Timeline: The 1960s

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1960

• ALGOL 60 introduces block structure, recursive procedures, and BNF grammar. → ALGOL: The Language That Taught Programming How to Teach Itself
• An IBM 650 plans a Turkish highway, an early computer in the Middle East. → The Middle East’s Tech Industry: Oil Money, Startups, and the Vision 2030 Bet
• Donald Bitzer’s PLATO teaches its first student on ILLIAC I at Illinois. → Donald Bitzer
• IFIP is established at the first World Computer Congress in Munich. → The Computer Societies Movement
• IFIP is established under UNESCO auspices. → IFIP: Computing Across the Iron Curtain
• PLATO begins at the University of Illinois. → PLATO and the Birth of Online Community
• Reed and Solomon publish the codes later used in CDs, QR codes, and Voyager. → Coding Theory and Error Correction
• Rudolf Kálmán publishes the Kalman filter. → Rudolf Kálmán and the Kalman Filter
• The CER-10, Yugoslavia’s first digital computer, is completed in Belgrade. → Yugoslavia’s Computing Industry: CER, Iskra Delta, and the Computer Broadcast on the Radio
• SADIO is founded in Argentina in March, the first computing society in Latin America. → SADIO: Argentina’s Computing Society
• The first Xerox 914 plain-paper copier ships, leased at $95 a month; Haloid Xerox’s revenue nearly doubles by 1961. → Chester Carlson
• The Information Processing Society of Japan is founded on 22 April. → Information Processing Society of Japan (IPSJ)
• Edward Fredkin publishes “Trie Memory” in the Communications of the ACM, naming the prefix tree. → Edward Fredkin

1961

• A Ferranti Mercury arrives in Buenos Aires. → Latin America’s Tech Industry: MercadoLibre, Nubank, and the Fintech Continent
• AICA, the Italian computing association, is founded. → AICA: Italy’s Computing Society
• CTSS introduces the computer password. → The History of Passwords and Authentication
• Corbató demonstrates CTSS, the first time-sharing system, at MIT. → Fernando Corbató and Time-Sharing
• Unimate, the first industrial robot, goes to work at General Motors. → Robotics
• Haloid Xerox shareholders rename the company Xerox Corporation, weeks before its New York Stock Exchange listing. → Joseph C. Wilson and Haloid
• Rolf Landauer shows that erasing a bit must dissipate at least kT ln 2 of heat. → Reversible Computing
• The transistorised GIER goes into service at the Danish Geodetic Institute; about fifty are built. → Regnecentralen and GIER: Denmark’s Computer Company

1962

• A. Michael Noll makes the first digital computer art at Bell Labs after a plotter bug draws something interesting. → A. Michael Noll and Ken Knowlton
• Carl Adam Petri’s dissertation introduces Petri nets. → Germany’s Computing Pioneers
• Donald Knuth starts writing The Art of Computer Programming. → Donald Knuth and the Art of Computer Programming
• John Tukey’s “The Future of Data Analysis” calls for a science of data analysis apart from mathematical statistics. → Data Science and the Notebook
• Kenneth Iverson publishes the array notation that becomes APL. → APL: The Language Written in Its Own Alphabet
• Licklider takes over ARPA’s computing office and starts funding interactive computing. → J.C.R. Licklider and the Intergalactic Network
• Morton Heilig patents the Sensorama, a booth with stereo film, wind, smells and a moving seat. → The History of Virtual Reality
• Procter & Gamble’s Car 54 contest asks the public for the shortest tour through 33 cities. → The Traveling Salesman Problem
• Purdue founds the first computer science department in the United States. → The Birth of Computer Science as a Discipline
• Stephanie Shirley founds Freelance Programmers with £6, staffed by women working from home. → Stephanie “Steve” Shirley and Freelance Programmers
• The China Computer Federation is founded. → China Computer Federation (CCF)
• Viktor Glushkov proposes OGAS, a nationwide network for the Soviet planned economy. → OGAS: The Soviet Internet That Never Was

1963

• ASCII encodes the Latin alphabet and nothing else; the rest of the world’s scripts wait for Unicode. → The Globalization of Software: i18n, L10n, and the Hidden Complexity of “Hello, World”
• IBM coins “emulator” to sell the System/360. → Emulation and Retrocomputing
• Ken Knowlton’s BEFLIX, the first programming language for computer animation, runs at Bell Labs. → A. Michael Noll and Ken Knowlton
• Roger Tomlinson’s Canada Geographic Information System invents GIS. → Digital Maps and GIS
• Ivan Sutherland demonstrates Sketchpad on the TX-2 in January. → Ivan Sutherland and Sketchpad: The First Graphical Interface

