Timeline - 1980-99
1980-84β
π Smalltalk-80 was the first language variant made available outside of PARC, first as Smalltalk-80 Version 1, given to a small number of firms and universities.
βοΈ The Berkeley r-commands are a suite of computer programs designed to enable users of one Unix system to log in or issue commands to another Unix computer via TCP/IP computer network. Initial release: June 1981
βοΈ IPv4 is described in RFC 791 (1981).
π’ In March 1982, the US Department of Defense declared TCP/IP as the standard for all military computer networking.
π Revision Control System (RCS) is an early implementation of a version control system (VCS). It is a set of UNIX commands that allow multiple users to develop and maintain program code or documents. RCS was first released in 1982 by Walter F. Tichy at Purdue University. RCS is currently maintained by the GNU Project.
π TeX82, a new version of TeX rewritten from scratch, was published in 1982. Among other changes, the original hyphenation algorithm was replaced by a new algorithm written by Frank Liang.
βοΈ The migration of the ARPANET from NCP to TCP/IP was officially completed on flag day January 1, 1983, when the new protocols were permanently activated.
π Development of the GNU operating system was initiated by Richard Stallman while he worked at MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. It was called the GNU Project, and was publicly announced on September 27, 1983.
βοΈ The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) protocol was implemented on the ARPANET in 1983.
π’ X/Open group was a consortium founded by several European UNIX systems manufacturers in 1984 to identify and promote open standards in the field of information technology.
π TeX has been the official typesetting package for the GNU operating system since 1984.
1985-89β
π LaTeX was created in the early 1980s by Leslie Lamport when he was working at Stanford Research Institute (SRI). He needed to write TeX macros for his own use and thought that with a little extra effort, he could make a general package usable by others. Lamport released versions of his LaTeX macros in 1984 and 1985.
π GNU Emacs is a free software text editor. It was created by GNU Project founder Richard Stallman, based on the Emacs editor developed for Unix operating systems. GNU Emacs is written in C and provides Emacs Lisp, also implemented in C, as an extension language. Version 13, the first public release, was made on March 20, 1985.
π’ The GNU Manifesto is a call-to-action by Richard Stallman encouraging participation and support of the GNU Project's goal in developing the GNU free computer operating system. The GNU Manifesto was published in March 1985.
π’ The Free Software Foundation was founded in 1985 as a non-profit corporation supporting free software development.
π C++ is a high-level general-purpose programming language created by Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup as an extension of the C programming language, or "C with Classes". The C++ programming language was initially standardized in 1998 as ISO/IEC 14882:1998, which was then amended by the C++03, C++11, C++14, and C++17 standards. First appeared: 1985
π GDB was first written by Richard Stallman in 1986 as part of his GNU system, after his GNU Emacs was "reasonably stable". GDB is free software released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Initial release: 1986
π The Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML; ISO 8879:1986) is a standard for defining generalized markup languages for documents.
π§ In machine learning, backpropagation is a widely used algorithm for training feedforward artificial neural networks or other parameterized networks with differentiable nodes. In 1986, David E. Rumelhart et al. published an experimental analysis of the technique. This contributed to the popularization of backpropagation and helped to initiate an active period of research in multilayer perceptrons.
π§ The term Deep Learning was introduced to the machine learning community by Rina Dechter in 1986.
π gnuplot is a command-line and GUI program that can generate two- and three-dimensional plots of functions, data, and data fits. The program runs on all major computers and operating systems (Linux, Unix, Microsoft Windows, macOS, FreeDOS, and many others). Initial release: 1986
π The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is an optimizing compiler produced by the GNU Project supporting various programming languages, hardware architectures and operating systems. When it was first released in 1987 by Richard Stallman, GCC 1.0 was named the GNU C Compiler since it only handled the C programming language. GCC was first released March 22, 1987, available by FTP from MIT.
