Timeline: The 1990s

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1990

• ARM is spun off from Acorn with Apple and VLSI; Fujitsu buys ICL. → The UK Computing Industry: From Bletchley to DeepMind
• An accounting scandal nearly destroys Oracle. → Larry Ellison and Oracle
• Archie, the first search tool, indexes FTP sites. → The Search Engine Wars: Finding the Web
• Fernando Corbató receives the Turing Award for time-sharing. → Fernando Corbató and Time-Sharing
• General Magic spins out of Apple to build a pocket communicator. → Dead End: General Magic
• Haskell 1.0 appears. → The Rise of Functional Programming
• Haskell 1.0 is standardized. → Haskell and Pure Functional Programming
• Japan’s fuzzy-logic appliance boom peaks; “fuzzy” wins a national buzzword award. → Fuzzy Logic
• Lee Wylie of the Gartner Group coins the term enterprise resource planning. → From MRP to ERP: Software for the Factory
• Robotron and the East German computer industry collapse within months of reunification. → Computing in East Germany: Robotron and the Kombinate
• The Americans with Disabilities Act passes. → The Accessibility Revolution in Computing: How Technology Learned to Include Everyone
• The Electronic Frontier Foundation is founded. → The Digital Rights Movement
• The Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik is established in Saarbrücken. → European Computer Science Academia
• The US Census Bureau’s TIGER database puts machine-readable streets in the public domain. → Digital Maps and GIS
• early 1990s: The first LCD computer monitors appear as portable displays. → The History of Displays
• ARPANET is decommissioned on 28 February. → ARPANET: Building the Network That Became the Internet
• DEC cancels the A1-class VAX security kernel on 1 March. → Paul Karger: Mr. High Assurance
• Poulsen seizes KIIS-FM’s phone lines on 1 June to win a Porsche. → Kevin Poulsen: Dark Dante and the Radio Station Hack
• GOSIP makes OSI a US government procurement requirement from August; TCP/IP wins regardless. → Early Networking Failures: The Protocol Wars
• The Secret of Monkey Island applies Gilbert’s rule that an adventure game should not kill the player. → LucasArts and the Point-and-Click Adventure
• Sanborn’s Kryptos sculpture is dedicated at CIA headquarters on 3 November. → Kryptos: The Cipher in the CIA Courtyard
• The first website runs at CERN by Christmas. → Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web

1991

• Hochreiter’s diploma thesis identifies the vanishing-gradient problem. → Schmidhuber, Hochreiter, and LSTM
• Linux is announced; Stallman’s GNU tools give it a userland. → The Open Source Revolution
• Robin Milner receives the Turing Award. → Robin Milner: The Logician Who Shaped Programming
• The Unicode Consortium is founded. → Unicode and UTF-8: The Long Road to a Universal Character Set
• The University of Minnesota releases Gopher. → Dead End: Gopher, the Web That Almost Was
• Tim Sweeney releases ZZT as shareware from his parents’ house; the company becomes Epic MegaGames in 1992. → Tim Sweeney
• Sierra opens The Sierra Network, a graphical dial-up service for multiplayer games and chat. → Ken and Roberta Williams and Sierra On-Line
• Phil Zimmermann posts PGP 1.0 to the internet in June. → Phil Zimmermann and PGP: Privacy for the People
• Sega releases Sonic the Hedgehog, programmed by Yuji Naka, drawn by Naoto Ohshima and designed by Hirokazu Yasuhara; from November it is packed with the Genesis. → Sonic Team: Naka, Ohshima and Yasuhara
• Linus Torvalds announces his “just a hobby” kernel on Usenet on 25 August. → Linus Torvalds and Linux
• Ben Rosen’s board removes Rod Canion as Compaq chief executive after the company’s first loss. → Rod Canion and Ben Rosen

