Timeline: The 2020s
Abstract
What happened in computing in the 2020s, year by year. 80 events from 69 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 2010s · [[index|Thematic index]]
2020
- Aho and Ullman share the Turing Award. → Aho and Ullman: The Dragon Book
- AlphaFold2 effectively solves protein-structure prediction at CASP14. → AlphaFold
- Finland inscribes the demoscene as intangible cultural heritage, the first digital culture so listed. → The Demoscene: Coding as an Art Form
- Folding@home passes an exaFLOP of volunteer compute during the pandemic. → Volunteer Computing
- Google forces out Timnit Gebru after the “Stochastic Parrots” paper dispute. → AI Ethics and Algorithmic Bias
- Meta’s Oversight Board begins hearing cases. → Content Moderation
- The Crypto AG scandal reveals CIA and BND ownership. → Switzerland’s Tech Industry: Neutrality, Precision, and the Birthplace of the Web
- The DOJ sues Google, the largest tech antitrust case since Microsoft. → The Platform Antitrust Story
- The FTC begins examining over 600 unreported acquisitions by the five giants. → The Rise of the Tech Giants
- Zoom’s daily meeting participants rise from 10 million to 300 million between December and April as the pandemic sends work home. → Eric Yuan
- The WHO declares a pandemic on 11 March; tens of millions start working from home within weeks. → The Remote Work Revolution
- Epic slips its own payment system into Fortnite on iOS, is removed from the App Store within hours, and sues Apple and Google. → Tim Sweeney
- Snowflake’s September IPO raises $3.4 billion, the largest software IPO to date. → The Database Wars: Oracle, Open Source, and the Cloud
- Jack Ma’s November speech criticizing regulators brings the state down on Alibaba. → Jack Ma and Alibaba: China’s Internet Pioneer
- Microsoft announces LAMBDA; Excel formulas become Turing complete. → The Spreadsheet Revolution
2021
- Facebook renames itself Meta. → Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook: The Social Network That Rewired Society
- John McAfee dies in a Spanish prison cell. → John McAfee: From Antivirus Pioneer to Fugitive
- Log4Shell is patched overnight by volunteers. → Volunteer-Maintained Infrastructure
- MIPS switches to RISC-V. → Hennessy and Patterson: The Quantitative Approach
- Ransomware shuts down the Colonial Pipeline. → The Ransomware Epidemic: The Industrialization of Cybercrime
- Smart Eye buys Affectiva for $73.5 million, mostly in stock. → Rana el Kaliouby
- Anthropic is founded in January as a public benefit corporation by former OpenAI researchers. → Anthropic and Claude
- Itanium production ends in July. → Dead End: Intel Itanium
- Total cryptocurrency market capitalisation passes $3 trillion on 10 November. → Dead End: Web3 and NFTs
2022
- IBM sells Watson Health for about $1 billion, after spending over $4 billion on it. → Dead End: IBM Watson Health
- Mudge files his whistleblower complaint about Twitter’s security. → Peiter “Mudge” Zatko: The Hacker Who Warned Washington
- OpenAI releases Whisper. → Speech Recognition
- RLHF makes ChatGPT useful. → Reinforcement Learning
- France’s CNIL fines Google and Facebook €210 million for cookie banners harder to refuse than to accept. → Dark Patterns: Deceptive Design and the Consent Dialog
- Russia’s full-scale invasion in February tests Ukraine’s IT sector, which keeps growing exports. → Ukraine’s Developer Ecosystem: From Outsourcing Hub to Wartime Resilience
- NIST selects CRYSTALS-Kyber, Dilithium, Falcon and SPHINCS+ as its first post-quantum algorithms. → Post-Quantum Cryptography
- The CHIPS and Science Act commits $52 billion to US chipmaking in August. → The Semiconductor Race: The Geopolitics of Silicon
- Stable Diffusion is released with downloadable weights on 22 August. → Stable Diffusion and AI Image Generation
- FTX collapses in November with an $8 billion hole in customer accounts. → Dead End: Web3 and NFTs
- FTX collapses in November with about $8 billion of customer money missing. → Sam Bankman-Fried and the Collapse of FTX
- ChatGPT launches in November and reaches 100 million users in two months. → Sam Altman and OpenAI
- ChatGPT’s launch on 30 November triggers the LLM race. → The LLM Race (2022–)
2023
- Gordon Moore dies. → Gordon Moore and Moore’s Law
- Hinton leaves Google to speak freely about AI risk. → Geoffrey Hinton and Deep Learning
