Bell Labs introduces the first computer to use Transistors instead of the traditional vacuum tubes. This shrank the size and cooling required to run digital computers considerably.

MIT introduces the Whirlwind computer in March. The Whirlwind was revolutionary in handling real-time graphics. It included the first magnetic core Random Access Memory (RAM) ever created.

Steve Jobs was born in San Francisco CA USA.

Planar transistor developed by Jean Hoerni
With this technology the integrated circuit became a reality. This process forces certain types of atoms to infuse into an otherwise pure piece of silicon. These impurities or dopants create the conducting and control structures of the transistors on the chip. With this technology, microscopic circuit boards could be laid out on the silicon surface, thus allowing the compacting of these circuits onto integrated circuits.

The computer language COBOL (COmmon Business-Oriented Language) is created. Business computing takes off.

Fairchild Semiconductor introduces the first commercially available Integrated Circuits (IC's).

The American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) is developed. This went on to standardize the exchange of data between computers. Prior to this time, every main frame computer manufacturer had their own set of character codes. A symbol on one system differed from another.

Gordon Moore observes in April what came to be known as Moore's Law:

His "Law" held steady from 1975 until around 2012.

The Logo computer language is a general purpose language also known as turle graphics. The name comes from the Greek logos, which means "word." Logo is interpreted, and primarily used to teach children about computers. The goal was to create a mathematical playground, where children could experiment and learn through words and sentences.

UNIX Operating System Developed
Developed at AT&T labs by engineers Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, the UNIX operating system was the first operating system that ran on a minicomputer and could handle multitasking and networking. It was also written in the C programming language - then a high level language with power and flexibility. Other operating systems existed, but they were usually written in assembly language for speed and efficiency. C was a natural environment for writing an operating system. Today, both C and UNIX are available for a wider variety of computer hardware platforms than any other programming language or operating system. This level of portability in computer programming makes UNIX popular even still. UNIX time started by counting seconds since January 1, 1970.

The first microprocessor chip was invented by Andrew Grove, Robert Noyce, and Gordon Moore of Intel. The 4004 microprocessor chip was introduced to replace the central processing units - previously constructed out of discrete components. The microprocessor chip would make Personal Computers possible.

In April, the first Cellular Phone was demonstrated. This device was about the size of a brick, but it was a handheld, portable phone weighing 4.4 lbs. John Mitchell and Martin Cooper of Motorola demonstrated it by making a phone call. The cell phone was born.

In May, Robert Metcalfe created Ethernet networking at Xerox (PARC). This network technology allowed Local Area Networks to spring up. Ethernet works by breaking the transmission into packets of data called frames. Each frame contains a source address, destination address, content and error checking data. The error checking allows the frame to be validated, so invalid frames can be caught and retransmitted. Ethernet was standardized in the IEEE 802.3 standard.

The Altair 8800 was a microcomputer you could build as a kit. It was the first successful personal computer. It sold for $439, and took hours to put together. However, it sparked the microcomputer revolution. For the first time, anyone could have a computer of their own; they didn't have to buy expensive time on a Main Frame Computer. The Altair used the Intel 8080 Chip as a CPU. It was capable of running BASIC as a programming language. The name perhaps came from the Star Trek episode "Amok Time," in which the Enterprise was on its way to Altair, the 12th brightest star in the sky from earth.

Microsoft is founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen to provide Altair Basic. This would later become Microsoft Basic.

Tandy launched the TRS-80 Micro Somp[uter System Model 1, with a Z80 microprocessor, 4K RAM, 64 column video monitor and the BASIC programming language. Tandy had licensed BASIC from Microsoft. The TRS-80 was a retail personal computer, available in Radio Shack stores everywhere. It quickly sold 100K units, making it the best selling PC line until 1982.

Compuserve Information Service (CIS) was the first major commercial online service provider. Originally a Life Insurance company, CIS began renting time on it's computers to end users on a time-sharing basis. You could sign-on using your personal computer's modem, then chat with other users or download software. Their CB Simulator became a popular online chat system. CIS set up forums with sysops on contract to support various software and hardware. CIS also offered limited access to what would eventually become the Internet. CIS also introduced the GIF format for images.

