project:technology_timeline:start
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Technology timeline
Sometimes it is useful to look at history, either to see how things improved (or not so), or when a tech or idea first popped up. This is an attempt to make a timeline of the most important advances in technology for historical interest.
Computers, information processing and machine intelligence
Year | Event | Importance |
---|---|---|
1957 | Fortran language invented at IBM by John Backus | Became standard for scientific and industrial computation |
1959 | COBOL language invented | Although unwieldy, the language became a standard for banking backend software and legacy systems programmed in it are still in use (albeit in decline) in 2017 |
1968 | “SHRDLU”, an early English language parsing system connected to a physical simulator (playground) aka “block world”, started on MIT (by Terry Winograd) | First attempt to teach a machine to understand reasonably complex commands in English, was meant to control a crane in well-defined storage room |
1969 | ARPANET started | Basis of what we now call the internet |
1970 | Pascal language invented by Niklaus Wirth | Meant primarily for education, Pascal was widely used for many kinds of tasks before replaced (mostly by C++), and influenced most of future languages. |
1972 | C language invented by Dennis Ritchie | A “portable assembly” language, standard for kernel-level code and small microcontrollers; still in wide use in 2017 |
1973 | First cell phone | |
1983 | C++ invented by Bjarne Stroustrup | For many years the de-facto standard for application programming, in 2017 still used for low-level apps like game engines |
1984 | First test models of autonomous cars at Carnegie Mellon University's Navlab and ALV | |
1988 | Standard for data CD's (aka CD-ROM) produced by Sony and Phillips (aka “The Yellow Book”) | In its time, CD-ROMs were the most popular storage medium for software (especially after popularization of CD writer devices) |
1990 | First web browser written at CERN; first HTML standard was made a year before by Tim Berners-Lee | |
1991 | First public post about Linux (that time, a small hobby OS by Linus Torvalds) | |
1991 | Python language invented by Guido van Rossum | Easy to write and understand, Python became widely used for various scripting, and very popular in science community thanks to its packages of scientific algorithms |
1991 | TiVo service launched | The first on-demand over-the-network television system |
1992 | JPEG algorithm discovered | First lossy compression algorithm for images that got massive use and is used worldwide in 2017 for photos |
1992 | Jürgen Schmidhuber proposes a solution to the vanishing gradient problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanishing_gradient_problem) in neural networks by pre-training each layer of a neural network separately with fine-tuning with backpropagation | Probably one of milestones for what will be called “deep learning” |
1993 | MP3 algorithm discovered at Fraunhofer institute | Very similarly to JPEG for images, this lossy compression algorithm for sound became de-facto standard for lower-to-medium music storage |
1995 | Java invented at Sun Microsystems by James Gosling | Java became standard for large-scale enterprise software, replacing COBOL, and for cell phone apps (first its reduced version, Java SE, modern Android phones use full-fledged Java); it started the app boom which lasts in 2017 |
1995 | Javascript invented by Brendan Eich | |
1995 | eBay founded | First worldwide buying and selling platform |
1997 | IBM “Deep Blue” computer defeats Gary Kasparov in chess | |
1998 | First hardware MP3 player (Diamond Rio PMP300) | |
2000 | C# invented in Microsoft | Microsoft's alternative to Java became its #1 competitor in non-enterprise (and some enterprise) applications; important use is in the Unity3D engine (scripting) which helped many indie games to hatch |
2000 | First USB Flash Drive comes to market (as “ThumbDrive” by Trek Technology + IBM) | Will become the standard for large data storage and transport, similarly to old science-fiction “memocrystals” |
2001 | Wikipedia launched | |
2003 | WiFi 802.11g standard published (up to 54 Mbps) | |
2004 | Facebook launched | From multiple candidates, Facebook become almost a definition of a social network platform |
2005 | 5 autonomous cars finished the DARPA challenge of driving through a desert (year before, none did) | |
2008 | Github launched | Became the most popular site for sharing coding projects |
2009 | Stack Exchange launched | |
2009 | Wolfram Alpha started | |
2010 | Microsoft Kinect V1 produced (face and gesture recognition, voice recognition and 3D image based on twin cameras); an open source driver (paid by Adafruit) allowed many useful hacks | |
2011 | GPU-trained CNN achieves superhuman performance in a traffic sign recognition contest | |
2012 | 22nm CPU die technology (Intel Ivy Bridge processors) | |
2012 | Google reports total of 500 000 km of test drives of their autonomous cars (on public roads but with two humans aboard) | |
2014 | 14nm CPU die technology (Intel Core M Broadwell, soon followed by desktop CPUs) | For comparison, an antibody molecule is about 10 nm while a glucose molecule is about 1 nm; 14 nm is smaller than biological viruses (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanoscopic_scale) |
2015 | Google TensorFlow published as open source (https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow) | |
2015 | Google Photos started by Google (project branched from Google+); its abilities to automatically classify images according to what they show is acclaimed by critics | |
2016 | Google announces its “RAISR” technology for image reconstruction and upscaling (based on a neural network trained on many images that then decides which filters to use) | |
2016 | Google AlphaGo defeats Lee Sedol in Go, receives honorary 9-dan | Go has much larger number of possible moves than chess and cannot be solved by bruteforce; even a year before, many Go masters considered Go inaccessible for computers due to crucial importance of intuition in the game |
2017 | AI player “Phillip” (programmed by Vlad Firoiu, MIT) beats professional players in Super Smash Bros (but itself can for now only play for one character, Captain Falcon, due to lack of support of shooting) | |
2017 | AI player “DeepStack” defeats 10 pro players in no-limits Texas Hold'em poker game (historically it is a tie with Libratus, both were developed simultanously) | Similarly to Go, poker was considered an improbable target for computers due to (perceived) necessity of empathy and bluffing |
project/technology_timeline/start.1495985989.txt.gz · Last modified: 2017/05/28 15:39 by bluebear