Timeline: The 2000s

← The 1990s · [[index|Thematic index]] · The 2010s →

2000

• Sony v. Connectix rules the emulator itself lawful. → Emulation and Retrocomputing
• AOL merges with Time Warner for $165 billion. → The AOL Era
• Bill Joy publishes “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us”. → Bill Joy: The Other Sun Founder
• Blum and von Ahn create the CAPTCHA. → Manuel Blum: From Complexity to CAPTCHA
• Breazeal’s thesis Sociable Machines establishes social robotics as a field; Kismet goes on display in the MIT Museum. → Cynthia Breazeal
• Chris Lattner begins LLVM as a University of Illinois project. → LLVM: The Compiler Infrastructure That Conquered Programming
• Eliezer Yudkowsky co-founds the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, later MIRI. → Eliezer Yudkowsky
• Eric Brewer conjectures the CAP theorem; Gilbert and Lynch prove it in 2002. → Distributed Systems: Consensus, CAP, and the Hard Problems
• Gibson defines “spyware” and releases OptOut, the first program to remove it. → Steve Gibson
• Marcus Hutter defines AIXI, a formal model of an optimal reinforcement-learning agent. → Solomonoff Induction and AIXI
• Microsoft announces C#, with Hejlsberg as lead architect. → Anders Hejlsberg: From Turbo Pascal to TypeScript
• Salesforce launches its web API. → The API Economy
• Son briefly holds the world’s largest paper fortune, then loses about $59 billion in the crash. → Masayoshi Son and SoftBank
• The Nasdaq crash begins; $5 trillion in market value is destroyed by 2001. → The Dot-com Bubble: Irrational Exuberance and the First Internet Crash
• The first Perl Golf Apocalypse is played at the fourth Perl Conference in Monterey. → Code Golf and Perl Golf
• Verbmobil’s final evaluation: the statistical engine from RWTH Aachen errs on 29% of sentences, the hand-built semantic transfer engine on 62%. → Dead End: Verbmobil
• 1 January passes with almost no Y2K failures after $300–600 billion of remediation. → The Y2K Crisis
• The Sims goes on sale; by 2002 it has overtaken Myst as the best-selling PC game → Will Wright
• R 1.0.0 is released on the leap day. → Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman
• R 1.0.0 ships on 29 February, a leap day. → R and Statistical Computing
• Cisco is briefly the world’s most valuable company in March. → Cisco: The Company That Routed the Internet
• Phil Katz, creator of the zip format, is found dead on 14 April at 37. → Phil Katz and the Zip Format
• Clinton switches off Selective Availability on 1 May; civilian GPS accuracy improves tenfold. → GPS and Satellite Navigation
• Tuvalu joins the United Nations, paying for membership with revenue from its .tv domain. → Top-Level Domains: Countries, Cash, and Ghost Domains
• The last Multics installation, at Canada’s Department of National Defence in Halifax, shuts down on 30 October. → Fernando Corbató and Time-Sharing
• Intel launches the Pentium 4, the first NetBurst processor, at 1.4 and 1.5 GHz. → Dead End: Intel NetBurst
• Winer’s RSS 0.92 adds the enclosure element that makes podcasting possible. → Dave Winer and RSS
• Fabrice Bellard starts FFmpeg under the pseudonym Gérard Lantau. → Fabrice Bellard: FFmpeg, QEMU and the One-Man Project
• Sonic Team releases Phantasy Star Online for the Dreamcast, the first online role-playing game on a home console to find a large audience. → Sonic Team: Naka, Ohshima and Yasuhara