π Perl is a family of two high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages. Perl was developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. First appeared: December 18, 1987
π Self is an object-oriented programming language based on the concept of prototypes. Self began as a dialect of Smalltalk, being dynamically typed and using just-in-time compilation (JIT) as well as the prototype-based approach to objects. Self was designed mostly by David Ungar and Randall Smith in 1986 while working at Xerox PARC. First appeared: 1987
π SQL was adopted as a standard by the ANSI in 1986 as SQL-86 and the ISO in 1987.
π Wolfram Mathematica (also known as Mathematica) is a software system with built-in libraries for several areas of technical computing that allows machine learning, statistics, symbolic computation, data manipulation, network analysis, time series analysis, NLP, optimization, plotting functions and various types of data, implementation of algorithms, creation of user interfaces, and interfacing with programs written in other programming languages. Initial release: June 23, 1988
π Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a text-based chat system for instant messaging. IRC is designed for group communication in discussion forums, called channels, but also allows one-on-one communication via private messages as well as chat and data transfer, including file sharing. Introduced: Late August, 1988
π The Morris worm or Internet worm of November 2, 1988, is one of the oldest computer worms distributed via the Internet, and the first to gain significant mainstream media attention.
π X.509 is an International Telecommunication Union (ITU) standard defining the format of public key certificates. X.509 First published 1.0 at November 25, 1988
π GNU Make (short gmake) is the standard implementation of Make for Linux and macOS. It provides several extensions over the original Make, such as conditionals. It also provides many built-in functions which can be used to eliminate the need for shell-scripting in the makefile rules as well as to manipulate the variables set and used in the makefile. First release: 1988
π AWK was significantly revised and expanded in 1985-88, resulting in the GNU AWK implementation written by Paul Rubin, Jay Fenlason, and Richard Stallman, released in 1988.
π’ The Open Software Foundation (OSF) was a not-for-profit industry consortium for creating an open standard for an implementation of the operating system Unix. It was formed in 1988.
π The Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) is a family of standards specified by the IEEE Computer Society for maintaining compatibility between operating systems. POSIX defines both the system- and user-level application programming interfaces (API). Started: 1988
π The concept of data warehousing dates back to the late 1980s when IBM researchers Barry Devlin and Paul Murphy developed the "business data warehouse". In 1988, Barry Devlin and Paul Murphy publish the article "An architecture for a business and information system" where they introduce the term "business data warehouse".
π Kerberos is a computer-network authentication protocol that works on the basis of tickets to allow nodes communicating over a non-secure network to prove their identity to one another in a secure manner. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) developed Kerberos in 1988 to protect network services provided by Project Athena. Kerberos version 4, the first public version, was released on January 24, 1989.
π Microsoft SQL Server is a proprietary relational database management system developed by Microsoft. As a database server, it is a software product with the primary function of storing and retrieving data as requested by other software applications. Initial release: April 24, 1989
βοΈ Bash is a Unix shell and command language written by Brian Fox for the GNU Project as a free software replacement for the Bourne shell. First released in 1989, it has been used as the default login shell for most Linux distributions. Initial release: June 8, 1989
π The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. Development of HTTP was initiated by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1989 and summarized in a simple document describing the behavior of a client and a server using the first HTTP protocol version that was named 0.9.
1990-94β
π groff (also called GNU troff) is a typesetting system that creates formatted output when given plain text mixed with formatting commands. The first version, 0.3.1, was released June 1990.
π Concurrent Versions System (CVS, also known as the Concurrent Versioning System) is a revision control system originally developed by Dick Grune in July 1986. Initial release: November 19, 1990
π CERN httpd (later also known as W3C httpd) is an early, now discontinued, web server (HTTP) daemon originally developed at CERN from 1990 onwards by Tim Berners-Lee, Ari Luotonen and Henrik Frystyk Nielsen. Implemented in C, it was the first web server software. Initial release: 24 December 1990
π In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee's proposals for hypertext implicitly introduced the idea of a URL as a short string representing a resource that is the target of a hyperlink.
