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My Hearing A Southern Baptist preacher said, "Anyone with 'special needs' who wants to be prayed over, please come forward to the front by the altar." With that, Old Tyrone got in line. When it was his turn, the Preacher asked, "Tyrone, what do you want me to pray about for you?" Old Tyrone replied, "Preacher, I need you to pray for help with my hearing." The preacher put one finger of one hand in Old Tyrone's ear, placed his other hand on top of Tyrone's head, and then prayed and prayed and prayed. And the whole congregation joined in with great enthusiasm. After a few minutes, the preacher removed his hands, stood back and asked, "Tyrone, how is your hearing now?" Old Tyrone answered, "I don't know, man. It isn’t 'til next week."

YouTube aids flat earth conspiracy theorists YouTube is playing a significant role in convincing some people that the Earth is flat, research suggests. A study quizzed people at flat earth conferences and found most cited videos viewed on the site as a key influence. They were won over by videos which claimed to amass evidence proving the Earth was not a spherical planet. YouTube needed to do a better job of ensuring visitors get accurate information alongside such videos, said the researcher behind the study. "There's a lot of helpful information on YouTube but also a lot of misinformation," Prof Asheley Landrum from Texas Tech University, who carried out the study, told The Guardian. The algorithms the site used to guide people to topics they might be interested in made it easy to "end up down the rabbit hole" of misinformation, said Prof Landrum. "Believing the Earth is flat is of itself is not necessarily harmful, but it comes packaged with a distrust in institutions and authority more generally," she added. The study involved interviews with 30 attendees at two conferences. Questioning revealed YouTube had suggested the flat earth videos after attendees had watched other clips at home about conspiracy theories. Some said they only watched the videos to criticise them but were won over by the arguments being advanced. The results from Prof Landrum's study were presented at the annual meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Science this weekend. Prof Landrum said there was a need for scientists and science advocates to produce their own YouTube videos that answered and debunked the claims of flat earthers and conspiracy theorists. "The only tool we have to battle misinformation is to try and overwhelm it with better information," said Prof Landrum.

Don't Fart In Harrods A lady walks into Harrods. She looks around, spots a beautiful diamond bracelet, and walks over to inspect it. As she bends over to look more closely, she unexpectedly farts. Very embarrassed, she looks around nervously to see if anyone noticed her little woops and prays that a sales person was not anywhere near. As she turns around, her worst nightmare materialises in the form of a salesman standing right behind her - Good looking as well. Cool as a cucumber, he displays all of the qualities one would expect of a professional in a store like Harrods. He politely greets the lady with, 'Good day, Madam. How may we help you today? Blushing, uncomfortable, but still hoping that the salesman somehow missed her little 'incident', she asks, 'what is the price of this lovely bracelet?' He answers, "Madam - if you farted just looking at it - you're going to shit yourself when I tell you the price!"

The War Is Over An elderly Italian man who lived on the outskirts of Rimini, Italy, went to the local church for confession. When the priest slid open the panel in the confessional, the man said: "Father, during World War II, a beautiful Jewish woman from our neighbourhood knocked urgently on my door and asked me to hide her from the Nazis. So I hid her in my attic." The priest replied: "That was a wonderful thing you did, and you have no need to confess that." "There is more to tell, Father... she started to repay me with sexual favours. This happened several times a week, and sometimes twice on Sundays." The priest said, "That was a long time ago and by doing what you did, that placed the two of you in great danger, but two people under those circumstances can easily succumb to the weakness of the flesh. However, if you are truly sorry for your actions, you are indeed forgiven." "Thank you, Father. That's a great load off my mind. I do have one more question." "And what is that?" asked the priest. "Should I tell her the war is over?''

If it's Saturday in the USA and it's Sunday in Australia My ? is why didn't y'all tell us about Hitler, Stock Market Crash, and War on Terror Y'all should have seen it on the News and then call us and say watch out for tomorrow

Boulevard du Temple Louis Daguerre 1839 The shoe shiner working on Paris’ Boulevard du Temple one spring day in 1839 had no idea he would make his­tory. But Louis Daguerre’s ground-breaking image of the man and a customer is the first known instance of human beings captured in a photograph. Before Daguerre, people had only been represented in artworks. That changed when Daguerre fixed his lens on a Paris street and then exposed a silver-plated sheet of copper for several minutes (though others came into the frame, they did not stay long enough to be captured), developed and fixed the image using chemicals. The result was the first mirror-image photograph. Unlike earlier efforts, daguerreotypes were sharp and permanent. And though they were eventually outpaced by newer innovations—daguerreotypes were not reproducible, nor could they be printed on paper—Daguerre did more than perhaps anyone else to show the vast potential of the new medium of photography.

HAHAHA.. so f'in true.. ur hilarious Tech.. LMFAO..

Male or Female? A language instructor was explaining to her class that French nouns, unlike their English counterparts, are grammatically designated as masculine or feminine. Things like 'chalk' or 'pencil, '. she described, would have a gender association although in English these words were neutral. Puzzled, one student raised his hand and asked, 'What gender is a computer?' The teacher wasn't certain which it was, and so divided the class into two groups and asked them to decide if a computer should be masculine or feminine. One group was made up of the women in the class, and the other, of men. Both groups were asked to give four reasons for their recommendation. The group of women concluded that computers should be referred to in the masculine gender because: 1. In order to get their attention, you have to turn them on. 2. They have a lot of data but are still clueless. 3. They are supposed to help you solve your problems, but half the time they ARE the problem. 4. As soon as you commit to one, you realize that, if you had waited a little longer, you might have had a better model. The men, on the other hand, decided that computers should definitely be referred to in the feminine gender because: 1. No one but their creator understands their internal logic. 2. The native language they use to communicate with other computers is incomprehensible to everyone else. 3. Even your smallest mistakes are stored in long-term memory for later retrieval. 4. As soon as you make a commitment to one, you find yourself spending half your pay-check on accessories for it.

