Timeline - 1930-89
1930s
📜 Lambda calculus is a formal system in mathematical logic for expressing computation based on function abstraction and application using variable binding and substitution, introduced by mathematician Alonzo Church in the 1930s as part of an investigation into the foundations of mathematics, though the original system was shown to be logically inconsistent in 1935.
📜 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, invented by Alan Turing in 1936 and named by his doctoral advisor Alonzo Church in a later review.
1940s
🎨 Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a theory of psychological health introduced by Abraham Maslow in his 1943 paper "A Theory of Human Motivation," published in the journal Psychological Review, proposing that human needs can be classified into a hierarchy ranging from basic physiological needs to self-actualization.
📜 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, with the first assembly code used to represent machine code instructions appearing 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 behavior 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.
⚙️ The caesium atomic clock was first built in 1955 by Louis Essen at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in the UK, providing a form of timekeeping far more stable and precise than astronomical observations, and laying the foundation for the modern definition of the SI second and Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).
🎨 Parkinson's law is the adage that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion," first articulated by Cyril Northcote Parkinson as a humorous essay published in The Economist in 1955, drawing on his experience of bureaucratic growth in the British Civil Service.
📜 Lisp is a family of programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized prefix notation, originally specified in 1958 when John McCarthy developed it at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), making it the second-oldest high-level programming language still in common use.
📜 ALGOL (short for "Algorithmic Language") is a family of imperative computer programming languages originally developed in 1958 that heavily influenced many other languages and became the standard method for algorithm description.
🧠 In machine learning, the perceptron (or McCulloch-Pitts neuron) is an algorithm for supervised learning of binary classifiers, with the first implementation being 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
🔐 Passwords have been used with computers since the earliest days of computing. The Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS), an operating system introduced at MIT in 1961, was the first computer system to implement password login.
⚙️ In May 1961, IBM engineer Bob Bemer submitted a proposal to the American Standards Association's (ASA) X3.2 subcommittee, initiating formal standardization work on ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange). Bemer, who also invented the escape sequence, later became known as "the father of ASCII."
📜 Simula is the name of two simulation programming languages developed in the 1960s at the Norwegian Computing Center in Oslo by Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard, with Simula 67 introducing objects, classes, inheritance, subclasses, virtual procedures, coroutines, discrete event simulation, and garbage collection, first appearing in 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 it, even though Henry J. Kelley had a continuous precursor of backpropagation already in 1960 in the context of control theory.
🎨 Diffusion of innovations is a theory of how, why, and at what rate new ideas and technology spread, developed by sociologist Everett Rogers, who synthesized over 508 diffusion studies into his 1962 book Diffusion of Innovations, introducing the classification of adopters into innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards.
⚙️ The first edition of ASCII (ASA X3.4-1963) was published in 1963, coinciding with the introduction of the Teletype Model 33. It was first used commercially as a seven-bit teleprinter code for AT&T's TWX (TeletypeWriter eXchange) network.
🖥️ 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.
🧠 Expert systems were formally introduced around 1965 by the Stanford Heuristic Programming Project led by Edward Feigenbaum, who is sometimes termed the "father of expert systems," with Dendral — a system designed to identify the molecular structure of unknown organic compounds from mass spectrometry data — being among the earliest, developed with Bruce Buchanan and Joshua Lederberg.
📜 Amdahl's law, a formula limiting the speedup of a task as resources are added to the system executing that task, was presented by Gene Amdahl in his paper "Validity of the Single Processor Approach to Achieving Large-Scale Computing Capabilities" at the AFIPS Spring Joint Computer Conference in April 1967.
🎨 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.
🔐 The PIN originated with the introduction of the automated teller machine (ATM) in 1967, as an efficient way for banks to dispense cash to their customers. The first ATM system was that of Barclays in London, in 1967; it accepted cheques with machine-readable encoding, rather than cards, and matched the PIN to the cheque.
⚙️ Pseudoterminals appeared as early as 1967 in the DEC PDP-6 Timesharing Monitor, where they were primarily used to implement batch processing.
🎨 The Mother of All Demos, a 90-minute live demonstration by Douglas Engelbart at the ACM/IEEE Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco on December 9, 1968, introduced the oN-Line System (NLS) and demonstrated windows, hypertext, the computer mouse, video conferencing, word processing, and a collaborative real-time editor.