In August, IBM introduces the IBM 5150 Personal Computer. This legitimizes the Personal Computer for corporate America. The IBM 5150 runs the Intel 8088 microprocessor at 4.7 MHz, with 16KB of RAM memory. It also cost $1565. It uses IBM-DOS, developed by Microsoft.

Bjarne Stroustrup of Bell Labs releases C++. Designed as "C with Classes," C++ is a general purpose language. It provides virtual functions, function and operator overloading, references, constants, memory allocation, improved type checking. The name comes from the increment operator, ++, which is used to increment the value of a variable. It is very efficient at mapping hardware access to various abstractions.

In March, Symbolics, a MA Computer Company, registers the first Internet domain name symbolics.com. This was the first time that an Internet address using .com existed. Prior to then, computers would interact with each other on the network to get the host file entries and merge them together. With this development, a domain lookup process became available, which would automatically map an alphabetical domain name to a specific IP numeric address. Since names are easier to remember than numbers, this became a boom to the Internet as a technology.

IBM announces the PS/2 third generation of personal computers. It included the VGA video standard, which allowed 640x480 color graphics utilizing a DB-15 connector. The PS/2 was IBM's attempt at recapturing the Personal Computer market. They thought the many innovations would encourage manufacturers to pay the licensing terms to sell compatible hardware on a per machine basis. However, manufacturers balked at this, eventually finding ways around the restrictions.

Hypercard developed
In August of 1987, Apple Computer introduced Hypercard to the public by bundling it with all new Macintosh computers. Hypermedia was a reality at last, with the hardware and software now in place to bring it into being. Hypercard was like a 3x5 card system, linking various documents together into an information network called a Hypercard stack.

In March, Tim Berners-Lee proposed a system called the "Mesh" which would run information webs. These webs would be available world wide to provide hypertext. As you read a document, you can jump to the network address for the item the text referenced immediately, without having to perform a new search on the term. These hypertext links could also include graphics, speech and video - i.e. hypermedia. He was helped by Robert Caillau, also at CERN.

Linux Torvalds at the University of Helsinki, creates the Linux operating system. Combining GNU Project components from the Free Software Foundation with a kernel developed on MINIX, he originally wanted to call it Freax. However, when it was uploaded to the FTP Server by Ari Lemmke, it got renamed Linux. Linux became the first, free open source operating system. It has spawned hundreds of others.

CD-ROM puts the power of vast storage technology and computer based search engines in the hands of ordinary people. World Library Incorporated produced a fully searchable CD-ROM containing 450 classical works of literature and historic documents. This demonstrated that you could take the text content of several bookshelves and concentrate it on one small piece of circular plastic. Many saw this as the ultimate in personal data storage and retrieval. Within a few years, the entire contents of an encyclopedia would be available to every personal computer.

Internet access and usage grow exponentially, as tools become more available and easier to use. People begin referring to the Internet as the information superhighway. CERN releases web source code to the public domain. Mosaic releases a browser. President Bill Clinton puts the White House and UN online by introducing the .gov domain. For the first time, users can email the President directly.

Netscape introduced Secure Socket Layer (SSL) as a cryptographic protocol for secure communications over a computer network. Developed by Dr Taher Elgamal at Netscape, the protocol establishes symmetric encryption between two systems on the network. Current browsers automatically handshake with the web server of HTTPS based domains.

Portable Network Graphics file format was created to replace the GIF image format for web sites. PNG was designed for transferring images over the Internet, not for printing. It was also supported with non-patented code, so it was free to use. It supports pallette based images with 32-bit RGBA colors, grayscale, and transparency. It has become the most widely used lossless image compression format on the Internet.

When computers were first built, memory was a precious resource. To conserve memory, dates were stored in a compressed form, utilizing every bit (i.e. single binary digits containing 1 or 0). Not surprisingly, years were stored as two decimal digits, 00 through 99. As the end of the second millenium came, fears arose as to what would happen to computer systems when the new millenium started. Early tests showed that many computers improperly handled the transition from 1999 to the year 2000, so this became known as the Y2K bug.
A massive effort was undertaken to avert this doomsday scenario. People feared that planes would fall out of the sky. All computer source code was reviewed, and fixes were designed for the problem areas. Some were band-aids, just offsetting the date by, say, 50 years or so. Others were massive rewrites of source code that had been running successfully for 30 years. Engineers were called out of retirement that had worked on the source code in the 1960s. Ultimately, there were only a few news reports of Y2K bugs that showed up on January 1, 2000 AD.

