Timeline: The 1970s
Abstract
What happened in computing in the 1970s, year by year. 153 events from 141 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 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
- 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
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
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
- 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 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
- 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
- The first UPC is scanned on a pack of Juicy Fruit in Troy, Ohio, on 26 June. → Barcodes and the UPC
1975
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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
- MIT students write Zork. → Colossal Cave, Zork, and Interactive Fiction
- 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
- 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
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)
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
- 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
- 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