1992

• Butler Lampson receives the Turing Award. → Butler Lampson and Xerox PARC
• Gravenreuth’s fictional “Tanja” letters entrap C64 game swappers. → Günter von Gravenreuth and the Tanja Letters
• SAP R/3 ships. → Germany’s IT Industry
• SGI releases OpenGL. → Graphics APIs: OpenGL, DirectX, and Vulkan
• TD-Gammon reaches world-class backgammon. → Reinforcement Learning
• The “LINUX is obsolete” debate. → Andrew Tanenbaum and MINIX
• The CAVE, a room of stereo projection walls by Cruz-Neira, Sandin and DeFanti, premieres at SIGGRAPH ‘92 in Chicago. → Tom DeFanti
• The EPA launches Energy Star. → The History of Green IT
• The Tanenbaum-Torvalds debate argues microkernels against monoliths. → Operating System Concepts: Kernels, Processes, and Scheduling
• Wang Laboratories files for bankruptcy in August. → Dead End: Wang Labs
• Pike and Thompson sketch UTF-8 on a diner placemat in September. → Rob Pike: From Unix to Go
• Compaq undercuts Japanese PC prices by half in October, the “Compaq shock”. → NEC PC-98 and Japan’s Domestic PC

1993

• Jurassic Park shows computer-generated dinosaurs. → The CGI Revolution
• A Connection Machine tops the first TOP500 list. → Danny Hillis and the Connection Machine
• Bennett, Brassard, and colleagues describe quantum teleportation. → Bennett and Brassard: Quantum Cryptography
• Bob Young and Marc Ewing found Red Hat. → The Open Source Business Model
• Check Point is founded. → Israel’s Tech Industry: From Unit 8200 to Startup Nation
• Doom makes PC gaming a 3D platform. → The PC Gaming Revolution
• Hartmanis and Stearns share the Turing Award. → Hartmanis and Stearns: Measuring the Cost of Computation
• IBM posts the largest corporate loss in US history to date. → IBM: The Company
• Ihaka and Gentleman post R, their S-syntax teaching language on a Scheme engine, to StatLib. → Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman
• Jensen Huang co-founds Nvidia. → Jensen Huang and Nvidia: From Graphics to the Engine of AI
• Marc Andreessen’s Mosaic browser brings the web to ordinary desktops. → Marc Andreessen and Netscape
• NCSA Mosaic puts images and text on the same page. → Mosaic: The Browser That Made the Web Mainstream
• Symbolics files for Chapter 11. → The Lisp Machine Era: The Rise and Fall of AI Specialization
• The first graphical browser starts the browser era. → The Browser Wars: The Fight for the Web’s Front Door
• Windows NT ships. → Dave Cutler and Windows NT
• id Software releases Doom. → John Carmack
• Verbmobil, Germany’s speech-to-speech translation project for German, English and Japanese, begins its first phase, coordinated by DFKI. → Dead End: Verbmobil
• Minnesota announces Gopher licensing fees; CERN puts the web in the public domain two months later. → Dead End: Gopher, the Web That Almost Was
• Eric Hughes posts “A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto”: “Cypherpunks write code.” → The Cypherpunks: From Chaum to Bitcoin
• Vernor Vinge’s NASA symposium paper predicts superhuman intelligence within thirty years. → The Singularity and Superintelligence
• The Clinton administration announces the Clipper chip in April. → The Crypto Wars of the 1990s
• CERN puts the web in the public domain in April. → Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web
• Adobe ships Acrobat 1.0 and the PDF format in June. → John Warnock and PostScript
• Ihaka and Gentleman announce R in August. → R and Statistical Computing
• Apple ships the Newton MessagePad on 2 August. → Dead End: Apple Newton
• SGI and Nintendo announce Project Reality, the console that becomes the Nintendo 64. → Dead End: Silicon Graphics
• Panasonic ships the first 3DO console in North America at $699.99. → Dead End: Short Cases
• Virtua Fighter, the first arcade fighting game built entirely from 3D polygons, reaches Japanese arcades on Sega’s Model 1 board. → Yu Suzuki