Apple iTunes is a media layer, online broadcaster, media library and mobile device manager. It is used to download, organize and play digital downloads of media. It was based on SoundJAM, an MP3 player by Bill Kincaid. It was released at Macworld in San Franscisco in January.

Broadband Networking comes to the home, providing better access to the Internet. Most metropolitan areas of the US rapidly adopted this technology, making it possible for PC users to download files that were megabytes in size in just a few minutes, rather than waiting hours for the same file over a modem connection. This rapid increase in capacity enabled all sorts of new applications, including musical file sharing.

The weB LOG is a personal web space where individuals can share their own thoughts and ideas with others on the Internet. Corporations began to incorporate blogs into their networks, allowing employees to use sophisticated web server technology to talk about their work. Unfortunately, sometimes this lead to problems, as employees shared more than they were supposed to; but on the whole, most employees found a new, creative outlet for self-expression. Anyone could put up a blog and start writing.

In January, Apple announced the iPhone with iOS. The iPhone was a radical new design for the cell phone, since it lacked a keyboard and a stylus. Instead, the user used their fingers to do everything: make calls, play music from iTunes, play games. The new touch screen would change the mobile phone forever.

Bitcoin is a worldwide cryptocurrency. This decentralized digital currency enables digital payments without a central repository. It was invented by an unknown programmer under the name of Satoshi Nakamoto and released as open-source software. Transactions are executed peer-to-peer, without an intermediary such as a bank. They are verified by network nodes and recorded in a publicly distributed ledger called the blockchain. Partial bitcoins can be thus exchanged for money in other currencies, or held as an investment. Thousands of merchants would start accepting payment via bitcoin.

IBM Supercomputer Watson was programmed to play the television quiz show Jeopardy. In a 3 day matchup with 2 former winning players, Watson won the event with a score greater than the 2 human players combined. Watson had access to 200 M pages of structured and unstructured content, consuming 4 TB of disk storage space. This included the full text of Wikipedia. However, Watson was not connected to the Internet during the game. For each clue, Watson displayed the 3 most probable questions. However, Watson did have the most trouble with short clues with few words.

Waze is a mobile social map application. It collects map data, travel times and traffic information from users on the road. The information is transmitted to the Waze server, then shared with other users on the same roads. Waze provides real time traffic reports, including traffic jams, speed traps, etc. Waze provides routing updates to users on their way to work or home. It also can identify the cheapest fuel station along a route. Waze can be used anywhere, but requires enough users to create and update the maps to make it useful. Currently, there are 13 countries that have a full base map. Waze also offers turn-by-turn voice navigation.

Big Data emerged as the cost of storage dropped to commodity prices. This resulted in Data Sets that were so large and complext that existing applications could not deal with them. New applications were written to capture this data, store it efficiently, analyze, search, share, transfer, query, visualize and update it in real time. This also applied to using analytics to predict user behavior, thus making applications more intuitive. With mobile devices becoming ubiquitos, Data As A Service (DAAS) provides techniques and technologies to reveal insights from these massive data sets.

Microsoft released Windows 10 with the Microsoft Edge web browser, universal apps, and support for multiple products. Windows 10 is estimated to be actively running on 400M devices.

Artificial Intelligence is starting to find practical applications. The robotic dog is transforming local policing by dealing with dangerous environments:

• Inspecting suspicious packages. The dog can sniff for explosives, and scan it for danger.
• Investigate dark areas where armed suspects might be hiding. The dog can identify where they are.
• Going into dangerous environments, such as gas leaks, chemical leaks. The dog can identify the source.

Ransomware attacks made headlines. One caused shortages in gasoline and natural gas on the east coast. Businesses of all sizes found themselves breached, so Information Security was a big concern. The demands of the public Internet cloud became a significant concern, and multiple businesses stepped up to provide secure services. Enterprise software grew at a rapid rate.

Digital Literacy empowers individuals to navigate the Internet effectively. But it includes much more than how to use a browser:

• How to critically evaluate information online
• How to engage others online in a responsible manner
• Adapting to new social media as it evolves

The future of the Internet is dependent upon people attaining Digital Literacy. Otherwise, it will likely become as antiquated as many public libraries.