2001

• Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within loses $137 million in the uncanny valley. → The CGI Revolution
• Bram Cohen releases BitTorrent. → Bram Cohen and BitTorrent
• Casey Reas and Ben Fry start Processing at the MIT Media Lab. → Processing and Creative Coding
• Chaff’s two-watched-literals scheme makes SAT solving industrial. → SAT Solvers
• Creative Commons is founded. → Copyright and IP in the Digital Age
• Dahl and Nygaard share the Turing Award. → Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard: The Inventors of Object-Oriented Programming
• DataPlay’s coin-sized optical disc wins Best of Show at CES. → Dead End: DataPlay
• Microsoft’s Xbox enters the console war. → The Console Wars: How Hardware Battles Shaped Gaming
• Sega exits the console business after the Dreamcast. → Sega: The Console War It Lost and the Games It Won
• The iPod ships. → Tony Fadell: From iPod to Nest
• JetBrains’ IntelliJ IDEA (January) and IBM’s Eclipse both appear. → The IDE Wars
• Wikipedia launches on 15 January. → Jimmy Wales and Wikipedia
• NTT DoCoMo’s 503i handsets go on sale with i-appli, downloadable Java programs for phones. → Mobile Gaming Before the Smartphone
• Seventeen developers write the Agile Manifesto at a Utah ski resort in February. → The Agile Revolution: From Waterfall to Manifesto to Industry
• Berners-Lee’s Scientific American article proposes the Semantic Web. → Dead End: The Semantic Web
• Intel launches Itanium on 29 May, three years late. → Dead End: Intel Itanium
• SmarterChild goes live as a chatbot contact on AOL Instant Messenger. → Chatbots Before ChatGPT
• A court order shuts Napster down in July. → Napster and the P2P Music Revolution
• eChapman of Baltimore buys NetNoir’s net assets. → NetNoir and the Afrocentric Web
• The Wayback Machine opens to the public in October with more than 10 billion archived pages. → Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive
• Apple launches the iPod on 23 October. → Steve Jobs and Apple
• Windows XP moves consumer Windows onto the NT kernel. → The Windows Story

2002

• AOL peaks at 26.7 million subscribers. → The AOL Era
• Bezos’s API mandate makes Amazon service-oriented. → The Microservices Revolution
• Bill Gates’s Trustworthy Computing memo halts Windows development for security. → Secure by Design: A History of Software Security Engineering
• Estonia issues digital identity cards. → Estonia and Eastern Europe’s Tech Industry: Digital Governance, Antivirus Pioneers, and the Game Studios
• Gary McKinnon’s intrusions into 97 US military and NASA systems end in March; a ten-year extradition fight follows. → Gary McKinnon: The UFO Hacker and the Decade-Long Extradition
• Hewlett-Packard absorbs Compaq. → Compaq and the BIOS Clean-Room
• Japan’s Earth Simulator takes the Top500 lead, the “Computenik” shock. → The Supercomputer Era: The Fastest Machines on Earth
• MMS launches commercially. → Dead End: MMS, the Picture Message with a Toll Booth
• Maine gives laptops to every seventh grader, the first statewide one-to-one program in the US. → Seymour Papert and the Children’s Machine
• Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman share the Turing Award. → Rivest, Shamir, Adleman and RSA
• Subhash Khot proposes the Unique Games Conjecture. → Approximation Algorithms
• The Sony Ericsson P800, the first UIQ phone, is announced. → Dead End: Symbian
• Tor is released as free software. → Tor and Anonymity Networks
• eBay buys PayPal for $1.5 billion. → Peter Thiel and the PayPal Mafia
• iRobot ships the Roomba. → Robotics
• Globalstar files for bankruptcy with $3.3 billion in liabilities; Teledesic stops work in October. → Dead End: Teledesic, Globalstar and the First Satellite Internet
• Spanish Wikipedia editors fork to the Enciclopedia Libre on 26 February; Wikipedia moves to .org and rules out advertising. → Jimmy Wales and Wikipedia
• Wolfram self-publishes A New Kind of Science; reviewers find its one new theorem is Matthew Cook’s. → Stephen Wolfram
• Hiroshi Yamauchi retires; programmer Satoru Iwata becomes Nintendo’s first president from outside the family. → Nintendo: A Century of Play
• IBM Zurich announces a storage density of a terabit per square inch with its Millipede probe array. → Dead End: IBM Millipede
• DataPlay files for bankruptcy months after its first copy-protected albums. → Dead End: DataPlay