🖥️ ed is a line editor for Unix and Unix-like operating systems, developed by Ken Thompson in August 1969 on a PDP-7 at AT&T Bell Labs as one of the first three key elements of the Unix operating system alongside the assembler and shell.
📜 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, first released in 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 of which became the technical foundation of the Internet, established in 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, developed as secret technology beginning in 1969 with RFC 15.
⚙️ TENEX was an operating system developed in 1969 by BBN for the PDP-10, which later formed the basis for Digital Equipment Corporation's TOPS-20 operating system. It introduced a full virtual memory system — allowing every program to access an address space of 262,144 words — implemented with a custom BBN-designed hardware pager, and its EXEC command interpreter pioneered command completion, expanding partial command words into complete words when the user pressed the escape key, a feature still found in modern shells such as tcsh.
1970-74
📊 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, introduced on April 16, 1971.
⚙️ mail is a command-line email client for Unix and Unix-like operating systems, first released on November 3, 1971.
📜 roff is a typesetting markup language and the first Unix text-formatting computer program, serving as a predecessor of the nroff and troff document processing systems, first released on 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.
📜 yacc (Yet Another Compiler Compiler) is a parser generator for context-free grammars that produces C code for LALR parsers. It was first developed by Stephen C. Johnson at Bell Labs in 1971, inspired by Donald Knuth's work on LR parsing; the self-deprecating name reflected the existence of other compiler-compilers at Bell Labs from the Multics project. By 1973 it had reached a form recognizably similar to its C implementation, though early versions were extremely slow and Johnson rewrote it over a dozen times to improve performance by a factor of roughly 10,000.
📜 ML (Meta Language) was released in 1972 by Robin Milner at Stanford (and later Cambridge) as the meta-language for the LCF (Logic for Computable Functions) proof assistant, providing the foundational type system for OCaml.
📜 C is a middle-level, general-purpose computer programming language created by Dennis Ritchie between 1972 and 1973 at Bell Labs to construct utilities running on Unix, remaining very widely used and influential due to its design that cleanly reflects the capabilities of targeted CPUs.
📜 Smalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamically typed reflective programming language designed for educational use as the product of research led by Alan Kay at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), with the first system (Smalltalk-72) running on a Xerox Alto and designed to support Kay's new object-oriented programming paradigm.
🏢 In June 1972, five IBM engineers from the AI department founded SAP (Systemanalyse und Programmentwicklung, "System Analysis and Program Development") as a private partnership under German Civil Code, launching its first commercial product, the RF financial accounting system, in 1973.
🎨 The Xerox Alto, developed at Xerox PARC with first machines introduced on March 1, 1973, was the first computer to demonstrate the desktop metaphor and a bitmapped graphical user interface, later heavily influencing the design of the Macintosh.
⚙️ Ethernet, a networking technology for local area networks, was invented by Robert Metcalfe at Xerox PARC and first ran on May 22, 1973, at a bit rate of 2.94 Mbps; Metcalfe named the concept "Ethernet" in a memo written around that time.
⚙️ 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, 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, with the specification of the resulting protocol (TCP/IP) 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 appearing in 1974.
🧠 MYCIN is an early backward chaining expert system that uses artificial intelligence to identify bacteria causing severe infections, such as bacteremia and meningitis, and to recommend antibiotics, with the dosage adjusted for patient's body weight, developed over five or six years in the early 1970s at Stanford University by Edward H. Shortliffe under the direction of Bruce G. Buchanan and others at the Stanford Heuristic Programming Project.
1975-79
🔐 The Data Encryption Standard is a symmetric-key algorithm for the encryption of digital data whose short key length of 56 bits makes it too insecure for modern applications, yet 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 March 17, 1975, the proposed DES was published in the Federal Register, with public comments requested and two open workshops held in the following year to discuss the proposed standard.
🏢 The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering by Fred Brooks was first published in 1975, drawing on his experience managing IBM's OS/360 project to argue that adding manpower to a software project that is already late makes it later, an idea that became known as Brooks's law.
⚙️ The cron command-line utility is a job scheduler on Unix-like operating systems used to schedule jobs (commands or shell scripts), also known as cron jobs, to run periodically at fixed times, dates, or intervals, first released in May 1975.
📜 lex is a lexical analyzer generator that reads a specification of tokens and produces C code for a lexer. It was developed at Bell Labs by Mike Lesk and Eric Schmidt and first documented in October 1975 as Computing Science Technical Report #39. The same year, Stephen C. Johnson published the formal yacc paper; among the first languages implemented with yacc were AWK, C++, eqn, and Pic.
