Bureau attended a dedication ceremony at the Eckert-Mauchly Laboratory in Philadelphia. UNIVAC read data from magnetic tape rather than only punched cards, used vacuum tubes for processing, and could print results or store them back to tape. It was the first computer built as a commercial product for sale to any customer rather than a one-off machine built for a single research or military purpose.
Reputable source · 2 sources Alexander Douglas writes OXO for EDSAC
Alexander 'Sandy' Douglas, a Cambridge University PhD candidate, wrote a version of tic-tac-toe (called noughts and crosses in Britain) for the university's EDSAC computer as part of his research into human-computer interaction. The program, OXO, let a player choose to move first or let the machine go first, entering moves with a rotary telephone dial while EDSAC drew the three-by-three board on a 35-by-15 dot cathode-ray tube, one of the machine's three small built-in displays. Because EDSAC was a one-of-a-kind research machine at Cambridge, almost no one outside the university ever played it.
Reputable source · 2 sources- 1952-1954History of Aviation
The De Havilland Comet Enters Service, Then Falls Apart
The de Havilland Comet, the world's first commercial jet airliner, began the first scheduled jet passenger service on May 2, 1952, flying BOAC's London to Johannesburg route at altitudes and speeds no propeller airliner could match. Then, within three months in 1954, two Comets disintegrated in midair: BOAC Flight 781 broke apart at 27,000 feet near Elba on January 10, killing all 35 aboard, and a second BOAC-owned aircraft on charter to South African Airways broke apart near Naples on April 8, killing all 21 aboard. Investigators at Britain's Royal Aircraft Establishment in Farnborough recreated the failure by submerging an entire Comet fuselage in a water tank and repeatedly pressurizing and depressurizing it to simulate flight cycles; after 3,060 simulated cycles the fuselage failed at the corner of a cabin window, proving that metal fatigue from repeated pressurization, concentrated at the sharp corners of the Comet's nearly square window cutouts, was the cause.
Reputable source · 2 sources The Logic Theorist proves theorems by search
Allen Newell, Herbert Simon, and Cliff Shaw, working at the RAND Corporation, built the Logic Theorist to prove theorems from Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica. Before any code ran on a machine, the team simulated the program by hand, with Simon's family members acting out the roles of individual program components using index cards. Once running on the JOHNNIAC computer, the program worked backward from a theorem to be proved, searching through chains of logical rules and past results to find a valid derivation, an approach the team called heuristic search rather than exhaustive checking. It went on to prove 38 of the first 52 theorems in chapter two of Principia Mathematica, including one for which its proof was shorter and more elegant than the original by Russell and Whitehead.
Reputable source · 2 sources- 18 June 1956Artificial Intelligence
The Dartmouth Workshop names 'artificial intelligence'
John McCarthy of Dartmouth College, Marvin Minsky of Harvard, Nathaniel Rochester of IBM, and Claude Shannon of Bell Telephone Laboratories submitted a proposal dated August 31, 1955 for a two-month, ten-person study to be held at Dartmouth College in the summer of 1956. The proposal stated the founding conjecture of the field: that every aspect of learning or intelligence could in principle be described precisely enough that a machine could be made to simulate it. It listed specific problems to attack, including how to make a computer use language, form abstractions, and improve itself, and it used the phrase 'artificial intelligence' to describe the whole undertaking, the term's first recorded appearance. The workshop itself ran through the summer with a rotating cast of attendees rather than the full ten researchers working continuously.
Primary source · 2 sources - April 1957The Internet and Computing
FORTRAN ships as the first widely used high-level language
Programming a computer in the 1950s meant writing in machine-specific assembly code or raw numeric instructions, tedious and error-prone work. John Backus led a small team at IBM that spent from 1954 to 1957 designing FORTRAN (Formula Translation) and a compiler to convert it automatically into machine code for the IBM 704. The system shipped to IBM 704 customers in April 1957. Backus later said his motivation was simple: 'I didn't like writing programs, so I started work on a system to make them easier to write.'
Reputable source · 2 sources Rosenblatt builds the Perceptron
Frank Rosenblatt, working at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory under Office of Naval Research funding, published 'The Perceptron: A Probabilistic Model for Information Storage and Organization in the Brain' in Psychological Review. Unlike McCulloch and Pitts' fixed logical networks, the perceptron adjusted the weights on its connections automatically based on whether its output was right or wrong, so it learned to classify simple patterns, such as letters, from labeled examples rather than from a programmer's rules. The device drew heavy press attention, with some coverage suggesting it might one day walk, talk, and reproduce itself. In 1969, Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert's book 'Perceptrons' proved mathematically that a single-layer perceptron could not compute certain simple functions, including logical XOR, a limitation that was true of that specific architecture but was widely read as a verdict on neural networks in general.
Primary source · 2 sources- October 26, 1958History of Aviation
The Boeing 707 Launches the American Jet Age
Boeing's 707, developed from its 367-80 prototype, first flew on December 20, 1957, and entered scheduled commercial service with Pan American World Airways on October 26, 1958, flying from New York's Idlewild Airport to Paris with a refueling stop in Gander, Newfoundland. Pan Am had considered buying the pioneering de Havilland Comet but instead became the 707's launch customer in 1955, ordering 20 aircraft, a decision made easier once the Comet's 1954 crashes had grounded the British jet and stalled its production. The 707 was not the first jetliner in the air, but it became the first to achieve wide production and route coverage, and is generally credited with starting the Jet Age in earnest.
General source · 2 sources - 18 October 1958History of Video Games
Tennis for Two draws a crowd at Brookhaven
William Higinbotham, head of the Instrumentation Division at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island and formerly a designer of wartime radar displays, built a two-player tennis game to entertain visitors at the lab's 1958 open house. Working with technicians David Potter and Robert Dvorak, he wired a small analog computer to an oscilloscope, showing a side-on view of a court, net, and bouncing ball on a five-inch screen, with players using separate box controllers to set the ball's angle and timing. It debuted on 18 October 1958 and drew long lines; Higinbotham never patented it, later saying it seemed no more novel than the bouncing-ball demonstration circuit in the computer's own instruction manual.
Primary source · 2 sources Grace Hopper helps design COBOL
The US Navy recalled Captain Grace Murray Hopper, who had already developed one of the world's first compilers in the 1950s, to active duty to help develop a new programming language for business applications. Hopper had worked on the Mark I and Mark II computers at Harvard in the 1940s and had spent the years since building compiler technology that translated instructions written closer to English into machine code. In 1959, she played a central role in defining COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language), designed with English-like syntax so that businesspeople, not only trained programmers, could read what a program was doing.
Reputable source · 2 sources- September 1958 to January 1959The Internet and Computing
The integrated circuit is invented twice in a year
In September 1958 at Texas Instruments, Jack Kilby demonstrated the first working circuit with all its components, transistor, resistors, and capacitors, built from a single piece of semiconductor material rather than wired together from separate parts. A few months later, in January 1959, Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor filed a patent for a different, more practical approach: components diffused directly into a silicon chip and connected by aluminum metal lines deposited on top, building on colleague Jean Hoerni's newly developed planar process. Noyce's design eliminated the fragile hand-wired connections Kilby's version still needed and could be mass-manufactured.
Primary source · 2 sources - 1961-62History of Video Games
Spacewar! spreads across MIT's PDP-1 labs
Steve Russell, Martin Graetz, and Wayne Wiitanen conceived Spacewar! at MIT in 1961, drawing on the pulp science-fiction Lensman novels, and Russell wrote the first working version for the new DEC PDP-1 minicomputer. Peter Samson, Dan Edwards, and Graetz made major improvements in spring 1962. Two players each command a spaceship, firing torpedoes at each other while an accurately simulated central star's gravity bends their flight paths. The game needed over 100,000 calculations per second to track ship motion, gravity, and player input, and it soon acquired custom controllers, including a repurposed surplus jet-fighter joystick.
Reputable source · 2 sources - December 22, 1964 (SR-71 first flight)History of Aviation
The SR-71 Blackbird Becomes the Fastest Jet Ever Flown
After Soviet missiles shot down Francis Gary Powers's U-2 spy plane on May 1, 1960, U.S. leadership asked Lockheed's Skunk Works division for a reconnaissance aircraft that could not be shot down at all. Engineer Kelly Johnson's team designed the A-12, which first flew on April 30, 1962, and its larger two-seat derivative, the SR-71, first flew on December 22, 1964. Sustained flight above Mach 3 required inventing new tires, fuel, oil, and paint, and the airframe was built almost entirely, about 95 percent, from titanium to survive the heat of sustained Mach 3 flight. On July 28, 1976, an SR-71 set the absolute world speed record for an air-breathing jet aircraft at 2,193 miles per hour, a record that still stood decades later.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 19 April 1965The Internet and Computing
Moore projects the doubling of chip components
Gordon Moore, director of R&D at Fairchild Semiconductor, drew a line through five data points tracking how many components fit on an integrated circuit at the lowest cost per component, from 1959 through 1964. His paper 'Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits' was published in Electronics magazine on 19 April 1965. Extrapolating the trend forward, he projected that by 1975 a single chip would hold 65,000 components, implying the number was roughly doubling every year. A decade later, with the industry's actual progress in hand, Moore revised his own forecast to a doubling every two years.
Primary source · 2 sources Weizenbaum's ELIZA imitates a therapist
Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT published 'ELIZA, A Computer Program for the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man and Machine' in Communications of the ACM. ELIZA worked by scanning a user's typed sentence for a keyword, applying a scripted transformation rule tied to that keyword, and printing the result back as a question, in the manner of a Rogerian psychotherapist reflecting a patient's own words. If no keyword matched, it fell back on a content-free prompt like 'please go on.' There was no understanding of meaning anywhere in the program, only string matching and substitution. Weizenbaum became alarmed when he found that people, including his own secretary, treated their sessions with ELIZA as genuinely private and confided in it as they would a real therapist, and asked him to leave the room.
Primary source · 2 sources- 9 December 1968The Internet and Computing
Engelbart's 'Mother of All Demos' unveils the mouse
At the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco, Douglas Engelbart and his team from the Stanford Research Institute demonstrated their oN-Line System (NLS) to an audience of computer professionals. The demonstration gave the very first public look at the computer mouse, alongside hypertext linking between documents, real-time collaborative text editing, multiple on-screen windows with adjustable views, and shared-screen video conferencing between Engelbart on stage and a colleague back at SRI, thirty miles away. Engelbart had spent years pursuing a personal research goal of using computers to 'augment human intellect' rather than simply automate calculation.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1966-1972Artificial Intelligence
Shakey becomes the first robot that reasons about its actions
Researchers at the Stanford Research Institute, led by Charles Rosen, Nils Nilsson, and Peter Hart, built Shakey, a wheeled robot that operated in a set of rooms containing blocks and ramps. Shakey used a camera and bump sensors to perceive its surroundings, and a planning program called STRIPS (Stanford Research Institute Problem Solver) to break a goal such as 'push block 9 to doorway 4' into a sequence of achievable actions. If an action failed partway through, Shakey could re-plan around the failure rather than simply stopping. Its control software was organized into layers, from low-level motor control up to high-level planning, an architecture that later became a template for other robots. It was not fast or practical: a single task could take Shakey hours to complete.