2003

• A backdoor disguised as an error check is planted in the CVS mirror of the Linux kernel and caught before it reaches the main tree. → Software Supply Chain Security
• AMD’s Opteron and Athlon 64 extend x86 to 64 bits; Intel later adopts the design. → AMD and the x86 Underdog
• Alan Kay receives the Turing Award. → Alan Kay and Smalltalk
• Android starts as a startup building a camera operating system. → Android: The Dominant Mobile OS
• Apple opens the iTunes Music Store. → The Digital Music Revolution
• Blaze publishes the master-key attack on pin-tumbler locks: one tenant’s key, a file and a few blanks yield the building’s master. → Matt Blaze
• Fabrice Bellard releases the first preview of the QEMU emulator. → Fabrice Bellard: FFmpeg, QEMU and the One-Man Project
• Linden Lab launches Second Life. → Dead End: Second Life
• The Pirate Bay launches in Sweden. → Peter Sunde and The Pirate Bay
• Valve launches Steam. → The PC Gaming Revolution
• The SCO Group sues IBM for $1 billion, claiming Linux contains Unix code. → Commercial Unix and the Unix Wars: System V, Xenix, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX
• The Human Genome Project finishes in April, after thirteen years and $2.7 billion. → Bioinformatics and the Human Genome
• CCP launches EVE Online, a single-shard space MMORPG. → EVE Online
• TransAlta announces a $24 million charge caused by a cut-and-paste error in a bid spreadsheet. → Spreadsheet Errors
• The Blaster worm starts spreading through Windows 2000 and XP. → The Windows Story
• Skype launches on 29 August. → Dead End: Skype
• Christopher Poole, 15, launches 4chan with an English translation of Futaba Channel’s software. → 4chan and Imageboard Culture

2004

• Ben Hammersley coins “podcasting”. → The Podcast Revolution
• Cerf and Kahn share the Turing Award. → Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn: Fathers of the Internet
• David Heinemeier Hansson extracts Ruby on Rails from Basecamp. → Ruby and Rails
• Doug Cutting starts what becomes Hadoop. → The Big Data Revolution
• Facebook launches; MySpace and Friendster precede it. → The Social Media Revolution: Connection, Addiction, and the Fragmentation of Public Space
• Google’s MapReduce paper appears; Hadoop follows as an open-source reconstruction. → The Big Data Revolution
• Google’s billboard math puzzle recruits engineers. → Recruiting by Puzzle
• Half-Life 2 ships requiring Steam, even on disc. → Valve and Steam
• No vehicle finishes the first DARPA Grand Challenge. → The Autonomous Vehicle Race: The Longest Last Mile in Technological History
• OpenStreetMap is founded. → Digital Maps and GIS
• Spam reaches 70–80% of all email traffic. → The History of Spam
• Steve Lipner’s Security Development Lifecycle becomes mandatory for Microsoft products. → Roger Schell and Steve Lipner
• Google launches Orkut on 22 January, two weeks before Facebook. → Dead End: Orkut
• Zuckerberg launches Facebook from his Harvard dorm in February. → Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook: The Social Network That Rewired Society
• Sundar Pichai joins Google on 1 April, the day Gmail launches. → Sundar Pichai and Google
• Intel cancels the 4 GHz Pentium 4 after dropping the next NetBurst designs in May. → Dead End: Intel NetBurst
• Canonical releases Ubuntu 4.10 “Warty Warthog”. → The Linux Distributions: From Floppy Sets to Enterprise Subscriptions
• The ZKM opens The Algorithmic Revolution, an exhibition on the history of interactive and algorithmic art. → Peter Weibel
• Firefox 1.0 launches on 9 November. → Mitchell Baker and Mozilla
• Facebook, still limited to college students, reaches a million active users in December. → Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook: The Social Network That Rewired Society

