Timeline: The 1970s

← The 1960s · [[index|Thematic index]] · The 1980s →

1970

• 1970s: Analog computing becomes a museum subject. → Analog Computers
• Andrew Gabor invents the daisy wheel printer at Diablo. → The History of Printing
• Bayer and McCreight publish the B-tree. → Data Structures: The Building Blocks of Computation
• Codd publishes “A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks”. → Edgar Codd and the Relational Model
• Conway’s Game of Life appears in Scientific American. → Cellular Automata and Artificial Life
• Frances Allen publishes “Control Flow Analysis”. → Frances Allen and Compiler Optimization
• Hesse passes the world’s first data protection law. → Germany’s Computing Pioneers
• Hopcroft and Tarjan begin the depth-first-search work that makes graph problems linear. → Hopcroft and Tarjan: Depth-First Search and the Linear-Time Graph
• Niklaus Wirth releases Pascal. → Niklaus Wirth and Pascal
• The NPL packet-switched network goes into service at Teddington → Donald Davies
• Xerox founds PARC. → The Xerox PARC Revolution
• Per Brinch Hansen publishes “The Nucleus of a Multiprogramming System”, describing the RC 4000’s message-passing nucleus. → Regnecentralen and GIER: Denmark’s Computer Company
• Centronics shows the Model 101 dot matrix printer and its 36-pin parallel interface. → Dead End: Centronics
• The CIA and the BND secretly buy the Swiss cipher-machine maker Crypto AG → Crypto AG and Operation Rubicon

1971

• ALOHAnet in Hawaii pioneers wireless packet radio. → The History of Wi-Fi
• APICS launches its “MRP Crusade” to spread material requirements planning. → From MRP to ERP: Software for the Factory
• An Esquire article on phone phreaking draws in Wozniak and Jobs. → John Draper: Captain Crunch and the Blue Box
• Berezin’s Redactron ships the Data Secretary, the first standalone word processor. → Evelyn Berezin
• Cook publishes NP-completeness; Levin’s independent version is blocked in Moscow. → Cook and Levin: NP-Completeness on Two Sides of the Iron Curtain
• Faggin’s Intel 4004, the first commercial single-chip microprocessor, ships. → Federico Faggin and the Microprocessor
• Frank Rosenblatt drowns on his forty-third birthday. → Frank Rosenblatt: The Forgotten Pioneer of Neural Networks
• Gary Starkweather moves to Xerox PARC and builds the laser printer. → Gary Starkweather
• Herbert Simon names the attention economy. → The Attention Economy
• Joel Moses takes over direction of Macsyma and publishes “Algebraic Simplification: A Guide for the Perplexed”. → Joel Moses
• Pouzin’s team at IRIA starts CYCLADES, the datagram network. → Louis Pouzin and the Datagram
• Ray Tomlinson picks the @ sign for network email. → Ray Tomlinson
• Ray Tomlinson sends the first networked email on ARPANET. → Email: The Killer App That Predated the Web
• Stephen Cook formulates the P vs NP question. → P vs. NP and Complexity Theory: The Hardest Easy Question
• The Intel 4004 puts a CPU on one chip. → The Microprocessor Revolution
• KAIST is established in Seoul on 16 February, modeled on MIT. → Asian Computer Science Academia
• DEC picks Galway for its first European hardware plant in May. → Ireland’s Tech Industry: The Tax Rate, the Galway Plant, and the Business of Being Elsewhere’s Headquarters
• Michael Hart types the Declaration of Independence into a mainframe on 4 July, the first e-book. → Project Gutenberg and the E-Book
• The Kenbak-1 goes on sale for $750 → The First Personal Computers