Peer-reviewed · 2 sources - February 9, 1969History of Aviation
The Boeing 747 Makes Its First Flight
The Boeing 747 completed its first test flight on February 9, 1969, with test pilots Jack Waddell and Brien Wygle at the controls and Jess Wallick as flight engineer, confirming the aircraft handled well despite a minor flap problem. The design, led by chief engineer Joe Sutter, had been developed in response to a Pan Am request for a jet two and a half times the size of the 707, built at a purpose-constructed factory in Everett, Washington, the largest building by volume in the world when it was completed. The 747 entered commercial service with Pan Am on January 22, 1970.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 29 October 1969The Internet and Computing
ARPANET carries its first message
UCLA professor Leonard Kleinrock and his student programmer Charley Kline set up a message transmission from the UCLA SDS Sigma 7 computer to a Stanford Research Institute computer 350 miles away, operated by programmer Bill Duvall. The plan was to remotely log in by typing 'login.' Kline transmitted the letters L and O; the system crashed before the G. The connection was fixed roughly an hour later and the full login completed. Kleinrock had spent years developing packet switching, a method of breaking information into small, independently routed pieces that get reassembled at their destination, and ARPANET (the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) was the first network built to test the idea at scale, initially linking four university and research computers.
Reputable source · 2 sources - Late 1971The Internet and Computing
Tomlinson sends the first networked email
Ray Tomlinson, a programmer at Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), had helped build ARPANET's networking software. In 1971 he adapted an existing local messaging program called SNDMSG, combining it with a file transfer program called CPYNET, so a message could be sent to a user on a different, remote host computer rather than only to someone logged into the same machine. To make that possible, he needed a way to separate the recipient's username from the name of the machine it lived on, so he picked the @ symbol, chosen mainly because it wasn't already used in usernames or in the TENEX programming environment. He tested the new capability by sending a message between two computers sitting only a few feet apart.
Reputable source · 2 sources - March 1971The Internet and Computing
Intel ships the 4004, the first commercial microprocessor
Japanese calculator maker Busicom hired Intel to build a set of chips for a new calculator line. Rather than design several fixed-purpose chips, Intel engineer Ted Hoff, with Stanley Mazor, proposed a single general-purpose processor chip that could be programmed for different tasks, working with Busicom engineer Masatoshi Shima to define what the chip needed to do. Federico Faggin, assisted by Shima, used his experience with silicon-gate MOS technology to fit the design's 2,300 transistors into a single 16-pin package. The first fully working Intel 4004 was delivered in March 1971 for Busicom's calculator prototype, and Intel began selling it to any customer that July.
Peer-reviewed · 2 sources - August 15, 1971History of Money
Nixon Ends Dollar-Gold Convertibility
Under the Bretton Woods system, the U.S. dollar had been convertible into gold at 35 dollars per ounce for foreign governments, but by the late 1960s persistent U.S. balance-of-payments deficits and rising foreign holdings of dollars had put growing pressure on America's gold reserves, as more countries requested conversion than the U.S. Treasury could comfortably sustain. On August 15, 1971, President Richard Nixon announced in a televised address a set of emergency economic measures that included suspending the dollar's convertibility into gold, ending, without formal international negotiation, the arrangement that had anchored the postwar monetary system since 1944. The move, quickly nicknamed the Nixon Shock, effectively ended the Bretton Woods system, and within a few years the major world currencies moved to floating exchange rates determined by markets rather than fixed pegs to gold or to the dollar.
Primary source · 2 sources - 29 November 1972History of Video Games
Atari's Pong overflows its coin box
Nolan Bushnell, Ted Dabney, and engineer Al Alcorn, all former Ampex employees, founded Atari and built Pong, an analog table-tennis game with two paddles and a bouncing square 'ball,' as the company's first project. Alcorn housed the prototype in a wooden cabinet with a cheap black-and-white television for a screen and installed it at Andy Capp's Tavern in Sunnyvale, California. Within days the bar's owner reported the machine had stopped working; when Alcorn opened it, he found no fault at all, only a coin box so packed with quarters it could not physically accept more. Atari announced Pong on 29 November 1972 and went on to sell tens of thousands of arcade units, followed by a home version through Sears in 1975.
Primary source · 2 sources The Lighthill Report triggers the first AI winter
The UK Science Research Council commissioned applied mathematician James Lighthill, who was not an AI researcher, to assess the field's progress. His 1973 report, 'Artificial Intelligence: A General Survey,' concluded that AI research had produced a pronounced sense of disappointment relative to the hopes raised since 1950, singling out the failure of general-purpose problem solvers to scale beyond toy problems, what Lighthill called the 'combinatorial explosion.' The report split AI research into categories and judged some, like robotics research under Donald Michie at Edinburgh, more harshly than others. Following the report and a televised debate between Lighthill and AI researchers including Michie, British funding for AI research outside a few select programs was sharply reduced.
Primary source · 2 sources- March 1973The Internet and Computing
Xerox PARC's Alto shows the first working GUI
Engineers at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center built the Alto as a research machine to explore what they called personal, distributed computing rather than a product to sell. It combined a bitmapped display, roughly 600 by 800 pixels capable of showing varied fonts and layouts rather than only fixed characters, with a mouse and software that presented movable, overlapping windows and clickable icons, a genuinely visual way of using a computer rather than typing text commands. Its word processor, Bravo, is considered the first WYSIWYG ('what you see is what you get') editor, showing text on screen exactly as it would print. The system never sold in large numbers; Xerox gave away or sold a few thousand units mostly to research institutions.
Peer-reviewed · 2 sources - 22 May 1973The Internet and Computing
Metcalfe and Boggs build Ethernet at Xerox PARC
Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) had built the Alto, an early personal computer, and wanted every Alto in the building connected to each other, to a newly built laser printer, and to the outside world through ARPANET. Robert Metcalfe, with colleague David Boggs, adapted ideas from the University of Hawaii's ALOHAnet, which broadcast data over radio, into a wired version running over coaxial cable, with no central controller. A node listened to the cable and only transmitted when it sensed the line was quiet, a technique called carrier sense. Metcalfe circulated a memo describing the scheme on 22 May 1973, though Boggs later argued the true birthday was 11 November 1973, the day the system first actually worked.
Reputable source · 2 sources - January 1975The Internet and Computing
The Altair 8800 launches the hobbyist personal computer
A small Albuquerque firm called MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems), which had previously sold electronic calculator kits before a price war wiped out that market, put its new computer kit on the cover of Popular Electronics magazine's January 1975 issue. The Altair 8800, built around Intel's 8080 processor, sold for $297 unassembled or $395 with a case, came with just 256 bytes of memory, and had no keyboard or screen; users entered programs by flipping switches and read results from blinking lights. Orders poured in regardless, and MITS co-founder Ed Roberts, who designed the machine, is credited with coining the term 'personal computer.'
Reputable source · 2 sources - January 21, 1976 (entered service)History of Aviation
Concorde Enters Supersonic Passenger Service
Concorde, developed jointly by Britain and France under a 1962 treaty, first flew on March 2, 1969, and began the world's first scheduled supersonic passenger service on January 21, 1976, with British Airways flying London to Bahrain and Air France flying Paris to Rio de Janeiro. Cruising at more than twice the speed of sound, Concorde could carry passengers from London to New York fast enough, given the time zone difference, to arrive before their own departure time. More than 2.5 million passengers flew supersonically on Concorde over its career, but only 14 aircraft were ever built, and the type was expensive and loud to operate. A July 2000 crash of an Air France Concorde killed 109 people onboard and four on the ground; both airlines retired their Concorde fleets in 2003, Air France in May and British Airways in October.
Reputable source · 2 sources - April 1977The Internet and Computing
The Apple II debuts at the West Coast Computer Faire
Steve Wozniak designed the Apple II, and Apple, cofounded with Steve Jobs, unveiled it at the West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco in April 1977. Unlike the Altair or Apple's own earlier Apple I, which required buyers to supply their own case, keyboard, and power supply, the Apple II arrived as a complete, ready-to-use unit that plugged into a television for its display and had BASIC built permanently into its memory. The floppy disk drive, added in 1978, and the VisiCalc spreadsheet program, released in 1979, later turned it into a genuine business tool rather than only a hobbyist machine.
Reputable source · 2 sources - September 1977History of Video Games
The Atari 2600 makes cartridges the standard
Two years after its home version of Pong, Atari released the Atari Video Computer System, later renamed the Atari 2600, built around a microprocessor and interchangeable ROM cartridges instead of the single hard-wired game of earlier consoles. Players could swap games such as Combat, Space Invaders, Pac-Man, and Frogger by changing a cartridge rather than buying a new machine, and the console offered sharper sound and more colorful graphics than the Odyssey generation. Americans went on to spend billions of dollars on 2600 hardware and software over its unusually long production run, which lasted about fifteen years.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1978-1980History of Video Games
Space Invaders and Pac-Man turn arcades into a mass phenomenon
Tomohiro Nishikado designed Space Invaders for Taito, releasing it in Japan in 1978; players moved a laser cannon along the bottom of the screen firing up at five descending rows of aliens, with a running high-score display that became a standard arcade feature. It became so popular in the United States that it drove Atari 2600 hardware sales when ported there in 1980. Two years later, programmer Toru Iwatani's Pac-Man, released by Namco in Japan and Midway in the United States, sent a yellow, dot-eating character through a maze while fleeing four colored ghosts, becoming the best-selling arcade game ever and spawning cartoons, songs, and merchandise well beyond the arcade itself.
Reputable source · 2 sources - October 24, 1978History of Aviation
The United States Deregulates Its Airline Industry
President Jimmy Carter signed the Airline Deregulation Act into law on October 24, 1978, ending four decades of federal control over U.S. domestic airline fares, routes, and market entry that the Civil Aeronautics Board had exercised since 1938. Carter framed the law's purpose plainly at the signing: it would help fight inflation and ensure ordinary citizens the opportunity for low-priced air travel, arguing that competition had already brought lower fares, more passengers, and higher profits in early test markets. The Civil Aeronautics Board itself was gradually phased out and ceased all regulatory operations on December 31, 1984, though the FAA retained full authority over aviation safety throughout.
Primary source · 2 sources - 1970s-1980sArtificial Intelligence
Expert systems drive AI's 1980s commercial boom
Researchers at Stanford, led by Edward Shortliffe and Bruce Buchanan, built MYCIN in the mid-1970s to diagnose bacterial blood infections and recommend antibiotic treatment. MYCIN encoded roughly 500 rules describing an infectious-disease specialist's reasoning as if-then statements, and used backward chaining, starting from a hypothesis such as a specific bacterial infection and asking what facts would need to be true for the hypothesis to hold, then querying the physician for those facts. It could also explain its own reasoning chain when asked. MYCIN itself was never deployed clinically, largely over liability and integration concerns, but the rule-based approach it demonstrated was commercialized widely through the 1980s across finance, manufacturing, and computer configuration, at one point rules-based systems like Digital Equipment Corporation's XCON handling thousands of production rules.