hahaha.. that's flippin hilarious.. omg.. poor guy just didn't wanna go to jail.. good one UK..

Hello To All The Admin, I did not know where to go to let you know, and I could not stay without not letting you know. That your emoticons are soooo cute!! I really love them. Seen so many sites but your emoticons beats all of them!! Keep creating these super cute, super amazing emoticons! each one is more cuter than the other!! Regards, vbins

Dress To Kill The ’dress to kill’ campaign was launched back in September 1997, when it provoked a number of criticisms for being offensive, but these were dismissed by the Advertising Standards Authority. Shot in grainy black and white, the suspense-filled ad continues the theme that a well-dressed and beautiful woman can unwittingly provoke accidents. The ads went on to win several awards, most notably at the Campaign Press Awards.

Timeline of Computer History 1960 - A team drawn from several computer manufacturers and the Pentagon develop COBOL—an acronym for Common Business-Oriented Language. - DEC PDP-1 introduced - NEAC 2203 goes online -While studying machine translation of languages in Moscow, C. A. R. Hoare develops Quicksort, an algorithm that would become one of the most used sorting methods in the world. 1961 - Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS) is Demonstrated - IBM 7030 (“Stretch”) completed - IBM Introduces 1400 series - The Ferranti Sirius is announced. The Sirius was a small, low-cost business computer using a simple programming language. Its main memory was a magnetostrictive delay line. - Max Mathews and Joan Miller use MUSIC IV to create Daisy Bell - Minuteman I missile guidance computer developed - Naval Tactical Data System introduced - Timesharing – the first online communities - UNIMATE, the first mass-produced industrial robot, begins work at General Motors. 1962 - The concept of virtual memory emerges from a team under the direction of Tom Kilburn at the University of Manchester on its Atlas computer. - Card Random Access Memory (CRAM) is introduced. - IBM 1311 Disk Storage Drive is announced. Announced on October 11, 1962, the IBM 1311 was the first disk drive IBM made with a removable disk pack. - Kenneth Iverson writes A Programming Language - MIT LINC introduced - Spacewar! debuts - The Atlas Computer debuts - Thin-film memory is introduced. 1963 - ASCII — American Standard Code for Information Interchange — permits machines from different manufacturers to exchange data. - BEFLIX developed at Bell Labs - DAC-1 computer aided design program is released - DECtape is introduced. - Ivan Sutherland publishes Sketchpad - Researchers design the Rancho Arm robot at Rancho Los Amigos Hospital in Downey, California as a tool for the handicapped. 1964 - CDC 6600 supercomputer introduced - Digital Equipment Corporation introduces the PDP-8 - IBM's 2315 disk cartridge is announced. - Seven years in the making, IBM’s 2321 Data Cell Drive stored up to 400 MB. - IBM Pavilion at New York World's Fair - IBM announces System/360 - IBM introduces SABRE - Project TACT launched - SABRE comes on-line - Online transaction processing makes its debut in IBM´s SABRE reservation system, set up for American Airlines. - Teletype introduced its ASR-33 Teletype - Thomas Kurtz and John Kemeny create BASIC - IBM introduces Transformer Read Only Storage (TROS) with the arrival of the IBM 360. 1965 - 3C DDP-116 introduced - Alphaville released - A Stanford team led by professors Ed Feigenbaum, Joshua Lederberg and Carl Djerassi creates DENDRAL, the first “expert system.” DENDRAL was an artificial intelligence program designed to apply the accumulated expertise of specialists to problem solving. - The IBM 2314 direct access storage facility is introduced. - Announced the year previously at the New York World's Fair the Programma 101 goes on sale. - Simula, an object-oriented language, is written by Kristen Nygaard and Ole-John Dahl at the Norwegian Computing Center. - Developed at Stanford University, the Orm robot (Norwegian for "snake") was an unusual air-powered robotic arm. - Victor Comptometer Corporation produces the Victor 3900 desktop calculator. 1966 - Used by Texas oilmen, the Carterfone acoustically connects mobile radios to the telephone network. - The 2116A is HP’s first computer. - ILLIAC IV project begins - Joseph Weizenbaum finishes ELIZA. ELIZA is a natural language processing environment. Its most famous mode was called DOCTOR, which responded to user questions much like a psychotherapist. - RCA announces its Spectra series of computers - Ralph Baer designs the Brown Box - The April 4, 1966 issue of Electronics magazine features an 8-bit RAM designed by Signetics for the SDS Sigma 7 mainframe computer. 1967 - Star Trek debuts with multiple computation devices - The IBM 1360 Photo-Digital Storage System is installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. - Seymour Papert designs LOGO as a computer language for children. 1968 - Edsger Dijkstra´s "GO TO considered harmful" letter is published in Communications of the ACM, fires the first salvo in the structured programming wars. - 2001: A Space Odyssey released - Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) makes its debut - CICS (Customer Information Control System), an IBM transaction processing system, is released. - Data General Corporation introduces the Nova Minicomputer - At IBM, development begins on the Minnow, a read-only floppy disk drive designed to load microcode into the controller for the "Merlin" (IBM 3330) Direct Access Storage Facility. - Multiplexers: Cramming More Users onto the Same Line - Terry Winograd begins work on his PhD thesis at MIT. His thesis focused on SHRDLU, a natural language used in artificial intelligence research. - Douglas Engelbart and his team at SRI, with funding from ARPA, unveil their experimental ‘oNline System’ at a computing conference in San Francisco in what will become known as the ‘mother of all demos.’ - Marvin Minsky develops the Tentacle Arm robot, which moves like an octopus. 1969 - Apollo Guidance Computer read-only rope memory is launched into space aboard the Apollo 11 mission, which carried American astronauts to the Moon and back. - Switched on in late October 1969, the ARPAnet is the first large-scale, general-purpose computer network to connect different kinds of computers together. - Kenneth Thompson and Dennis Ritchie develop UNIX - SIGGRAPH is founded - The RS-232-C standard is adopted - Victor Scheinman´s Stanford Arm robot makes a breakthrough as the first successful electrically powered, computer-controlled robot arm. 1970 - Gene Amdahl, father of the IBM System/360, starts his own company, Amdahl Corporation, to compete with IBM in mainframe computer systems. - Banking Automation Reaches the Customer - First IBM computer to use semiconductor memory - The Pascal programming language, named after Blaise Pascal, a French physicist, mathematician and inventor turned philosopher, is introduced by Professor Niklaus Wirth. - SRI International´s Shakey robot becomes the first mobile robot controlled by artificial intelligence. 