π The first web browser, WorldWideWeb, was developed in 1990 by Tim Berners-Lee for the NeXT Computer and introduced to his colleagues at CERN in March 1991.
π The Linux kernel is a free and open-source, monolithic, modular, multitasking, Unix-like operating system kernel. It was originally authored in 1991 by Linus Torvalds for his i386-based PC. In April 1991, Linus Torvalds, at the time a 21-year-old computer science student at the University of Helsinki, Finland, started working on some simple ideas for an operating system inspired by UNIX, for a personal computer. He started with a task switcher in Intel 80386 assembly language and a terminal driver.
π On 17 September 1991, Torvalds prepared version 0.01 of Linux and put on the "ftp.funet.fi" β FTP server of the Finnish University and Research Network (FUNET). It was not even executable since its code still needed Minix for compilation and play. On 5 October 1991, Torvalds announced the first "official" version of Linux, version 0.02. At this point, Linux was able to run Bash, GCC, and some other GNU utilities.
π Vim (a contraction of Vi IMproved) is a free and open-source, screen-based text editor program. It is an improved clone of Bill Joy's vi. Vim's author, Bram Moolenaar, derived Vim from a port of the Stevie editor for Amiga and released a version to the public in 1991. Initial release: 2 November 1991
π Python is a high-level, interpreted, general-purpose programming language. Its design philosophy emphasizes code readability with the use of significant indentation. Guido van Rossum began working on Python in the late 1980s as a successor to the ABC programming language and first released it in 1991 as Python 0.9.0.
π§ In 1991, the autoencoder was first proposed as a nonlinear generalization of principal components analysis (PCA) by Kramer.
π Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) is an encryption program that provides cryptographic privacy and authentication for data communication. PGP is used for signing, encrypting, and decrypting texts, e-mails, files, directories, and whole disk partitions and to increase the security of e-mail communications. Phil Zimmermann developed PGP in 1991.
π MD5 is one in a series of message digest algorithms designed by Professor Ronald Rivest of MIT (Rivest, 1992). When analytic work indicated that MD5's predecessor MD4 was likely to be insecure, Rivest designed MD5 in 1991 as a secure replacement. First published: April 1992
π libwww (Library World Wide Web) is a modular client-side web API for Unix and Windows. It is also the name of the reference implementation of the libwww API. In 1991 and 1992, Tim Berners-Lee and a student at CERN named Jean-FranΓ§ois Groff rewrote various components of the original WorldWideWeb browser for the NeXTstep operating system in portable C code, in order to demonstrate the potential of the World Wide Web. Initial release: 1.0, November 1992
π’ In November 1992 the IETF "URI Working Group" met for the first time.
π CTAN (an acronym for "Comprehensive TeX Archive Network") is the authoritative place where TeX related material and software can be found for download. CTAN was built in 1992, by Rainer SchΓΆpf and Joachim Schrod in Germany, Sebastian Rahtz in the UK, and George Greenwade in the U.S. CTAN was officially announced at the EuroTeX conference at Aston University, 1993. The WEB server itself is maintained by Gerd Neugebauer.
π NCSA Mosaic is a discontinued web browser, one of the first to be widely available. It was instrumental in popularizing the World Wide Web and the general Internet by integrating multimedia such as text and graphics. Mosaic is based on the libwww library. Mosaic was the first browser that could submit forms to a server. Initial release: 0.5 / January 23, 1993
π R was started by professors Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman as a programming language to teach introductory statistics at the University of Auckland. First appeared: August 1993
βοΈ Debian, also known as Debian GNU/Linux, is a Linux distribution composed of free and open-source software, developed by the community-supported Debian Project. The first version of Debian (0.01) was released on September 15, 1993.