Primary source · 2 sources Donkey Kong invents Mario to save a failing arcade launch
In 1981 Nintendo's young North American arcade business was in trouble: thousands of imported cabinets of its game Radar Scope sat unsold in warehouses. Nintendo needed a replacement fast, and a junior employee named Shigeru Miyamoto was given the job. He built Donkey Kong around an original story, a first for arcade games, in which a giant ape kidnaps a construction worker's girlfriend and the player must climb girders to rescue her, jumping over barrels the ape rolls down at him. Nintendo of America staff renamed the hero, originally called Jumpman, Mario after the owner of their warehouse. The cabinet sold more than 100,000 copies in the United States alone.
Reputable source · 2 sources- 12 August 1981The Internet and Computing
The IBM PC opens personal computing to third parties
IBM introduced the IBM 5150 Personal Computer on 12 August 1981, built around Intel's 8088 processor. Rather than build the machine entirely from proprietary IBM parts as it had with earlier products, IBM used off-the-shelf components and, unusually for the company, published detailed technical documentation describing the PC's open architecture. That decision let outside companies build compatible expansion cards, and eventually entire compatible computers, that would work with IBM's machine. The PC ran PC-DOS, IBM's version of the operating system Microsoft had bought the rights to and licensed to IBM while keeping the right to sell it to others as MS-DOS.
Primary source · 2 sources Japan launches the Fifth Generation Computer Project
Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry started the Fifth Generation Computer Project in 1982, establishing the Institute for New Generation Computer Technology (ICOT) to run it. The goal was a new kind of computer built for knowledge-based information processing rather than conventional arithmetic, using massively parallel hardware and the logic-programming language Prolog instead of standard procedural code. ICOT built a series of prototype parallel inference machines, including the PIM/p with 512 processing elements and the PIM/m with 256, aiming for hundreds of millions of logical inferences per second. The project ran for its full planned decade and consumed about 54 billion yen before concluding in 1992 without producing commercially competitive machines, as conventional workstations and the desktop computing revolution overtook its specialized hardware.
General source · 2 sources- 1982-1985History of Video Games
The North American video game market crashes
By 1982, Atari's home console business was under pressure from Mattel's Intellivision and Coleco's ColecoVision, and a flood of third-party developers, some skilled, many not, was saturating store shelves with new cartridges. Trying to license Steven Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial for a Christmas 1982 release, Atari gave developer Howard Scott Warshaw only about five and a half weeks to build the game rather than the usual six to nine months, and the rushed result sold roughly a million of the four million cartridges Atari needed to break even, with many buyers returning it as unplayable. In September 1983 Atari buried a large stock of unsold cartridges, later confirmed at about 728,000, in a landfill near Alamogordo, New Mexico. Atari lost hundreds of millions of dollars, and Mattel and Coleco both exited the console business by 1985.
Primary source · 2 sources - 1 January 1983The Internet and Computing
ARPANET switches to TCP/IP, creating the internet
ARPANET had run since 1969 on the Network Control Program (NCP), a protocol built only to connect ARPANET's own hosts, with no way to link it to other, separate networks. In March 1982, the US Department of Defense declared a new protocol suite, TCP/IP, its official standard and set a deadline: every host still using NCP after 1 January 1983 would lose access to the network entirely. Engineers coordinated a single global cutover, sometimes called 'flag day,' on that date, extensively tested in advance so the transition caused no major outages. TCP/IP's use of 32-bit addressing also allowed for roughly 4 billion possible host addresses, letting separate networks interconnect into one network of networks.
General source · 2 sources - September 1983The Internet and Computing
GNU project begins the free software movement
Richard Stallman, a programmer at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab, made the Initial Announcement of the GNU Project on a Usenet newsgroup in September 1983. GNU, a recursive acronym for 'GNU's Not Unix,' aimed to build a complete operating system compatible with Unix but made entirely of free software, meaning anyone could run, copy, study, and modify it without a proprietary license restricting them. Stallman personally wrote core pieces including the GNU Emacs editor and a C compiler; by 1990, the project had built or found nearly every major component of an operating system except one, the kernel, the core program that manages a computer's hardware and resources.
Primary source · 2 sources - 24 January 1984The Internet and Computing
Apple launches the Macintosh with a Super Bowl ad
Apple aired a one-minute commercial called '1984,' directed by Ridley Scott, during Super Bowl XVIII on 22 January 1984, casting IBM's dominance of the computer industry as a dystopian Big Brother that the Macintosh would defeat. Two days later, on 24 January, Apple unveiled the Macintosh itself at its shareholders meeting. Drawing directly on ideas Steve Jobs had seen at Xerox PARC and on Apple's own underperforming Lisa computer, the Macintosh built in a mouse, a graphical interface with overlapping windows and menus, clickable icons, and cut-copy-paste editing, packaged as a complete, self-contained product rather than a kit or expandable box.
Reputable source · 3 sources - 18 October 1985 (New York test launch)History of Video Games
Super Mario Bros. and the NES revive the industry
Nintendo test-launched its Famicom console in the United States as the Nintendo Entertainment System in New York City on 18 October 1985, shipping an initial 100,000 Deluxe Set units before a wider national rollout, at a moment when American retailers still remembered the 1983 crash and were wary of stocking any game console. Launch titles included Super Mario Bros., designed by Shigeru Miyamoto, a side-scrolling platformer starring the character introduced in Donkey Kong, in which Mario runs and jumps through the Mushroom Kingdom to rescue Princess Peach from Bowser. Nintendo built the console with a gray, VCR-like front-loading cartridge slot and a lockout chip to control which games could run on it, both direct responses to the quality problems of the crash era.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 21 February 1986History of Video Games
The Legend of Zelda lets players save the world in any order
Shigeru Miyamoto, drawing on childhood memories of exploring woods and caves near his hometown, designed The Legend of Zelda as a flagship title for the Famicom Disk System, releasing it in Japan on 21 February 1986. Rather than a fixed path through levels, the game dropped players into the world of Hyrule as the hero Link, free to explore in almost any order while gathering eight fragments of the Triforce of Wisdom to rescue Princess Zelda from the villain Ganon. It was the first console game sold in North America with an internal battery that saved a player's progress, ending the need to finish a game in one sitting or use a password system.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1987-1993Artificial Intelligence
The Lisp machine crash brings a second AI winter
Through the mid-1980s, companies including Symbolics and Lisp Machines Inc. sold specialized workstations, known as Lisp machines, built to run the AI programming language Lisp efficiently, priced from tens of thousands to over $100,000. By 1987, general-purpose workstations from vendors like Sun Microsystems had closed the performance gap at a fraction of the cost, and the dedicated Lisp-hardware market collapsed within about a year; Lisp Machines Inc. filed for bankruptcy in 1987 and Symbolics followed in 1993. At the same time, expert systems such as DEC's XCON, despite genuine early success managing tens of thousands of rules, proved brittle and expensive to maintain as their rule sets grew, a problem researchers called the knowledge acquisition bottleneck. DARPA, which had funded AI heavily through its Strategic Computing Initiative since 1983, cut funding sharply after concluding the initiative would not deliver on its original goals.
Primary source · 3 sources - 1987Rockstar Games
David Jones starts DMA Design in Dundee
David Jones was made redundant from Dundee's Timex plant and put the money toward a Commodore Amiga 1000, coding his first game, Menace, in his bedroom and during lecture time at college. He signed Menace to the publisher Psygnosis at a video game convention in 1987, trading under the name DMA Design, which he lifted from the direct memory access chapters of the Amiga's programming manuals. The company was formally established in Dundee in 1988, and Jones hired friends he had met at the Kingsway Amateur Computer Club around 1984: Mike Dailly, Russell Kay, and Steve Hammond. Menace sold fifteen thousand copies in 1988.
Primary source · 3 sources - February 22, 1987History of Aviation
The Airbus A320 Introduces Digital Fly-by-Wire to Airliners
The Airbus A320, launched as a program in March 1984, made its first flight on February 22, 1987, from Toulouse-Blagnac Airport in France, with test pilot Pierre Baud at the controls for a flight lasting about three and a half hours. The A320 was the first airliner built with a fully digital, computerized fly-by-wire control system paired with a sidestick controller instead of a traditional yoke, meaning pilot inputs are interpreted by flight control computers, which keep the aircraft within a defined flight envelope, rather than moving control surfaces through direct mechanical linkage. Air France took delivery of the first production A320 on March 28, 1988, and began commercial service on April 8, 1988, flying between Paris and Dusseldorf.
General source · 2 sources - Autumn 1988Rockstar Games
Menace, DMA's first game, ships on the Amiga
DMA's first game was a horizontally scrolling shoot-'em-up that Dave Jones had coded in his bedroom, with graphics by Tony Smith and sound effects by musician David Whittaker. It was nearly finished by early summer of 1988 under the name Draconia, itself a rename of the working title CopperCon1, taken from a register of the Amiga's Copper graphics chip. Another game then shipped with the same name, so Draconia became Menace so close to release that some magazines had already printed reviews under the old title. Psygnosis released it on its new Psyclapse arcade label for the Amiga at £19.95, and it sold fifteen thousand copies in 1988. The Games Machine scored it 78 percent that December and called it "a step in the right direction" for 16-bit shoot-'em-ups. The first royalties bought Jones a 16-valve Vauxhall Astra, which he drove straight over to show the team.
Primary source · 4 sources Tetris and the Game Boy make handheld gaming universal
Soviet programmer Alexey Pajitnov created Tetris in 1984, adapting his own fondness for pentomino puzzles into a game where seven differently shaped four-square pieces fall down a well and the player must arrange them into complete, clearing rows. The game spread through Eastern Europe before reaching North American and European PCs in 1987. In 1989 Nintendo, following the enormous success of its NES home console, launched the handheld Game Boy and bundled it with Tetris rather than an action game, betting that the puzzle's simplicity would appeal beyond the usual young, male gaming audience. The Game Boy's Game Link cable let two units connect for simultaneous multiplayer, a first for a portable system.
Reputable source · 2 sources- 12 March 1989The Internet and Computing
Berners-Lee proposes the World Wide Web at CERN
Tim Berners-Lee, a software engineer at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory, wrote a proposal in March 1989 for what he called an information management system, meant to solve the practical problem of CERN's own scattered documentation, spread across incompatible formats and systems used by scientists visiting from around the world. Working with Belgian colleague Robert Cailliau, he formalized the idea as a management proposal in November 1990 and, by Christmas 1990, had defined the core pieces still used today, HTML for formatting documents, HTTP for transferring them, and the URL for addressing them, and had written the first web browser and server software himself. In 1991, he released the software, first to CERN colleagues and then, that August, to internet newsgroups worldwide.
Primary source · 2 sources - Spring 1989Rockstar Games
Blood Money pushes the Amiga harder
Dave Jones started Blood Money on January 4, 1989, on a 25 MHz 386 PC development system that a pleased Psygnosis had sent after Menace, taking his inspiration from Irem's cute helicopter arcade game Mr. Heli. He abandoned the Amiga's hardware scrolling for a blitter-driven system so he could use the machine's full color range and fill the screen with animated enemies. The finished game cast players as tourists on a shoot-'em-up safari across four alien planets, tackled by helicopter, submarine, jetpack, and spaceship, alone or with a second player, buying weapons with the coins that shot-down aliens dropped. Psygnosis published it for the Amiga at £24.95, with graphics by Tony Smith. The Games Machine's June 1989 review called it a game that "shines with the latest and best of Psygnosis's superlative presentation" and judged its intro, Loadsamoney samples included, a promise the game actually kept.