1971 - The cult success of Steve Russell's SpaceWar! and other early space battle games led Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney to design Computer Space, one of the earliest electronic arcade games. - By 1971 Sam Fedida at the British Post Office and teams at the BBC and the IBA (Independent Broadcasting Association) have started developing Web-like information systems that use televisions for display. - First Kenbak-1 is sold to a private girl’s school - Hewlett-Packard introduces the HP-35 - Honeywell vs. Sperry Rand trial begins - The ILLIAC IV supercomputer is delivered to NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California. One Fairchild-built Processing Element Memory (PEM), which stores 16,834 bytes, was in each of ILLIAC IV’s 64 processors. - The introduction of the 1 KB Intel 1103 memory chip marks the beginning of the end for magnetic core memory and ushers in the era of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) integrated circuits for main memory in computers. - Intel introduces the first microprocessor - Laser printer invented at Xerox PARC - In the early 1970s email makes the jump from timesharing systems – each with perhaps a couple of hundred users – to the newly burgeoning computer networks 1972 - C programming language is released - LUNAR, a natural language information retrieval system is completed by William Woods, Ronal Kaplan and Bonnie Nash-Webber at Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN). - Pong is released - SuperPaint is probably the first digital computer drawing system to use a frame buffer—a special high-speed memory—and the ancestor of all modern paint programs. 1973 - Birth of modern mobile networks - Dean Koontz publishes Demon Seed - IBM's 3340 data module is introduced. - Early networks successfully connected computers. But different kinds of networks couldn’t link to each other, limiting the size of online communities. So, the next challenge has been creating “networks of networks,” a process called internetworking or internetting. - Computers have to communicate down the hall, as well as globally. Local area networks (LANs) evolved from the early links to peripheral devices such as terminals and printers. - Based on the Intel 8008 microprocessor, the Micral is one of the earliest commercial, non-kit personal computers. - The TV Typewriter plans are published - Wang Laboratories releases the Wang 2200 1974 - La Faim (Hunger) debuts - The IBM 3850 mass storage system is introduced. - IBM announces SNA (Systems Network Architecture) - Scelbi advertises its 8H computer - The Mark-8 appears in the pages of Radio-Electronics - David Silver at MIT designs the Silver Arm, a robotic arm to do small-parts assembly using feedback from delicate touch and pressure sensors. - Xerox PARC Alto introduced 1975 - The mid-1970s brings a number of commercial networks for corporate customers and professionals to choose from. - Community Memory - Anyone can walk up and use this terminal, connected to a timeshared mainframe computer, for posting messages and announcements. That's a radical idea when computers are mostly inaccessible to ordinary people, and seen by the counterculture as tools of government and corporate power. - The DEC RL01 is introduced as a successor to DEC's RK05 drives. - MITS Altair 8800 kit appears in Popular Electronics - MOS 6502 is introduced - Southwest Technical Products introduces the SWTPC 6800 - Tandem Computers releases the Tandem-16 - The Video Display Module (VDM) marks the first implementation of a memory-mapped alphanumeric video display for personal computers. Introduced at the Altair Convention in Albuquerque in March 1976, the visual display module enabled the use of personal computers for interactive games. 1976 - Gary Kildall develops the first commercially successful operating system for microcomputers, CP/M. - Cray-1 supercomputer introduced - Intel and Zilog introduced new microprocessors. Five times faster than its predecessor, the 8008, the Intel 8080 could address four times as many bytes for a total of 64 kilobytes. - The Japanese Trade Ministry sees a chance to make Japan a leader in the dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) chip industry, as sales soared when DRAMs entered commercial production in the early 1970s. - Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom sends out an e-mail on March 26 from the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment (RSRE) in Malvern as a part of a demonstration of networking technology. - Shigeo Hirose´s Soft Gripper robot can conform to the shape of a grasped object, such as a wine glass filled with flowers. 1977 - Set in a Galaxy far, far away, Star Wars combined old-fashioned science fiction storytelling with cutting-edge special effects provided by Industrial Light & Magic. One effect, the Death Star briefing, featured a wire-frame version of the space station, one of the first uses of wire-frame animation in a major motion picture. - Apple II introduced - Atari launches the Video Computer System game console - C3PO and R2D2 play a critical role in 1977’s blockbuster hit movie Star Wars. - The built-in Commodore 1530 Datasette (data+cassette) is the primary storage device for the newly released Commodore PET. - The Atari Video Computer System (VCS) video game console is introduced. It was one of the first successful consoles that used interchangeable cartridges with factory programmed ROM chips to store the software. - Tandy Radio Shack introduces its TRS-80 - The Commodore PET (Personal Electronic Transactor) introduced 1978 - First computers installed in the White House - The LaserDisc is introduced as “Discovision” by MCA and Philips. - The 5 ¼-inch flexible disk drive and diskette are introduced by Shugart Associates in 1976. This was the result of a request by Wang Laboratories to produce a disk drive small enough to use with a desktop computer, since 8-inch floppy drives were considered too large for that purpose. By 1978, more than 10 manufacturers were producing 5 ¼-inch floppy drives. - Texas Instruments Inc. introduces Speak & Spell, a talking learning aid for children aged 7 and up. - The DEC VAX introduced - WordStar is created 1979 - Atari introduces its Model 400 and 800 computers - Intel introduces its 4 Mbit bubble memory array. - Until the late 1970s the momentum in computing has been all about