Timeline: The 2000s
Abstract
What happened in computing in the 2000s, year by year. 168 events from 147 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 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
- 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
- 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
- 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 in 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
- Winer’s RSS 0.92 adds the enclosure element that makes podcasting possible. → Dave Winer and RSS
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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
- A court order shuts Napster down in July. → Napster and the P2P Music Revolution
- The Wayback Machine opens to the public in October with more than 10 billion archived pages. → Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive
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
- Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman share the Turing Award. → Rivest, Shamir, Adleman and RSA
- 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
2003
- 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
- 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 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
- Skype launches on 29 August. → Dead End: Skype
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
- Firefox 1.0 launches in November. → Mitchell Baker and Mozilla
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 in two weeks. → 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
- 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
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
- 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
- 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
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
- Netflix begins streaming. → Reed Hastings and Netflix
- 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
- Safaricom launches M-Pesa in Kenya on 6 March. → Africa’s Tech Industry: Leapfrog, Mobile Money, and the Continent That Skipped the Landline
- 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
- Apple announces that App Store developers will keep 70 percent of sales, fixing the 30 percent platform fee. → The Platform Tax
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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
- why the lucky stiff deletes his entire online presence on 19 August. → why the lucky stiff
- 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