Primary source · 3 sources - Summer 1989Rockstar Games
DMA opens its first office above a Dundee baby shop
Around April 1989, Dave Jones asked Mike Dailly whether he would come and work for him if he got an office. Dailly, who had been programming at home since he was about thirteen and had just been pushed out of college, was ecstatic. The office came through family: Jones's father-in-law-to-be owned the Deep Sea chip shop and restaurant in town, along with an odd red and green building across the road, above a baby shop at the bottom of Perth Road. Inside it, Russell Kay set about deciphering the Ballistix source code for a PC port while Dailly, who had spent three days straight formatting its thirteen thousand lines to make them readable, handled the C64 version. Gary Timmons, a friend of Kay's, came in to play with Deluxe Paint, replicated a walker animation using nothing but dots, and was offered a job as an artist in the back room; Scott Johnston arrived freelance from a stint at McDonald's to draw Walker graphics. At the end of August, Dailly's first paycheck arrived: £272, on a salary of about £4,000 a year.
Primary source · 4 sources - 14 February 1991Rockstar Games
Lemmings turns DMA into a household name
Lemmings grew out of a game that never shipped. While DMA was building Walker, which starred a single large, heavily animated character, artist Scott Johnston animated small men to attack it, and the team's argument over those tiny figures is remembered inside the studio as the moment that sparked Lemmings and its famous walking animation. The idea that emerged was a crowd of small green-haired creatures that march mindlessly into danger while the player assigns them skills, digger, builder, blocker, climber, and the memorable bomber, to steer enough of them to the exit. Dave Jones led the Amiga version with Mike Dailly and Russell Kay, Gary Timmons and Johnston handled animation, and Dailly built a front-end screen filled with hundreds of individually animating lemmings; Jones modeled the on-screen explosion on the classic Williams arcade game Defender. Psygnosis published it, and it became a phenomenon, later folded into Commodore's Cartoon Classics Amiga bundle and ported to dozens of systems.
Primary source · 5 sources - 23 June 1991History of Video Games
Sonic the Hedgehog fuels the Sega-Nintendo console war
Sega ran an internal design contest to create a mascot character able to compete with Nintendo's Mario, choosing artist Naoto Ohshima's blue hedgehog, developed under the internal codename 'Mr. Needlemouse' by a team that named itself Sonic Team. Sonic the Hedgehog released for the Sega Genesis in June 1991, built around fast, momentum-driven platforming that let the character run in loops and blast through levels far quicker than Mario's more deliberate pace. Sega bundled the game with the Genesis in North America, and it went on to sell more than 15 million copies, becoming the best-selling Genesis game of all time.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1991Rockstar Games
Lemmings mania turns DMA into a real company
On launch day, Psygnosis phoned DMA almost every hour with the running total: ten thousand, twenty, thirty, forty-five, and by the end more than fifty-five thousand copies of the Amiga version sold in the first day alone. For scale, DMA's earlier games Menace and Blood Money had sold about twenty thousand and forty thousand copies across their entire lifetimes. Reviews were rapturous, and a couple of magazines awarded a flat 100 percent, a score almost no game had ever received. Psygnosis pushed for an immediate follow-up, so DMA hired more artists, among them Stacey Jamieson and Mark Ireland, and produced the standalone Oh No! More Lemmings while the original was ported to dozens of platforms. Across all those conversions, the first Lemmings is estimated to have sold over fifteen million copies worldwide.
Primary source · 3 sources - January 1993The Internet and Computing
Mosaic makes the web visual
Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, programmers at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois, built Mosaic, a browser released as an early version in January 1993 and as version 1.0 that April, with Windows and Macintosh versions following that September. It was the first widely used browser to display images inline on the same page as text, rather than as separate windows or plain text placeholders, arranging pictures and words the way a printed magazine layout would. By December 1993, more than 5,000 copies were being downloaded every month, and the New York Times called it network computing's first 'killer app,' a program so useful on its own that it could create an entire new industry from nothing.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 10 December 1993History of Video Games
Doom defines the first-person shooter and modding culture
Programmers John Carmack and John Romero, artists Adrian Carmack and Kevin Cloud, and designer Tom Hall had been moonlighting on their own games while working together at a small Louisiana software publisher before forming id Software. Building on techniques John Carmack developed for faster PC graphics rendering, id released Doom on 10 December 1993, putting players in fast, dark, three-dimensional corridors fighting demons with an arsenal of weapons. The game supported networked multiplayer 'deathmatch' over local networks and modems, and id deliberately separated the game's data files from its executable code, making it straightforward for players to build and share their own levels and modifications.
Peer-reviewed · 2 sources - 1994Rockstar Games
DMA leaves Psygnosis for Nintendo's Dream Team
After years of publishing through Psygnosis, DMA's next partner was Nintendo itself. Its Super Nintendo racer Uniracers, known in Europe as Unirally, was a fast game built around riderless unicycles, published by Nintendo in 1994. Pixar sued over the unicycle's resemblance to the one in its 1987 short film Red's Dream; the court sided with Pixar, and Nintendo agreed to press no more cartridges, capping the game at its initial 300,000-copy run. DMA was then invited onto Nintendo's Dream Team, the group of studios developing for its next console, known first as Project Reality and later as the Ultra 64 and then the Nintendo 64. The commitment was real and early: Next Generation reported in January 1995 that only three outside developers had signed on, DMA, Rare, and Acclaim, and that DMA was among the few studios with development hardware, shipped Silicon Graphics Onyx workstations while the console's chipset was still being finished. The team got an early look at the hardware and met Shigeru Miyamoto, and set to work on an ambitious 3D game, Body Harvest. The working relationship was nothing like the hands-off Psygnosis years: Nintendo was deeply involved, with its American and Japanese branches often pulling the design in opposite directions and hard to satisfy.
Reputable source · 3 sources - 16 September 1994History of Video Games
Mortal Kombat's violence leads Congress to force the ESRB into existence
Midway's 1992 arcade fighting game Mortal Kombat, created by programmer Ed Boon and artist John Tobias to compete with Capcom's Street Fighter II, featured graphic finishing moves that let winners execute defeated opponents on screen. Along with the full-motion-video horror game Night Trap, it drew the attention of the US Senate, and in December 1993 Senators Joe Lieberman and Herb Kohl held hearings scrutinizing video game violence, with Lieberman threatening to create a federal ratings commission if the industry did not regulate itself. In response, major publishers formed the Interactive Digital Software Association and launched the Entertainment Software Rating Board on 16 September 1994, with age-based categories such as 'Kids to Adults,' 'Teen,' and 'Mature.'
Primary source · 2 sources - 3 December 1994 (Japan)History of Video Games
Sony's PlayStation pushes gaming onto CDs and into 3D
Sony had originally been developing a CD-ROM add-on for Nintendo's Super NES; when Nintendo abandoned that partnership in 1991, Sony engineer Ken Kutaragi, backed by company president Norio Ohga over internal resistance, pushed forward with a standalone console instead. Sony released the PlayStation in Japan on 3 December 1994 and in North America in September 1995, built around 3D polygon graphics and CD-ROM discs rather than the cartridges every prior console had used. The CD format let games grow far larger than cartridge-based titles and be manufactured more cheaply, while Sony's design and marketing presented the machine as a mature consumer electronics product rather than a children's toy.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 23 June 1996 (Japan)History of Video Games
Super Mario 64 remakes the platformer in three dimensions
Nintendo launched its Nintendo 64 console in Japan with Super Mario 64 as a flagship title, giving players a free-moving 3D camera and analog-stick control that let Mario run, long-jump, climb, and punch through fully three-dimensional castle grounds and paintings-as-portals to other worlds. Unlike the fixed, linear stages of earlier Mario games, levels rewarded open exploration and puzzle-solving toward collecting stars rather than following one set path from start to finish, a structural departure the development team, led again by Shigeru Miyamoto, built specifically to showcase what 3D hardware and an analog joystick could do that 2D games could not.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1997Rockstar Games
Jones sells DMA to Gremlin months before GTA changes everything
Months before Grand Theft Auto shipped, David Jones sold DMA Design to Gremlin Interactive, the Sheffield publisher whose recent titles included Realms of the Haunting and VR Soccer. Gremlin's own announcement shows the logic of the deal: DMA brought roughly a hundred staff in Dundee, doubling Gremlin's development force to over 250, along with the Lemmings pedigree of twenty million units shipped and a seat as, in the release's words, "the UK flagship in Nintendo's 'Dream-Team'". DMA was to run on a semi-autonomous basis and deliver at least five original titles a year, with Jones joining Gremlin's board as Creative Director alongside chairman Ian Stewart, and all future DMA titles carrying the Gremlin label from 1998. Jones told the press he was pleased the combined company was entirely UK based and that DMA could now focus fully on making games. As part of the arrangement, Gremlin honoured BMG Interactive's existing agreement to publish Grand Theft Auto, so DMA's biggest game reached the world months after its studio had been sold.
Primary source · 3 sources - 11 May 1997Artificial Intelligence
Deep Blue defeats a reigning world chess champion
IBM's Deep Blue, a chess computer using 32 processors and 216 custom chess chips, played a six-game rematch against reigning world champion Garry Kasparov at the Equitable Center in New York in May 1997, a year after Kasparov had beaten an earlier version of the machine. Deep Blue searched up to 200 million chess positions per second, evaluating moves through brute-force lookahead rather than any learned strategic sense, aided by hand-tuned evaluation functions built with input from chess grandmasters. Kasparov won game one, Deep Blue took game two, three games were drawn, and Deep Blue won the decisive sixth game, taking the match 3.5 to 2.5. Kasparov later said the loss unsettled him enough that he suspected human interference, an accusation IBM denied and that has never been substantiated.
Primary source · 2 sources - Late 1997Rockstar Games
Grand Theft Auto ships, and a messy cops-and-robbers game becomes a phenomenon
Grand Theft Auto began life in March 1995, when a team at DMA met to plan a new PC project called Race'n'Chase: a top-down game of racing, demolition derbies, and bank robberies in which players could choose to be either a cop or a robber. The finished game committed to the criminal side, set across three open cities based on real American places: Liberty City, San Andreas, and Vice City. Development was chaotic. Creative manager Gary Penn, who came over from publisher BMG Interactive, calls it "a mess" and remembers being about the only person at BMG trying to keep the project alive; project manager Brian Lawson recalls a version with no proper police chases, a single pistol, one-shot deaths, and a plodding mission structure before the team rebuilt it around score-chasing chaos. Inside BMG the game found believers, among them head of development Sam Houser, later the defining creative force of the series. Before launch, BMG hired publicist Max Clifford, whose firm stoked a tabloid moral panic complete with MPs demanding a ban. The game reached PC in late 1997, with a PlayStation version following.