🖥️ Make is a build automation tool that automatically builds executable programs and libraries from source code by reading files called Makefiles that specify how to derive the target program, first appearing in April 1976.
⚙️ Metcalfe and Boggs published "Ethernet: Distributed Packet Switching for Local Computer Networks" in Communications of the ACM in July 1976.
🖥️ vi is a screen-oriented text editor originally created for the Unix operating system, with the original code 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 as the earliest publicly known work proposing 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, 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 widely used for secure data transmission, with the acronym "RSA" coming from the surnames of Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman, who publicly described the algorithm in 1977.
🔐 The Data Encryption Standard was standardized in January 1977, despite its short 56-bit key length making it too insecure for modern applications, yet it has been highly influential in the advancement of cryptography.
🖥️ Bill Joy's ex 1.1 was released as part of the first Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) Unix release in March 1978, with many of the ideas in this visual mode 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 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.
🏢 Taiichi Ohno published his seminal book, "Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production," in 1978, formalizing the philosophy for a global audience.
📜 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.
🖥️ The C shell (csh) is a Unix shell created by Bill Joy while he was a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley in the late 1970s, and distributed beginning with the 2BSD release of the Berkeley Software Distribution which Joy first distributed in 1978. Its syntax is modelled on the C programming language, and other early contributors to the ideas or the code were Michael Ubell, Eric Allman, Mike O'Brien and Jim Kulp.
📜 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 developed by Stephen Bourne at Bell Labs and 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.
📜 Both lex and yacc became standard tools in the Unix toolchain with the release of Version 7 Unix in 1979, establishing them as foundational components for compiler and language development on Unix systems.
📊 Oracle Database (commonly referred to as Oracle DBMS, Oracle Autonomous Database, or simply Oracle) is a proprietary multi-model database management system produced and marketed by Oracle Corporation, first released in 1979.
⚙️ Jef Raskin, an Apple employee, initiated the Macintosh project in 1979, envisioning an affordable, easy-to-use computer for the masses. He named the project after his favorite apple variety, the McIntosh.
🧠 An independent evaluation of MYCIN was conducted in 1979 at Stanford Medical School, in which the system received an acceptability rating of 65%, comparable to or exceeding the 42.5% to 62.5% ratings given to faculty physicians, demonstrating that rule-based expert systems could achieve performance on par with human specialists in targeted diagnostic tasks.
🎨 Prospect theory is a theory of behavioral economics, judgment, and decision-making that describes how people choose between probabilistic alternatives, introduced in a 1979 Econometrica paper, "Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk," by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky as a descriptive alternative to expected utility theory.
🧩 Usenet, a worldwide distributed discussion system, was conceived in 1979 when Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis of Duke University came up with the idea as a replacement for a local announcement program, with the public release of the news software written by Steve Daniel and Truscott.
1980-84
⚙️ Digital Equipment Corporation, Intel, and Xerox (DIX) published version 1.0 of "The Ethernet: A Local Area Network — Data Link Layer and Physical Layer Specifications," known as the "Blue Book," on September 30, 1980.
📜 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.
🧩 Usenet was connected to ARPANET through UC Berkeley in 1980, marking its initial link to the broader network beyond the original UUCP dial-up connections.
⚙️ Steve Jobs took over the Macintosh project in 1981 after being removed from the Lisa team, redirecting the design toward a Xerox PARC-inspired graphical user interface while retaining Jef Raskin's vision of producing computers by the millions.
⚙️ 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 network, first released in June 1981.
🧩 By June 1, 1981, the UUCP/Usenet network had expanded to include dozens of connected systems across universities and research institutions.
⚙️ IPv4 is described in RFC 791 (1981).
🖥️ tcsh, an enhanced C shell, has its origins in Ken Greer's work at Carnegie Mellon University to implement TENEX-style filename completion, which he began in September 1975 and finally merged into the C shell in December 1981. The "t" in tcsh comes from the "T" in TENEX, the operating system whose command-completion feature inspired Greer.
⚙️ In March 1982, the US Department of Defense declared TCP/IP as the standard for all military computer networking.
🏢 The Mythical Man-Month was reprinted with corrections in 1982, by which point Brooks's law had become a foundational principle in software project management
📊 Microsoft Multiplan, an early spreadsheet program developed by Microsoft, was released in August 1982.
