An outline, era by era

Digital revolution; the Internet

20th Century · 1914 – 2000

The digital revolution is the shift from mechanical and analogue technology to electronic computing and digital information. It was a gradual, international development with no single start date. Important early work took place in the 1930s and 1940s in Britain, the United States, Germany and elsewhere. It gathered pace after the invention of the transistor in 1947 and the integrated circuit in 1958, and reached ordinary homes and offices with personal computers in the late 1970s and 1980s.

The Internet is the global network of networks that grew out of this change. It began as ARPANET, a United States research network, in 1969. In the 1970s and 1980s shared rules for sending data, called protocols, joined many separate networks together. In 1989 to 1991 Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web at CERN, and by the end of the 1990s hundreds of millions of people were online. Digital technology has since changed work, trade, education, war and daily life, and it is one of the defining developments of the twentieth century.

Things happened, and the rest is history

  1. The first electronic computers

    Event

    What happened

    In Britain, the Colossus machines are built to break German teleprinter ciphers and run at Bletchley Park from 1943 to the end of the war in 1945. In the United States, ENIAC is completed at the University of Pennsylvania in 1945 and is publicly announced in February 1946. Both use thousands of vacuum tubes to calculate far faster than any mechanical device.

    The rest is history

    ENIAC and its successors showed that programmable electronic calculation was practical. In 1945 John von Neumann circulated a report describing a stored-program design, in which instructions and data share one memory. Machines of this kind, such as the Manchester Baby in 1948, became the model for modern computers. Colossus stayed secret for decades, so its influence on later designs was limited.

    Sources

    1. BookCeruzzi, Paul E. Computing: A Concise History. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012.
    2. BookCopeland, B. Jack, ed. Colossus: The Secrets of Bletchley Park's Codebreaking Computers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

  2. The transistor and the integrated circuit

    Event

    What happened

    In December 1947 John Bardeen and Walter Brattain demonstrate the first transistor at Bell Laboratories, in a research group led by William Shockley, who soon developed an improved junction design. In 1958 Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments builds an early integrated circuit, and in 1959 Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor devises a practical silicon version. These parts replace bulky, hot vacuum tubes.

    The rest is history

    Transistors and chips made electronics smaller, cheaper and more reliable. In 1965 Gordon Moore observed that the number of components on a chip was doubling regularly, a trend later called Moore's law. In 1971 Intel released the 4004, an early microprocessor that put a computer's central processing on one chip. Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956, and Kilby received it in 2000.

    Sources

    1. BookRiordan, Michael, and Lillian Hoddeson. Crystal Fire: The Invention of the Transistor and the Birth of the Information Age. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.

  3. ARPANET goes live

    Event

    What happened

    In 1969 the United States Advanced Research Projects Agency funds a network linking computers at research sites. The first link joins the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Stanford Research Institute in October 1969, and four sites are connected by the end of the year. The network uses packet switching, in which messages are cut into small packets sent separately, an idea developed by Paul Baran in the United States and Donald Davies in Britain.

    The rest is history

    ARPANET grew to dozens of sites in the 1970s and showed that packet networks worked. It was a research network, and it was not built to survive nuclear war, though that is often claimed. Its success led to work on joining different networks together. Electronic mail, added in 1971 by Ray Tomlinson, became its most popular use. ARPANET was formally closed in 1990.

    Sources

    1. BookAbbate, Janet. Inventing the Internet. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.
    2. BookHafner, Katie, and Matthew Lyon. Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.

  4. TCP/IP joins the networks

    Event

    What happened

    In 1974 Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn publish a design for linking separate packet networks through a common protocol. It is refined into TCP/IP, the Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol. On 1 January 1983 ARPANET switches over to TCP/IP.

    The rest is history

    A shared protocol let any network join, whatever its hardware. This is why the 1983 switch is often taken as the birth of the Internet as a network of networks. In the mid-1980s the National Science Foundation built NSFNET, a high-speed backbone linking universities. The Domain Name System, introduced in 1983 to 1985, gave computers readable names. Commercial traffic was allowed on the backbone in the early 1990s.

    Sources

    1. ArticleCerf, Vinton G., and Robert E. Kahn. "A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication." IEEE Transactions on Communications 22, no. 5 (1974): 637-648.
    2. BookAbbate, Janet. Inventing the Internet. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.

  5. The personal computer arrives

    Event

    What happened

    In 1975 the Altair 8800 kit appears, built around a microprocessor, and hobbyists rush to buy it. In 1977 the Apple II, the Commodore PET and the Tandy TRS-80 go on sale as ready-made machines. In 1981 IBM launches its Personal Computer, which runs an operating system supplied by Microsoft.

    The rest is history

    Other firms reverse-engineered the IBM PC's hardware and software from the early 1980s, and the resulting compatible machines made its design the dominant standard. Graphical interfaces had earlier roots in research such as Douglas Engelbart's work in the 1960s. Xerox PARC developed them substantially, and the Apple Macintosh brought them to a wide public in 1984. By the 1990s computers were common in offices, schools and many homes. This created the mass of users who later went online.

    Sources

    1. BookCeruzzi, Paul E. A History of Modern Computing. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003.
    2. BookCampbell-Kelly, Martin, and William Aspray. Computer: A History of the Information Machine. New York: Basic Books, 1996.