Peer-reviewed · 5 sources - March 1998 to January 1999Rockstar Games
BMG sells its games arm to Take-Two, and Rockstar Games is born
By early 1998 BMG Interactive, the games arm of Bertelsmann's music empire and the publisher that had put out Grand Theft Auto, was dormant. On March 12, 1998, the small New York publisher Take-Two Interactive announced it was acquiring substantially all of BMG Interactive's assets: the UK publishing group, distribution operations in France and Germany, rights to twelve upcoming releases, and, above all, the worldwide publishing and distribution rights and copyright to Grand Theft Auto. The price was paid in paper, with Take-Two issuing BMG 1,850,000 shares of convertible preferred stock, roughly a sixteen percent stake. The studio that made GTA was not part of the deal; DMA still belonged to Gremlin in Dundee, while its most famous creation was now owned in New York. A group of ex-BMG people followed the games across the Atlantic: Sam and Dan Houser, Jamie King, and Gary Foreman, joined by Terry Donovan from Arista Records. On January 22, 1999, Take-Two announced what they had been building, a new internal label called Rockstar Games with Sam Houser as president. The launch release promised an elite team drawn from music video, record labels, and night club promotion, and Houser declared the goal was to change the way the media looks at the game industry and give it some personality.
Primary source · 4 sources - August 1998The Internet and Computing
Google is incorporated
Larry Page and Sergey Brin met at Stanford in 1995 and began building a search engine, initially called BackRub, that ranked web pages by treating links to a page as votes for its importance rather than only matching keywords in the page's own text, an approach that became the PageRank algorithm. In August 1998, Sun Microsystems cofounder Andy Bechtolsheim wrote them a $100,000 check on the spot after a demonstration, and Google Inc. was officially incorporated.
Primary source · 2 sources - 1998Rockstar Games
Body Harvest survives Nintendo development hell, and its engine becomes GTA
Body Harvest was DMA's big swing for the Dream Team: an ambitious 3D game starring Adam Drake, fighting off alien invasions across different locations and time zones, with more than sixty drivable vehicles scattered through its world. Development turned into an ordeal. Nintendo's American and Japanese branches pulled the design in opposite directions by fax, with Nintendo of America asking for more detail and complexity while Nintendo of Japan wanted it simplified, then reimagined Drake as a secret agent, complete with a note asking whether he could wear a dinner jacket. A first-hand account from inside DMA describes a partner that often didn't know what it wanted but definitely knew when it wasn't getting it. In the end Nintendo decided not to publish the game at all. It finally shipped on the Nintendo 64 in late 1998, published by Gremlin Interactive, with Midway picking up the North American rights. The most important thing to come out of the project was not the game: during its development Mike Dailly built the graphics engine that would go on to form Grand Theft Auto.
Reputable source · 2 sources Wi-Fi reaches consumers with 802.11b
The IEEE ratified the original 802.11 wireless networking standard in 1997, transmitting at up to 2 megabits per second over unlicensed 2.4 GHz radio spectrum, too slow for most practical use. In 1999, the IEEE ratified 802.11b, raising the top speed to 11 megabits per second, still on the 2.4 GHz band, fast enough to be genuinely useful for general computing. Apple's commercial breakthrough that same year, its AirPort wireless base station bundled with the iBook laptop, was the first mass-marketed consumer product built around the new standard.
Primary source · 2 sources- 9 September 1999 (North America)History of Video Games
The Dreamcast makes online console play standard
Sega launched the Dreamcast in Japan in November 1998 and in North America on 9 September 1999, a date the company marketed heavily as '9.9.99.' The console shipped with a built-in 56k modem as standard equipment, letting players connect to online services for multiplayer and web browsing without extra hardware, a first among home consoles. The North American launch set a new industry record for first-day US retail sales, moving 225,132 units and generating 98.4 million dollars in a single day, and the console reached over 30 percent US market share by Christmas 1999 on the strength of launch titles and in-house sports games.
Reputable source · 2 sources - September 1999Rockstar Games
Take-Two buys DMA Design for one pound
Two years of corporate pass-the-parcel ended in September 1999: Take-Two, already owner of the Grand Theft Auto copyright and the Rockstar label, acquired DMA Design itself. The terms, recorded in Take-Two's own annual report, are among the strangest in the industry's history: all outstanding stock of DMA Design Holdings for exactly one pound, plus roughly 12.3 million dollars of assumed debt. The filing describes what Take-Two was really buying in seven words: the developer of the Grand Theft Auto series. DMA had reached its third owner in three years, by way of Gremlin and the French publisher Infogrames, and this one would stick.
Primary source · 2 sources - October 1999Rockstar Games
GTA2 ships a million copies
GTA2 arrived in October 1999, weeks after Take-Two bought its developer. Still top-down but denser than the original, it moved the formula forward with rival gangs whose respect the player could win or burn. Take-Two's annual report records the commercial result: more than one million copies shipped within the fiscal year, making GTA2 alone about a tenth of the company's revenue, with the original Grand Theft Auto still contributing six percent more.
Primary source · 2 sources - 4 March 2000 (Japan)History of Video Games
The PlayStation 2 turns a game console into a DVD player
Sony released the PlayStation 2 in Japan on 4 March 2000, drawing more than 10,000 people to queue across Tokyo, some for four days beforehand, and selling out its one million launch units within the first weekend. The console played DVD movies as well as games, undercutting the price of many standalone DVD players at the time and pulling many households into the format through a game console rather than dedicated home theater equipment. It launched in North America that October at 299 dollars, again selling out within hours, and remained in production until 2013, eventually selling more than 155 million units worldwide, a figure no console has since surpassed.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 10 March 2000 (Nasdaq peak)The Internet and Computing
The dot-com bubble bursts
Through the late 1990s, investors poured venture capital into internet startups on the promise of future growth rather than current profit, driving the Nasdaq Composite index up 86 percent in 1999 alone and to a peak of 5,048 points on 10 March 2000. Cheap credit after the Federal Reserve lowered interest rates following the 1998 collapse of hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management helped fuel the run-up; by December 1999, Nasdaq-listed stocks were worth 80 percent as much as the entire New York Stock Exchange, up from just 11 percent in 1990. The bubble then imploded. The Nasdaq fell more than 75 percent between March 2000 and October 2002, erasing more than five trillion dollars in market value, and companies with no sustainable revenue, including the online pet-supply retailer Pets.com, went out of business within months.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 15 January 2001The Internet and Computing
Wikipedia launches as an open, editable encyclopedia
Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger had been running Nupedia, a free online encyclopedia whose articles were written by credentialed experts and passed through a slow, formal peer-review process. In its first six months, Nupedia had published only two articles. Sanger proposed adding a wiki, software that lets any visitor edit a page directly in a web browser, as a faster way to draft material for Nupedia's review queue. That side project, launched 15 January 2001 and named Wikipedia, a blend of 'wiki' and 'encyclopedia,' let anyone write or edit an article with no review at all. It had more than 20,000 articles across 18 languages by the end of its first year.
Reputable source · 2 sources - November 19, 2001 (Aviation and Transportation Security Act)History of Aviation
September 11 Rewrites Aviation Security
Following the September 11, 2001 attacks, in which hijackers commandeered four commercial airliners using small blades that were permitted under pre-9/11 FAA rules, Congress passed the Aviation and Transportation Security Act, which President George W. Bush signed on November 19, 2001. The law created the Transportation Security Administration within the Department of Transportation and gave it responsibility for aviation security nationwide, replacing a system in which individual airlines had hired private contractors to staff security checkpoints. The Act required that by December 31, 2002, TSA screen 100 percent of checked baggage for explosives, mandated reinforced, locking cockpit doors on commercial aircraft, and expanded the Federal Air Marshal Service to place armed marshals on many more flights. The Homeland Security Act of November 25, 2002 then moved TSA into the newly created Department of Homeland Security.
Primary source · 2 sources - 22 October 2001Rockstar Games
Grand Theft Auto III invents the modern open world
On 22 October 2001, Grand Theft Auto III shipped for the PlayStation 2 and turned the series' top-down sandbox into a living, three-dimensional city. IGN's review ran the same day; three weeks earlier, DMA producer Leslie Benzies had walked the press through the ambition in a pre-launch interview. The reception became a coronation: IGN named it PlayStation 2 Game of the Year for 2001, and Take-Two's next annual report recorded the aftermath in regulator-grade language: the top-selling video game across all platforms in the United States for fiscal 2002, the best-selling PlayStation 2 title in North America and Europe since the console launched, and approximately eight million units sold globally by the end of 2002.
Primary source · 4 sources - 22 October 2001History of Video Games
Grand Theft Auto III turns the open world mainstream
Rockstar Games released Grand Theft Auto III on 22 October 2001 for the PlayStation 2, rebuilding its earlier top-down crime series as a fully three-dimensional city that players could explore on foot or by car with almost no restrictions on where to go or what to do outside the main missions. It was not the first 3D open-world game, but it was the first of its kind to achieve massive mainstream popularity, becoming the best-selling video game in the United States in 2001 despite, and partly because of, controversy over its violent and mature content. Its commercial success led Rockstar and its parent company Take-Two to pursue the international market aggressively, including a complex, previously undisclosed effort to bring the game to Japan through publisher relationships with EA and Capcom before Japan's own CERO ratings board existed.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 2002Rockstar Games
DMA Design becomes Rockstar North
In 2002, the name DMA Design retired. Take-Two folded the studio fully into the Rockstar identity, and by the time the company filed its annual report that December, the entity signing the office leases in Dundee and Edinburgh was called Rockstar North Limited, formerly DMA Design Limited, in the filing's own words. Accounts of the transition record it as a two-step rename during the year, with the studio briefly badged Rockstar Studios before Rockstar North stuck.
Primary source · 2 sources - 1999-2002History of Money
The Euro Replaces a Dozen National Currencies
The euro was launched on January 1, 1999, but at first it was an invisible currency, used only for accounting and electronic payments while national notes and coins stayed in people's pockets. The physical changeover came three years later. On January 1, 2002, euro banknotes and coins were introduced simultaneously in 12 countries with a combined population of about 308 million, in what the European Central Bank calls the world's largest ever monetary changeover. An initial supply of 14.89 billion banknotes and roughly 52 billion coins had been produced across European printing works and mints. Adoption was fast: within days almost all cash machines in the euro area were dispensing euros, and the old national currencies of the twelve countries stopped being legal tender by the end of February 2002.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 29 October 2002Rockstar Games
Vice City turns the formula into a period piece
Just over a year after GTA III, Rockstar North shipped Grand Theft Auto: Vice City for the PlayStation 2 on 29 October 2002 in North America, with international release on 8 November and Australia in December. Where GTA III's Liberty City was anonymous and grey, Vice City was a place and a decade: 1986, neon, a radio dial full of licensed pop, and a voiced protagonist backed by film actors. Take-Two's annual report recorded the launch in market terms: the top-selling video game across all platforms in the United States for both four-week sales periods after release.
Primary source · 2 sources - 15 November 2002 (Xbox Live launch)History of Video Games
Xbox and Xbox Live bring Microsoft into console gaming
In 1998, members of Microsoft's DirectX graphics team reconfigured old Dell laptops into a prototype Windows-based game console, an idea management approved despite it being seen as a major risk for a software company with no console experience. Microsoft released the resulting Xbox in North America in November 2001, built around standard PC components including a hard drive and an Nvidia-designed graphics processor. On 15 November 2002, exactly one year after the console's launch, Microsoft introduced Xbox Live, a paid subscription online service sold through a 49.95 dollar starter kit that bundled a headset, a minigame, and a year of access; more than 150,000 people subscribed in the service's first week.