- Mistral AI raises a €105 million seed round, Europe’s largest, on a three-slide pitch. → Mistral
- Unity’s Runtime Fee provokes a developer revolt. → Game Engines: The Engine as a Platform
- Stadia closes on 18 January with full refunds. → Dead End: Google Stadia
- AI laboratory heads and researchers sign the one-sentence statement on the risk of extinction from AI. → The Singularity and Superintelligence
- The Tokyo District Court gives Sonic programmer Yuji Naka a suspended sentence of two and a half years for insider trading in Square Enix partners’ shares. → Sonic Team: Naka, Ohshima and Yasuhara
- Douglas Lenat dies in August, a month after his last paper with Gary Marcus. → Douglas Lenat and Cyc
- Sutskever votes to fire Sam Altman in November, then recants. → Ilya Sutskever and the GPT Series
- OpenAI’s board fires Sam Altman in November; he is back in four days. → Sam Altman and OpenAI
- Vera Molnár dies in Paris at 99, a month short of her hundredth birthday. → Vera Molnár
2024
- Assange walks free after an Espionage Act plea deal. → Julian Assange: From “Mendax” to WikiLeaks
- Barto and Sutton share the Turing Award. → Barto and Sutton: Learning from Reward
- Hassabis and Jumper share the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold. → AlphaFold
- Hinton and Hopfield share the Nobel Prize in Physics. → Geoffrey Hinton and Deep Learning
- Pew finds 91% of American adults own a smartphone. → How We Use Computers
- The xz backdoor is caught after a maintainer is socially engineered. → Volunteer-Maintained Infrastructure
- A UK High Court rules that Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto and forged his evidence. → Craig Wright: The Man Who Said He Was Satoshi
- Sam Bankman-Fried is sentenced to 25 years in March. → Sam Bankman-Fried and the Collapse of FTX
- Avi Wigderson is named the 2023 Turing Award recipient, the first to hold it alongside the Abel Prize. → Avi Wigderson
- Sutskever leaves OpenAI to found Safe Superintelligence. → Ilya Sutskever and the GPT Series
- An online collaboration proves BB(5) = 47,176,870 in July. → The Busy Beaver Problem
- Judge Amit Mehta rules in United States v. Google that “Google is a monopolist” in general search. → The Rise of the Tech Giants
- NIST publishes the first post-quantum standards, FIPS 203, 204 and 205. → Post-Quantum Cryptography
- Donald Bitzer dies in Cary, North Carolina, at 90. → Donald Bitzer
2025
- Europe’s first exascale machine runs in Jülich. → The Supercomputer Era: The Fastest Machines on Earth
- OpenAI buys Ive’s hardware startup io for $6.5 billion. → Jony Ive and Apple Design
- Sanborn auctions the K4 solution; journalists find the plaintext in his Smithsonian papers first. → Kryptos: The Cipher in the CIA Courtyard
- Ross Ulbricht receives a full presidential pardon in January. → Ross Ulbricht and the Silk Road
- A federal judge holds Apple in contempt over its 27 percent fee on linked-out purchases. → The Platform Tax
- Microsoft shuts Skype down on 5 May. → Dead End: Skype
- Stephanie Shirley dies in August. → Stephanie “Steve” Shirley and Freelance Programmers
- Google’s goo.gl links stop resolving; Archive Team reports 3.75 billion of them saved. → Archive Team
- Vaire Computing reports net energy recovery on Ice River, a 22-nanometre reversible test chip. → Reversible Computing
- Amazon settles the FTC’s Prime dark-patterns case for $2.5 billion. → Dark Patterns: Deceptive Design and the Consent Dialog
- The Wayback Machine reaches one trillion archived pages in October. → Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive
- Judge James Boasberg rules that the FTC has not shown Meta holds a monopoly; Meta keeps Instagram and WhatsApp. → The Rise of the Tech Giants
2026
- Andrej Karpathy joins Anthropic’s pretraining team. → Andrej Karpathy and Modern AI
- Anthropic accidentally publishes the Claude Code source to npm in March. → Famous Leaks
- The 2025 Turing Award to Bennett and Brassard is announced in March. → Bennett and Brassard: Quantum Cryptography
- David Potter dies six days short of 83. → David Potter
- Deutsche Telekom, O2, and 1&1 switch off MMS at the end of June. → Dead End: MMS, the Picture Message with a Toll Booth
- John Deere settles the FTC’s right-to-repair lawsuit and must give farmers dealer-grade repair tools for ten years. → Right to Repair
← The 2010s · [[index|Thematic index]]