📜 Revision Control System (RCS) is an early implementation of a version control system (VCS), 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 and is currently maintained by the GNU Project.
🖥️ John Warnock and Charles Geschke left Xerox PARC and founded Adobe Systems in December 1982. They began developing PostScript, a page description language drawing on Warnock's earlier Interpress research at Xerox, with the goal of providing a device-independent way to describe printed pages.
📜 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.
⚙️ 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.
📊 Lotus 1-2-3 was officially released for the IBM PC on January 26, 1983, quickly becoming the platform's "killer app" by integrating spreadsheet, graphing, and data management capabilities into a single, high-performance program written in x86 assembly.
🖥️ KornShell (ksh) is a Unix shell developed by David Korn at Bell Labs in the early 1980s and announced at USENIX on July 14, 1983. It is backward-compatible with the Bourne shell and includes many features of the C shell, inspired by the requests of Bell Labs users.
⚙️ The r-commands (including rlogin, rsh, and rcp) were fully incorporated into 4.2BSD in August 1983, a release that provided the mature interprocess communication (IPC) primitives that enabled them to become the de facto standards for Unix networking throughout the 1980s.
📜 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.
⚙️ The Internet Engineering Task Force published the DNS original specifications in RFC 882 and RFC 883 in November 1983.
⚙️ The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) protocol was implemented on the ARPANET in 1983.
⚙️ The modern Unix pseudoterminal interface originated in 1983 during the development of Eighth Edition Unix and was widely popularized following its inclusion in the 4.2BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) release.
⚙️ In 1983, IEEE published the 802.3 standard as a draft for 10 Mbps Ethernet over coaxial cable up to 500 meters (10BASE5).
🖥️ In the spring of 1983, Steve Jobs visited Adobe and was dazzled by PostScript's potential for the Macintosh. Apple and Adobe signed a PostScript licensing deal in December 1983, with Apple investing in Adobe and agreeing to use PostScript in its upcoming laser printer.
⚙️ The original Macintosh 128K was introduced by Steve Jobs on January 24, 1984, at a price of US$2,495. It was the first commercially successful personal computer to feature a mouse-driven graphical user interface, using a Motorola 68000 processor and a 9-inch monochrome display.
⚙️ In 1984, four UC Berkeley students, Douglas Terry, Mark Painter, David Riggle, and Songnian Zhou, wrote the first Unix name server implementation for the Berkeley Internet Name Domain, commonly referred to as BIND.
🏢 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.
🏢 Eliyahu M. Goldratt introduced the Theory of Constraints to a wide audience in his business novel, The Goal, in 1984.
📜 TeX has been the official typesetting package for the GNU operating system since 1984.
🧠 The seminal book Rule Based Expert Systems: The MYCIN Experiments of the Stanford Heuristic Programming Project was published in 1984 by Bruce Buchanan and Edward Shortliffe, documenting the MYCIN system and EMYCIN (Essential MYCIN) — an expert system shell stripped of its medical knowledge base — which enabled construction of rule-based expert systems across diverse domains and contributed to the rapid proliferation of expert systems throughout the 1980s, when two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies applied the technology in daily business activities.
1985
🖥️ Apple and Adobe announced the LaserWriter on January 23, 1985 — the first printer to ship with PostScript — at Apple's annual shareholder meeting. Aldus simultaneously announced PageMaker, triggering the desktop publishing revolution.
📜 GNU Emacs is a free software text editor created by GNU Project founder Richard Stallman based on the Emacs editor developed for Unix operating systems, written in C and providing Emacs Lisp (also implemented in C) as an extension language, with version 13 as the first public release on March 20, 1985.
🏢 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. It was published in March 1985.
🖥️ Aldus PageMaker 1.0 was released in July 1985 for the Macintosh with native PostScript support, becoming the first widely adopted desktop publishing application and cementing PostScript as the standard page description language for professional printing. PageMaker won a Codie Award for Best New Use of a Computer in 1986.
📊 Microsoft Excel was first released for the Macintosh on September 30, 1985, and was the first spreadsheet to allow the user to define the appearance of spreadsheets.
📊 Lotus 1-2-3 Release 2.0 was launched in September 1985, introducing support for macros, add-ins, and expanded memory (EMS), which solidified its dominance in the corporate spreadsheet market.