1964

• A cancelled dinner in New York leaves Zadeh alone for an evening; he works out the idea of membership by degree. → Lotfi Zadeh
• Antonín Svoboda leaves Czechoslovakia for UCLA. → Czechoslovakia’s Computing Industry: Svoboda, SAPO, and the Institute That Lost Its Founder
• Bitzer, Slottow and Willson invent the plasma display panel for PLATO terminals. → Donald Bitzer
• Cray’s CDC 6600 runs three times faster than IBM’s best machine. → Seymour Cray and Supercomputing
• IBM introduces the Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter, the first machine marketed as a word processor. → The History of Word Processing
• Joan Ball runs the first commercially successful computer dating match-ups in London and renames her bureau the St. James Computer Dating Service. → Joan Ball
• Kemeny and Kurtz create BASIC at Dartmouth. → BASIC: The Language That Democratized Programming
• MIT, Bell Labs, and GE begin Multics. → The Multics Story
• Norbert Wiener dies. → Norbert Wiener and Cybernetics
• Olivetti sells its electronics division to General Electric. → Camillo and Adriano Olivetti
• RAND publishes Baran’s eleven-volume On Distributed Communications. → Paul Baran and Packet Switching: The Network That Was Never Built
• SABRE’s nationwide network is complete, the largest commercial real-time data-processing system in the world. → SABRE and Airline Reservation Systems
• The plasma display is invented at Illinois for PLATO. → The History of Displays
• Xerox pays $4 million for a commercial-free UN television series on ABC and keeps it despite a John Birch Society letter campaign. → Joseph C. Wilson and Haloid
• IBM announces the System/360 in April, a $5 billion bet on one architecture. → The IBM Mainframe Era: The Computer That Ran the World

1965

• Ball’s firm becomes Com-Pat, short for computerised compatibility. → Joan Ball
• Cooley and Tukey publish the Fast Fourier Transform. → Cooley, Tukey, and the Fast Fourier Transform
• Edmonds’s matching paper defines the efficient algorithm as polynomial time. → Jack Edmonds and the Good Algorithm
• Feigenbaum and Lederberg begin DENDRAL, the first expert system. → Edward Feigenbaum and the Expert System
• Hartmanis and Stearns publish the paper that names computational complexity. → Hartmanis and Stearns: Measuring the Cost of Computation
• Harvard’s Operation Match makes punch-card dating a national fad. → The History of Online Dating
• I. J. Good writes that the first ultraintelligent machine will be “the last invention that man need ever make.” → The Singularity and Superintelligence
• Kolmogorov defines the information in an object as the length of the shortest program producing it. → Andrey Kolmogorov
• Kolmogorov publishes algorithmic complexity, after Solomonoff (1960–1964) and before Chaitin. → Kolmogorov Complexity
• Lotfi Zadeh publishes “Fuzzy Sets”. → Fuzzy Logic
• Margaret Dayhoff compiles the first atlas of protein sequences. → Bioinformatics and the Human Genome
• Olivetti shows Perotto’s Programma 101, a programmable desktop computer with magnetic-card storage, in New York. → Pier Giorgio Perotto
• Olivetti’s Programma 101 desktop calculator-computer ships. → Camillo and Adriano Olivetti
• Ted Nelson coins “hypertext”. → Ted Nelson and Hypertext: The Dream That Partially Came True
• The Computer Society of India is founded, when the country has fewer than thirty computers. → Computer Society of India (CSI)
• Widlar’s µA709 op-amp ships from Fairchild. → Bob Widlar and Analog Integrated Circuits
• Georg Nees exhibits plotter drawings in Stuttgart in February, the first computer-art show. → Computer Art and Generative Art
• Georg Nees’s plotter drawings go on show in Stuttgart on 5 February, the first exhibition of computer art; Frieder Nake joins him at Galerie Niedlich in November. → Georg Nees and Frieder Nake
• Gordon Moore’s Electronics article states what becomes Moore’s Law. → Gordon Moore and Moore’s Law

1966

• Alan Perlis becomes the first recipient of the Turing Award. → Alan Perlis and the Epigrams on Programming
• Böhm and Jacopini publish the structured-program theorem. → AICA: Italy’s Computing Society
• Gregory Chaitin, nineteen, publishes program-size complexity in the Journal of the ACM, independently of Kolmogorov and Solomonoff. → Gregory Chaitin
• IBM makes John Whitney its first artist in residence; Jack Citron programs his films on the System/360. → John Whitney and Charles Csuri
• Larry Roberts joins ARPA to build the network. → Larry Roberts and ARPANET: The Network Architect
• MIT’s Summer Vision Project expects to solve vision in a summer. → Computer Vision
• Ralph Baer’s memo proposes games on the home TV set. → Ralph Baer and the Magnavox Odyssey
• SRI begins building Shakey, the first mobile robot that reasons about its own actions. → A* and Shakey the Robot
• The ALPAC report cuts machine-translation funding. → Machine Translation
• The Apollo Guidance Computer is the first embedded computer to fly. → The Embedded Systems Story: From ROM Firmware to Safety-Critical Software
• The Australian Computer Society forms from state-level computing bodies. → Australian Computer Society (ACS)
• Weizenbaum publishes ELIZA. → Joseph Weizenbaum and ELIZA