βοΈ CFEngine is an open-source configuration management system, written by Mark Burgess. Its primary function is to provide automated configuration and maintenance of large-scale computer systems. The CFEngine project began in 1993 as a way for author Mark Burgess to get his work done by automating the management of a small group of workstations in the Department of Theoretical Physics. Initial release: 1993
π The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. Initial release: 1993
π Common Gateway Interface (CGI) is an interface specification that enables web servers to execute an external program, typically to process user requests. In 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) team wrote the specification for calling command line executables on the www-talk mailing list.
π NCSA HTTPd is an early, now discontinued, web server originally developed at the NCSA at the University of Illinois at UrbanaβChampaign by Robert McCool and others. First released in 1993, it was among the earliest web servers developed.
π Linux version 0.95 was the first to be capable of running the X Window System. In March 1994, Linux 1.0.0 was released with 176,250 lines of code. It was the first version suitable for use in production environments.
π’ In June 1994, the IETF published Berners-Lee's first Request for Comments that acknowledged the existence of URLs and URNs.
π The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 and led by Tim Berners-Lee. Formation: 1 October 1994
π Perl 5.000 was released on October 17, 1994. It was a nearly complete rewrite of the interpreter, and it added many new features to the language, including objects, references, lexical (my) variables, and modules
π Netscape Navigator was a proprietary web browser, and the original browser of the Netscape line, from versions 1 to 4.08, and 9.x. It was the flagship product of the Netscape Communications Corp and was the dominant web browser in terms of usage share in the 1990s. Initial release: 15 December 1994
π©· The QR code system was invented in 1994, at the Denso Wave automotive products company, in Japan.
1995β
π Transport Layer Security (TLS) is a cryptographic protocol designed to provide communications security over a computer network. Netscape developed the original SSL protocols, and Taher Elgamal, chief scientist at Netscape Communications from 1995 to 1998, has been described as the "father of SSL". SSL Version 2.0, after being released in February 1995 was quickly discovered to contain a number of security and usability flaws.
π Java is a high-level, class-based, object-oriented programming language that is designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible. Java was originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems. Java SE defines a range of general-purpose APIs and also includes the Java Language Specification and the Java Virtual Machine Specification. First appeared: May 23, 1995
π MySQL is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). MySQL is free and open-source software under the terms of the GNU General Public License, and is also available under a variety of proprietary licenses. Initial release: 23 May 1995
π PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared toward web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994. PHP First appeared: June 8, 1995
π CPAN was conceived in 1993 and has been active online since October 1995. It is based on the CTAN model and began as a place to unify the structure of scattered Perl archives. On October 26, 1995, the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) was established as a repository for the Perl language and Perl modules.
π Ruby is an interpreted, high-level, general-purpose programming language which supports multiple programming paradigms. The first public release of Ruby 0.95 was announced on Japanese domestic newsgroups on December 21, 1995.
π In December 1995, Sun Microsystems and Netscape announced JavaScript in a press release. The first JavaScript engine was created by Brendan Eich in 1995 for the Netscape Navigator web browser. It was a rudimentary interpreter for the nascent language Eich invented.
π The predecessor of NumPy, Numeric, was originally created by Jim Hugunin with contributions from several other developers. Initial release: 1995
π The Apache HTTP Server is a free and open-source cross-platform web server software, released under the terms of Apache License 2.0. Apache is developed and maintained by an open community of developers under the auspices of the Apache Software Foundation. Initial release: 1995
π SHA-1 (Secure Hash Algorithm 1) is a hash function which takes an input and produces a 160-bit (20-byte) hash value known as a message digest β typically rendered as 40 hexadecimal digits. It was designed by the United States National Security Agency, and is a U.S. Federal Information Processing Standard. First published: 1995
π SSH was designed as a replacement for Telnet and for unsecured remote shell protocols such as the Berkeley rsh and the related rlogin and rexec protocols. In 1995, Tatu YlΓΆnen, a researcher at Helsinki University of Technology, Finland, designed the first version of the protocol (now called SSH-1) prompted by a password-sniffing attack at his university network.