2005

• Apple ships VoiceOver with Mac OS X Tiger. → The Accessibility Revolution in Computing: How Technology Learned to Include Everyone
• Arduino is released. → The Open Hardware Movement: Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and the Democratization of Making
• Google buys Android for at least $50 million. → Android: The Dominant Mobile OS
• Kurzweil publishes The Singularity Is Near. → Ray Kurzweil
• May co-founds XMOS in Bristol to build multicore microcontrollers with hardware-scheduled threads and channels. → David May
• Negroponte hires Mary Lou Jepsen as chief technology officer and first employee of One Laptop per Child; she designs the XO-1’s dual-mode sunlight-readable screen. → Mary Lou Jepsen
• Peter Naur receives the Turing Award. → Peter Naur
• Rana el Kaliouby’s Cambridge thesis infers six complex mental states from video in real time. → Rana el Kaliouby
• Security Now! begins on Leo Laporte’s TWiT network; episode 1,000 airs in 2024. → Steve Gibson
• Single-core speed gains stall; the multicore era makes concurrency everyone’s problem. → Concurrency and Parallelism: Threads, Locks, and the Hard Problem
• Sun releases ZFS; its license keeps it out of Linux. → File Systems: From FAT to ext to ZFS
• Torvalds writes Git after the kernel loses free access to BitKeeper. → Linus Torvalds and Linux
• YouTube launches. → The Streaming Wars
• Media Lab Europe in Dublin announces its voluntary liquidation. → The MIT Media Lab
• Google Maps launches in February. → Digital Maps and GIS
• Y Combinator launches its first Summer Founders Program. → Paul Graham and Y Combinator
• The Acid2 test, prompted by Lie’s challenge to Microsoft, is published; Safari passes first. → Håkon Wium Lie and Bert Bos
• Azureus ships a distributed hash table, and BitTorrent clients no longer need a central tracker. → BitTorrent: The Protocol
• Nokia announces the 770 Internet Tablet, the first Maemo Linux device. → Dead End: Maemo and MeeGo
• Google Reader launches on 7 October. → Dead End: Google Reader
• Star Wars Galaxies’ New Game Enhancements cut 34 professions to nine and drive players out. → Raph Koster
• The Xbox 360 goes on sale in the United States and Canada on 22 November. → The Console Wars: How Hardware Battles Shaped Gaming
• December 2005: David A. Wheeler presents diverse double-compiling as a countermeasure to the trusting-trust attack. → Reflections on Trusting Trust
• Electronic Arts agrees to buy the mobile game publisher JAMDAT for about $680 million. → Mobile Gaming Before the Smartphone
• Ruby on Rails 1.0 is released. → Ruby and Rails
• IBM ends sales of OS/2. → Dead End: OS/2

2006

• Adblock Plus is released. → The Browser Extension Ecosystem
• Amazon Web Services launches. → Jeff Bezos and Amazon
• Amazon launches EC2 and S3, inventing the public cloud. → The Cloud Computing Era: When the Server Disappeared
• Amazon launches EC2. → The Cloud Wars: AWS, Azure, GCP, and the Infrastructure Battle
• Concorde proves an optimal tour through an 85,900-point chip-layout instance. → The Traveling Salesman Problem
• Facebook introduces the News Feed and Twitter launches. → The Social Media Revolution: Connection, Addiction, and the Fragmentation of Public Space
• Frances Allen becomes the first woman to receive the Turing Award. → Frances Allen and Compiler Optimization
• Geoffrey Chang retracts protein structures produced by a faulty in-house program; five papers fall. → The Reproducibility Crisis in Computational Science
• Julian Assange launches WikiLeaks. → Julian Assange: From “Mendax” to WikiLeaks
• Nvidia introduces CUDA. → Jensen Huang and Nvidia: From Graphics to the Engine of AI
• Symbian holds 73% of the smartphone market. → Dead End: Symbian
• The Netflix Prize offers $1 million for a 10% better recommender. → Recommendation Systems
• Toshiba settles Masuoka’s lawsuit over the flash invention for 87 million yen. → Fujio Masuoka and Flash Memory
• Jack Dorsey sends the first tweet on 21 March. → Jack Dorsey, Twitter, and Square
• SGI files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection for the first time. → Dead End: Silicon Graphics
• Bill Gates names Ray Ozzie Microsoft’s chief software architect. → Ray Ozzie
• Intel launches the Core 2 Duo, descended from the Haifa-designed Pentium M. → Dead End: Intel NetBurst
• Marcus Hutter announces the Hutter Prize for compressing Wikipedia. → Solomonoff Induction and AIXI
• Dutch activists show on live television that a Nedap voting computer can be reprogrammed to shift votes. → Voting Machines and the Paper Trail

