Timeline: The 2020s
Abstract
What happened in computing in the 2020s, year by year. 98 events from 84 articles. Each line links the article that tells the story and carries the sources; the years are taken from those articles. This is the chronological way into the encyclopedia; the thematic way is [[index|the index]].
← The 2010s · [[index|Thematic index]]
2020
- Aho and Ullman share the Turing Award. → Aho and Ullman: The Dragon Book
- AlphaFold2 effectively solves protein-structure prediction at CASP14. → AlphaFold
- Finland inscribes the demoscene as intangible cultural heritage, the first digital culture so listed. → The Demoscene: Coding as an Art Form
- Folding@home passes an exaFLOP of volunteer compute during the pandemic. → Volunteer Computing
- Google forces out Timnit Gebru after the “Stochastic Parrots” paper dispute. → AI Ethics and Algorithmic Bias
- The Crypto AG scandal reveals CIA and BND ownership. → Switzerland’s Tech Industry: Neutrality, Precision, and the Birthplace of the Web
- The DOJ sues Google, the largest tech antitrust case since Microsoft. → The Platform Antitrust Story
- The FTC begins examining over 600 unreported acquisitions by the five giants. → The Rise of the Tech Giants
- Zoom’s daily meeting participants rise from 10 million to 300 million between December and April as the pandemic sends work home. → Eric Yuan
- The Washington Post, ZDF and SRF reveal the CIA-BND ownership of Crypto AG (Operation Rubicon) → Crypto AG and Operation Rubicon
- The WHO declares a pandemic on 11 March; tens of millions start working from home within weeks. → The Remote Work Revolution
- Epic slips its own payment system into Fortnite on iOS, is removed from the App Store within hours, and sues Apple and Google. → Tim Sweeney
- Snowflake’s September IPO raises $3.4 billion, the largest software IPO to date. → The Database Wars: Oracle, Open Source, and the Cloud
- Jack Ma’s November speech criticizing regulators brings the state down on Alibaba. → Jack Ma and Alibaba: China’s Internet Pioneer
- Microsoft announces LAMBDA; Excel formulas become Turing complete. → The Spreadsheet Revolution
2021
- Facebook renames itself Meta. → Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook: The Social Network That Rewired Society
- John McAfee dies in a Spanish prison cell. → John McAfee: From Antivirus Pioneer to Fugitive
- Log4Shell is patched overnight by volunteers. → Volunteer-Maintained Infrastructure
- MIPS switches to RISC-V. → Hennessy and Patterson: The Quantitative Approach
- Ransomware shuts down the Colonial Pipeline. → The Ransomware Epidemic: The Industrialization of Cybercrime
- Smart Eye buys Affectiva for $73.5 million, mostly in stock. → Rana el Kaliouby
- Anthropic is founded in January as a public benefit corporation by former OpenAI researchers. → Anthropic and Claude
- Meta’s Oversight Board issues its first decisions, overturning Meta in four of five cases. → Content Moderation
- Itanium production ends in July. → Dead End: Intel Itanium
- DeepMind and EMBL-EBI open the free AlphaFold Protein Structure Database. → AlphaFold
- Total cryptocurrency market capitalisation passes $3 trillion on 10 November. → Dead End: Web3 and NFTs
2022
- IBM sells Watson Health for about $1 billion, after spending over $4 billion on it. → Dead End: IBM Watson Health
- Mudge files his whistleblower complaint about Twitter’s security. → Peiter “Mudge” Zatko: The Hacker Who Warned Washington
- OpenAI releases Whisper. → Speech Recognition
- RLHF makes ChatGPT useful. → Reinforcement Learning
- France’s CNIL fines Google and Facebook €210 million for cookie banners harder to refuse than to accept. → Dark Patterns: Deceptive Design and the Consent Dialog
- Russia’s full-scale invasion in February tests Ukraine’s IT sector, which keeps growing exports. → Ukraine’s Developer Ecosystem: From Outsourcing Hub to Wartime Resilience
- Go 1.18 adds generics after more than a decade of debate. → Go: The Cloud-Native Language
- NIST selects CRYSTALS-Kyber, Dilithium, Falcon and SPHINCS+ as its first post-quantum algorithms. → Post-Quantum Cryptography
- “Notes on e/acc principles and tenets” launches effective accelerationism. → Silicon Valley Philosophies: How Ideas and Machines Shape Each Other
- The CHIPS and Science Act commits $52 billion to US chipmaking in August. → The Semiconductor Race: The Geopolitics of Silicon
- Stable Diffusion is released with downloadable weights on 22 August. → Stable Diffusion and AI Image Generation
- FTX collapses in November with an $8 billion hole in customer accounts. → Dead End: Web3 and NFTs
- FTX collapses in November with about $8 billion of customer money missing. → Sam Bankman-Fried and the Collapse of FTX
- The FTX Future Fund team resigns as FTX collapses. → Effective Altruism
- ChatGPT launches in November and reaches 100 million users in two months. → Sam Altman and OpenAI
- ChatGPT’s launch on 30 November triggers the LLM race. → The LLM Race (2022–)
2023
- Gordon Moore dies. → Gordon Moore and Moore’s Law
- Hinton leaves Google to speak freely about AI risk. → Geoffrey Hinton and Deep Learning
- Mistral AI raises a €105 million seed round, Europe’s largest, on a three-slide pitch. → Mistral
- Unity’s Runtime Fee provokes a developer revolt. → Game Engines: The Engine as a Platform
- Stadia closes on 18 January with full refunds. → Dead End: Google Stadia
- Yudkowsky calls in Time for a worldwide halt to large AI training runs. → Eliezer Yudkowsky
