Timeline: The 2010s
Abstract
What happened in computing in the 2010s, year by year. 172 events from 145 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 2000s · [[index|Thematic index]] · The 2020s →
2010
- Adrian Lamo reports Chelsea Manning to the FBI. → Adrian Lamo: The Homeless Hacker Who Reported Chelsea Manning
- Albert Gonzalez receives 20 years for the TJX and Heartland card thefts. → Albert Gonzalez: The Biggest Card Thief of the 2000s
- Chelsea Manning passes roughly three-quarters of a million classified documents to WikiLeaks. → Chelsea Manning: The Analyst Who Leaked a War
- Demis Hassabis co-founds DeepMind in London. → Demis Hassabis and DeepMind: Games, Proteins, and the Path to AGI
- Fadell founds Nest. → Tony Fadell: From iPod to Nest
- Fei-Fei Li’s ImageNet challenge runs for the first time. → Fei-Fei Li and ImageNet: The Dataset That Fed the Revolution
- Microsoft launches Azure. → The Cloud Wars: AWS, Azure, GCP, and the Infrastructure Battle
- Nokia and Intel merge Maemo and Moblin into MeeGo. → Dead End: Maemo and MeeGo
- Steve Jobs publishes “Thoughts on Flash”. → Dead End: Flash & The Plugin Web
- Oracle completes its $7.4 billion purchase of Sun in January. → Dead End: Sun Microsystems
- Google Buzz launches inside Gmail on 9 February and exposes users’ contacts. → Dead End: Google Buzz
- The Flash Crash of 6 May erases nearly $1 trillion in minutes. → High-Frequency Trading
- Stuxnet is discovered on 17 June, the first cyberweapon to cause physical damage. → The History of Cyberwar: When Code Became a Weapon
- Harry Brignull registers darkpatterns.org to name and shame deceptive interfaces. → Dark Patterns: Deceptive Design and the Consent Dialog
2011
- Alexandra Elbakyan launches Sci-Hub. → Alexandra Elbakyan and Sci-Hub
- Eric Yuan leaves Cisco with about forty WebEx engineers to build Zoom. → Eric Yuan
- Google Brain is founded. → Jeff Dean and Google’s Infrastructure
- JetBrains announces Kotlin. → Kotlin and Modern JVM Development
- Judea Pearl receives the Turing Award. → Judea Pearl and the Causal Revolution
- LulzSec’s fifty days of hacks end with its leader cooperating with the FBI. → Anonymous and LulzSec: Hacktivism and the Mask
- Microsoft buys Skype for $8.5 billion. → Dead End: Skype
- Newell tells a Seattle industry conference that piracy is a service problem, not a pricing problem. → Gabe Newell
- Smartphones outsell PCs for the first time. → The Personal Computing Explosion
- Sony sues Hotz over the PlayStation 3 root key. → George Hotz: geohot, the iPhone, and the PlayStation War
- The Arab Spring peaks the “liberation technology” thesis; Morozov’s The Net Delusion argues the opposite. → Online Censorship and Internet Freedom
- The FTC’s Buzz order requires Google to run an audited privacy program. → Dead End: Google Buzz
- Yandex lists on NASDAQ. → Arkady Volozh and Yandex: The Russian Internet
- Stack Exchange opens its code golf site; the first question asks for a JAPH. → Code Golf and Perl Golf
- Kagermann, Lukas and Wahlster publish “Industrie 4.0” in VDI Nachrichten on 1 April; the term becomes German industrial policy. → Wolfgang Wahlster
- Google+ launches in June. → Dead End: Google+
- Nokia announces the MeeGo-based N9, already its only planned MeeGo phone. → Dead End: Maemo and MeeGo
- Tim Cook becomes Apple CEO in August. → Tim Cook and Apple
- Google announces “a fall spring-clean”, closing Desktop, Notebook, Sidewiki and seven other products. → Killed by Google: The Product Graveyard
- Apple introduces Siri on 4 October. → The Voice Assistant Revolution: Speaking to the Machine
- Steve Jobs dies on 5 October. → Steve Jobs and Apple
2012
- A jury awards Apple $1 billion against Samsung. → The Patent Wars
- AlexNet makes CUDA’s value for machine learning undeniable. → The GPU Revolution: From Pixels to Intelligence
- AlexNet wins the ImageNet competition, trained on two gaming GPUs. → Alex Krizhevsky
- AlexNet’s ImageNet win launches the deep learning era. → ImageNet: The Dataset That Proved Deep Learning Worked
- ByteDance is founded in Beijing. → ByteDance and TikTok: The Algorithm That Reorganized Attention
- Goldwasser and Micali share the Turing Award. → Shafi Goldwasser and Silvio Micali: Proving Cryptography Works
- Jaan Tallinn co-founds the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge with Martin Rees and Huw Price. → Jaan Tallinn
- Megaupload is indicted; a helicopter raid hits Kim Dotcom’s New Zealand mansion. → Kim Schmitz (Kim Dotcom)
- Microsoft releases TypeScript. → Anders Hejlsberg: From Turbo Pascal to TypeScript
- Ng co-founds Coursera. → Andrew Ng and AI Education
