COMPUTER HISTORY

AERIAL HARRIS
JANUARY 9,2017
6TH PERIOD
1990-
FIRST WEB BROWSER-EDITOR, 1990
THE "WORLDWIDE WEB" IS BORN

At the worlds biggest physics laboratory, CERN in Switzerland, English programmer

and physicist Tim Berners-Lee submits two proposals for what will become the Web,
starting in March of 1989. Neither is approved. He proceeds anyway, with only
unofficial support from his boss and his coworker Robert Cailliau. By Christmas of
1990 he has prototyped WorldWideWeb (as he writes it) in just three months on
an advanced NeXT computer. It features a server, HTML, URLs, and the first
browser. That browser also functions as an editorlike a word processor connected
to the Internet
1991-
MICHAEL JACKSON'S BLACK OR WHITE VIDEO
PREMIERES

Michael Jackson's album Dangerous spawns several number one hits and classic
music videos. The first video from Dangerous, Black or White, was directed by
legendary film and video director John Landis
The video debuted in more than twenty countries simultaneously before an
estimated five hundred million viewers, making it one of the most viewed movies
with computer graphics up to that point in time.
1992-
JPEG STANDARD FINALIZED

In 1986, a group of international standards organizations spun-off the Joint

Photographic Expert Group (JPEG) to create a set of standards for digital images. By
1992, the group had determined a set of rules for what became the jpeg (or .jpg)
format. Jpeg compression allows for a trade-off between photo quality and file size.
Jpeg is one of the most popular image formats, and is the format most widely used
by digital cameras.
1993-
THE APPLE NEWTON PERSONAL DIGITAL ASSISTANT
APPLE SHIPS THE FIRST NEWTON

Apple enters the handheld computer market with the Newton. Dubbed a Personal
Data Assistant by Apple President John Scully in 1992, the Newton featured many
of the features that would define handheld computers in the following decades. The
handwriting recognition software was much maligned for inaccuracy. The Newton
line never performed as well as hoped and was discontinued in 1998
1994-WEB MOMENTUM MOVES TO US

When main Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee forms the World Wide Web Consortium
(W3C) in 1994, the European headquarters are slated for the Webs birthplace,
CERN in Switzerland, with U.S. headquarters at MIT in Boston. But then CERN
changes its plans and the core team of Web developers gets split among several
French research sites. Also in 1994, Vice-President Al Gore supports a prominent
White House Web site, as well as encouraging funding of W3C in the U.S.
1995-
JAVASCRIPT IS DEVELOPED

JavaScript, an object-based scripting language, is developed at Netscape

Communications by Brendan Eich. It was used extensively across the Internet on
both client and server sides. Although it shared its name with the Java
programming language, the two are completely different.
1996-
SONY VAIO LAPTOP
SONY VAIO SERIES IS BEGUN

Sony had manufactured and sold computers in Japan, but the VAIO signals their
entry into the global computer market. The first VAIO, a desktop computer,
featured an additional 3D interface on top of the Windows 95 operating system as a
way of attracting new users. The VAIO line of computers would be best known for
laptops were designed with communications and audio-video capabilities at the
forefront, including innovative designs that incorporated TV and radio tuners, web
cameras, and handwriting recognition. The line was discontinued in 2014.
1997-
MICROSOFT INTRODUCES VISUAL STUDIO

Microsoft introduces Visual Studio. Bundled within Visual Studio were a number of
programming tools, as Microsofts intent was to create a single environment where
developers could use different programming languages. The idea of visual
programming is to allow programmers to develop software using built-in visual
elements (like in a block diagram) instead of text.
1998-
SGI RELEASES MAYA

Silicon Graphics Incorporated (SGI) initially develops Maya as a next generation 3D

animation tool, basing it on code from previous systems created by Wavefront and
Alias. Maya quickly found adoption by video game and graphics industries,
especially in film and television. Maya was the basis for three separate Academy
Awards for Technical Achievement between 2003 and 2008.
1999-
SONY'S AIBO ROBOT PET
THE AIBO ROBOTIC PET DOG

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.
2000-
THE SIMS IS RELEASED

While most games see a player working towards an end-game scenario, The Sims
allows players to create a home, get a job, and form relationships in a free-form
world. Designed by a team at Maxis led by Wil Wright, The Sims took concepts from
Wright's previous game Sim City. Characters controlled by the player were
customizable, and spoke an artificial language called Simlish. The Sims became
exceptionally popular with women, who accounted for more than sixty percent of
players.
2001-
SONY-BUILT J-PHONE J-SH04
FIRST CAMERA PHONE INTRODUCED