togetherness – users first sharing computers, then linking over networks and soon networks of networks. But the rise of the personal computer from the mid 1970s makes something once unthinkable an everyday reality: a standalone computer for just one person. While the new machines can be connected to networks and to each other, a lot of users both at home and work don't bother. They run their own programs off of floppy disks. The “personal computer revolution” begins to push back against the centralized control of network system administrators, a trend that won't fully reverse until the 2000s and the emergence of “the cloud.” - The first Multi-User Domain (or Dungeon), MUD1, goes on-line. - Motorola introduces the 68000 microprocessor - North America: Rise of Online Services and BBSs - Personal computers have started to slowly take off in North America by the end of the 1970s, a decade earlier than most other parts of the world. Connecting them to remote servers can be a nightmare of endless settings and false starts, accompanied by the squawks and squeals of an expensive, finicky modem. Most computer owners don't bother, but by 1979 a subset of brave or stubborn ones are subscribing to early online services like MicroNet (later CompuServe Information Service) and The Source, or connecting to Bulletin Board Services (BBSs) hosted on somebody else’s minicomputer or PC. - From the late 1970s on academics and geeks continue expanding “techie” online communities like Usenet (a message board conceived by Duke University students) and BITNET (a network for file and email exchange). One of the most durable online communities, Usenet provides topic-oriented “newsgroups” for collaborative discussion, and its community and ethos will shape the early Web. - Texas Instruments TI 99/4 is released - The Stanford Cart was a long-term research project undertaken at Stanford University between 1960 and 1980. In 1979, it successfully crossed a room on its own while navigating around a chair placed as an obstacle. Hans Moravec rebuilt the Stanford Cart in 1977, equipping it with stereo vision. A television camera, mounted on a rail on the top of the cart, took pictures from several different angles and relayed them to a computer. - Visicalc is developed - John Shoch and Jon Hupp at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center create the computer "worm," a short program that searches a network for idle processors. Initially designed to provide more efficient use of computers and for testing, the worm has the unintended effect of invading networked computers, creating a security threat. Shoch took the term "worm" from the 1976 book The Shockwave Rider, by John Brunner, in which an omnipotent "tapeworm" program runs loose through a network of computers. 1980 - Commodore introduces the VIC-20 - In 1980 Tim Berners-Lee at the CERN physics laboratory creates Enquire, a networked hypertext system used for project management but with far greater ambitions. It seeks to categorize hyperlinks in a way that can be read by computers as well as people. He later claims he hadn't been aware of earlier hypertext work at the time, so it may be an independent reinvention. - Seagate Technology creates the first hard disk drive for microcomputers, the ST506. The disk held 5 megabytes of data, five times as much as a standard floppy disk, and fit in the space of a floppy disk drive. - The Sinclair ZX80 introduced 1981 - Sony introduces the first 3 ½-inch floppy drives and diskettes in 1981. - The Computer Programme debuts on the BBC - Apollo Computer unveils its first workstation, its DN100 - Arnie Katz, Joyce Worley-Katz, and Bill Kunkle form first video game magazine, Electronic Games - IBM introduces its Personal Computer (PC) - MS-DOS released with the IBM PC - Osborne 1 introduced - Free! That’s often an effective way to attract customers. In 1981, France Telecom offers free Minitel terminals to every phone subscriber, launching the first mass “Web.” Minitel will have tens of millions of users by 1990 and online services such as newspapers, train schedules, tax filing, and erotic classified ads as well as email and chat. The ‘80s Minitel boom heavily foreshadows the dot-com boom. But the business model is different. Customers pay by the minute for access to Minitel services (sites), charged on their phone bills; France Telecom keeps about a third and passes on the rest to the service provider. As in the later Web, Minitel service providers run their own servers. But they also pay France Telecom a fee to connect to its network. Despite major efforts in the US, Canada, and Europe, similar videotex systems will fizzle outside France. - The first direct drive (DD) arm by Takeo Kanade serves as the prototype for DD arms used in industry today. 1982 -TIME magazine alters its annual tradition of naming a "Man of the Year," choosing instead to name the personal computer its "Machine of the Year." - Protocols like Ethernet or Token Ring have established low-level links between computers and peripherals in the office. But that's only part of the solution – workers still need to do higher-level tasks such as sending e-mail, exchanging files, and sharing printers. This need yields a hodge-podge of third party “network operating systems,” including Novell Netware, and built-in solutions like Apple’s AppleTalk. - Commodore introduces the Commodore 64 - Franklin releases Apple II “clones” - ILM produces The Genesis Effect for Star Trek II – The Wrath of Khan - Internetting as a Business - Bolt Beranek and Newman, which had built the original IMP and designed important parts of the ARPAnet, had also been a key participant in ARPA’s 1977 internetworking experiments. They produce early switches like the C/30 Communications Processors, but nimbler rivals like Cisco will soon overtake them. - Mitch Kapor develops Lotus 1-2-3 - Movie Tron released - Sun Microsystems is founded - Nolan Bushnell founded Androbot with former Atari engineers to make playful robots. The “Friendly Robotic Educational Device” (FRED), designed for 6-15 year-olds, never made it to market. - Based on a Japanese robot, IBM’s 7535 was controlled by an IBM PC and programmed in IBM’s AML (“A Manufacturing Language”). It could manipulate objects weighing up to 13 pounds. 