- Picard’s group shows in Neurology that skin conductance measured at the wrist during a seizure predicts how long the brain stays suppressed afterwards. → Rosalind Picard
- The Raspberry Pi launches. → The Open Hardware Movement: Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and the Democratization of Making
- Tinder reduces dating to a swipe. → The History of Online Dating
- Kodak files for bankruptcy in January. → Digital Photography and the Fall of Kodak
- Virginia Rometty becomes IBM’s first woman chief executive. → Virginia Rometty
- The English Wikipedia blacks itself out for 24 hours on 18 January to protest SOPA and PIPA. → Jimmy Wales and Wikipedia
- Double Fine’s adventure-game Kickstarter passes $1 million in 24 hours and closes above $3.3 million. → Crowdfunding and Kickstarter
- The Pirate Bay stops serving .torrent files and switches to magnet links. → BitTorrent: The Protocol
- Archive Team publishes the Warrior, a virtual machine that lets anyone join its rescue downloads. → Archive Team
- Pebble’s Kickstarter opens on 11 April and raises $10.27 million, a record. → Dead End: Pebble
- Knight Capital loses $440 million in 45 minutes on 1 August. → Famous Software Disasters
- The Oculus Rift Kickstarter raises $2.4 million from 9,522 backers after Carmack’s E3 demo of Luckey’s prototype. → Palmer Luckey
- Massachusetts voters pass the first automotive right-to-repair law with 86 percent. → Right to Repair
2013
- Adobe drops boxed software for the Creative Cloud subscription. → Adobe: The Creative Software Empire
- Geoffrey Hinton joins Google. → Geoffrey Hinton and Deep Learning
- Google buys Waze for about $1 billion. → Israel’s Tech Industry: From Unit 8200 to Startup Nation
- Leslie Lamport receives the Turing Award. → Leslie Lamport and the Science of Distributed Systems
- Nubank is founded in Brazil. → Latin America’s Tech Industry: MercadoLibre, Nubank, and the Fintech Continent
- Patreon launches. → The Creator Economy
- The FBI arrests Ross Ulbricht, operator of the Silk Road, in a San Francisco library. → Ross Ulbricht and the Silk Road
- Aaron Swartz dies on 11 January while facing federal prosecution over JSTOR downloads. → Aaron Swartz: The Internet’s Own Boy
- Vine launches on 24 January. → Dead End: Vine
- Solomon Hykes demonstrates Docker at PyCon on 13 March. → The Container Revolution
- Disney closes LucasArts’ internal game development, laying off about 150 people. → LucasArts and the Point-and-Click Adventure
- The Guardian publishes the first Snowden document on 5 June. → Edward Snowden and the NSA
- Google Reader shuts down on 1 July. → Dead End: Google Reader
- Michael Dell and Silver Lake take Dell private in a $24.4 billion buyout over Carl Icahn’s opposition. → Michael Dell
2014
- Alibaba’s IPO is the largest in history to date. → Jack Ma and Alibaba: China’s Internet Pioneer
- Facebook buys Oculus for $2 billion. → The History of Virtual Reality
- Facebook buys WhatsApp for $19 billion. → Instant Messaging: From ICQ to Signal
- Fernando Pérez spins the language-independent parts of the IPython notebook off as Project Jupyter. → Data Science and the Notebook
- Fowler and Lewis popularize the term “microservices”. → The Microservices Revolution
- Google buys Nest for $3.2 billion. → Tony Fadell: From iPod to Nest
- Google forms Project Zero. → The Vulnerability Disclosure Debate: Full Disclosure, Responsible Disclosure, and the Bug Bounty Economy
- Heartbleed exposes OpenSSL, a library funded by $2,000 a year. → Volunteer-Maintained Infrastructure
- Ian Goodfellow codes the first Generative Adversarial Network in Montreal. → The Generative AI Revolution
- Michael Stonebraker receives the Turing Award. → Michael Stonebraker and Postgres
- Microsoft absorbs Nokia’s phone business. → Nokia: The Mobile Empire That Couldn’t Become a Software Company
- Mt. Gox collapses with about 850,000 bitcoins missing. → Mark Karpelès and the Fall of Mt. Gox
- Rowhammer shows software can flip bits in DRAM. → Spectre, Meltdown, and Hardware Vulnerabilities
- Tallinn co-founds the Future of Life Institute; the 2023 pause letter is one of its products. → Jaan Tallinn
- The battle of B-R5RB destroys 75 titans over 21 hours after a missed sovereignty payment. → EVE Online
- Google publishes a Glass etiquette guide warning against being a “Glasshole”. → Dead End: Google Glass & The First Wearable Wave
- Satya Nadella becomes Microsoft CEO in February. → Satya Nadella and Microsoft’s Transformation
- Facebook buys Oculus VR for $2 billion. → Palmer Luckey
- Apple unveils Swift in June. → Swift and the Post-Objective-C Era