1996β
βοΈ Debian first stable version (1.1) was released on June 17, 1996.
π PostgreSQL also known as Postgres, is a free and open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) emphasizing extensibility and SQL compliance. In 1996, the project was renamed to PostgreSQL to reflect its support for SQL. Initial release: 8 July 1996
π Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML. Initial release: 17 December 1996
π’ The Open Group is a global consortium that seeks to "enable the achievement of business objectives" by developing "open, vendor-neutral technology standards and certifications." It was established in 1996 when X/Open merged with the Open Software Foundation.
π IntelliSense is Microsoft's implementation of code completion, best known in Visual Studio. It was first introduced as a feature of a mainstream Microsoft product in 1996 building on many already invented concepts of code completion and syntax checking.
π HTTP/1 was finalized and fully documented (as version 1.0) in 1996.
π In 1996, the iframe tag was introduced by Internet Explorer; like the object element, it can load or fetch content asynchronously.
π Newer versions of SSL/TLS are based on SSL 3.0, released in 1996.
1997β
π Visual Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) from Microsoft. It is used to develop computer programs, as well as websites, web apps, web services and mobile apps. Microsoft first released Visual Studio in 1997, bundling many of its programming tools together for the first time. Visual Studio 97 / 1997-03-19
π’ The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary (abbreviated CatB) is an essay, and later a book, by Eric S. Raymond on software engineering methods. The essay was first presented by the author at the Linux Kongress on May 27, 1997 in WΓΌrzburg (Germany) and was published as the second chapter of the same-titled book in 1999.
π The first edition of ECMA-262 (ECMAScript) was adopted by the Ecma General Assembly in June 1997.
π The unified modeling language (UML) is a general-purpose visual modeling language that is intended to provide a standard way to visualize the design of a system. UML 1.1 was submitted to the OMG in August 1997 and adopted by the OMG in November 1997.
π The Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) is R's central software repository, supported by the R Foundation. CRAN was created by Kurt Hornik and Friedrich Leisch in 1997, with the name paralleling other early packing systems such as TeX's CTAN (released 1992) and Perl's CPAN (released 1995).
π Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans rewrote the parser in 1997 and formed the base of PHP 3, changing the language's name to the recursive acronym PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.
π§ A recurrent neural network (RNN) is a class of artificial neural networks where connections between nodes can create a cycle, allowing output from some nodes to affect subsequent input to the same nodes. This allows it to exhibit temporal dynamic behavior. Long short-term memory (LSTM) networks were invented by Hochreiter and Schmidhuber in 1997 and set accuracy records in multiple applications domains.
π Google Search is a search engine operated by Google. Google Search uses algorithms to analyze and rank websites based on their relevance to the search query. Launched: 1997
1998β
π Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. First published: February 10, 1998
π’ The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is the steward of the Open Source Definition, the set of rules that define open source software. The organization was founded in late February 1998 by Bruce Perens and Eric S. Raymond, part of a group inspired by the Netscape Communications Corporation publishing the source code for its flagship Netscape Communicator product.
βοΈ Advanced package tool, or APT, is a free-software user interface that works with core libraries to handle the installation and removal of software on Debian, and Debian-based Linux distributions. APT Initial release: 31 March 1998
π The Document Object Model (DOM) is a cross-platform and language-independent interface that treats an XML or HTML document as a tree structure wherein each node is an object representing a part of the document. First published: October 1, 1998
π OpenSSL is a software library for applications that secure communications over computer networks against eavesdropping or need to identify the party at the other end. It is widely used by Internet servers, including the majority of HTTPS websites. The OpenSSL project was founded in 1998 to provide a free set of encryption tools for the code used on the Internet. Initial release: 23 December 1998
π LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python) is an acronym denoting one of the most common software stacks for many of the web's most popular applications. The acronym LAMP was coined by Michael Kunze in the December 1998 issue of Computertechnik, a German computing magazine, as he demonstrated that a bundle of free and open-source software "could be a feasible alternative to expensive commercial packages".