Primary source · 2 sources - 12 September 2003History of Video Games
Steam turns from a patch tool into PC gaming's storefront
Valve Corporation launched Steam on 12 September 2003 to solve a problem with its own games: getting patches and updates onto players' computers automatically instead of relying on them to download files manually. For its first two years the platform carried only Valve's own titles, such as Counter-Strike, with no way to buy other publishers' games; that changed in 2005 when Ragdoll Kung Fu and Darwinia became the first third-party games sold through the store. Half-Life 2's November 2004 release, which required Steam to authenticate even retail copies, drove a surge of new users and overloaded Valve's servers on launch day, but it also cemented Steam as something players had to use rather than an optional add-on.
Primary source · 2 sources - 4 February 2004The Internet and Computing
Zuckerberg launches thefacebook from a Harvard dorm room
Mark Zuckerberg, a Harvard sophomore, launched thefacebook on 4 February 2004 from his Kirkland House dorm room, running on a single rented server costing $85 a month. It began as an internal directory limited to Harvard students, letting them build profile pages and connect with classmates. Within 24 hours, 650 students had registered; within two weeks, that had grown to 4,300, and by the end of the first month, more than half of Harvard's undergraduates had signed up. Zuckerberg had built the site with roommates and classmates including Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, Andrew McCollum, and Chris Hughes.
Reputable source · 2 sources - October 2004Rockstar Games
San Andreas ships an entire state
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas arrived for the PlayStation 2 in late October 2004 and stretched the open world from a city to a state: three cities modeled on Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Las Vegas, with deserts and small towns between them, wrapped around the story of CJ returning home to a 1992 Los Santos. IGN's review ran on 25 October. Take-Two's annual report for the fiscal year records what the franchise had become: Grand Theft Auto titles, led by San Andreas, accounted for 34.3 percent of the entire company's revenue.
Primary source · 2 sources - 21 November 2004 (North America)History of Video Games
The Nintendo DS bets on touchscreens and a second pillar
Nintendo announced its dual-screen handheld in January 2004, describing it as an experimental 'third pillar' alongside the GameCube and Game Boy Advance rather than a replacement for either, and launched it in North America on 21 November 2004 for 149.99 dollars, ten days ahead of its Japanese release. The system's lower screen was touch-sensitive and controlled with a stylus, it connected to Wi-Fi out of the box, a first for Nintendo, and it included PictoChat, letting up to sixteen nearby units chat over a local wireless network. Nintendo's longtime president Hiroshi Yamauchi reportedly said of the gamble, 'If it succeeds, we will rise to heaven, but if it fails we will sink to hell'; more than three million preorders arrived across North America and Japan before launch.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 23 November 2004History of Video Games
World of Warcraft turns the MMO into a mass-market genre
Building on the 'massively multiplayer online role-playing game' concept Richard Garriott had described with Ultima Online in 1997, Blizzard Entertainment released World of Warcraft on 23 November 2004, a decade after the original Warcraft strategy game, setting it in the persistent fantasy world of Azeroth. Players created an avatar, joined guilds and raiding parties, and built social and even romantic relationships through the game's built-in chat while questing and fighting across a constantly evolving shared world. Blizzard charged a recurring subscription fee, roughly 15 dollars a month, at a time when many games were moving toward free access, and by February 2015 the game had accumulated more than 100 million accounts created since launch.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 14 March 2006 (S3 launch)The Internet and Computing
Amazon launches S3 and EC2, starting the cloud
Amazon had learned, running its own retail business, how expensive and difficult it was to provision and manage computing infrastructure, which distracted engineering teams from building the actual product. On 14 March 2006, Amazon launched Simple Storage Service (S3), letting any customer store data on Amazon's own servers instead of buying and maintaining storage hardware; 12,000 developers signed up within a single day. Amazon followed a few months later, in a limited public beta announced 25 August 2006, with Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which gave customers on-demand access to computing power itself, letting them run applications on Amazon's servers rather than their own, paid for by usage rather than owned outright.
Primary source · 2 sources - 19 November 2006 (North America)History of Video Games
The Wii sells motion control to people who don't call themselves gamers
After the GameCube struggled against Sony and Microsoft's consoles, Nintendo revealed a successor codenamed 'Revolution' built around an entirely different premise: instead of more buttons or better graphics, the Wii Remote used accelerometers and an infrared sensor so players could swing, point, and gesture in physical space to control on-screen action, in games such as Wii Sports bowling and tennis. Nintendo launched the console, renamed simply Wii, in North America on 19 November 2006, and it sold out almost immediately worldwide, with shortages persisting well into 2007. Rather than compete on raw processing power, Nintendo aimed the console at people who had never considered themselves gamers, including older adults and young children.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 9 January 2007The Internet and Computing
Apple unveils the iPhone
Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone at the Macworld conference in San Francisco on 9 January 2007, describing it as three devices in one: 'a revolutionary mobile phone, a widescreen iPod with touch controls, and a breakthrough internet communications device.' Its defining feature was a new interface built on a large multi-touch display, controlled entirely by finger taps and gestures instead of a stylus or physical keyboard, which Apple had spent years developing. The phone went on sale that June, with a 4GB model priced at $499 and an 8GB model at $599.
Primary source · 2 sources - March 2007History of Money
M-Pesa Turns the Mobile Phone Into a Bank in Kenya
In March 2007 the Kenyan mobile operator Safaricom, then majority-owned by Vodafone, launched M-Pesa, a service that let people store money as value on their mobile phone SIM cards and send it to others by text message. Customers handed cash to a local agent, who credited their phone with electronic funds; they could then transfer that money by SMS to anyone else, who withdrew it as cash from their own nearby agent. The service had originally been designed to help microfinance customers repay loans, but pilot users were instead sending money to relatives and paying for goods, so the team relaunched it as a person-to-person money transfer product. In a country where most adults had no bank account, uptake was extraordinarily fast, reaching about 2 million customers within a year, and M-Pesa built a network of agents that vastly outnumbered the country's bank branches and cash machines.
Primary source · 2 sources - 29 April 2008Rockstar Games
GTA IV opens the HD era with a record week
Grand Theft Auto IV shipped for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 on 29 April 2008, rebuilding Liberty City as a dense, rain-slicked immigrant story around Niko Bellic. IGN's review, published four days before launch, opened its verdict with a single line: this is the American dream. Take-Two's annual report recorded the launch week the way the industry press did at the time: reported as surpassing all-time entertainment records for first-day and first-week retail sales, with approximately six million units bought globally in the first week at an estimated retail value of more than 500 million dollars. For that fiscal year, Grand Theft Auto titles were 46.2 percent of Take-Two's entire revenue.
Primary source · 2 sources - October 31, 2008History of Money
Satoshi Nakamoto Publishes the Bitcoin Whitepaper
On October 31, 2008, roughly six weeks after Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, a pseudonymous author or group using the name Satoshi Nakamoto released a nine-page paper titled 'Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.' According to HISTORY, the paper's central breakthrough was persuading users to trust each other and the Bitcoin network directly, without a centralized bank or government acting as intermediary, through an electronic ledger, later known as a blockchain, that is signed and distributed to every participant in the network, making false spending or tampering with the ledger extremely difficult. MIT Sloan describes the resulting technology as one where a network of computers periodically agrees on the true state of a shared, distributed ledger that exists as copies across every participating computer rather than in one central location. Nakamoto mined Bitcoin's first block, the genesis block, in January 2009, embedding within it a headline referencing a British government bank bailout, widely read as a pointed commentary on the crisis the currency was designed to route around.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 2007-2009History of Money
Subprime Mortgages Trigger the 2008 Global Financial Crisis
In the years before 2008, subprime mortgage lending, home loans to borrowers with weak credit histories, grew rapidly as rising home prices kept default rates artificially low and lenders increasingly waived income verification, a shift Econlib's account notes drew in borrowers whose real risk of default was higher than their credit scores suggested. New Century Financial, a major subprime lender that had made 60 billion dollars in such loans in 2006 alone, declared bankruptcy in April 2007 as defaults mounted. The crisis accelerated through 2008: the U.S. Treasury took over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in September, and on September 15, 2008, Lehman Brothers filed the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history, involving 619 billion dollars in debt. Congress passed the 700 billion dollar Troubled Asset Relief Program that October, and the National Bureau of Economic Research later determined, in its formal business-cycle dating, that the recession itself had begun in December 2007. Economists remain divided on the primary cause: some point to deregulation, including the Commodity Futures Modernization Act's exemption of derivatives from oversight, others to loose monetary policy and low interest rates that inflated the housing bubble, and the U.S. government's own Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission split along ideological lines, producing three separate official narratives rather than one agreed account.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 10 July 2008The Internet and Computing
The App Store opens the mobile app economy
The original iPhone launched in June 2007 with only the fifteen applications Apple had built into it and no way for outside developers to add more. Apple opened the App Store on 10 July 2008 with 500 apps available at launch, built by third-party developers who had paid a $99 annual fee to join the iPhone Developer Program announced that March. Users downloaded roughly 10 million apps in the store's first weekend alone.
Primary source · 2 sources - 10 July 2008History of Video Games
The iPhone's App Store creates the mobile game industry
Apple released the iPhone in 2007 as a combined web browser, music player, and phone with a touchscreen and GPS, then opened the App Store on 10 July 2008 with about 500 third-party applications available, letting any developer sell software directly to iPhone and iPod touch owners without going through a mobile carrier or console publisher. Games were popular from the store's first hour; independent developer Steve Demeter built the tilt-controlled puzzle game Trism in about four months and earned roughly 250,000 dollars in profit within two months of release, a sum no publisher had been willing to fund when he pitched the idea beforehand. Users downloaded more than 10 million apps in the store's first three days.
Primary source · 2 sources - 17 May 2009 (public alpha)History of Video Games
Minecraft turns building blocks into the best-selling game ever
Markus 'Notch' Persson released the first public version of Minecraft through his studio Mojang in 2009, putting players into a procedurally generated, blocky world with almost no set objectives, where they mine raw materials and use them to build anything from simple shelters to elaborate structures, largely setting their own goals as they go. The game's minimal graphics kept it lightweight enough to run on modest hardware while its open-ended construction and survival mechanics drew a global following that spanned young children to serious hobbyist builders. In 2014, Microsoft agreed to acquire Mojang and the Minecraft franchise for 2.5 billion dollars, folding the studio into Microsoft Studios alongside Halo and Forza while Persson and his co-founders departed the company.
Primary source · 2 sources - 20 June 2009Artificial Intelligence
ImageNet gives computer vision a dataset at internet scale
Jia Deng, Wei Dong, Richard Socher, Li-Jia Li, Kai Li, and Li Fei-Fei presented 'ImageNet: A Large-Scale Hierarchical Image Database' at the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition in Miami. The dataset organized images according to WordNet, a lexical database that groups roughly 80,000 English nouns into hierarchical concepts, or synsets, such as mammal, then dog, then golden retriever. Using Amazon Mechanical Turk to crowdsource human verification of image labels at scale, the initial 2009 release already contained 3.2 million images across 5,247 synsets, with the stated goal of eventually reaching tens of millions of images covering the majority of WordNet's noun concepts. The team's founding insight was that computer vision progress had been limited less by algorithms than by the small size of existing training sets, some containing only a few thousand images.