  6. The World Wide Web at CERN

    Event

    What happened

    In March 1989 Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist at CERN near Geneva, proposes a system of linked documents to help researchers share information. By late 1990 he has written the first web browser and server, using HTML and HTTP. In August 1991 he announces the project to the public, and in April 1993 CERN places the web software in the public domain.

    The rest is history

    The web made the Internet easy to use for people with no technical training. The Mosaic browser, released in 1993 at the University of Illinois, added images and spread quickly, and Netscape followed in 1994. The web is one service that runs on the Internet and is not the same thing as it. By 1995 there were tens of thousands of websites, and the number grew rapidly through the decade.

    Sources

    1. BookBerners-Lee, Tim. Weaving the Web. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1999.
    2. BookGillies, James, and Robert Cailliau. How the Web Was Born. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

  7. Commercial Internet and the dot-com boom

    Event

    What happened

    In 1995 the National Science Foundation ends its backbone and commercial providers carry Internet traffic. Netscape goes public in August 1995, and Amazon and eBay start that year. Through the late 1990s investors pour money into Internet companies, and share prices of technology firms climb steeply.

    The rest is history

    The boom ended when the Nasdaq index peaked in March 2000 and then fell sharply, and many young firms failed. The infrastructure and some firms, such as Amazon, survived. Internet use kept growing, and by 2000 around four hundred million people were online worldwide, with most in wealthier countries. The gap in access between richer and poorer regions became a lasting concern.

    Sources

    1. BookGreenstein, Shane. How the Internet Became Commercial. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.
    2. BookShiller, Robert J. Irrational Exuberance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.

  8. Digital standards and convergence

    Event

    What happened

    In 1982 the compact disc, developed by Philips and Sony, goes on sale and stores sound as digital data. In 1991 the first GSM digital mobile phone network launches, and in the 1990s digital mobile networks spread, at first alongside analogue ones and unevenly between countries. In 1993 the MP3 audio format is adopted as part of an international standard.

    The rest is history

    Once sound, text, images and video could all be stored as numbers, one network could in principle carry them all. This is often called digital convergence. It reshaped the music, publishing and telecommunications industries in the following years, though analogue media such as radio, vinyl and film continued alongside digital ones. Digital television broadcasting began in several countries in the late 1990s.

    Sources

    1. BookGleick, James. The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. New York: Pantheon, 2011.
    2. BookCeruzzi, Paul E. Computing: A Concise History. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012.

  9. The Internet was built to survive nuclear war

    Popular belief

    The legend

    Many people say the Internet was designed by the American military so that communications would survive a nuclear attack. In this story ARPANET had no centre, so it could not be knocked out by a single strike.

    The rest is history

    The idea mixes two separate things. Paul Baran at the RAND Corporation did study survivable military communications in the early 1960s and proposed distributed networks and message blocks. ARPANET, however, was funded as a way for researchers to share expensive computers, as the project's own managers such as Charles Herzfeld and Robert Taylor later said. Donald Davies in Britain developed packet switching independently, with no military aim. The military origin is real in funding, but survival in nuclear war was not ARPANET's purpose.

    Sources

    1. BookAbbate, Janet. Inventing the Internet. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.
    2. BookHafner, Katie, and Matthew Lyon. Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.

  10. Al Gore invented the Internet

    Popular belief

    The legend

    A popular joke says that Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet. It is repeated as an example of a politician's boast.

    The rest is history

    In a CNN interview in March 1999 Gore said he took the initiative in creating the Internet, which was a clumsy phrase. He had in fact been a leading congressional supporter of high-speed networking in the 1980s and early 1990s, and sponsored the High Performance Computing Act of 1991. Cerf and Kahn publicly said he deserved credit for that support. He never claimed to have invented it in the technical sense, and the technical inventors were people such as Cerf, Kahn, Baran, Davies and Berners-Lee.

    Sources

    1. BookIsaacson, Walter. The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014.

  11. The Y2K bug and the end of the world

    Popular belief

    The legend

    Before 1 January 2000 many people believe that computers storing years as two digits will read 2000 as 1900 and crash. Newspapers warn of failing power grids, banks and aircraft, and some people stockpile food and cash.

    The rest is history

    The problem was real, because many old programs did store years with two digits. Companies and governments spent large sums, often estimated in the hundreds of billions of dollars worldwide, checking and fixing code in the late 1990s. When the date passed there were only minor faults and no widespread collapse. Experts still disagree about how much of that calm was due to the preparation and how much the danger had been overstated. Some countries that did little work also had few problems.

    Sources

    1. BookCeruzzi, Paul E. A History of Modern Computing. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003.

  12. Garage inventors and the lone genius

    Popular belief

    The legend

    A common story says the digital age was created by a few young geniuses working alone in garages, with Apple's garage start often cited as the model. The computer is pictured as the idea of one inventor.

    The rest is history

    Apple was founded in 1976 by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, and the garage part of its story is often overstated. Microsoft was founded in Albuquerque in 1975, not in a garage. The underlying technologies came from large, mostly publicly funded efforts: universities, government laboratories and corporate research centres such as Bell Labs and Xerox PARC. The Internet, the microprocessor and the graphical interface all grew from teams and funding built up over decades. Historians generally describe the digital revolution as collaborative rather than the work of single inventors. The 1945 ENIAC team alone included dozens of people, many of them women programmers.

    Sources

    1. BookIsaacson, Walter. The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014.
    2. BookMazzucato, Mariana. The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths. London: Anthem Press, 2013.

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