Timeline - 1930-79
1930s
📜 Lambda calculus is a formal system in mathematical logic for expressing computation based on function abstraction and application using variable binding and substitution. The original system was shown to be logically inconsistent in 1935. The lambda calculus was introduced by mathematician Alonzo Church in the 1930s as part of an investigation into the foundations of mathematics.
📜 A Turing machine is a mathematical model of computation describing an abstract machine that manipulates symbols on a strip of tape according to a table of rules. Alan Turing invented the "a-machine" (automatic machine) in 1936. It was Turing's doctoral advisor, Alonzo Church, who later coined the term "Turing machine" in a review.
1940s
📜 In computer programming, assembly language is any low-level programming language with a very strong correspondence between the instructions in the language and the architecture's machine code instructions. The first assembly code in which a language is used to represent machine code instructions is found in Kathleen and Andrew Donald Booth's 1947 work.
1950s
🧠 The Turing test, originally called the imitation game by Alan Turing in 1950, is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human.
📜 Regular expressions originated in 1951, when mathematician Stephen Cole Kleene described regular languages using his mathematical notation called regular events.
📜 Lisp (historically LISP) is a family of programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized prefix notation. Originally specified in 1958, Lisp is the second-oldest high-level programming language still in common use. John McCarthy developed Lisp in 1958 while he was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). First appeared: 1958
📜 ALGOL (short for "Algorithmic Language") is a family of imperative computer programming languages originally developed in 1958. ALGOL heavily influenced many other languages and was the standard method for algorithm description. First appeared: 1958
🧠 In machine learning, the perceptron (or McCulloch-Pitts neuron) is an algorithm for supervised learning of binary classifiers. The first implementation was a machine built in 1958 at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory by Frank Rosenblatt.
🧠 The term machine learning was coined in 1959 by Arthur Samuel, an IBM employee and pioneer in the field of computer gaming and artificial intelligence. The synonym self-teaching computers was also used in this time period.
1960s
📜 Simula is the name of two simulation programming languages, Simula I and Simula 67, developed in the 1960s at the Norwegian Computing Center in Oslo, by Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard. Simula 67 introduced objects, classes, inheritance and subclasses, virtual procedures, coroutines, and discrete event simulation, and featured garbage collection. First appeared: 1962
🧠 In machine learning, backpropagation is a gradient estimation method used to train neural network models. The term "back-propagating error correction" was introduced in 1962 by Frank Rosenblatt, but he did not know how to implement this, even though Henry J. Kelley had a continuous precursor of backpropagation already in 1960 in the context of control theory.
⚙️ In 1964, for the Multics operating system, Louis Pouzin conceived the idea of "using commands somehow like a programming language," and coined the term shell to describe it.
🏢 Conway's law is an adage that states organizations design systems that mirror their own communication structure. It is named after the computer programmer Melvin Conway, who introduced the idea in 1967.
📜 ed is a line editor for Unix and Unix-like operating systems. The ed text editor was one of the first three key elements of the Unix operating system — assembler, editor, and shell — developed by Ken Thompson in August 1969 on a PDP-7 at AT&T Bell Labs.
📜 Hoare logic is a formal system with a set of logical rules for reasoning rigorously about the correctness of computer programs. It was proposed in 1969 by the British computer scientist and logician Tony Hoare, and subsequently refined by Hoare and other researchers.
⚙️ Unix (trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix. Initial release: 1969
🌐 The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical foundation of the Internet. Etablished: 1969
🌐 In computing, "server" dates at least to RFC 5 (1969), one of the earliest documents describing ARPANET (the predecessor of Internet), and is contrasted with "user", distinguishing two types of host: "server-host" and "user-host".
🌐 Telnet (short for "teletype network") is a client/server application protocol that provides access to virtual terminals of remote systems on local area networks or the Internet. Telnet was developed as secret technology in 1969 beginning with RFC 15.
1970s
📊 The term "relational database" was first defined by E. F. Codd at IBM in 1970. Codd introduced the term in his research paper "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks".
🌐 The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard communication protocol used for the transfer of computer files from a server to a client on a computer network. Introduction: April 16, 1971
⚙️ mail is a command-line email client for Unix and Unix-like operating systems. Initial release: November 3, 1971
📜 roff is a typesetting markup language. As the first Unix text-formatting computer program, it is a predecessor of the nroff and troff document processing systems. Initial release: November 3, 1971
🌐 In 1971 the first ARPANET network mail was sent, introducing the now-familiar address syntax with the '@' symbol designating the user's system address. Over a series of RFCs, conventions were refined for sending mail messages over the File Transfer Protocol.