Primary source · 2 sources - 18 May 2010Rockstar Games
Red Dead Redemption proves Rockstar is bigger than GTA
Red Dead Redemption launched for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 on 18 May 2010, trading Rockstar's cities for the closing years of the American frontier and outlaw John Marston's forced hunt for his old gang. Three weeks later, Take-Two's quarterly earnings release reported the title had already sold in over five million units, carrying what the company called a near-perfect Metacritic score of 95. The fiscal year it led saw Take-Two's revenue rise 49 percent to 1.14 billion dollars, swinging the company from a 123 million dollar loss to a 48.5 million dollar profit.
Primary source · 3 sources - 16 February 2011Artificial Intelligence
Watson beats Jeopardy!'s greatest champions
IBM's Watson, a question-answering system built on a room-sized cluster of 90 servers and 2,880 processor cores, competed on Jeopardy! against the show's two most successful all-time champions, Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings, in a televised match broadcast over three episodes in February 2011. Watson's DeepQA software decomposed each clue's wordplay and phrasing, generated multiple candidate answers, then scored each candidate against evidence gathered from a large corpus of text using natural language processing techniques, all without a live internet connection. Watson won decisively, finishing with $77,147 against Jennings' $24,000 and Rutter's $21,600; in his closing answer on the show, Jennings wrote 'I for one welcome our new computer overlords.'
Primary source · 2 sources - June 2011History of Video Games
Twitch turns watching games into its own industry
Twitch launched in June 2011 as a gaming-focused spin-off of the general video streaming site Justin.tv, giving anyone the ability to broadcast themselves playing games live to an audience that could chat alongside the stream in real time. Competitive events found a natural home there almost immediately, including the first League of Legends world championship and the first Dota 2 International, both held in 2011. By July 2014, more than 55 million unique visitors were watching over 15 billion minutes of content each month from more than a million broadcasters, ranging from individual players to publishers and stadium-filling esports organizations, and on 25 August 2014 Amazon announced it would acquire Twitch for approximately 970 million dollars in cash.
Primary source · 2 sources - 30 September 2012Artificial Intelligence
AlexNet wins ImageNet and starts the deep learning boom
Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever, and Geoffrey Hinton, at the University of Toronto, entered a convolutional neural network in the 2012 ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge. The network, later called AlexNet, had 60 million parameters across five convolutional layers and three fully connected layers, and was trained on two consumer-grade Nvidia GeForce GPUs rather than specialized research hardware. It used ReLU activations to train faster than the standard sigmoid function of the time, and a regularization technique called dropout, which randomly disables neurons during training, to reduce overfitting. AlexNet achieved a top-5 error rate of 15.3 percent, beating the second-place entry's 26.2 percent by nearly 11 percentage points, a margin far larger than the field's usual year-over-year gains.
Primary source · 2 sources - 16 January 2013Artificial Intelligence
word2vec turns words into vectors that capture meaning
Tomas Mikolov, Kai Chen, Greg Corrado, and Jeffrey Dean at Google published 'Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space' on arXiv, introducing what became known as word2vec. The method trained a shallow neural network on the simple task of predicting a word from its surrounding context, or vice versa, across a text corpus of 1.6 billion words. Once trained, each word was represented as a dense vector of a few hundred numbers, and words used in similar contexts ended up with similar vectors, so that arithmetic on the vectors captured relationships, the canonical example being that the vector for 'king' minus 'man' plus 'woman' lands near the vector for 'queen.' The whole training process took under a day on a single CPU, far cheaper than the more complex neural language models it outperformed.
Primary source · 2 sources - 17 September 2013Rockstar Games
GTA V: a billion dollars in three days
Grand Theft Auto V launched on 17 September 2013 for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, with three playable protagonists and a satirical Los Santos built at a reported scale no open world had attempted. The next day, Take-Two announced first-day sell-through of more than 800 million dollars worldwide, the highest in the company's and the series' history. Two days after that, a second announcement: more than one billion dollars in retail sales in the first three days, which the company said it believed made GTA V the fastest entertainment property of any kind, games or films, to reach that mark. Grand Theft Auto Online followed in October 2013, and by the next annual report the franchise had sold in over 185 million units lifetime.
Primary source · 4 sources - 10 June 2014Artificial Intelligence
Goodfellow invents Generative Adversarial Networks
Ian Goodfellow, then a PhD student at the University of Montreal, conceived Generative Adversarial Networks after a late-night conversation with friends at a Montreal bar, Les 3 Brasseurs, about whether a computer could generate photos on its own; he went home and coded a working version that night. The paper, co-authored with Jean Pouget-Abadie, Mehdi Mirza, and others including Yoshua Bengio, described a framework pitting two neural networks against each other: a generator that produces fake data, and a discriminator that tries to tell the fakes from real training examples. Goodfellow compared it to a counterfeiter trying to produce undetectable fake currency against a police force trying to catch the fakes; as training proceeds, both networks improve until the generator's output is statistically indistinguishable from real data. The framework required no explicit description of the data's structure, only the adversarial contest between the two networks.
Primary source · 2 sources - 26 February 2015Artificial Intelligence
DeepMind's DQN learns Atari games from raw pixels
DeepMind researchers led by Volodymyr Mnih, Koray Kavukcuoglu, and David Silver published 'Human-level control through deep reinforcement learning' in Nature. Their deep Q-network, or DQN, combined a convolutional neural network with reinforcement learning to play Atari 2600 games, receiving only the raw pixels on screen and the game's score as input, with no hand-coded knowledge of any game's rules. DQN used a technique called experience replay, storing past game transitions and randomly sampling from that memory during training rather than learning strictly in the order actions occurred, which stabilized the learning process. Using the same algorithm, network architecture, and hyperparameters across all games, DQN matched or exceeded the level of a professional human game tester on a majority of the 49 Atari games tested.
Primary source · 2 sources - 9 February 2016The Internet and Computing
Apple refuses to unlock the San Bernardino iPhone
After the December 2015 San Bernardino terrorist attack, the FBI recovered an iPhone 5C that had belonged to one of the shooters, but could not access its data because of the encryption built into iOS. On 9 February 2016, the FBI announced it wanted Apple's help, and a court order followed asking Apple to build custom software that would let investigators bypass the phone's passcode limits and try unlimited password guesses. Apple CEO Tim Cook publicly refused, arguing that creating such a tool at all, even for one phone, would create a permanent capability that could be turned against any iPhone user's encryption in the future. The FBI dropped its legal demand after paying a third-party contractor more than $1.3 million to break into the phone without Apple's help.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 9-15 March 2016Artificial Intelligence
AlphaGo defeats Lee Sedol at Go
DeepMind's AlphaGo, developed under David Silver, played a five-game match against Lee Sedol, winner of 18 world Go titles and widely regarded as one of the greatest players of his generation, in Seoul, South Korea. AlphaGo combined a 'policy network,' trained first on human expert games and then refined through self-play, to propose promising moves, with a 'value network' to judge how good a board position was, both guiding a Monte Carlo tree search rather than exhaustively searching Go's roughly 10 to the 170th power possible positions. AlphaGo won the match 4 games to 1, watched by an estimated 200 million people worldwide. In game two, AlphaGo played a move, later called 'Move 37,' that professional commentators initially thought was a mistake because it violated centuries of accumulated Go strategy, and Lee Sedol needed nearly fifteen minutes to respond to it.
Primary source · 2 sources - August 29, 2016History of Aviation
The FAA Opens U.S. Skies to Routine Commercial Drone Flight
The FAA's Part 107 rule for small unmanned aircraft systems took effect on August 29, 2016, allowing routine commercial drone operations, for aircraft under 55 pounds, without requiring the traditional airworthiness certificate or pilot's license the agency had previously mandated for all aircraft. In place of a practical flying test, the rule created a written knowledge exam covering basic aeronautical knowledge, with the FAA estimating individual certification costs at around 150 dollars, less than any other airman certification permitting non-recreational flight. By the mid-2020s more than 480,000 people held Part 107 remote pilot certificates in the United States.
Primary source · 2 sources - 3 March 2017History of Video Games
The Nintendo Switch outsells every prior Nintendo hardware launch
Nintendo released the Switch worldwide on 3 March 2017, a hybrid device that functioned as a home console docked to a television or as a handheld with detachable Joy-Con controllers clipped to its sides, succeeding the commercially disappointing Wii U. According to NPD data reported by Nintendo Life, the Switch's March 2017 launch became the second-best hardware launch for any video game platform in the US since NPD began tracking sales in 1995, and the best launch of any Nintendo platform, selling 31,000 more units in its debut month than the previous record holder, the Game Boy Advance. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, a launch title, sold over 900,000 physical copies in the US in March alone and became the top-selling Adventure-genre game since 1995 tracking began, while total Switch software sales reached 1.3 million copies and helped push US hardware sales up 91 percent year over year.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 12 June 2017Artificial Intelligence
'Attention Is All You Need' introduces the Transformer
Ashish Vaswani and seven co-authors at Google Brain and Google Research published 'Attention Is All You Need,' introducing the Transformer architecture. Earlier sequence models processed text word by word in order, using recurrent connections that made long-range relationships hard to learn and training difficult to parallelize. The Transformer replaced recurrence entirely with a self-attention mechanism, which lets the model weigh every word in a sentence against every other word simultaneously to build a representation informed by the whole context at once, rather than only what came before. Because self-attention can be computed for all words in parallel rather than one step at a time, Transformers trained dramatically faster on modern GPU hardware. The model achieved a new state-of-the-art BLEU score of 41.8 on an English-to-French translation benchmark after training for just 3.5 days on eight GPUs, far less compute than prior best results required.
Primary source · 2 sources - 26 September 2017History of Video Games
Fortnite's Battle Royale mode becomes a two-month pivot heard worldwide
Epic Games released the co-op survival game Fortnite: Save the World into paid early access on 25 July 2017. According to Epic's Ed Zobrist, speaking at a Game Developers Conference panel, work on a competing mode inspired by the standalone hit PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds began around the same time and took about two months, an unusually fast pivot Zobrist said he doubted any major publisher could have managed. Epic had initially planned to place the new hundred-player, last-man-standing mode behind Save the World's 40-dollar paywall, but decided in its final two weeks of development to release it as a separate, completely free title instead. Fortnite Battle Royale launched on 26 September 2017 across PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One simultaneously, unlike PUBG, which was still console-exclusive-in-waiting at the time.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 11 October 2018Artificial Intelligence
BERT makes language models read in both directions
Jacob Devlin, Ming-Wei Chang, Kenton Lee, and Kristina Toutanova at Google AI Language published 'BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding.' Earlier Transformer-based language models, including OpenAI's original GPT, read text strictly left to right, so each word could only be informed by the words before it. BERT instead trained using a 'masked language model' objective, randomly hiding some words in a sentence and training the model to predict them using context from both the left and the right simultaneously, giving it a genuinely bidirectional understanding of a sentence. The pretrained model could then be fine-tuned with just one additional output layer for a specific task, and it set new state-of-the-art results across eleven different natural language processing benchmarks, pushing the GLUE benchmark score up by 7.7 percentage points over the prior best. Google open-sourced the model and pretrained weights the following month.