1972

• C and Smalltalk both appear. → The Evolution of Language: From Machine Code to Modern Abstraction
• De Dombal’s Leeds program outdiagnoses senior clinicians on acute abdominal pain in a prospective trial. → AI in Clinical Practice
• Ed Catmull’s four-minute film of his own hand is made at Utah. → Ed Catmull
• Harold Cohen begins AARON, the program that drew autonomously for the next four decades. → Harold Cohen
• Karen Spärck Jones publishes inverse document frequency. → Karen Spärck Jones and Information Retrieval
• Karp’s 21 problems map NP-completeness. → Richard Karp and the 21 Problems
• Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital are founded. → Venture Capital and Silicon Valley: The Money That Made the Industry
• Lampson’s memo “Why Alto?” sets out the personal workstation. → Butler Lampson and Xerox PARC
• Milner’s LCF is the first proof assistant. → Robin Milner: The Logician Who Shaped Programming
• Pong starts the video game industry. → The History of the Video Game Industry
• Prolog is born in Marseille. → Prolog and Logic Programming: When AI Spoke in Clauses
• Sandra Kurtzig starts ASK in the second bedroom of her apartment with a $2,000 commission cheque and no outside investment. → Sandra Kurtzig
• Sinclair’s Executive, the first slimline pocket calculator, goes on sale. → Clive Sinclair
• The HP-35 retires the slide rule for scientists. → The Pocket Calculator
• Two Princeton students write the INTERCAL manual, founding the esolang genre. → Esoteric Programming Languages
• Version control begins at Bell Labs as a fix for overwritten files. → The Rise of Version Control: From SCCS to Git and GitHub
• West German interior ministers decide to build INPOL, the joint police information system run by the BKA → Horst Herold and Computerized Policing
• The Limits to Growth, based on the World3 computer model, is presented in Washington → The Limits to Growth and World3
• ILLIAC IV, cut from 256 to 64 processors, is delivered to NASA Ames → Dead End: ILLIAC IV
• Five former IBM engineers found SAP in June. → SAP: The Enterprise Software Giant Europe Built
• Bushnell and Dabney found Atari on 27 June with $250 each; Pong follows. → Nolan Bushnell and Atari

1973

• ARPANET reaches the UK and Norway. → The Connected World: From Packet Switching to the Global Web
• Bob Metcalfe invents Ethernet at Xerox PARC. → Bob Metcalfe and Ethernet
• Charles Bachman becomes the first Turing Award winner from industry. → Charles Bachman and the Integrated Data Store
• Community Memory, the first public-access bulletin board, opens on a Teletype in Leopold’s Records, Berkeley. → Lee Felsenstein
• Motorola demonstrates the first handheld cellular telephone. → Motorola: The Company That Built the Cell Phone and Then Lost It
• Ritchie’s C language is complete; Unix is rewritten in it. → Dennis Ritchie and the C Language
• The Korean Institute of Information Scientists and Engineers is founded. → Korean Institute of Information Scientists and Engineers (KIISE)
• The Lighthill report triggers the first AI winter in Britain. → The Rise of Artificial Intelligence: Dreams, Winters, and the Deep Learning Revolution
• The MIT AI Lab starts building Lisp machines. → The Lisp Machine Era: The Rise and Fall of AI Specialization
• The oil crisis wrecks Nintendo’s Laser Clay shooting ranges and leaves it about ¥5 billion in debt. → Nintendo: A Century of Play
• Unidata, the European answer to IBM, is formed; France pulls out in 1975. → Dead End: Buying a Computer Industry (Unidata, the Fifth Generation, Alvey, and ESPRIT)
• The Xerox Alto, the first computer with bitmapped screen, mouse, and network, runs on 1 March. → Chuck Thacker and the Alto
• The minirex 73, East Germany’s first pocket calculator, appears at the Leipzig spring fair. → Computing in East Germany: Robotron and the Kombinate
• The coup of 11 September destroys Project Cybersyn. → Project Cybersyn: Chile’s Cybernetic Dream
• Charles Bennett shows that any computation can be done reversibly, without erasing information. → Reversible Computing

