Tech History
A timeline of the inventions that built the modern world — and how each one changed what came next.
- 1947Hardware
The transistor
Bell Labs builds the first working transistor — a tiny, reliable switch and amplifier that would replace the bulky vacuum tube and make all modern electronics possible.
Read more → - 1958Hardware
The integrated circuit
Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments builds the first integrated circuit, putting multiple components on one chip — the idea that lets transistor counts, and computing power, explode.
- 1969Networking
ARPANET
The first message travels over ARPANET, a packet-switched network linking a handful of US universities — the direct ancestor of the internet.
- 1971Hardware
The microprocessor
Intel ships the 4004, the first commercial microprocessor — an entire CPU on a single chip — making computers small and cheap enough to put anywhere.
- 1974Networking
TCP/IP
Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn publish the design for TCP/IP, a common language that lets separate networks interconnect — the protocol the internet still runs on.
- 1983Networking
The internet switches on
On 1 January 1983, ARPANET adopts TCP/IP as its only protocol — the moment a single, unified internet is often said to be born.
- 1989Networking
The World Wide Web
Tim Berners-Lee proposes the World Wide Web at CERN — URLs, HTTP and HTML — turning the internet from a specialist tool into something anyone could browse.
Read more → - 1991Software
Linux and open source
Linus Torvalds releases the Linux kernel and invites the world to improve it — proving that open, collaborative software could power everything from phones to supercomputers.
- 2012AI
Deep learning arrives (AlexNet)
A deep neural network called AlexNet crushes the ImageNet image-recognition contest, triggering the modern AI boom by showing that deep networks, trained on GPUs, work.
Read more → - 2017AI
The Transformer
A Google paper, "Attention Is All You Need", introduces the Transformer — the architecture that scales to today's large language models.
Read more →
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