2007

• Amazon launches the Kindle. → Project Gutenberg and the E-Book
• Clarke, Emerson, and Sifakis share the Turing Award for model checking. → Formal Methods and Model Checking
• Hadley Wickham releases ggplot2, an implementation of Wilkinson’s grammar of graphics for R. → Hadley Wickham
• Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld found the charity evaluator GiveWell. → Effective Altruism
• MIT teaches its Scheme-based introductory course 6.001 for the last time. → Scheme and SICP
• Netflix begins streaming. → Reed Hastings and Netflix
• Schaeffer’s team announces in Science that checkers is a draw under perfect play. → Deep Blue and Computer Chess
• Seventeen-year-old George Hotz unlocks the first iPhone. → George Hotz: geohot, the iPhone, and the PlayStation War
• The PUE metric for data-center efficiency is introduced. → The History of Green IT
• The YouTube Partner Program makes video creation a profession. → The Creator Economy
• The iPhone launches and redefines the smartphone. → The Mobile Computing Revolution: The Computer in the Pocket
• Vista ships after the Longhorn collapse. → The Windows Story
• Holtzbrinck buys StudiVZ for roughly €85 million in January. → Europe’s Local Social Networks Before Facebook
• Jim Gray disappears at sea off San Francisco in January. → Jim Gray and the Transaction
• Jobs unveils the iPhone on 9 January. → Steve Jobs and Apple
• Paul Graham launches Hacker News. → Paul Graham and Y Combinator
• Safaricom launches M-Pesa in Kenya on 6 March. → Africa’s Tech Industry: Leapfrog, Mobile Money, and the Continent That Skipped the Landline
• Charles Simonyi launches to the International Space Station as a paying passenger. → Charles Simonyi: From Bravo to Word
• Sony announces the end of its ATRAC-based Connect store and opens Walkmans to MP3 and Windows Media. → Dead End: Sony ATRAC and MagicGate
• Griesemer, Pike and Thompson sketch Go on a whiteboard during a long C++ build. → Go: The Cloud-Native Language
• The AP and the EFF show Comcast forging TCP resets to disrupt BitTorrent uploads. → BitTorrent: The Protocol
• Quanta begins full production of the XO-1 at $188; Jepsen leaves at year’s end to found Pixel Qi. → Mary Lou Jepsen

2008

• Barbara Liskov receives the Turing Award. → Barbara Liskov and Data Abstraction
• Netscape formally shuts down. → Marc Andreessen and Netscape
• Notebooks outsell desktops worldwide for the first time. → The Portable Computer
• Spotify launches. → The Digital Music Revolution
• Stack Overflow and GitHub both launch. → The Rise of Developer Communities
• Sun buys MySQL AB for $1 billion. → The Database Wars: Oracle, Open Source, and the Cloud
• Yahoo! turns down Microsoft’s $44.6 billion offer. → Dead End: Yahoo!
• Warner goes Blu-ray only on 4 January; Toshiba concedes 46 days later. → Dead End: HD-DVD
• Pakistan Telecom’s BGP announcement diverts most of YouTube’s traffic for about two hours. → BGP: The Three-Napkin Protocol
• Germany’s Constitutional Court creates a fundamental right to the confidentiality and integrity of IT systems. → Germany’s IT Security Policy: From the Cipher Office to the State Trojan
• Kevin Kelly publishes the essay “1,000 True Fans.” → Kevin Kelly
• Apple announces that App Store developers will keep 70 percent of sales, fixing the 30 percent platform fee. → The Platform Tax
• ISO announces approval of Office Open XML, the .docx format, as ISO/IEC 29500. → The History of Word Processing
• HP Labs claims in Nature to have found the missing memristor in titanium dioxide. → The Memristor
• EVE players elect the first Council of Stellar Management. → EVE Online
• Apple opens the App Store on 10 July. → The Rise of the App Store: Platform, Power, and the 30-Percent Tax
• Garriott flies to the International Space Station on Soyuz TMA-13, the first child of an astronaut in orbit. → Richard Garriott
• The T-Mobile G1, the first Android phone, goes on sale in the United States. → Android: The Dominant Mobile OS
• Satoshi Nakamoto posts the Bitcoin white paper on 31 October. → The Cryptocurrency Revolution

