Technology

The tech industry — companies, founders, products, and inflection moments that built the world we live in. From IBM's System/360 to OpenAI's ChatGPT; from the Homebrew Computer Club to the dot-com bubble, the iPhone keynote, the AI era.

A chronological documentary of 197 moments spanning 1947–2026 on Loreline.

last updated 2026-07-16

1. 1947 — Transistor Invented at Bell Labs. December 23, 1947. Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley demonstrate the point-contact transistor. The end of the vacuum-tube era; the silicon era begins. All three share the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics.
2. 1951 — UNIVAC I Delivered. June 14, 1951. The first commercial computer in the United States. Used by CBS to predict the 1952 presidential election; the live broadcast made "computer" a household word.
3. 1960 — SAGE Air Defense Computer. The IBM AN/FSQ-7 — heart of the SAGE air-defense system. Half-acre rooms of vacuum tubes; the most ambitious computing project of the 1950s.
4. 1964 — IBM System/360. April 7, 1964. IBM bets the company on the System/360 — a compatible family of mainframes spanning the price range. Defined "computer architecture" as a concept; ran every large business in the world by 1970.
5. 1967 — Unimate — First Industrial Robot. GM's 1961 deployment of Unimate at the New Jersey Inland Fisher Guide Plant. The first industrial robot to work an assembly line. Famous Johnny Carson Tonight Show appearance.
6. 1968 — Mother of All Demos. December 9, 1968. Doug Engelbart's 90-minute live demo at SRI — the mouse, hypertext, video conferencing, collaborative real-time editing. Every interactive computing concept of the next 50 years in one session.
7. 1968-07-18 — Intel Founded. July 18, 1968. Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce leave Fairchild Semiconductor to found Intel. By 1971 they ship the 4004 — the first commercial microprocessor — and the chip company that would define the next 50 years of computing.
8. 1969 — ARPANET First Connection. October 29, 1969. UCLA → Stanford. The first ARPANET message was supposed to be "LOGIN"; the system crashed after "LO." The internet's direct ancestor.
9. 1969 — Unix Created at Bell Labs. 1969. Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie create Unix on a discarded PDP-7 at Bell Labs. The operating system that became the substrate for everything from servers to smartphones; macOS, Linux, Android, iOS all descend from it.
10. 1973-03-01 — Xerox Alto. March 1, 1973. Xerox PARC builds the Alto — the first personal computer with a GUI, mouse, ethernet, and WYSIWYG editing. Never commercialised; Steve Jobs visits PARC in 1979 and takes everything to Apple.
11. 1975-04-04 — Microsoft Founded. April 4, 1975. Bill Gates and Paul Allen found Microsoft to sell BASIC for the Altair. Within 25 years, the most valuable company in the world. Gates is 19 at the founding.
12. 1975 — Altair 8800 (Popular Electronics Cover). January 1975. The MITS Altair 8800 — the first commercially-successful personal computer kit. The cover of Popular Electronics that launched the homebrew industry; Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote a BASIC interpreter for it and founded Microsoft within months.
13. 1975 — Cray-1 Supercomputer. March 1976. Seymour Cray's Cray-1 — the most famous supercomputer of all time. Sold for $7.9M (≈$40M today); installed at Los Alamos. The shape of the modern supercomputer arms race.
14. 1976-04-01 — Apple Founded. April 1, 1976. Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne found Apple in the Jobs family garage in Los Altos. Wayne sells his 10% stake for $800 twelve days later; it would have been worth ~$300B by 2024.
15. 1977 — Apple II Released. June 10, 1977. The Apple II — the first mass-market personal computer. 6M units sold over 16 years. The platform on which VisiCalc (1979) became the first killer app.
16. 1978-12 — ARM Architecture Born. October 1985. Acorn Computers in Cambridge designs the ARM1 — a low-power RISC processor for the BBC Micro. By 2024, ARM chips ship in 270+ billion devices; the underlying CPU architecture of every smartphone in the world.
17. 1979-05 — VisiCalc — First Spreadsheet. October 1979. Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston ship VisiCalc on the Apple II. The first killer app: businesses bought Apple IIs just to run it. Killed the punched-card era of accounting.