Primary source · 2 sources - 26 October 2018Rockstar Games
Red Dead Redemption 2 sets the record for the biggest opening in entertainment
Red Dead Redemption 2 launched for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on 26 October 2018, a sprawling, slow prequel about the outlaw Van der Linde gang in the dying days of the American West. Take-Two's earnings release two weeks later reported it: a 97 Metacritic score, over 725 million dollars in retail sell-through in its first three days, which the company called the biggest opening weekend in the history of entertainment, and more units sold in its first eight days than the original Red Dead Redemption sold in eight years. By 2024 it had sold in more than 60 million units.
Primary source · 3 sources - 14 February 2019Artificial Intelligence
OpenAI withholds GPT-2 over misuse concerns
Alec Radford and colleagues at OpenAI published 'Language Models are Unsupervised Multitask Learners,' describing GPT-2, a 1.5-billion-parameter Transformer trained purely to predict the next word across a 40-gigabyte scrape of internet text called WebText. Without any task-specific training, GPT-2 could perform reading comprehension, translation, and summarization simply by being prompted in the right format, a capability the paper called zero-shot task transfer, and it achieved state-of-the-art results on seven of eight tested language modeling benchmarks. Rather than releasing the full trained model as it had with prior research, OpenAI announced it was withholding GPT-2's largest version, citing concern about malicious uses such as generating fake news or impersonating people online, and instead released progressively larger versions over the following months as what it called a staged release, an experiment in responsible disclosure.
Primary source · 3 sources - March 13, 2019 (U.S. grounding)History of Aviation
Two Crashes Ground the Boeing 737 MAX Worldwide
Boeing's 737 MAX 8 was involved in two crashes within five months: Lion Air Flight 610 crashed into the Java Sea on October 29, 2018, killing all 189 aboard, and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crashed shortly after takeoff on March 10, 2019, killing all 157 aboard, a combined 346 deaths. Both crashes were traced to the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, software designed to push the aircraft's nose down automatically to prevent an aerodynamic stall, which relied on a single angle-of-attack sensor with no backup; in the Lion Air crash, MCAS forced the aircraft's nose down 26 times in the plane's final 10 minutes. Most airlines and regulators worldwide had already grounded the aircraft when the United States, through the FAA, grounded all 387 in-service 737 MAX jets on March 13, 2019. The fleet remained grounded for 21 months before the FAA rescinded the order on November 18, 2020.
Peer-reviewed · 2 sources - 28 May 2020Artificial Intelligence
GPT-3 shows scale alone unlocks few-shot learning
Tom Brown and over thirty co-authors at OpenAI published 'Language Models are Few-Shot Learners,' introducing GPT-3, an autoregressive Transformer with 175 billion parameters, ten times larger than any earlier non-sparse language model. Rather than fine-tuning the model's weights for each new task, the paper showed that simply describing a task in the prompt and providing a small number of examples, so-called few-shot learning, let GPT-3 perform competitively on many benchmarks with no gradient updates at all. Performance on these tasks improved smoothly as the model scaled up, without any architectural changes, suggesting scale itself was driving the new capability. In September 2020, Microsoft announced an exclusive license to GPT-3's underlying model for its own products, while OpenAI continued to offer the model to others through an API.
Primary source · 2 sources - 2020-2021Artificial Intelligence
AlphaFold effectively solves protein structure prediction
DeepMind's AlphaFold 2 competed in CASP14 (the 14th Critical Assessment of protein Structure Prediction), a biennial blind test in which independent judges compare predicted protein structures against ones solved experimentally but not yet published. AlphaFold produced models for about two-thirds of the CASP14 target proteins with accuracy indistinguishable from experimental methods, measured by a global distance test score above 90 out of 100, a level most competing methods had never reached even once. CASP's assessors, who are not affiliated with DeepMind, stated that AlphaFold had effectively solved the fifty-year-old protein structure prediction problem, predicting a protein's three-dimensional folded shape from its amino acid sequence alone. DeepMind published the full method in Nature in July 2021 and released the AlphaFold source code and, in partnership with EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute, predicted structures for hundreds of millions of proteins.
Primary source · 2 sources - 5 January 2021Artificial Intelligence
DALL-E generates images directly from text captions
OpenAI announced DALL-E, a 12-billion-parameter version of the GPT-3 Transformer architecture trained to generate images from text descriptions rather than text from text. Aditya Ramesh and co-authors described the underlying method in 'Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation': the model treated both text and image patches as tokens in a single stream, using a discrete variational autoencoder to compress images into a manageable vocabulary of visual tokens the Transformer could then predict autoregressively, one token at a time, conditioned on the caption. DALL-E could generate plausible images for captions describing combinations that had likely never co-occurred in its training data, such as anthropomorphized objects or animals rendered in specific artistic styles, and it could also apply requested edits or transformations to existing images.
Primary source · 2 sources - 22 August 2022Artificial Intelligence
Stable Diffusion open-sources text-to-image generation
Robin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann, Dominik Lorenz, Patrick Esser, and Bjorn Ommer, working across LMU Munich, Heidelberg University, and Runway, published 'High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models,' describing a diffusion model that generates images by learning to reverse a process of gradually adding noise to an image, but crucially performing that denoising in a compressed latent space produced by a pretrained autoencoder rather than on full-resolution pixels directly. That compression cut the computational cost enough to make training and running the model practical on far more modest hardware than earlier diffusion approaches required. Stability AI, in collaboration with the original research groups, EleutherAI, and LAION, publicly released the resulting model, called Stable Diffusion, on August 22, 2022, under a license permitting commercial use, after an earlier restricted release to about 1,000 researchers. It could generate 512-by-512 pixel images using under 7 gigabytes of GPU memory, putting it within reach of a single consumer graphics card.
Primary source · 2 sources - 30 November 2022Artificial Intelligence
ChatGPT brings conversational AI to the mainstream
OpenAI released ChatGPT as a free research preview, describing it as a sibling model to GPT-3.5 fine-tuned specifically for dialogue using reinforcement learning from human feedback, in which human trainers ranked candidate responses to steer the model toward answers people preferred. Unlike the raw text-completion interface of earlier GPT models, ChatGPT's dialogue format let it answer follow-up questions, acknowledge and correct its own mistakes, challenge premises it judged incorrect, and decline requests it was trained to treat as inappropriate. According to OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman, ChatGPT reached one million users within five days of launch with essentially no marketing push, and analysts at UBS estimated it reached 100 million monthly users by January 2023, a pace of adoption faster than either TikTok or Instagram achieved in their early growth.
Primary source · 2 sources - 14 March 2023Artificial Intelligence
GPT-4 adds multimodal, human-level exam performance
OpenAI released GPT-4, described in its technical report as a large-scale, multimodal Transformer that accepts both image and text inputs and produces text outputs, a departure from earlier GPT models that handled text only. OpenAI reported that GPT-4 achieved human-level performance on a range of professional and academic benchmarks originally designed for people, including a simulated bar exam on which it scored around the top 10 percent of test takers, compared with GPT-3.5's bottom-10-percent score on the same test. A significant part of the underlying engineering effort, according to the report, went into building training infrastructure that behaved predictably across scales, letting OpenAI forecast aspects of GPT-4's eventual performance using much smaller models trained with a tiny fraction of GPT-4's total compute. OpenAI did not disclose GPT-4's parameter count, architecture details, or training data in the technical report, a departure from the fuller disclosures of earlier GPT papers.
Primary source · 2 sources - 4 December 2023Rockstar Games
The Grand Theft Auto VI trailer breaks YouTube
After a decade of speculation, Rockstar released the first trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI. It was scheduled for 5 December 2023, but Rockstar brought it forward to the evening of 4 December after the trailer leaked online. Set in a modern Vice City, it drew 90,421,491 views in its first 24 hours, which Guinness World Records certified as the most-viewed video game reveal trailer ever and the most-viewed non-music YouTube video in a day, ahead of any film trailer or viral clip. Take-Two's annual report that year set the plan: a release in the fall of calendar 2025.
Primary source · 3 sources - 12 September 2024Artificial Intelligence
OpenAI's o1 introduces visible chain-of-thought reasoning
OpenAI released o1-preview and o1-mini, describing them as a new series of models trained with reinforcement learning to work through a chain of thought before producing a final answer, rather than generating a response immediately as prior GPT models did. Through this training process, the model learned to break difficult problems into smaller steps, try alternative approaches when one path stalled, and recognize and correct its own errors, spending more computation at answer time on harder problems. On a qualifying exam for the International Mathematical Olympiad, OpenAI reported that its existing GPT-4o model correctly solved only 13 percent of problems, while the new reasoning model scored 83 percent. OpenAI deliberately kept the model's internal chain of thought hidden from users, citing both safety monitoring and competitive concerns, and reset its model-naming scheme to '1' to mark what it described as a new level of capability distinct from the GPT series.
Primary source · 2 sources - 8-9 October 2024Artificial Intelligence
Neural network pioneers win the 2024 Nobel Prizes
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics jointly to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton for foundational discoveries and inventions enabling machine learning with artificial neural networks. Hopfield had created an associative memory network, modeled mathematically on the physics of atomic spin systems, that could store and reconstruct patterns by settling into low-energy states; Hinton built on such networks to develop methods letting machines autonomously find properties in data, work that underlies later deep learning. The following day, the Academy awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry half to David Baker for computational protein design and jointly to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of Google DeepMind for AlphaFold's protein structure predictions. It was the first time Nobel Prizes across two categories in the same year recognized artificial intelligence research directly.
Primary source · 2 sources - May 2025Rockstar Games
The first delay, then the biggest video launch ever claimed
On 2 May 2025, Take-Two announced that Grand Theft Auto VI, expected that fall, was now planned for 26 May 2026, with CEO Strauss Zelnick backing Rockstar taking additional time to realize their creative vision. Days later, Rockstar released the game's second trailer, confirming protagonists Jason and Lucia and a return to Vice City. The company told The Hollywood Reporter the trailer drew more than 475 million views across platforms in its first day, which it called the biggest video launch of all time.
Primary source · 3 sources - Late October 2025Rockstar Games
Rockstar fires more than 30 workers; the union calls it union-busting
At the end of October 2025, Rockstar dismissed more than 30 staff across its UK studios, with additional dismissals reported in Canada. Rockstar said the workers were fired for gross misconduct, specifically leaking confidential information. The Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain said every UK worker dismissed was a member of its Game Workers Union organizing channel on Discord, called the firings the most blatant act of union-busting in the industry's history, and filed legal claims for victimization and collective dismissal linked to trade union activity. In June 2026, a UK employment tribunal allowed all of the workers' allegations to proceed to trial.
Primary source · 3 sources - 6 November 2025Rockstar Games
The second delay: 19 November 2026
In its quarterly earnings release on 6 November 2025, Take-Two announced that Rockstar would now release Grand Theft Auto VI on 19 November 2026 for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, the second slip from the original fall 2025 target. The same release reported quarterly net bookings of 1.96 billion dollars, above the company's own guidance, and reiterated its expectation of record results in the fiscal year the game ships.
Primary source · 2 sources - 25 June 2026Rockstar Games
Pre-orders open on the biggest launch in entertainment
On 25 June 2026, at midnight local time around the world, pre-orders opened for Grand Theft Auto VI: a standard edition at 79.99 dollars and an Ultimate Edition at 99.99 dollars, for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, launching 19 November 2026. Take-Two's announcement, made the day before, called it the most immersive evolution of the series yet, built around protagonists Jason and Lucia in the state of Leonida.
Primary source · 2 sources