1983 - Apple introduces the Lisa computer - The Bernoulli Box is released. - Able to hold 550 megabytes of pre-recorded data, CD-ROMs grow out of music Compact Disks (CDs). The CD was developed by Sony and Philips in 1982 for distributing music. - Compaq Computer Corporation introduces the Compaq Portable - DIGITAL ships the HSC50 controller, its first intelligent disk subsystem - Lucasfilm produces The Road to Point Reyes - The Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) is introduced at the first North American Music Manufacturers (NAMM) show in Los Angeles. MIDI is an industry-standard electronic interface that links computers with electronic musical instruments. - Microsoft introduces Word - Richard Stallman, a programmer at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab, set out to develop a free alternative to the popular Unix operating system. This operating system called GNU (for Gnu's Not Unix) was going to be free of charge but also allow users the freedom to change and share it. Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation (FSF) based on this philosophy in 1985. While the GNU work did not immediately result in a full operating system, it provided the necessary tools for creating another Unix-type system known as Linux. The software developed as part of the GNU project continues to form a large part of Linux, which is why the FSF asks for it to be called GNU/Linux. 1984 - Apple 1984 commercial debuts - Apple Computer launches the Macintosh - CD-ROMs introduced, multimedia takes off - CompacTape is introduced. - Fujio Masuoka invents flash memory in 1984 while working for Toshiba. - Heathkit introduces the Hero Jr. home robot kit, one of several robots it sells at the time. Hero Jr. could roam hallways guided by sonar, play games, sing songs and even act as an alarm clock. The brochure claimed it “seeks to remain near human companions” by listening for voices. - Announced in March 1984, IBM’s new 3480 cartridge tape system sought to replace the traditional reels of magnetic tape in the computer center with a 4-inch by 5-inch cartridge that held more information (200MB) and offered faster access to it. - IBM releases its PC Jr. and PC/AT - Matlab is released - Many agreed on the goal: to develop a global network of networks, or an “internet” in the parlance of the time. They don't agree on how. By the early 1980s, several different national and corporate protocols are competing with each other. OSI (Open Systems Interconnect) is the first with international backing, and support from the International Standards Organization as an official standard. Begun in 1977 by a member of a team that pioneered internetworking on the French CYCLADES network, OSI is officially published in 1984. - Term ‘cyberspace’ coined - In his novel Neuromancer, William Gibson coins the term "cyberspace." Gibson also spawned a genre of fiction known as "cyberpunk" in his book, which described a dark, complex future filled with intelligent machines, computer viruses, and paranoia. Gibson introduced cyberspace as: "A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding..." - Verilog is created 1985 - The C++ Programming Language is published - Aldus announces PageMaker - Boston-based Denning designed the Sentry robot as a security guard patrolling for up to 14 hours at 3 mph. - MIT Media Lab founded - Nintendo releases the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in the U.S. - The Omnibot 2000 remote-controlled programmable robot toy could move, talk and carry objects. The cassette player in its chest recorded actions to be taken and speech to be played. - PC's Limited is founded - The Amiga 1000 is released - The Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (WELL) is founded. - U.S. National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET) starts up 1986 - Compaq introduces the Deskpro 386 system - IBM releases the first commercial RISC-based workstation - The LMI Lambda LISP workstation is introduced. - Pixar is founded - The SCSI-1 standard is adopted, and formalizes the interface that had its roots in SASI, which was introduced by Shugart Associates several years earlier. Before SCSI, external devices such as hard drives had specific and non-standardized interfaces for connecting to computers. - The Connection Machine is unveiled 1987 - Acorn Archimedes is released - The Conner CP340A hard disk drive (HDD) is introduced. - GSM standard formally agreed - HyperCard revives hypertext - IBM introduces its Personal System/2 (PS/2) machines - Mitsubishi Movemaster RM-501 Gripper is introduced - Perl is written by Larry Wall - William Atkinson designs HyperCard 1988 - Pixar´s Tin Toy becomes the first computer-animated film to win an Academy Award, taking the Oscar for Best Animated Short Film. - Apple co-founder Steve Jobs unveils the NeXT Cube - Creative Arts releases the first SoundBlaster - Laser 128 is released - Mathematica is created - 23 year old Robert T. Morris, the son of a computer security expert for the National Security Agency, sends a nondestructive worm through the Internet causing major problems for days for about 6,000 of the 60,000 hosts linked to the network. The result is widespread outages. This is the first worm to have a major effect on real-world computer systems, and publicizes the importance of network security. Morris will be the first person convicted under the “Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.” He will apologize in 2008, saying he'd sought to estimate the Internet's size, not cause harm. 1989 - At its official 1983 launch, the Internet had been a modest experimental network of networks owned by the U.S. government. As late as 1989, even insiders are betting against it – OSI is the official favorite for the future of internetworking, or connecting networks together. But in the meantime the Internet has quietly grown to 100,000 host machines, each with multiple users. - Computer defeats master chess player - Intel introduces the 80486 microprocessor - James Cameron's The Abyss is released - Macintosh Portable is introduced - More than six Online Systems for the Internet - Nintendo releases the Game Boy handheld game console 1990 - IBM's 9345 hard disk drive is introduced. Codenamed "Sawmill," it was the first hard disk drive to use magneto-resistive heads. - Intel's Touchstone Delta supercomputer system comes online - Magneto-Optical Discs are introduced. - Microsoft ships Windows 3.0 - Photoshop is released - The "WorldWideWeb" is born - Video Toaster is introduced by NewTek - William Gibson and Bruce Sterling publish The Difference Engine 1991 - Babbage's Difference Engine #2 is completed - Linus Torvalds releases the Linux kernel - Michael Jackson's Black or White video premieres - NSF lifts restrictions on commercial use of the Internet - PGP is introduced - PowerBook series of laptops is introduced - Tim Berners-Lee’s 1990 GUI browser-editor runs only on rare NeXT computers. CERN refuses to fund other versions for common platforms. So the Web team writes a simple text-only browser for quick distribution, and then begs volunteers to write or adapt the needed GUI browsers for PCs, Macs, and UNIX machines. The team also provides code to start with; the WWW Common Library is essentially a build-your-own-browser toolkit written by Tim Berners-Lee and technical research assistant Jean-François Groff. Eight volunteers respond, resulting in UNIX, Mac, and PC browsers. Viola and Midas are initially the most popular, eclipsed later by Mosaic. All of them leave out editing features, which are trickier to implement on machines other than the NeXT. Berners-Lee never regains control of his creation. 