1994

• BBSes peak at an estimated 60,000 in the United States. → The BBS Era: Bulletin Boards and the First Online Culture
• Britannica sells its first consumer CD-ROM for $995 and puts the encyclopedia online for universities. → Britannica and the CD-ROM Encyclopedias
• Bruce Schneier publishes Applied Cryptography. → Bruce Schneier: The Public Intellectual of Security
• Craig McCaw and Bill Gates announce Teledesic, an 840-satellite “Internet-in-the-Sky”. → Dead End: Teledesic, Globalstar and the First Satellite Internet
• Ericsson engineers begin the cable-replacement radio that becomes Bluetooth. → Bluetooth
• Feigenbaum and Raj Reddy share the Turing Award. → Edward Feigenbaum and the Expert System
• Gary Kildall dies at 52. → Gary Kildall and the OS IBM Didn’t Take
• GroupLens brings collaborative filtering to Usenet news. → Recommendation Systems
• Jeff Bezos leaves his hedge fund to sell books online. → Jeff Bezos and Amazon
• Novell buys WordPerfect for $1.4 billion. → Dead End: WordPerfect
• O’Reilly’s GNN carries the web’s first clickable banner ad. → Tim O’Reilly
• Rasmus Lerdorf writes the Personal Home Page tools that become PHP. → PHP: The Web’s Workhorse
• Saxenian’s Regional Advantage explains why Route 128 lost to Silicon Valley. → Route 128: The Region That Lost to Silicon Valley
• Shor’s algorithm shows a quantum computer could factor in polynomial time. → Peter Shor
• The AT&T v. BSD lawsuit settles after freezing BSD for three years. → The BSD Family: The Open-Source Unix That Survived a Lawsuit
• The Fifth Generation project ends, its machines obsolete. → Dead End: Buying a Computer Industry (Unidata, the Fifth Generation, Alvey, and ESPRIT)
• The Gang of Four publish Design Patterns. → Design Patterns and the Gang of Four
• The QR code is invented in Japan. → Barcodes and the UPC
• The W3C is founded. → The Open Standards Process: How the Internet Governs Itself
• VRML proposes a three-dimensional web. → Dead End: VRML & The First Metaverse
• Ward Cunningham creates the wiki. → Ward Cunningham and the Wiki: The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work
• California’s AB 1624, pushed by Jim Warren, puts the state’s legislative records online free of charge. → Jim Warren and Jerry Pournelle
• IEEE 1284 formally standardizes the Centronics parallel interface, 24 years after its debut. → Dead End: Centronics
• Poulsen receives 51 months, the longest US hacker sentence to date. → Kevin Poulsen: Dark Dante and the Radio Station Hack
• Matt Blaze’s Clipper paper reaches the front page of the New York Times: a 16-bit checksum lets the chip be used with its wiretap field disabled. → Matt Blaze
• The FCC’s first simultaneous multiple-round auction sells ten licenses for $617 million. → Spectrum Auctions
• Håkon Wium Lie posts the Cascading HTML Style Sheets proposal to www-talk. → Håkon Wium Lie and Bert Bos
• HotWired puts paid banner ads online, including AT&T’s “You will.” → The Attention Economy