- Google open-sources Kubernetes on 7 June. → The Container Revolution
- Google shuts Orkut down on 30 September. → Dead End: Orkut
2015
- A formal verification tool finds a crash bug in Timsort that shipped in Java and Python for over a decade. → The History of Sorting
- A study of 625,000 mammograms finds computer-aided detection improves no measure of screening accuracy. → AI in Clinical Practice
- HP splits into two companies. → Hewlett-Packard
- IBM forms Watson Health. → Dead End: IBM Watson Health
- Microsoft releases Visual Studio Code. → The IDE Wars
- OpenAI is co-founded as a nonprofit. → Sam Altman and OpenAI
- Rob Pike codifies the Go Proverbs. → The Philosophy of Programming Languages
- Rust 1.0 is released. → Rust: The Language That Solved C’s Fifty-Year-Old Problem
- Sundar Pichai becomes CEO of Google. → Sundar Pichai and Google
- The FCC reclassifies broadband under Title II; it is reversed in 2017. → The Net Neutrality Battles
- Google ends the consumer Glass program in January. → Dead End: Google Glass & The First Wearable Wave
- Shenmue III is announced at Sony’s E3 press conference; its Kickstarter closes at $6,333,295, then the most-funded video game on the platform. → Yu Suzuki
- The Librarian of Congress exempts repair of vehicle software, including tractors, from the DMCA’s anti-circumvention rule. → Right to Repair
- SpaceX lands an orbital booster for the first time in December. → Elon Musk and Software-Defined Industry
- Sutskever co-founds OpenAI in December. → Ilya Sutskever and the GPT Series
2016
- Bill Campbell dies. → Bill Campbell: The Trillion Dollar Coach
- BlackBerry’s smartphone share falls below 1%. → Dead End: BlackBerry
- India’s Jio makes mobile data nearly free. → The Digital Divide: Who Gets Computing and Who Doesn’t
- Jepsen founds Openwater to replace the MRI scanner with near-infrared light and holographic imaging. → Mary Lou Jepsen
- The 2016 US election exposes microtargeting and foreign interference. → Tech and Democracy / Elections
- The COMPAS recidivism-prediction controversy puts algorithmic bias on the public agenda. → AI Ethics and Algorithmic Bias
- The Mirai botnet of IoT devices launches record denial-of-service attacks. → The IoT Revolution: When Everything Connects
- The US election makes disinformation a mainstream concern. → Disinformation and Misinformation
- The deletion of left-pad breaks build systems worldwide. → Volunteer-Maintained Infrastructure
- The tidyverse meta-package collects Wickham’s data-science packages under one philosophy. → Hadley Wickham
- Tristan Harris’s “How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds” makes attention design a public issue. → The Attention Economy
- Vulkan 1.0 is released. → Graphics APIs: OpenGL, DirectX, and Vulkan
- AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol 4–1 in Seoul in March. → DeepMind and AlphaGo: The Match That Changed AI
- Microsoft launches the Tay chatbot on Twitter and takes it offline about 16 hours later. → Dead End: Short Cases
- Mayhem wins DARPA’s Cyber Grand Challenge, then finishes last against human teams at DEF CON CTF. → Capture the Flag: Hacking as a Sport
- Dell closes its $67 billion purchase of EMC, the largest technology acquisition to that date. → Michael Dell
- DeepMind publishes WaveNet, a neural network that generates speech one audio sample at a time. → The History of Speech Synthesis
- Twitter announces Vine’s shutdown on 27 October. → Dead End: Vine
- Pebble is insolvent; its assets go to Fitbit in December. → Dead End: Pebble
2017
- “Attention Is All You Need” introduces the Transformer. → The Transformer: “Attention Is All You Need”
- “Attention Is All You Need”, co-authored by Jakob Uszkoreit, introduces the Transformer. → Hans Uszkoreit and German Language Technology
- AMD ships the Zen architecture under CEO Lisa Su, beginning its turnaround. → AMD and the x86 Underdog
- CSS Grid gives the web a real layout system. → The History of Web Design
- Google makes Kotlin an official Android language. → Kotlin and Modern JVM Development
- Hennessy and Patterson share the Turing Award for RISC. → Hennessy and Patterson: The Quantitative Approach
- President Obama commutes Manning’s 35-year sentence. → Chelsea Manning: The Analyst Who Leaked a War
- The Transformer ends decades of dispute in NLP and opens the LLM era. → The Natural Language Processing Revolution
- The first DEF CON Voting Village, co-founded by Blaze; an AVS WinVote falls over Wi-Fi in about ten minutes. → Matt Blaze
- Verizon buys Yahoo!’s core business for $4.48 billion. → Dead End: Yahoo!
