This page lists some important dates in modern computer science history, starting in the 1970s, with the generalization of personal computers (PCs).
Hardware
| Date | Device | Manufacturer |
|---|---|---|
| 1976 | Apple I | Apple |
| 1981 | The IBM PC (Acorn) | IBM |
| 1983 | Apple Lisa (the first personal computer with a GUI) | Apple |
| 1986 | The Deskpro 386 (32-bit architecture) | Compaq |
| 1993 | The Pentium microprocessor | Intel |
| 2003 | Athlon 64 (The first 64-bit processor) | AMD |
| 2007 | The iPhone | Apple |
| 2010 | The iPad | Apple |
Operating systems
| Date | Event | Developer(s) |
|---|---|---|
| 1971 | Unix | Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy and Joe Ossanna at Bell Labs |
| 1981 | MS-DOS | Microsoft |
| 1983-09-27 | The GNU Project | Richard Stallman |
| 1984-01-24 | The Macintosh System 1 | Apple |
| 1985-11-20 | Windows 1.0 | Microsoft |
| 1991-09-17 | Linux | Linus Torvalds |
| 2001-03-24 | mac OS X | Apple |
| 2007-06-29 | iOS | Apple |
| 2008-07-23 | Android | The Open Hanset Alliance |
Databases
| Date | Event | Author(s)/Developer(s) |
|---|---|---|
| 1970-06 | Relational model of data | Edgar F. Codd |
| 1974 | SQL | Donald D. Chamberlin and Raymond F. Boyce at IBM |
| 1979 | Oracle database | Oracle |
| 1989-04-24 | Microsoft SQL server | Microsoft |
| 1993 | IBM db2 | IBM |
| 1995-05-23 | mySQL | MySQL AB |
| 1996-27-08 | PostgreSQL | PostgreSQL Global Development Group |
| 2000-08-17 | SQLite | Dwayne Richard Hipp |
| 2009-10-29 | MariaDB | MariaDB Corporation Ab and MariaDB Foundation |
Programming languages (1st versions)
| Date | Event | Designer(s) |
|---|---|---|
| 1972 | C | Dennis Ritchie |
| 1985 | C++ | Bjarne Stroustrup |
| 1987-12-18 | Perl | Larry Wall |
| 1991-02-20 | Python | Guido van Rossum |
| 1993-08 | R | Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman |
| 1995-05-23 | Java | James Gosling |
| 1995-06-08 | PHP | Rasmus Lerdorf |
| 1995-12-04 | JavaScript (first released as LiveScript) | Brendan Eich at Netscape |
| 1995-12-21 | Ruby | Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto |
| 2000 | C# | Anders Hejlsberg at Microsoft |
| 2009-11-10 | Go | Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike and Ken Thompson at Google |
| 2010-07-07 | Rust | Graydon Hoare at Mozilla |
| 2011-07-22 | Kotlin | JetBrains |
| 2012-10-01 | TypeScript | Microsoft |
| 2014-06-02 | Swift | Chris Lattner, Doug Gregor, John McCall, Ted Kremenek and Joe Groff at Apple |
The internet
| Date | Event | Author(s) |
|---|---|---|
| 1973 | TCP/IP | Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn at the IPTO (US Department of Defense) |
| 1990-12-25 | WorldWideWeb | Tim Berners-Lee at CERN |
| 1991-05-14 | Line Mode Browser 0.7 | Tim Berners-Lee, Henrik Frystyk Nielsen and Nicola Pellow |
| 1993-01-23 | Mosaic | NCSA |
| 1994-07-05 | Amazon | Jeff Bezos |
| 1994-12-15 | Netscape Navigator 1.0 | Netscape |
| 1995-08 | Internet Explorer | Thomas Reardon at Microsoft |
| 1995-11-24 | HTML 2 | The HTML Working Group |
| 1996-12-17 | CSS 1 | Håkon Wium Lie and Bert Bos |
| 1998-09-04 | Larry Page and Sergey Brin |
Other resources
- History of Computers: A Brief Timeline, by Kim Ann Zimmermann
- History of computer science, Wikipedia
- A Very Brief History of Computer Science, by Jeffrey Shallit
- Computer science: The history of computer development, by Genevieve Carlton