1995

• Toy Story, the first fully computer-animated feature, is released. → Pixar and Computer Animation
• AltaVista launches. → The Search Engine Wars: Finding the Web
• Amazon and eBay both open for business. → The E-Commerce Revolution: Selling Everything to Everyone
• An office poll at Fraunhofer picks the .mp3 file extension. → Karlheinz Brandenburg and MP3
• Apple begins licensing Mac OS to clone makers. → Dead End: The Mac Clones
• Borland releases Delphi. → Anders Hejlsberg: From Turbo Pascal to TypeScript
• Brendan Eich writes JavaScript in ten days at Netscape. → Brendan Eich and JavaScript
• General Magic’s IPO raises $96 million on essentially no revenue. → Dead End: General Magic
• Java brings object-oriented programming to the enterprise. → The OOP Revolution: Objects All the Way Down
• Larry Page and Sergey Brin meet at Stanford. → Larry Page and Sergey Brin: The Accidental Empire
• Manuel Blum receives the Turing Award. → Manuel Blum: From Complexity to CAPTCHA
• Match.com moves dating to the web. → The History of Online Dating
• Matsumoto releases Ruby. → Ruby and Rails
• Microsoft ships DirectX. → Graphics APIs: OpenGL, DirectX, and Vulkan
• NTIA’s Falling Through the Net documents the digital divide. → The Digital Divide: Who Gets Computing and Who Doesn’t
• Negroponte publishes Being Digital. → Nicholas Negroponte
• R’s source is released under the GNU General Public License after Martin Maechler’s request. → Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman
• Rosalind Picard’s MIT technical report proposes affective computing. → Rosalind Picard
• Shor shows quantum error correction is possible. → Peter Shor
• Sun releases Java and the JVM. → The JVM and Java Ecosystem
• Sun releases Java. → James Gosling and Java
• The GPS constellation is declared fully operational. → GPS and Satellite Navigation
• The JVM makes bytecode mainstream. → Assembly, Machine Code, and Bytecode: The Low-Level Layer
• The Netscape IPO announces the commercial internet. → The Dot-com Bubble: Irrational Exuberance and the First Internet Crash
• Windows 95 ends OS/2’s chances. → Dead End: OS/2
• Windows 95 launches as a cultural event. → The Windows Story
• The FBI arrests Kevin Mitnick in February after a celebrated chase. → Kevin Mitnick: The Most Wanted Computer Criminal in America
• Microsoft Bob ships in March; about 58,000 copies sell. → Dead End: Microsoft Bob and Clippy
• JavaScript is written in ten days in May. → The JavaScript Revolution
• Kim Polese, Java’s product manager, launches the renamed language at SunWorld with Netscape on board. → Kim Polese
• Security First Network Bank opens as the first US Internet-only bank. → The E-Commerce Revolution: Selling Everything to Everyone
• HTML 2.0 is published as RFC 1866, the first formal HTML standard. → Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web

1996

• BackRub, the PageRank prototype, runs at Stanford. → Larry Page and Sergey Brin: The Accidental Empire
• Bandai launches the Apple Pippin console at $599; 42,000 sell. → Dead End: The Apple Pippin
• Bandai launches the Tamagotchi. → Japan’s Digital Culture: Walkman, Tamagotchi, and the Galapagos Problem
• Bartle’s “Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades” sorts online players into achievers, explorers, socialisers and killers. → Richard Bartle
• CSS is standardised; it takes until about 2000 to work in a browser. → The History of Web Design
• FoxMeyer Drug goes bankrupt after a troubled SAP R/3 and warehouse-automation project. → From MRP to ERP: Software for the Factory
• Google begins as a Stanford research project on link-based ranking. → Google: From Dorm Room to Digital Infrastructure
• ICQ launches. → Instant Messaging: From ICQ to Signal
• Jacob Safra buys Encyclopædia Britannica after its revenue halves and disbands the door-to-door sales force. → Britannica and the CD-ROM Encyclopedias
• Malaysia decrees the Multimedia Super Corridor. → Southeast Asia’s Tech Industry: Grab, Gojek, and the Super-App Archipelago
• Marimba’s Castanet ships in October and makes “push” the word of the following year. → Kim Polese
• Metcalfe predicts the internet will collapse; he later eats the column. → Bob Metcalfe and Ethernet
• Nvidia nearly goes bankrupt before the RIVA 128. → Jensen Huang and Nvidia: From Graphics to the Engine of AI
• Rogers and Pajitnov found The Tetris Company as the game’s rights revert to its author. → Henk Rogers
• Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act shields platforms from liability for user content. → Internet Law and Section 230
• Side Effects Software releases Houdini 1.0, the successor to the PRISMS code bought from the Omnibus receivers. → Dead End: Omnibus Computer Graphics
• The Dancing Baby becomes an early viral internet meme. → Internet Memes
• The KDE project begins; GNOME follows in answer. → The History of Desktop Environments
• The Telecommunications Act sets the Title I / Title II divide. → The Net Neutrality Battles
• The Williamses sell Sierra On-Line to CUC International for about $1.5 billion in stock. → Ken and Roberta Williams and Sierra On-Line
• The Zimmermann investigation collapses; Clipper is dead. → The Crypto Wars of the 1990s
• The first Capture the Flag contest is held at DEF CON 4 in Las Vegas. → Capture the Flag: Hacking as a Sport
• Windows CE ships. → Dead End: Microsoft’s Mobile Failures
• id Software releases Quake. → John Carmack
• The USB 1.0 specification is published on 15 January. → USB: The Port for Almost Everything
• A 4–4 Supreme Court leaves standing the ruling that the Lotus 1-2-3 menu hierarchy is not copyrightable. → The Spreadsheet Revolution
• Barlow publishes the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace from Davos on 8 February. → John Perry Barlow and the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
• The Palm Pilot 1000 ships in March at $299. → Dead End: Palm and the PDA
• Brewster Kahle founds the Internet Archive in May. → Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive
• Ariane 5 Flight 501 self-destructs on 4 June from reused Ariane 4 code. → Famous Software Disasters
• Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington found Valve in Kirkland, Washington. → Gabe Newell
• Apple’s negotiation to buy Be falls apart in December; Apple buys NeXT instead. → Dead End: BeOS
• CSS level 1 becomes a W3C Recommendation. → Håkon Wium Lie and Bert Bos