⚙️ Microsoft Windows was first announced by Bill Gates on November 10, 1983, as a graphical user interface for MS-DOS, and Windows 1.0 was officially released on November 20, 1985.
📜 LaTeX was created in the early 1980s by Leslie Lamport while working at Stanford Research Institute (SRI), originally written to fulfill his own need for TeX macros but designed with the intent to be made into a general package usable by others, with versions released in 1984 and 1985.
🏢 The Free Software Foundation was founded in 1985 as a non-profit corporation supporting free software development.
📜 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"), first appearing in 1985 and initially standardized in 1998 as ISO/IEC 14882:1998, which was subsequently amended by the C++03, C++11, C++14, and C++17 standards.
📜 GNU Bison, a free yacc-compatible parser generator, was originally written by Robert Corbett in 1985. Richard Stallman subsequently made it fully yacc-compatible as part of the GNU Project, with Wilfred Hansen of Carnegie Mellon University adding multi-character string literals and other features.
1986
🏢 Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka introduced the term "scrum" in the context of product development in their Harvard Business Review article "The New New Product Development Game" in January–February 1986.
📜 GDB is free software released under the GNU General Public License, first written by Richard Stallman in 1986 as part of his GNU system after GNU Emacs reached a "reasonably stable" state.
🌐 The Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML; ISO 8879:1986) is a standard for defining generalized markup languages for documents.
📜 Dick Grune at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam developed an early form of CVS in July 1986 as a set of shell scripts wrapping RCS, to allow multiple developers to work on the same files concurrently.
🧠 In machine learning, backpropagation is a widely used algorithm for training feedforward artificial neural networks or other parameterized networks with differentiable nodes, with David E. Rumelhart et al. publishing an experimental analysis in 1986 that contributed to its popularization and helped initiate an active period of research in multilayer perceptrons.
🧠 The term Deep Learning was introduced to the machine learning community by Rina Dechter in 1986.
📊 gnuplot is a command-line and GUI program that can generate two- and three-dimensional plots of functions, data, and data fits across all major computers and operating systems (Linux, Unix, Microsoft Windows, macOS, FreeDOS, and many others), first released in 1986.
📊 The POSTGRES project officially launched at UC Berkeley in 1986 under the leadership of Michael Stonebraker, aiming to solve the limitations of the relational model by introducing object-relational concepts.
🧩 RFC 977, published in 1986, provided the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) specification for distributing Usenet articles over TCP/IP.
1987
⚙️ The Macintosh SE and Macintosh II were both introduced at the AppleWorld conference in Los Angeles on March 2, 1987. The Macintosh II was Apple's first modular and color-capable Macintosh, breaking from the all-in-one design of earlier models.
📜 The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is an optimizing compiler produced by the GNU Project supporting various programming languages, hardware architectures, and operating systems. Originally named the GNU C Compiler when first released by Richard Stallman on March 22, 1987 (available via FTP from MIT) because it only supported the C programming language, GCC has since evolved to support many more languages.
🏢 "No Silver Bullet — Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering" is an essay by Fred Brooks arguing that no single development in technology or management technique promises an order-of-magnitude improvement in software productivity within a decade, distinguishing "essential" complexity inherent to a problem from "accidental" complexity introduced by tools and processes; first presented at the 1986 IFIP Tenth World Computing Conference and republished in IEEE Computer in April 1987.
📜 flex (Fast Lexical Analyzer Generator) is a free reimplementation of lex that produces faster and more efficient C code for scanners. It was written by Vern Paxson at UC Berkeley around 1987 with inspiration from Van Jacobson, removing the proprietary licensing restrictions that had limited the original AT&T lex's adoption outside commercial Unix environments.
🎨 Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams by Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister was first published in 1987.
⚙️ Windows 2.0, released on December 9, 1987, introduced overlapping windows, desktop icons, and keyboard shortcuts, significantly improving the user experience over the previous version.
📜 Perl is a family of high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier, first appearing on December 18, 1987.
📊 The first Windows version of Excel was released on November 19, 1987, numbered as version 2.0 to be in line with the Macintosh version, and included a run-time version of Windows.
📜 In 1987, a committee of researchers convened to create a standardized, purely functional language, which would come to be known as Haskell.
📜 Self is an object-oriented programming language based on the concept of prototypes, designed mostly by David Ungar and Randall Smith while working at Xerox PARC in 1986. It began as a Smalltalk dialect with dynamic typing, just-in-time compilation (JIT), and a prototype-based approach to objects, first appearing in 1987.