1992 - Terminator 2: Judgment Day opens - DEC announces Alpha chip architecture - Intel Paragon is operational - JPEG standard finalized - Japan's Fifth Generation Computer Systems project abandoned - A prototype solid state disk (SSD) module is made for evaluation by IBM. SanDisk, which at time was known as SunDisk, manufactured the module which used non-volatile memory chips to replace the spinning disks of a hard disk drive. SanDisk recognized that handheld devices and computers were becoming lighter and smaller, and that flash memory, as was used in the SSD module, offered powerful advantages over hard disks. - Storage Tek announces upgrades to its 4400 ACS tape library. This tape robot was used in a variety of installations, and one was used at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (now the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory) to store data from experiments, providing medium-speed access to immense amounts of data. Storage Tek was one of the first major players in the automated tape library sector, and competed with IBM for market share. 1993 - Doom is released - Jurassic Park released - Wired Magazine debuts - Apple ships the first Newton - Fantasy game Myst is released - FreeBSD is launched - Gopher, which organizes content in folders rather than clickable links, grows faster than the Web in the early ‘90s and is its most direct Internet competitor. Educational institutions embrace Gopher, as do the U.S. Congress. Developed by Mark McCahill, Paul Lindner and Farhad Anklesaria from a Campus-Wide Information Service, Gopher is named both for the University of Minnosota mascot, and after “go for” meaning fetch. By 1993, the gopher developers are planning to add hyperlinks and even virtual reality features. The Web pulls ahead partly by incorporating the ability to read Gopher pages; this is the same absorption strategy it had employed previously when it added support for WAIS and others. Two other rival standards, Lynx and Viola, have conveniently converted themselves into Web browsers. But with Gopher, the Web also gets a major lucky break: the University of Minnesota begins charging for Gopher server licenses in 1993, literally the same spring the Web becomes officially public domain – and free. - Intel's Pentium microprocessor is released - Microsoft Windows NT is released - Mosaic popularizes the Web - Online ads mark the slow start of the commercial Web 1994 - When CompactFlash is introduced by SanDisk, it is quickly adopted and becomes the preferred memory storage option in many consumer as well as professional electronic devices. - The release of violent video games such as Mortal Kombat, Night Trap, and Doom leads to a set of congressional hearings in 1992. While several companies, including Sega and 3DO, had individual, voluntary ratings systems for their games, there was no industry-wide system in place. As a measure to pre-empt the possibility of a governmental rating board being created, several of the largest game providers created the ESRB to give ratings to video games. These ratings, ranging from Early Childhood to Adults Only, are given to games as a guideline for parents and consumers, similar to those given to films by the MPAA. These ratings have led to some controversy ranging from the appropriateness of the categories themselves to the effect they have on commerce as many stores refuse to stock Adult Only games. - The Iomega Zip Disk is released. - RISC PC is released - Web momentum moves to US 1995 - BeBox is released - Browser War I had been more of a coup – when half the Mosaic team defected in early 1994 and formed Netscape under entrepreneur Jim Clark, Mosaic lasted less than a year. But when Microsoft licenses a version of Mosaic and rebrands it Internet Explorer, the fight is on. In the mid to late 1990s Netscape revolutionizes the business model for the Web, and helps it spread to ordinary people as well as businesses. But Microsoft gives away Explorer free with every copy of Windows 95 and beyond, and by the end of the 1990s Netscape is failing. As a last-ditch strategy the code for Netscape's Navigator browser gets converted to open source, and becomes the basis of the Mozilla Foundation and its Firefox browser today. - Computer-animated Homer Simpson appears on The Simpsons - The Digital Video Disc (DVD) format is introduced, and its storage capacity is a huge increase over the common compact disc (CD). - IBM releases the ThinkPad 701C - Java 1.0 is introduced - JavaScript is developed - Most of the big “walled gardens” — CompuServe, AOL, Minitel in France—resist the Web and Internet. By the mid 1990s they are either fading out or on their way to becoming Web portals. Microsoft Network (MSN) is the one that might have mounted a serious challenge. The tens of millions of copies of Windows 95 come ready to connect to this private network, which has proprietary protocols; it could have become the biggest online service in the world nearly overnight. But by 1995 the Web is growing quickly, and Microsoft CEO Bill Gates decides it is better to fight within the Web than to fight the Web itself. In a single memo, he turns company strategy completely around to focus on the Web in nearly every product. MSN becomes a Web portal. - Sony releases the PlayStation in North America - The MQ-1 Predator drone is introduced and put into action by the United States Air Force and the Central Intelligence Agency. 