📜 C is a middle-level, general-purpose computer programming language. It was created in the 1970s by Dennis Ritchie, and remains very widely used and influential. By design, C's features cleanly reflect the capabilities of the targeted CPUs. C was originally developed at Bell Labs by Dennis Ritchie between 1972 and 1973 to construct utilities running on Unix. First appeared: 1972
📜 Smalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamically typed reflective programming language. It was designed and created in part for educational use. Smalltalk was the product of research led by Alan Kay at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). The first Smalltalk programming system (called Smalltalk-72) ran on a Xerox Alto and was designed to support Alan Kay's new programming paradigm called object-oriented programming. Ref
🏢 In June 1972, five IBM engineers from the AI department founded the SAP Systemanalyse und Programmentwicklung ("System Analysis and Program Development" / "SAPD") company, as a private partnership under the German Civil Code. In 1973, SAP launched its first commercial product, the RF financial accounting system.
⚙️ In 1973, Version 4 Unix was rewritten in the higher-level language C, contrary to the general notion at the time that an operating system's complexity and sophistication required it to be written in assembly language.
📜 sed ("stream editor") is a Unix utility that parses and transforms text, using a simple, compact programming language. sed was developed from 1973 to 1974 by Lee E. McMahon of Bell Labs
🌐 TCP provides reliable, ordered, and error-checked delivery of a stream of octets (bytes) between applications running on hosts communicating via an IP network. In May 1974, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn described an internetworking protocol for sharing resources using packet switching among network nodes. The specification of the resulting protocol (TCP/IP) was written by Vint Cerf, Yogen Dalal, and Carl Sunshine, and published in December 1974.
📊 Structured Query Language (SQL) is a domain-specific language used in programming and designed for managing data held in a relational database management system (RDBMS), or for stream processing in a relational data stream management system (RDSMS). First appeared: 1974
🔐 The Data Encryption Standard is a symmetric-key algorithm for the encryption of digital data. Although its short key length of 56 bits makes it too insecure for modern applications, it has been highly influential in the advancement of cryptography. The origins of DES date to 1972, when a National Bureau of Standards study of US government computer security identified a need for a government-wide standard for encrypting unclassified, sensitive information. On 17 March 1975, the proposed DES was published in the Federal Register. Public comments were requested, and in the following year two open workshops were held to discuss the proposed standard.
⚙️ The cron command-line utility is a job scheduler on Unix-like operating systems. Users who set up and maintain software environments use cron to schedule jobs (commands or shell scripts), also known as cron jobs, to run periodically at fixed times, dates, or intervals. Initial release: May 1975
📜 Make is a build automation tool that automatically builds executable programs and libraries from source code by reading files called Makefiles which specify how to derive the target program. Make First appeared: April 1976
📜 vi is a screen-oriented text editor originally created for the Unix operating system. The original code for vi was written by Bill Joy in 1976, as the visual mode for a line editor called ex that Joy had written with Chuck Haley.
🔐 Diffie–Hellman key exchange is a mathematical method of securely exchanging cryptographic keys over a public channel. Published in 1976 by Diffie and Hellman, this is the earliest publicly known work that proposed the idea of a private key and a corresponding public key.
📜 AWK is a domain-specific language designed for text processing and typically used as a data extraction and reporting tool. AWK was initially developed in 1977 by Alfred Aho (author of egrep), Peter J. Weinberger (who worked on tiny relational databases), and Brian Kernighan.
🔐 RSA is a public-key cryptosystem that is widely used for secure data transmission. The acronym "RSA" comes from the surnames of Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman, who publicly described the algorithm in 1977.
📜 Bill Joy's ex 1.1 was released as part of the first Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) Unix release in March 1978. According to Joy, many of the ideas in this visual mode were taken from Bravo—the bimodal text editor developed at Xerox PARC for the Alto.
📜 In 1978, Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie published the first edition of The C Programming Language. This book, known to C programmers as K&R, served for many years as an informal specification of the language. The version of C that it describes is commonly referred to as "K&R C".
📜 TeX is a typesetting system which was designed and written by Donald Knuth and first released in 1978. The first version of TeX, called TeX78, was written in the SAIL programming language to run on a PDP-10 under Stanford's WAITS operating system.
📜 The problem of obtaining Byzantine consensus was conceived and formalized by Robert Shostak, who dubbed it the interactive consistency problem. This work was done in 1978 in the context of the NASA-sponsored SIFT project in the Computer Science Lab at SRI International.
📜 Model-view-controller (MVC) is a software design pattern commonly used for developing user interfaces that divides the related program logic into three interconnected elements. Trygve Reenskaug created MVC while working on Smalltalk-79 as a visiting scientist at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in the late 1970s.
⚙️ The Bourne shell, sh, was a new Unix shell by Stephen Bourne at Bell Labs. Distributed as the shell for UNIX Version 7 in 1979
⚙️ A chroot on Unix and Unix-like operating systems is an operation that changes the apparent root directory for the current running process and its children. The chroot system call was introduced during development of Version 7 Unix in 1979.
📊 Oracle Database (commonly referred to as Oracle DBMS, Oracle Autonomous Database, or simply as Oracle) is a proprietary multi-model database management system produced and marketed by Oracle Corporation. Initial release: 1979