1974

• Aho, Hopcroft, and Ullman publish The Design and Analysis of Computer Algorithms. → Aho and Ullman: The Dragon Book
• Catmull’s dissertation introduces the z-buffer and texture mapping. → Ed Catmull
• Cerf and Kahn publish the TCP paper. → Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn: Fathers of the Internet
• Donald Knuth receives the Turing Award. → Donald Knuth and the Art of Computer Programming
• Foxconn is founded. → Taiwan’s Tech Ecosystem: OEM, ODM, and the Smiling Curve
• In debt, Ball sells Com-Pat to John Patterson of Dateline for the price of its £2,000 of debts. → Joan Ball
• Jean Sammet becomes the first woman to serve as ACM president. → Jean Sammet and COBOL
• Karger’s Multics vulnerability analysis predicts the compiler backdoor. → Paul Karger: Mr. High Assurance
• Liskov’s CLU is the first language with abstract data types as a feature. → Barbara Liskov and Data Abstraction
• Popek and Goldberg state the virtualization requirements. → The Virtualization Revolution: One Machine, Many Worlds
• Robert Dennard and IBM colleagues publish the MOSFET scaling rules → Semiconductor Fabrication
• Tesler and Mott build the modeless Gypsy editor at PARC, with cut, copy, and paste. → Larry Tesler and the War on Modes
• Triple-I forms its Motion Pictures Product Group under John Whitney Jr. and Gary Demos. → Triple-I: Information International
• Roland Moreno files his first patent for a chip in a signet ring, precursor of the French smart card → The Smart Card
• The first UPC is scanned on a pack of Juicy Fruit in Troy, Ohio, on 26 June. → Barcodes and the UPC

1975

• Benoit Mandelbrot coins the word fractal → Benoit Mandelbrot and Fractals
• Chaitin defines Ω, the halting probability, and makes program-size theory formally identical to Shannon’s. → Gregory Chaitin
• Fred Brooks publishes The Mythical Man-Month. → Fred Brooks and the Mythical Man-Month
• Gates and Allen found Microsoft. → Bill Gates and Microsoft
• John Cocke’s group at Yorktown begins the IBM 801, the first RISC. → John Cocke and the IBM 801
• Newell and Simon share the Turing Award. → Newell and Simon: The Thinking Machines
• Saltzer and Schroeder publish the design principles of secure systems. → Secure by Design: A History of Software Security Engineering
• The Altair 8800 appears on the January Popular Electronics cover at $397. → The Altair 8800: The Spark That Started the Microcomputer Revolution
• The January Popular Electronics Altair cover sends Allen and Gates to write BASIC. → Paul Allen: The Other Half of Microsoft
• Steve Walker at DARPA starts MsgGroup, the first ARPANET mailing list. → Email: The Killer App That Predated the Web
• Byte is founded in September at $10 a year. → The Computer Press
• Chuck Peddle’s MOS 6502 microprocessor goes on sale for $25 → Chuck Peddle
• Ulrich Klotz’s MCS-40, Germany’s first microprocessor computer, runs its operating system in Berlin → The First Personal Computers
• Steve Sasson builds the first digital camera at Kodak in December. → Digital Photography and the Fall of Kodak