18. 1979 — Xerox Alto Demo. Archival demos of the Xerox Alto — the GUI, mouse, ethernet, and WYSIWYG editing that Steve Jobs would see on his 1979 PARC visit.
19. 1981-08-12 — IBM PC. August 12, 1981. IBM ships the 5150 — the original IBM PC. Open architecture; clones flood the market; PC becomes the de-facto standard for business computing. IBM licenses DOS from a tiny Microsoft.
20. 1982-02-24 — Sun Microsystems Founded. February 24, 1982. Andy Bechtolsheim, Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy, Bill Joy. "The network is the computer." Dominates the engineering workstation market through the 1990s; Java ships in 1995. Bought by Oracle 2010.
21. 1982-02-28 — Adobe Founded. December 1982. John Warnock and Charles Geschke leave Xerox PARC to found Adobe. PostScript ships in 1984; Illustrator in 1987; Photoshop in 1990. The graphic-design industry runs on Adobe within a decade.
22. 1982 — Tron — First Computer-Animated Feature. July 9, 1982. Tron's release. 15 minutes of computer-generated imagery; first feature film to make heavy use of CGI. The Visual-Effects Academy disqualified it because computers were considered "cheating."
23. 1983-01-26 — Lotus 1-2-3. January 26, 1983. Mitch Kapor's Lotus 1-2-3 — the spreadsheet that established the IBM PC platform. Outsold every other business application for the rest of the decade.
24. 1983 — AOL Founded. May 24, 1985. Quantum Computer Services (renamed AOL in 1991) launches. By 2001, 30M paying subscribers. The "You've got mail" jingle defines the consumer internet onramp of the 1990s.
25. 1983-07-15 — Nintendo NES Launches in NA. October 18, 1985. Nintendo Entertainment System launches in North America after the 1983 video-game crash had killed the home-console market. Sold 62M units; rebuilt the industry single-handed.
26. 1983-09-27 — GNU Project Announced. September 27, 1983. Richard Stallman announces the GNU Project — a free Unix-compatible OS. The GNU GPL (1989) and the broader free-software movement that followed reshape the entire software industry; Linux (1991) completes the GNU stack.
27. 1984-01-24 — Macintosh — 1984 Super Bowl Ad. January 22, 1984. The "1984" Super Bowl commercial directed by Ridley Scott aired once. Two days later: the Macintosh launch keynote. First commercial PC with a GUI + mouse to reach mainstream success.
28. 1984 — Macintosh Launch Keynote. January 24, 1984. Steve Jobs unveils the Mac at the Apple shareholder meeting. The Mac speaks for itself: "Hello, I am Macintosh." Iconic launch-keynote template that Jobs would revisit for decades.
29. 1985 — Amiga 1000 Launch — Andy Warhol Demo. July 23, 1985. Andy Warhol demos the Amiga 1000's graphics by drawing Debbie Harry. The strangest computer-launch event of the 1980s.
30. 1985 — Commodore Amiga 1000. July 23, 1985. The Amiga — multi-tasking 32-bit OS, true colour graphics, 4-channel sampled audio. Years ahead of its time; never reached the install base its tech deserved. Commodore folds in 1994.
31. 1985-06-20 — NeXT Founded. September 1985. Steve Jobs, ousted from Apple, founds NeXT. The NeXT cube's OS becomes the basis of macOS (after Apple's 1996 acquisition) and indirectly of iOS. Tim Berners-Lee writes the first web browser on a NeXT machine.
32. 1985-09-30 — Microsoft Excel Released. September 1985. Microsoft Excel ships for the Macintosh — Microsoft's first GUI application. Windows version follows in 1987; by 1993 Excel has overtaken Lotus 1-2-3 as the dominant spreadsheet.
33. 1985-11-20 — Windows 1.0. November 20, 1985. Microsoft ships Windows 1.0 — a GUI layered on top of MS-DOS. Slow, ugly, mocked. By Windows 3.0 (1990) it was the most-used desktop OS in the world; held that position for 30+ years.