1997

• Apple buys NeXT for $429 million; NeXTSTEP becomes the basis of macOS. → The macOS Lineage: From NeXTSTEP to Darwin
• Campbell joins Apple’s board on Jobs’s return. → Bill Campbell: The Trillion Dollar Coach
• Cynthia Breazeal begins building Kismet at the MIT AI Lab, a robot head that reads the tone of a voice and answers with an expression. → Cynthia Breazeal
• Hochreiter and Schmidhuber publish LSTM. → Schmidhuber, Hochreiter, and LSTM
• Impagliazzo and Wigderson show P = BPP if exponential time needs exponential circuits. → Avi Wigderson
• Joseph Jacobson, Barrett Comiskey and J. D. Albert found E Ink to commercialize their microencapsulated electrophoretic display. → Joseph Jacobson
• MAME is released. → Emulation and Retrocomputing
• Reed Hastings co-founds Netflix as DVD-by-mail. → Reed Hastings and Netflix
• Rosalind Picard’s book Affective Computing names the field. → Affective Computing: Machines That Read Feelings
• Steve Jobs ends Mac cloning, paying $100 million to buy out the biggest licensee. → Dead End: The Mac Clones
• Terry Kuny coins “digital dark age”. → Link Rot and the Digital Dark Age
• The Pentagon repeals the Ada mandate. → Ada: The Language the Pentagon Built
• The first IEEE 802.11 standard is published. → The History of Wi-Fi
• Transputer production ends. → Dead End: The Transputer
• Yandex launches, more than a year before Google is incorporated. → Arkady Volozh and Yandex: The Russian Internet
• Wired puts push media on its March cover: “kiss your browser goodbye”. → Dead End: PointCast and Push Technology
• Deep Blue beats Garry Kasparov in the deciding sixth game on 11 May. → Deep Blue and Computer Chess
• Ultima Online, lead-designed by Raph Koster, launches and passes 100,000 subscribers within six months. → Raph Koster
• The OMG adopts UML 1.1 in November. → UML and the Three Amigos