- WebAssembly ships in major browsers. → WebAssembly
- The FCC incentive auction, run with the SATFC repacking solver, closes at $19.8 billion. → Spectrum Auctions
- Luckey leaves Facebook in March and incorporates Anduril Industries in April. → Palmer Luckey
- Marcus Hutchins stops WannaCry on 12 May by registering a $10 domain. → Marcus Hutchins: The Accidental Hero of WannaCry
- Impression Products v. Lexmark is decided on 30 May. → The History of Printing
- Zadeh, who died in Berkeley on 6 September, is buried in Baku’s First Alley of Honor with state honors. → Lotfi Zadeh
- Ruja Ignatova, the OneCoin “Cryptoqueen”, vanishes on a flight to Athens in October. → Ruja Ignatova: The Missing Cryptoqueen
2018
- Bengio, Hinton, and LeCun share the Turing Award. → Yoshua Bengio and the Montreal School
- CeBIT holds its last edition; the computer trade fair era ends. → CeBIT and the Age of the Computer Trade Fair
- Joy Buolamwini’s Gender Shades study measures facial-recognition error rates by skin tone and gender. → AI Ethics and Algorithmic Bias
- The Cambridge Analytica scandal breaks. → Tech and Democracy / Elections
- The Cambridge Analytica scandal breaks. → Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook: The Social Network That Rewired Society
- The FDA clears Empatica’s Embrace, co-founded by Picard, as the first wristwatch for seizure alerting in neurology. → Rosalind Picard
- The GDPR takes effect. → The Privacy War: Surveillance, Data, and the Architecture of Attention
- The Google Walkout: 20,000 employees protest sexual-harassment payouts. → Tech Labor Movements
- Spectre and Meltdown are disclosed on 3 January. → Spectre, Meltdown, and Hardware Vulnerabilities
- Trump blocks Broadcom’s $117 billion bid for Qualcomm on 12 March. → Qualcomm: The Invisible Tax on Every Phone
- The FDA authorizes IDx-DR, the first autonomous AI diagnostic system. → AI in Clinical Practice
- The European Commission fines Google €4.34 billion over Android licensing restrictions. → Android: The Dominant Mobile OS
- Cody Ogden starts Killed by Google, a public graveyard of discontinued Google products. → Killed by Google: The Product Graveyard
- IBM under Rometty announces the $34 billion purchase of Red Hat, its largest acquisition. → Virginia Rometty
- Epic Games opens a PC store charging 12 percent, the first major break with 30. → The Platform Tax
2019
- A review of over a thousand studies finds the basic-emotions premise behind face-reading unsupported. → Affective Computing: Machines That Read Feelings
- A study re-executes 863,878 Jupyter notebooks from GitHub; 4 percent reproduce their stored results. → Data Science and the Notebook
- California’s AB5 tries to reclassify gig workers as employees. → The Gig Economy and Technology
- Catmull and Hanrahan share the Turing Award. → Ed Catmull
- Jibo’s servers are switched off in March; each robot delivers its own farewell and does a last dance. → Cynthia Breazeal
- Jony Ive leaves Apple. → Jony Ive and Apple Design
- Shoshana Zuboff publishes The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. → Surveillance Capitalism: The Business Model That Monetized Human Behavior
- Apple and Qualcomm settle their royalty war in April. → Qualcomm: The Invisible Tax on Every Phone
- Google shuts consumer Google+ in April. → Dead End: Google+
- The Oculus Quest ships on 21 May, a VR headset that needs no PC, phone or cable. → The History of Virtual Reality
- Joi Ito resigns as Media Lab director over hidden donations from Jeffrey Epstein. → The MIT Media Lab
- Google launches Stadia on 19 November. → Dead End: Google Stadia
- Coolest Cooler shuts down, leaving more than 20,000 of its 62,642 Kickstarter backers without a cooler. → Crowdfunding and Kickstarter