1996 - 3dfx begins selling Voodoo Graphics chips - Diary of a Camper machinima created - Palm Pilot is introduced - Sony Vaio series is begun - Web users reach 36 million, now biggest user community 1997 - Grand Theft Auto is released - ASCI Red is operational - The Compact Disc-ReWritable (CD-RW) is introduced. - With the ability to evaluate 200 million positions per second, IBM’s Deep Blue chess computer defeats the current world chess champion, Garry Kasparov on May 11. Of the six matches played, Deep Blue won two, Kasparov won one and the other three matches ended in a draw. - IBM’s Deep Blue defeats world chess champion Garry Kasparov - Microsoft introduces Visual Studio 1998 - Furby ignites buying frenzy - SGI releases Maya - The Digital Millennium Copyright Act becomes law - The iMac, a range of all-in-one Macintosh desktop computers, is launched 1999 - EverQuest is released - The Matrix released - IBM releases the Microdrive in 170 MB and 340 MB capacities. - Nvidia releases the GeForce 256 - The Sony AIBO, the $2,000 “Artificial Intelligence RoBOt” was a robotic pet dog designed to “learn” by interacting with its environment, its owners and other AIBOs. It responded to more than 100 voice commands and talked back in a tonal language. It was even programmed to occasionally ignore commands like its biological four-legged counterparts. - The Mobile Web arrives in Japan - WiFi Comes Home 2000 - The Sims is released - First camera phone introduced - Honda’s Advanced Step in Innovative Mobility (ASIMO) humanoid robot is introduced. - Sony releases the PlayStation 2 - USB Flash drives are introduced. - During the late 1990s, the impending Year 2000 (Y2K) bug fuels news reports that the onset of the year 2000 will cripple telecommunications, the financial sector and other vital infrastructure. The issue was rooted in the fact that date stamps in most previously written software used only two digits to represent year information. This meant that some computers might not be able to distinguish the year 1900 from the year 2000. Although there were some minor glitches on New Year’s Day in 2000, no major problems occurred, in part due to a massive effort by business, government and industry to repair their code beforehand. 2001 - BitTorrent is launched - First Apple stores open - Mac OS X is released - Microsoft enters gaming arena with Xbox - Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence released worldwide - The Dot Com Boom…and Bust - Windows XP is released - iTunes is released 2002 - The Centibots project, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), sought to prove that up to 100 robots could survey a potentially dangerous area, build a map in real time, and seek items of interest. Centibots communicated with each other to coordinate their effort. If one robot failed, another took over its task. The robots were completely autonomous, requiring no human supervision. - Earth Simulator is world's fastest supercomputer - Handspring Treo is released - The Roomba is introduced 2003 - Eve OnLine is released - Developed by a technology industry consortium, the Blu-ray optical disc is released. - CSAIL at MIT is formed - MySpace founded - PowerMac G5 is released 2004 - World of Warcraft comes on-line - In 2004, Google is the first major Web company to float a publicly traded stock since the go-go days of the dot-com boom. This is a direct result of Google solving the eternal problem plaguing all previous search engines – how to profit from search. The secret turns out to be a discreet form of advertising, based on auctioning off keywords to appear as "sponsored results" within a search results page. Many people take Google's Initial Public Offering (IPO) as a sign that the Web is not only back from its deep trough after the crash but entering a new period of expansion, and many other IPOs follow Beneath it all, of course, the Web continues to steadily grow as it has since the early 1990s. - Hacker group Anonymous forms - Opportunity and Spirit Mars Rovers land on Mars - The original Web concept, and many pre-Web systems, had depended heavily on user contributions. Yet many 1990s Web sites had been more like traditional TV or radio broadcasting, with providers feeding content to passive surfers. Partly this had been because dominant Web browsers lacked editing capability. From the early 2000s a number of sites begin helping users generate and shape content: wikis, blogs, social networking sites, and more. Photo and video sharing sites take advantage of the spread of faster Internet connections to let users both upload and browse those media. O’Reilly and Associates popularizes the name “Web 2.0” with their 2004 conference of that name. Most browsers still don't support Web page editing, but Web 2.0 sites find various workarounds – from wiki and blogging software to commenting features – to give users a voice. 2005 - Harkening back to the hobbyist era of personal computing in the 1970s, Arduino begins as a project of the Interaction Design Institute, Ivrea, Italy. Each credit card-sized Arduino board consisted of an inexpensive microcontroller and signal connectors which made Arduinos ideal for use in any application connecting to or monitoring the outside world. The Arduino used a Java-based integrated development environment and users could access a library of programs, called “Wiring,” that allowed for simplified programming. Arduino soon became the main computer platform of the worldwide “Maker” movement. - Hadoop is developed - Lenovo acquires IBM's PC business - Named in honor of the space shuttle which broke-up on re-entry, the Columbia supercomputer is an important part of NASA's return to manned spaceflight after the 2003 disaster. Columbia was used in space vehicle analysis, including studying the Columbia disaster, but also in astrophysics, weather and ocean modeling. At its introduction, it was listed as the second fastest supercomputer in the world and this single system increased NASA's supercomputing capacity 10-fold. The system was kept at NASA Ames Research Center until 2013, when it was removed to make way for two new supercomputers. - Stanford's autonomous vehicle wins 2005 DARPA “Grand Challenge” 2006 - Amazon Web Services Launches Cloud-Based Services - Fiftieth anniversary of seminal artificial intelligence conference - Nintendo Wii comes to market - One Laptop Per Child initiative begins - Verb 'to google' added to dictionaries - WikiLeaks established - “The Cloud”: Computer utilities return - In the 1960s when computers were extremely expensive, a number of companies had offered what were called computer utilities. They would run your programs and store your data on their computer, which you would access with a terminal. As time went on cheaper computers had made it more economical for companies and eventually individuals to maintain their own workstations and PCs. But in the Web era, the economies of scale that evolved from large commercial Web servers had begun to tip the balance back the other way. Starting in the mid 2000s the computer utility model starts to became fashionable again under the name “The Cloud,” and is once again a major trend in both networking and computing. Amazon's 2006 Elastic Compute Cloud helps popularize the idea. Today, cloud-based companies offer nearly any software or service – including data storage – that could be done on a personal computer or on larger machines run by a company’s IT department. 