1967

• Bosch’s D-Jetronic makes electronic fuel injection work in production cars. → From Carburetor to Code: The Computer in the Car
• Charles Csuri and James Shaffer make Hummingbird at Ohio State, a ten-minute computer animation of more than 14,000 plotter frames; MoMA buys it in 1968. → John Whitney and Charles Csuri
• Dahl and Nygaard publish Simula 67, the first object-oriented language. → Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard: The Inventors of Object-Oriented Programming
• Gene Amdahl states Amdahl’s Law. → Gene Amdahl and the System/360
• INRIA is founded (as IRIA). → European Computer Science Academia
• Maurice Wilkes receives the second Turing Award. → Maurice Wilkes and EDSAC
• Papert’s Logo and its turtle let children program. → Seymour Papert and the Children’s Machine
• Simula 67 contains classes, inheritance, and virtual procedures. → Simula: The Language That Invented Objects Before Anyone Called Them That
• Telesincro’s Factor-P is the first computer designed and built in Spain. → Spain’s Computing Industry: From the Ajedrecista to the Golden Age of the Spectrum
• The Singapore Computer Society is founded. → Singapore Computer Society (SCS)
• Knowlton and Harmon’s Studies in Perception I runs in The New York Times on 11 October. → A. Michael Noll and Ken Knowlton

1968

• Albert Endres founds the German Chapter of the ACM. → German Chapter of the ACM
• Dijkstra’s “Go To Statement Considered Harmful” appears in CACM. → Edsger Dijkstra and Structured Programming
• Doug McIlroy proposes “software ICs”, reusable components. → Doug McIlroy and Unix Pipes
• Hart, Nilsson, and Raphael publish the A* search algorithm. → A* and Shakey the Robot
• IBM fires Lynn Conway for transitioning. → Lynn Conway and the VLSI Revolution
• ICL is formed as Britain’s national computing champion. → The UK Computing Industry: From Bletchley to DeepMind
• Information International introduces the FR-80 film recorder, drawing on film at 16,384 by 16,384 points. → Triple-I: Information International
• Macsyma begins at MIT’s Project MAC under Engelman, Martin and Moses. → Joel Moses
• Richard Hamming receives the third Turing Award. → Richard Hamming
• Stewart Brand publishes the first Whole Earth Catalog. → Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth
• The BESM-6 enters series production, the peak of Soviet indigenous computing. → Soviet and Russian Computing: Parallel History, Divergent Fate
• The NATO conference in Garmisch names the software crisis and coins “software engineering”. → The Software Crisis: How a 1968 Conference Named Computing’s Permanent Problem
• Vera Molnár gets access to a computer and plotter in Paris and begins executing by machine the rules she had run by hand since 1959. → Vera Molnár
• Engelbart’s “Mother of All Demos” shows the mouse, hypertext, and video conferencing on 9 December. → Douglas Engelbart and the Mother of All Demos
• The Comecon states sign the treaty to build the ES EVM, a clone of the IBM System/360, on 23 December. → Comecon Computing: ES EVM and the Bloc That Copied IBM

1969

• Perceptrons argues neural networks are a dead end. → Marvin Minsky and the MIT AI Lab: The Architect of Artificial Minds
• Fairchild defectors found Advanced Micro Devices. → AMD and the x86 Underdog
• Howard’s note connects types to proofs, the Curry-Howard correspondence. → Type Systems: From Bug Catcher to Theorem Prover
• IBM unbundles software from hardware, creating the independent software industry. → IBM: The Company
• Jon Postel begins editing the RFC series. → Jon Postel: The God of the Internet
• Minsky and Papert’s Perceptrons stalls neural-network research. → Seymour Papert and the Children’s Machine
• Nees defends Generative Computergraphik under Max Bense, the first doctoral thesis on computer art. → Georg Nees and Frieder Nake
• Rene Pardo and Remy Landau write LANPAR, a mainframe spreadsheet with natural order recalculation. → The Spreadsheet Revolution
• Samsung Electronics is established. → Samsung: From Dried Fish to the World’s Memory
• Steve Crocker writes RFC 1. → The Open Standards Process: How the Internet Governs Itself
• Thompson and Ritchie start Unix at Bell Labs. → The Unix Story: The Operating System That Ate the World
• Travers and Milgram report that 64 of 296 mailed folders reached a Boston stockbroker, through 5.2 intermediaries on average. → Network Science and the Small World
• Xerox buys Scientific Data Systems for about $900 million in stock; it closes the computer division in 1975. → Joseph C. Wilson and Haloid
• Apollo 11 lands on 20 July; the guidance software’s priority scheduling survives the 1202 alarms. → Margaret Hamilton and the Apollo Software
• The Gesellschaft für Informatik is founded in Bonn on 16 September. → Gesellschaft für Informatik: Establishing Informatik in Germany
• The first ARPANET message, “LO”, is sent on 29 October. → ARPANET: Building the Network That Became the Internet
• Dana Scott finds a model of the untyped lambda calculus in Oxford in November. → Dana Scott

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