Tech History
A timeline of the inventions that built the modern world — and how each one changed what came next.
- 1936Computing
The Turing machine
Alan Turing describes a simple imaginary machine that can compute anything computable — defining, before any computer existed, what a computer is and where its limits lie.
Read more → - 1945Computing
The stored-program computer
Von Neumann's EDVAC report sets out the idea that a computer's instructions should live in the same memory as its data — the architecture nearly every computer still uses today.
Read more → - 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.
Read more → - 1968Computing
The Mother of All Demos
Douglas Engelbart demonstrates the mouse, on-screen windows, hypertext links, video conferencing and live collaborative editing — decades before any of them became everyday tools.
Read more → - 1969Networking
ARPANET
The first message travels over ARPANET, a packet-switched network linking a handful of US universities — the direct ancestor of the internet.
Read more → - 1970Software
The relational database
Edgar Codd proposes organising data as simple related tables queried by logic rather than physical layout — the model behind virtually every business database since.
Read more → - 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.
Read more → - 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.
Read more → - 1976Security
Public-key cryptography
Diffie and Hellman show how two strangers can agree on a secret over an open line without ever sharing a key — the breakthrough that makes secure internet commerce possible.
Read more → - 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.
- 1993Networking
Mosaic and the graphical web
The Mosaic browser shows images and text on the same page and runs on ordinary computers, turning the web from a niche research tool into a mass medium.
Read more → - 2006Computing
Cloud computing arrives
Amazon Web Services launches S3 and EC2, letting anyone rent computing and storage by the hour — turning infrastructure into an on-demand utility.
Read more → - 2007Hardware
The modern smartphone
Apple's iPhone fuses a phone, an internet device and a touch computer into one pocket-sized slab — putting a general-purpose computer, and the internet, into billions of hands.
Read more → - 2009Security
Bitcoin and the blockchain
A pseudonymous author launches Bitcoin, showing that strangers can agree on a shared ledger with no bank or central authority — and introducing the blockchain.
Read more → - 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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