- AI laboratory heads and researchers sign the one-sentence statement on the risk of extinction from AI. → The Singularity and Superintelligence
- The Tokyo District Court gives Sonic programmer Yuji Naka a suspended sentence of two and a half years for insider trading in Square Enix partners’ shares. → Sonic Team: Naka, Ohshima and Yasuhara
- Douglas Lenat dies in August, a month after his last paper with Gary Marcus. → Douglas Lenat and Cyc
- Marc Andreessen publishes “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto.” → Silicon Valley Philosophies: How Ideas and Machines Shape Each Other
- Sutskever votes to fire Sam Altman in November, then recants. → Ilya Sutskever and the GPT Series
- OpenAI’s board fires Sam Altman in November; he is back in four days. → Sam Altman and OpenAI
- Vitalik Buterin answers Andreessen with “My techno-optimism” and d/acc. → Accelerationism
- Vera Molnár dies in Paris at 99, a month short of her hundredth birthday. → Vera Molnár
- Adobe abandons its $20 billion purchase of Figma under regulatory pressure. → Adobe: The Creative Software Empire
2024
- Assange walks free after an Espionage Act plea deal. → Julian Assange: From “Mendax” to WikiLeaks
- Barto and Sutton share the Turing Award. → Barto and Sutton: Learning from Reward
- Hassabis and Jumper share the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold. → AlphaFold
- Hinton and Hopfield share the Nobel Prize in Physics. → Geoffrey Hinton and Deep Learning
- Pew finds 91% of American adults own a smartphone. → How We Use Computers
- The xz backdoor is caught after a maintainer is socially engineered. → Volunteer-Maintained Infrastructure
- A UK High Court rules that Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto and forged his evidence. → Craig Wright: The Man Who Said He Was Satoshi
- Sam Bankman-Fried is sentenced to 25 years in March. → Sam Bankman-Fried and the Collapse of FTX
- Avi Wigderson is named the 2023 Turing Award recipient, the first to hold it alongside the Abel Prize. → Avi Wigderson
- Oxford closes Bostrom’s Future of Humanity Institute. → Nick Bostrom
- Sutskever leaves OpenAI to found Safe Superintelligence. → Ilya Sutskever and the GPT Series
- An online collaboration proves BB(5) = 47,176,870 in July. → The Busy Beaver Problem
- A faulty CrowdStrike update crashes 8.5 million Windows machines worldwide. → The Windows Story
- Judge Amit Mehta rules in United States v. Google that “Google is a monopolist” in general search. → The Rise of the Tech Giants
- NIST publishes the first post-quantum standards, FIPS 203, 204 and 205. → Post-Quantum Cryptography
- Donald Bitzer dies in Cary, North Carolina, at 90. → Donald Bitzer
2025
- Europe’s first exascale machine runs in Jülich. → The Supercomputer Era: The Fastest Machines on Earth
- OpenAI buys Ive’s hardware startup io for $6.5 billion. → Jony Ive and Apple Design
- Sanborn auctions the K4 solution; journalists find the plaintext in his Smithsonian papers first. → Kryptos: The Cipher in the CIA Courtyard
- Ross Ulbricht receives a full presidential pardon in January. → Ross Ulbricht and the Silk Road
- Meta ends third-party fact-checking in the United States. → Content Moderation
- Apple withdraws iCloud end-to-end encryption in Britain rather than build a backdoor for the Home Office. → The Crypto Wars of the 1990s
- A federal judge holds Apple in contempt over its 27 percent fee on linked-out purchases. → The Platform Tax
- Microsoft shuts Skype down on 5 May. → Dead End: Skype
- A US court rules that training an AI model on lawfully bought books is fair use, but not on pirated ones. → Copyright and IP in the Digital Age
- Stephanie Shirley dies in August. → Stephanie “Steve” Shirley and Freelance Programmers
- Google’s goo.gl links stop resolving; Archive Team reports 3.75 billion of them saved. → Archive Team
- Vaire Computing reports net energy recovery on Ice River, a 22-nanometre reversible test chip. → Reversible Computing
- Amazon settles the FTC’s Prime dark-patterns case for $2.5 billion. → Dark Patterns: Deceptive Design and the Consent Dialog
- The Wayback Machine reaches one trillion archived pages in October. → Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive
- Judge James Boasberg rules that the FTC has not shown Meta holds a monopoly; Meta keeps Instagram and WhatsApp. → The Rise of the Tech Giants
- Sam Altman declares a code red at OpenAI after Google releases Gemini 3. → Code Red: When Incumbents Panic
- Ruby 4.0 marks thirty years of the language. → Ruby and Rails
2026
- Andrej Karpathy joins Anthropic’s pretraining team. → Andrej Karpathy and Modern AI
- Anthropic accidentally publishes the Claude Code source to npm in March. → Famous Leaks
- The 2025 Turing Award to Bennett and Brassard is announced in March. → Bennett and Brassard: Quantum Cryptography
- David Potter dies six days short of 83. → David Potter
- Deutsche Telekom, O2, and 1&1 switch off MMS at the end of June. → Dead End: MMS, the Picture Message with a Toll Booth
- John Deere settles the FTC’s right-to-repair lawsuit and must give farmers dealer-grade repair tools for ten years. → Right to Repair
- Hyves returns under Mediahuis; about 250,000 people sign up within a day. → Europe’s Local Social Networks Before Facebook
- Margaret Hamilton dies on 30 September, aged 90. → Margaret Hamilton and the Apollo Software
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.
← The 2010s · [[index|Thematic index]]