1998

• Akamai is founded on consistent hashing, inventing the content delivery network. → Content Delivery Networks
• Bechtolsheim writes a $100,000 check to Google Inc. before it exists. → Andy Bechtolsheim and Sun
• Compaq buys DEC. → DEC and the Minicomputer Era
• DigiCash goes bankrupt. → David Chaum and Digital Cash
• Google is incorporated. → The Search Engine Wars: Finding the Web
• Google is incorporated. → Larry Page and Sergey Brin: The Accidental Empire
• Jim Gray receives the Turing Award for transaction processing. → Jim Gray and the Transaction
• Nokia becomes the world’s largest mobile-phone maker. → Nokia: The Mobile Empire That Couldn’t Become a Software Company
• O’Reilly’s summit settles the industry on the name “open source”. → Tim O’Reilly
• Peter Thiel co-founds PayPal. → Peter Thiel and the PayPal Mafia
• Psion, Nokia, Ericsson and Motorola found Symbian around Psion’s EPOC32. → David Potter
• S receives the ACM Software System Award; Chambers endows a statistical-software prize with the money. → John Chambers
• Sutton and Barto publish Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction. → Barto and Sutton: Learning from Reward
• Symbian is formed from Psion’s EPOC. → Dead End: Symbian
• Tencent is founded in Shenzhen. → Tencent: WeChat, Gaming, and the Super-App Model
• The Bluetooth Special Interest Group forms. → Bluetooth
• The Digital Millennium Copyright Act passes. → Copyright and IP in the Digital Age
• The United States sues Microsoft for monopoly abuse. → Bill Gates and Microsoft
• The iMac G3 announces Apple’s comeback. → Jony Ive and Apple Design
• The term “open source” is adopted; the free-software schism begins. → The Open Source Movement
• Unreal ships with an engine built for licensing. → Game Engines: The Engine as a Platform
• Unreal ships with its editor in the box; licensing the Unreal Engine becomes Epic’s second business. → Tim Sweeney
• Postel redirects most of the DNS root with one email in January; ICANN is incorporated that autumn and he dies sixteen days later. → Jon Postel: The God of the Internet
• Steve Jobs cancels the Newton on 27 February. → Dead End: Apple Newton
• L0pht tells the US Senate in May it could take down the internet in 30 minutes. → Peiter “Mudge” Zatko: The Hacker Who Warned Washington
• Watts and Strogatz describe small-world networks in Nature. → Network Science and the Small World
• The EFF’s Deep Crack breaks DES for under $250,000 in July. → The Crypto Wars of the 1990s
• The E Ink paper makes the cover of Nature: a bistable, printable display that holds its image with no power. → Joseph Jacobson
• Wei Dai publishes b-money, a design for money created by computation and recorded by every participant. → The Cypherpunks: From Chaum to Bitcoin
• Iridium’s 66-satellite phone network switches on in November; bankruptcy follows within nine months. → Dead End: Iridium

1999

• Dell passes Compaq to become the largest PC vendor. → The Commodity PC
• Jack Ma founds Alibaba in his Hangzhou apartment. → Jack Ma and Alibaba: China’s Internet Pioneer
• Jeff Dean joins Google. → Jeff Dean and Google’s Infrastructure
• Marc Benioff founds Salesforce. → Marc Benioff and Salesforce
• NTT DoCoMo launches i-mode. → Japan’s Digital Culture: Walkman, Tamagotchi, and the Galapagos Problem
• Napster brings file sharing to 26 million ordinary users. → The Warez and Filesharing Era: Copying as Rebellion, Industry, and Revolution
• Napster gives MP3s away by the million. → The Digital Music Revolution
• PointCast sells for about $7 million, having refused around $450 million. → Dead End: PointCast and Push Technology
• Salesforce is founded under the slogan “No Software”. → The Rise of SaaS
• The CVE list begins. → The Vulnerability Disclosure Debate: Full Disclosure, Responsible Disclosure, and the Bug Bounty Economy
• The GeForce 256 introduces the term “GPU”. → The GPU Revolution: From Pixels to Intelligence
• The GeForce 256 is marketed as the first GPU. → Jensen Huang and Nvidia: From Graphics to the Engine of AI
• The paper usually taken as the founding of algorithmic game theory appears. → Algorithmic Game Theory
• WCAG 1.0 is published. → The Accessibility Revolution in Computing: How Technology Learned to Include Everyone
• Marimba goes public at $20 and closes its first day at $60.75, a $1.37 billion valuation on $13.9 million of revenue. → Kim Polese
• SETI@home launches on 17 May. → Volunteer Computing
• Greg Bacon names the shortest-program threads on comp.lang.perl.misc “Perl Golf”. → Code Golf and Perl Golf
• Napster launches in June. → Napster and the P2P Music Revolution
• The Mars Climate Orbiter is lost on 23 September to a unit mix-up. → Famous Software Disasters
• The first WAP service goes live in the Netherlands in October. → Dead End: WAP and the Mobile Web
• Barabási and Albert propose preferential attachment as the origin of scale-free networks. → Network Science and the Small World

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