📜 The first implementation of Caml (Categorical Abstract Machine Language) was created by Ascánder Suárez at INRIA in 1987 based on the Categorical Abstract Machine compiling method.
📊 SQL was adopted as a standard by the ANSI in 1986 as SQL-86 and the ISO in 1987.
1988
🎨 Cognitive load theory is an instructional theory that differentiates cognitive load into intrinsic, extraneous, and germane load, developed by educational psychologist John Sweller, who published "Cognitive Load During Problem Solving: Effects on Learning" in Cognitive Science in April 1988, showing that means-ends problem-solving strategies can impose cognitive demands that hinder schema acquisition.
📊 Wolfram Mathematica is a software system with built-in libraries for technical computing including machine learning, statistics, symbolic computation, data manipulation, network analysis, time series analysis, NLP, optimization, plotting, algorithm implementation, user interface creation, and interfacing with programs in other languages, first released on June 23, 1988.
🧩 Joe Becker of Xerox published a draft proposal in August 1988 for an international/multilingual text character encoding system tentatively called "Unicode," outlined in a document entitled Unicode 88, proposing a 16-bit character scheme developed with Lee Collins and Mark Davis of Apple.
🧩 Internet Relay Chat (IRC), a text-based chat system, was created by Jarkko Oikarinen in August 1988 at the University of Oulu, Finland, originally intended to replace a program called MUT (MultiUser Talk) on a BBS called OuluBox.
🐛 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.
🔐 X.509 is an International Telecommunication Union (ITU) standard defining the format of public key certificates, first published on November 25, 1988.
📜 GNU Make (short gmake) is the standard implementation of Make for Linux and macOS, providing several extensions over the original Make such as conditionals, built-in functions to eliminate the need for shell scripting in makefile rules, and the ability to manipulate variables, first released in 1988.
📊 GNU Octave was conceived in 1988 by John W. Eaton at the University of Texas at Austin as a high-level language for numerical computations, originally intended as a companion for a chemical reactor design course.
📜 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.
🏢 The Open Software Foundation (OSF) was a not-for-profit industry consortium formed in 1988 to create an open standard for Unix operating system implementations.
📜 The Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) is a family of standards specified by the IEEE Computer Society for maintaining compatibility between operating systems, defining both system- and user-level application programming interfaces (APIs), developed starting in 1988.
📊 The concept of data warehousing dates back to the late 1980s when IBM researchers Barry Devlin and Paul Murphy developed the "business data warehouse" and published the article "An architecture for a business and information system" in 1988 introducing the term to the broader audience.
🎨 The Design of Everyday Things is a book by cognitive scientist Donald Norman, originally published in 1988 under the title The Psychology of Everyday Things (POET), that describes design principles rooted in cognitive psychology and advocates for user-centered design based on human needs and cognition, with a revised edition released in 2013.
🖥️ The functionality of the original KornShell, ksh88, was used as a basis for the POSIX.2 standard. The ksh88 version, named after 1988, became the default shell on AIX and several other commercial Unix systems.
1989
🔐 Kerberos is a computer-network authentication protocol that works using tickets to allow nodes communicating over non-secure networks to prove their identity to one another securely, developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1988 to protect network services provided by Project Athena. Kerberos version 4, the first public version, was released on January 24, 1989.
📊 Microsoft SQL Server is a proprietary relational database management system developed by Microsoft that functions as a database server with the primary purpose of storing and retrieving data as requested by other software applications, with initial release on April 24, 1989.
📜 Brian Berliner redesigned and rewrote CVS in C in April 1989, vastly improving performance and reliability over Grune's original shell script implementation.
🖥️ 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 on June 8, 1989, and has been used as the default login shell for most Linux distributions.
📊 Lotus 1-2-3 Release 3.0 was released in June 1989 as a major rewrite in the C language, introducing "3D spreadsheets" with multiple worksheets in a single file, though it required newer 80286-based hardware to run.
📊 POSTGRES Version 1 was released to a small group of external users in June 1989, marking the first public implementation of the extensible database system developed at Berkeley.
⚙️ NeXTSTEP 1.0, the object-oriented, multitasking operating system developed by NeXT Computer founded by Steve Jobs after leaving Apple in 1985, was released on September 18, 1989. Built on the Mach kernel and BSD, it would later become the foundation for Mac OS X and modern macOS.
🌐 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.