2007 - Portal is introduced - Checkers is Solved - Dropbox is founded by Arash Ferdowsi and Drew Houston. - First 1 TB hard disk drive (HDD) - Hulu is founded - Nvidia releases Cuda GPU - Scratch is publicly released - The Amazon Kindle is released - The Apple iPhone is released 2008 - WALL-E debuts - The MacBook Air is released 2009 - Minecraft is introduced - Plants vs. Zombies is released - In 2008, “Satoshi Nakamoto,” likely a pseudonym, publishes Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, describing the use of peer-to-peer networks to generate a “crypto-currency.” In the Bitcoin system, users run software that searches for blocks of data, the discovery of which reward the users with Bitcoins. The transaction is recorded on the system though user information is private. These can then be used online much like cash in the real world. Nakamoto 'mines' the first Bitcoins in January 2009 and a year later a user used them to order two pizzas. Bitcoins’ value exploded in November 2013 before a gradual devaluation. Bitcoin's anonymous nature, along with the electronic nature of the currency, has led to its adoption by some criminal organizations. - Vendors announce cloud-based network-attached storage solutions for online backup. - IBM's Roadrunner supercomputer is completed - Jaguar Supercomputer at Oak Ridge upgraded - The Mobile Web hits the Mass Market 2010 - Angry Birds becomes top-selling mobile game - Since the release of the Macintosh in 1984, Apple has placed emphasis on high-resolution graphics and display technologies. In 2012, Apple introduced the Retina display for the MacBook Pro laptop and iPad tablet. With a screen resolution of up to 400 pixels-per-inch (PPI), Retina displays approached the limit of pixel visibility to the human eye. The display also used In Plane Switching (IPS) technology, which allowed for a wider viewing angle and improved color accuracy. The Retina display became standard on most of the iPad, iPhone, MacBook, and Apple Watch product lines. - China's Tianhe supercomputers are operational - First Emily Howell album released - In the 1980s, David Cope, a music professor at University of California, Santa Cruz, begins to to develop a music composition program called Emily Howell. Based on his earlier Experiments in Musical Intelligence (EMI), Emily Howell was designed to incorporate feedback from listeners to influence its compositions. Emily Howell's first album, From Darkness, Light, featured works composed by the program and played by Cope and Erika Arul, though many in the music community still consider Cope the composer for having created the program. - IBM’s Watson defeats Jeopardy! contestants - The Stuxnet virus is widely reported in the media due to attacks centered in Iran. The virus attempted to damage uranium enrichment centrifuges used in Iran’s nuclear development program by causing damaging speed variations. Although it was recognized that some centrifuges were rendered inoperable by the virus, the full extent of the damage remained unknown. Stuxnet brought attention to the fragile nature of global infrastructure in a networked world. - The Apple iPad is released 2011 - Adobe Creative Cloud is Announced - Arab Spring protests spread by social media - Starting in late 2010 and continuing through 2011, protests in North Africa and the Middle East lead to regime change, and in some cases, free elections for the first time in history. Many of these protests were organized or promoted on sites such as Twitter and Facebook, and commentary appearing on popular blogs helped get the news out to the rest of the world while official, government-run media outlets were often silent. - IBM Sequoia is delivered to Lawrence Livermore Labs - Nest Learning Thermostat is Introduced - Passing of Steve Jobs - Siri is Announced 2012 - Facebook Acquires Instagram - Raspberry Pi, a credit-card-size single board computer, is released as a tool to promote science education 2013 - Former CIA employee and NSA contractor Edward Snowden copied hundreds of thousands of documents from his workplace covering dozens of confidential US national security programs. Snowden worked with journalists in the US and UK to bring the programs to light. Among the programs Snowden's revelations exposed was PRISM, where the NSA collected data with the assistance of companies such as Microsoft, Facebook, and Google. - Microsoft introduces Xbox One - Sony releases PlayStation 4 - The Stable Release of Microsoft Office 365 is Unveiled 2014 - Silicon Valley TV series - Apple Pay is Released - In August of 2014, Eron Gjoni creates a blog post dealing with his break-up with game designer Zoe Quinn. The post accused Quinn of inappropriate relations with a game journalist, setting off a major controversy on sites such as 4Chan and Twitter. Several prominent women in gaming, such as academic Anita Sarkeesian and designer Brianna Wu, began receiving death threats on social media, while others experienced various forms of abuse, including releasing personal information online, or “doxxing.” The two sides of the controversy were divided as to the focus of Gamergate; some saw it as a misogynistic response to increased participation of women in gaming, while others believe that it is actually about ethics in game journalism. - HTML 5 is Announced - Heartbleed Bug Discovered - In December 2014, media conglomerate Sony suffers one of the largest hacks in corporate history, with hackers claiming to have accessed more than a hundred terabytes of confidential information. Referring to themselves as the Guardians of Peace, hackers also accessed emails from top executives, possibly as a form of retaliation for the pending release of the anti-North Korean comedy The Interview. While most believe the Guardians of Peace are affiliated with the North Korean government, some believe disgruntled former Sony employees are to blame. In March 2015 thousands of the Sony emails were released on the site Wikileaks. - University of Michigan Micro Mote is Completed 2015 - Building a computer into the watch form factor has been attempted many times but the release of the Apple Watch leads to a new level of excitement. Incorporating a version of Apple's iOS operating system, as well as sensors for environmental and health monitoring, the Apple Watch was designed to be incorporated into the Apple environment with compatibility with iPhones and Mac Books. Almost a million units were ordered on the day of release. The Watch was received with great enthusiasm, but critics took issue with the somewhat limited battery life and high price. - FCC issues Net Neutrality decision - Gates Joins Musk, Hawking in Expressing Fear of AI (Note: although this answer is long in comparison to it's entirety this is a 'brief' discussion of the evolution of technology since 1960) (Reference: Timeline of Computer History http://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/1960/