Japan's SoftBank introduces the first camera phone, the J-Phone J-SH04; a Sharp-
manufactured digital phone with integrated camera. The camera had a maximum
resolution of 0.11 megapixels a 256-color display, and photos could be shared
wirelessly. The J-Phone line would quickly expand, releasing a flip-phone version just a
month later. Cameras would become a significant part of most phones within a year,
and several countries have even passed laws regulating their use.
2002-
EARTH SIMULATOR SUPERCOMPUTER
EARTH SIMULATOR IS WORLD'S FASTEST SUPERCOMPUTER

Developed by the Japanese government to create global climate models, the Earth
Simulator is a massively parallel, vector-based system that costs nearly 60 billion
yen (roughly $600 million at the time). A consortium of aerospace, energy, and
marine science agencies undertook the project, and the system was built by NEC
around their SX-6 architecture. To protect it from earthquakes, the building housing
it was built using a seismic isolation system that used rubber supports. The Earth
Simulator was listed as the fastest supercomputer in the world from 2002 to 2004.
2003-
ONE OF THE INITIAL BLU-RAY RELEASES, THE TERMINATOR
BLU-RAY OPTICAL DISC

Developed by a technology industry consortium, the Blu-ray optical disc is

released. It was intended to be the successor to the DVD, and was designed to
store high definition video at 1080p, while older DVDs were only capable of 480p
resolution. The disc was named for the relatively short wavelength blue laser that
reads the data on the disc, which was capable of reading data stored at a higher
density compared to the red laser used for reading DVDs. A brief storage format
battle ensued between Blu-ray and HD DVD, a format that was being supported in
an effort spearheaded by Toshiba. Blu-ray ultimately prevailed.
2004-
NOOGLER (NEW GOOGLER) HAT WORN BY FRESH RECRUITS
GOOGLES IPO AND THE NEW, SLOW BOOM

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.
2005-
NASA AMES RESEARCH CENTER SUPERCOMPUTER
COLUMBIA

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.
2006-
NINTENDO WII COMES TO MARKET
GRAPHICS & GAMES

Nintendo's Wii game system does not merely introduce new games and controllers,
but new ways of interacting with game systems. The Wii Remote combined
advanced gesture recognition into gaming, using accelerometer and optical sensor
technologies to interact with the user. These advances allowed for games to
incorporate a wide range of player physical movements. Several games came their
own with specialized controllers, including Wii Fit, Wii Tennis and Wii Boxing.
2007-
TYPICAL SERVER FARM
DROPBOX

Dropbox is founded by Arash Ferdowsi and Drew Houston. Dropbox was designed as
a cloud-based service used for convenient storage and access to files. Users could
upload files via the web to Dropboxs vast server farms, and could instantly access
them on any of their devices or computers that had the Dropbox client installed.
2008-
STEVE JOBS INTRODUCING MACBOOK AIR
THE MACBOOK AIR IS RELEASED

Apple introduces their first ultra notebook a light, thin laptop with high-capacity
battery. The Air incorporated many of the technologies that had been associated
with Apple's MacBook line of laptops, including integrated camera, and Wi-Fi
capabilities. To reduce its size, the traditional hard drive was replaced with a solid-
state disk, the first mass-market computer to do so
2009-
PLANTS VS. ZOMBIES IS RELEASED

Initially conceived as a game that would walk the line between gritty and
sickeningly cute, programmer George Fan develops Plants vs. Zombies for PopCap
Games. Influenced by 'tower defense games' where players attempt to repel
attackers, Plants vs. Zombies gave players a chance to turn back an invasion of the
Undead using cartoon household plants. The game was ported to many different
systems, including the iPad, Steam, and PlayStation 3.
2010-
STEVE JOBS INTRODUCING THE IPAD
THE APPLE IPAD IS RELEASED

The iPad combines many of the popular capabilities of the iPhone, such as built-in
high-definition camera, access to the iTunes Store, and audio-video capabilities, but
with a nine-inch screen and without the phone. Apps, games, and accessories
helped spur the popularity of the iPad and led to its adoption in thousands of
different applications from movie making, creating art, making music, inventory
control and point-of-sale systems, to name but a few.