1976

• Acer is founded. → Taiwan’s Tech Ecosystem: OEM, ODM, and the Smiling Curve
• Appel and Haken prove the four-color theorem with 1,834 computer-checked cases. → Computer-Assisted Proof
• Bill Joy writes vi. → Bill Joy: The Other Sun Founder
• Bushnell sells Atari to Warner for $28 million. → Nolan Bushnell and Atari
• Diffie and Hellman publish public-key cryptography. → Public Key Cryptography: The Mathematics That Secured the Internet
• Intel hires William Kahan to design the 8087’s arithmetic, the seed of IEEE 754. → William Kahan and IEEE 754
• John Chambers starts S at Bell Labs; SAS Institute is incorporated. → R and Statistical Computing
• Kurzweil announces the Reading Machine for the blind. → Ray Kurzweil
• Margaret Hamilton leaves Draper and co-founds Higher Order Software with Saydean Zeldin. → Margaret Hamilton and the Apollo Software
• Mike Markkula funds Apple and writes its business plan. → Mike Markkula: The Adult Supervision
• Rabin and Scott share the Turing Award. → Dana Scott
• Richard Dawkins coins “meme”. → Internet Memes
• The Cray-1 brings vector processing to supercomputing at $8.8 million a unit. → Seymour Cray and Supercomputing
• The Sol-20, designed by Lee Felsenstein, puts a keyboard and video output in the box and makes the July Popular Electronics cover. → Lee Felsenstein
• Wang’s screen-based word processor defines the category. → Dead End: Wang Labs
• Weizenbaum’s Computer Power and Human Reason founds computer ethics. → Joseph Weizenbaum and ELIZA
• Will Crowther writes Colossal Cave Adventure in FORTRAN. → Colossal Cave, Zork, and Interactive Fiction
• Wirth publishes Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs. → Data Structures: The Building Blocks of Computation
• Bill Gates publishes the “Open Letter to Hobbyists” on 3 February. → The Open Letter to Hobbyists: The Day Software Became Property
• Jobs and Wozniak found Apple on 1 April. → Steve Jobs and Apple
• John Chambers, Rick Becker and colleagues start S at Bell Labs at a meeting held without management approval. → John Chambers
• SAS Institute is incorporated in Raleigh by Goodnight, Barr, Sall and Helwig with 100 customers. → James Goodnight
• Lore Harp and Carole Ely incorporate Vector Graphic to sell an Altair memory board from a Westlake Village bedroom. → Lore Harp McGovern and Vector Graphic
• Diffie and Hellman publish “New Directions in Cryptography” in November. → Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman: The Key Exchange That Unlocked the Internet

1977

• A microprocessor times spark in a production car for the first time. → From Carburetor to Code: The Computer in the Car
• A randomized primality test makes RSA practical. → Randomness in Algorithms
• Aho and Ullman publish Principles of Compiler Design, the “Dragon Book”. → Aho and Ullman: The Dragon Book
• DeFanti and Dan Sandin build the Sayre Glove, the first data glove, at the Chicago lab that becomes EVL. → Tom DeFanti
• Ellison founds the company that becomes Oracle. → Larry Ellison and Oracle
• Kay and Goldberg publish “Personal Dynamic Media”, describing the tablet computer. → Adele Goldberg and Smalltalk
• Knuth-Morris-Pratt and Boyer-Moore string search are published. → String Matching
• Lempel and Ziv publish LZ77, the basis of ZIP, gzip and PNG. → Data Compression
• MIT students write Zork. → Colossal Cave, Zork, and Interactive Fiction
• Micronic Computer Systeme in Berlin brings out the Alpha 1, the first German eight-bit computer → Microcomputers Made in West Germany
• RSA is published; DES becomes a federal standard. → Cryptography: The Secret Science
• The Apple II, Commodore PET, and TRS-80 ship, the 1977 trinity. → The Home Computer Boom
• The first Berkeley Software Distribution tape ships. → The BSD Family: The Open-Source Unix That Survived a Lawsuit
• Vector Graphic ships the Vector 1, a Z80 computer on the S-100 bus. → Lore Harp McGovern and Vector Graphic
• Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman invent RSA after a Passover seder in April. → Rivest, Shamir, Adleman and RSA
• The Apple II debuts at the West Coast Computer Faire in April. → Steve Wozniak: The Engineer’s Apple
• The first West Coast Computer Faire draws over 12,000 people to San Francisco; the Apple II and Commodore PET debut there. → Jim Warren and Jerry Pournelle
• Postel argues in IEN 2 that TCP should be split, leading to the TCP/IP design. → Jon Postel: The God of the Internet
• DEC announces the 32-bit VAX architecture. → DEC and the Minicomputer Era

