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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
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
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
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)
1992	JPEG algorithm discovered	First lossy compression algorithm for images that got massive use and is used worldwide in 2017 for photos
1995	Java invented by James Gosling
1995	Javascript invented by Brendan Eich
1997	IBM “Deep Blue” computer defeats Gary Kasparov in chess
2001	Wikipedia launched
2003	WiFi 802.11g standard published (up to 54 Mbps)
2004	Facebook launched
2005	5 autonomous cars finished the DARPA challenge of driving through a desert (year before, none did)
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)
2015	Google TensorFlow published as open source
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