π In 1998, the Ruby Application Archive was launched by Matsumoto, along with a simple English-language homepage for Ruby.
π’ The Halloween documents comprise a series of confidential Microsoft memoranda on potential strategies relating to free software, open-source software, and to Linux in particular, and a series of media responses to these memoranda. Both the leaked documents and the responses were published by open-source software advocate Eric S. Raymond in 1998.
π In 1998, the Microsoft Outlook Web Access team developed the concept behind the XMLHttpRequest scripting object. XMLHttpRequest (XHR) is an API in the form of an object whose methods transfer data between a web browser and a web server. The object is provided by the browser's JavaScript environment.
π AppArmor ("Application Armor") is a Linux kernel security module that allows the system administrator to restrict programs' capabilities with per-program profiles. Profiles can allow capabilities like network access, raw socket access, and the permission to read, write, or execute files on matching paths. Initial release: 1998
π Perl 5 gained widespread popularity in the late 1990s as a CGI scripting language, in part due to its powerful regular expression and string parsing abilities.
βοΈ Between 1998 and 2004, CFEngine grew in adoption along with the popularity of Linux as a computing platform.
1999β
π TLS 1.0 was first defined in RFC 2246 in January 1999 as an upgrade of SSL Version 3.0.
π’ Salesforce, Inc. is an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides applications focused on sales, customer service, marketing automation, e-commerce, analytics, artificial intelligence, and application development. Salesforce was founded on March 8, 1999 by former Oracle executive Marc Benioff, together with Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff, and Frank Dominguez as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company.
π’ The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is an American nonprofit corporation to support a number of open source software projects. The ASF was formed from a group of developers of the Apache HTTP Server, and incorporated on March 25, 1999.
π HotSpot, released as Java HotSpot Performance Engine, is a Java virtual machine for desktop and server computers, developed by Sun Microsystems and now maintained and distributed by Oracle Corporation. It features improved performance via methods such as just-in-time compilation and adaptive optimization. The Java HotSpot Performance Engine was released on April 27, 1999, built on technologies from an implementation of the programming language Smalltalk named Strongtalk. Initially available as an add-on for Java 1.2, HotSpot became the default Sun JVM in Java 1.3.
βοΈ VMware Workstation Pro (known as VMware Workstation until release of VMware Workstation 12 in 2015) is a hosted hypervisor that runs on x64 versions of Windows and Linux operating systems. VMware Workstation Initial release: 15 May 1999
βοΈ RRDtool (round-robin database tool) aims to handle time series data such as network bandwidth, temperatures or CPU load. RRDtool Initial release: July 16, 1999
π GnuPG was initially developed by Werner Koch. The first production version, version 1.0.0, was released on September 7, 1999, almost two years after the first GnuPG release (version 0.0.0).
π’ Extreme programming (XP) is a software development methodology intended to improve software quality and responsiveness to changing customer requirements. Kent Beck developed extreme programming during his work. He began to refine the development methodology used in the project and wrote a book on the methodology (Extreme Programming Explained, published in October 1999).
π’ The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master is a book about computer programming and software engineering, written by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas and published in October 1999.
π GNU nano is a text editor for Unix-like computing systems or operating environments using a command line interface. Initial release: 18 November 1999
π OpenSSH is a suite of secure networking utilities based on the Secure Shell (SSH) protocol, which provides a secure channel over an unsecured network in a clientβserver architecture. OpenSSH first appeared in OpenBSD 2.6. The first portable release was made in October 1999. Initial release: 1 December 1999
π Jakarta EE, formerly Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) and Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE), is a set of specifications, extending Java SE with specifications for enterprise features such as distributed computing and web services. Initial specification release: 1999-12-17
π SourceForge, founded in 1999 by VA Software, was the first provider of a centralized location for free and open-source software developers to control and manage software development and offering this service without charge.