1978

• ASK begins selling MANMAN as a turnkey manufacturing system on Hewlett-Packard minicomputers. → Sandra Kurtzig
• IBM leaves India. → India’s IT Industry
• Kernighan and Ritchie publish The C Programming Language. → Brian Kernighan and the Unix Tools
• Lamport’s “Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events” gives distributed systems logical time. → Leslie Lamport and the Science of Distributed Systems
• MUD1 is written at Essex University. → MMORPGs and Virtual Worlds
• Milner publishes type inference, the Hindley-Milner algorithm. → Robin Milner: The Logician Who Shaped Programming
• Robert McEliece publishes a code-based public-key system, still unbroken but with keys hundreds of times larger than RSA’s. → Post-Quantum Cryptography
• Texas Instruments shows the Speak & Spell, built around the first single-chip speech synthesizer. → The History of Speech Synthesis
• The British government funds Inmos with £50 million. → Dead End: The Transputer
• The ISO committee that produces the OSI seven-layer model begins meeting. → Hubert Zimmermann and the Seven Layers
• The first GPS satellite launches. → GPS and Satellite Navigation
• Ward Christensen’s CBBS starts the bulletin-board era. → The BBS Era: Bulletin Boards and the First Online Culture
• Gary Thuerk sends the first spam to 393 ARPANET users on 3 May. → The History of Spam
• The Brazilian Computer Society is founded in Porto Alegre on 24 July. → Sociedade Brasileira de Computação (SBC)
• The first Nixdorf cash machine goes into service at the Kreissparkasse Köln → The ATM

1979

• BLAS and LINPACK begin the numerical software stack. → Scientific and Numerical Computing
• Dan Bricklin ships VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet. → Dan Bricklin and VisiCalc: The Killer App
• David May joins Inmos in Bristol as architect of the transputer. → David May
• David Mills sketches the Network Time Protocol. → David Mills and NTP
• Glenford Myers’s The Art of Software Testing frames testing as destruction. → Software Testing and QA: The Discipline of Finding Bugs Before Users Do
• Herbert W. Franke co-founds the Ars Electronica festival in Linz → Herbert W. Franke
• Iverson’s Turing lecture “Notation as a Tool of Thought” states the case for language as thought. → The Philosophy of Programming Languages
• Jean Ichbiah’s team wins the Pentagon’s language-design competition; the result is named Ada. → Ada: The Language the Pentagon Built
• Oracle Version 2 ships to the CIA, customer number one. → The Database Revolution: From Filing Cabinets to the Relational Model
• Richard Garriott sells Akalabeth in Ziploc bags from a Houston ComputerLand; California Pacific moves 30,000 copies. → Richard Garriott
• The Sony Walkman goes on sale. → Japan’s Digital Culture: Walkman, Tamagotchi, and the Galapagos Problem
• Two graduate students create Usenet as a “poor man’s ARPANET”. → Usenet: The Original Online Community
• Toshiba ships the JW-10, the first Japanese word processor, at ¥6.3 million. → The History of Word Processing
• MicroPro releases WordStar for CP/M. → The History of Word Processing
• The British Post Office opens Prestel, the first public viewdata service, to paying customers. → Videotex: Prestel, Minitel and the Viewdata Era
• Triumph-Adler and Diehl show the Alphatronic P1, based on SKS’s KISS, at the Systems fair in Munich → Microcomputers Made in West Germany
• Bennett and Brassard meet swimming off a San Juan beach and begin quantum cryptography. → Bennett and Brassard: Quantum Cryptography
• VisiCalc goes on sale on 17 October. → The Spreadsheet Revolution
• Adele Goldberg is overruled and demonstrates Smalltalk to Steve Jobs at Xerox PARC in December. → Adele Goldberg and Smalltalk

Other Timelines

Chronologies kept by the Computer History Museum in Mountain View:

• Timeline of Computer History: people, machines and events across computing, filterable by theme.
• The Silicon Engine: semiconductors from the first documented semiconductor effect in 1833 to the integrated circuit.
• The Storage Engine: data storage from punched cards onward.
• Internet History, 1962 to 1992: the networks that became the internet.
• Apple@50: Apple from its founding in 1976.
• This Day in History: computing events by calendar day.

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