2009

• A Swedish court convicts the Pirate Bay founders. → Peter Sunde and The Pirate Bay
• Amazon remotely deletes purchased copies of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm from customers’ Kindles. → Digital Rights Management: The Revocable Purchase
• BlackBerry holds over 50% of the US enterprise smartphone market, its peak. → Dead End: BlackBerry
• Chuck Thacker receives the Turing Award. → Chuck Thacker and the Alto
• Dorsey co-founds Square. → Jack Dorsey, Twitter, and Square
• El Kaliouby and Rosalind Picard spin Affectiva out of the MIT Media Lab. → Rana el Kaliouby
• Flickr’s “10+ deploys a day” talk at Velocity and the first DevOpsDays in Ghent start the DevOps movement. → The DevOps Revolution: Tearing Down the Wall Between Development and Operations
• Free turn-by-turn navigation on Android collapses the sat-nav industry. → Digital Maps and GIS
• Google announces ChromeOS. → ChromeOS and the Browser-as-OS: Google’s Bet on the Web
• Google buys reCAPTCHA. → Luis von Ahn and Human Computation
• Google releases Go as open source. → Go: The Cloud-Native Language
• Hoare calls the null reference his “billion-dollar mistake”. → Tony Hoare and the Science of Programming
• Microsoft’s PhotoDNA gives platforms a tool against child-abuse imagery. → Content Moderation
• SGI’s remains sell for $42.5 million. → Dead End: Silicon Graphics
• The L4-family kernel seL4 becomes the first OS kernel with a formal proof of correctness. → Jochen Liedtke and L4
• UIQ Technology, maker of Symbian’s pen interface, files for bankruptcy. → Dead End: Symbian
• Uber is founded; Airbnb the year before. → The Gig Economy and Technology
• PC Magazine prints its last issue in January; Dr. Dobb’s ends print in February. → The Computer Press
• Microsoft announces the end of Encarta in March; it closes in October. → Dead End: Encarta
• Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court rules the use of voting computers in the 2005 federal election unconstitutional. → Voting Machines and the Paper Trail
• Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai launch Foursquare at SXSW. → The Social Media Revolution: Connection, Addiction, and the Fragmentation of Public Space
• Kickstarter launches with all-or-nothing funding and rewards instead of equity. → Crowdfunding and Kickstarter
• Wolfram Alpha, a computational answer engine built on Mathematica, goes live. → Stephen Wolfram
• Google demonstrates Wave at I/O on 28 May; it is discontinued fifteen months later. → Dead End: Google Wave
• The Regional Court of Cologne dismisses Facebook’s suit against StudiVZ. → Europe’s Local Social Networks Before Facebook
• why the lucky stiff deletes his entire online presence on 19 August. → why the lucky stiff
• Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard ships on 28 August without AppleTalk. → Early Networking Failures: The Protocol Wars
• GeoCities closes; Jason Scott’s new Archive Team has saved over a million of its accounts. → Archive Team
• Prime View International of Taiwan completes its purchase of E Ink for about $450 million and renames itself E Ink Holdings. → Joseph Jacobson
• Fabrice Bellard finishes computing pi to 2.7 trillion digits on a desktop PC, a world record. → Fabrice Bellard: FFmpeg, QEMU and the One-Man Project

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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