34. 1988-10-29 — Sega Genesis Launches in NA. August 14, 1989. Sega Genesis launches in North America. "Genesis does what Nintendon't." Sega briefly outsells Nintendo in the US (1991-94) — the only time before or since.
35. 1989-04-21 — Game Boy Released. April 21, 1989. Nintendo Game Boy. 118M units sold. Tetris bundled with launch. The handheld-gaming category as the West understood it for two decades.
36. 1991 — First Website Goes Live. August 6, 1991. Tim Berners-Lee publishes info.cern.ch — the first website ever. Hosted on a NeXT machine in his CERN office. Still online in archived form 30+ years later.
37. 1991-09-17 — Linux Kernel Released. September 17, 1991. Linus Torvalds, age 21, releases version 0.01 of the Linux kernel. By 2024, runs on every Android phone, every Chromebook, the majority of web servers, and the world's top 500 supercomputers.
38. 1993-01-23 — Mosaic Browser. April 22, 1993. NCSA Mosaic — the first graphical web browser to display inline images. Within a year, the web is consumed by mainstream audiences. Marc Andreessen leaves NCSA to co-found Netscape.
39. 1994-07-05 — Amazon Founded. July 5, 1994. Jeff Bezos founds Amazon in his Bellevue garage. First book sold: July 1995. By 2024: the world's largest e-commerce + cloud-computing company; Bezos the richest person on Earth for most of the previous decade.
40. 1995-05-23 — Java Released. May 23, 1995. Sun Microsystems releases Java. "Write once, run anywhere." By 2024, ~9M Java developers; the dominant enterprise programming language for 25+ years.
41. 1995 — AOL Free-Trial CDs. AOL's free-trial CDs that came in every magazine, every cereal box, every mailbox in the US 1993-2006. Estimated 1 billion CDs produced.
42. 1995-09-03 — eBay Founded. September 3, 1995. Pierre Omidyar starts AuctionWeb (renamed eBay 1997). First item sold: a broken laser pointer for $14.83. The platform that proved the internet could host real commerce between strangers.
43. 1996 — ICQ Released. November 15, 1996. Israeli company Mirabilis releases ICQ — first widely-used internet messenger. The "uh-oh" notification sound is one of the most-recognised audio cues of the late-1990s internet.
44. 1996-07-04 — Hotmail Launches. July 4, 1996. Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith launch Hotmail — first widely-used webmail. Acquired by Microsoft in December 1997 for $400M, the first 9-figure internet acquisition.
45. 1998-09-04 — Google Founded. September 4, 1998. Larry Page and Sergey Brin incorporate Google. Andy Bechtolsheim writes a $100,000 check before they have a bank account. PageRank algorithm; by 2004 the most-used search engine ever.
46. 1998-12 — PayPal Founded. December 1998. Peter Thiel and Max Levchin found Confinity (Elon Musk's X.com merges 2000; rebrands as PayPal). eBay acquires for $1.5B in 2002. The "PayPal mafia" goes on to found LinkedIn, YouTube, SpaceX, Tesla, Yelp, Palantir, Reddit.
47. 1999-02-03 — Salesforce Founded. March 8, 1999. Marc Benioff founds Salesforce — first major company built entirely on the SaaS model. "No software." By 2024: world's largest CRM, $250B market cap.
48. 1999 — Bezos in his Garage. 1997 60 Minutes profile of 33-year-old Jeff Bezos in Amazon's Bellevue warehouse. The infamous packing-the-orders-on-the-floor footage.
49. 1999 — The Matrix — "Bullet Time". March 31, 1999. The Matrix's "bullet time" sequence — 122 still cameras firing in sequence around Trinity's kick. Reshaped the visual language of action cinema for the next decade.
50. 2000 — Larry & Sergey on PageRank. 1998 Stanford-era interviews with Larry Page and Sergey Brin explaining PageRank. The pitch that became one of the most valuable algorithms in history.
51. 2000 — Pets.com Sock Puppet Commercial. The Pets.com sock-puppet Super Bowl XXXIV commercial. Cheerful, doomed; the most quoted relic of the dot-com bubble.
52. 2000 — AOL-Time Warner Merger Announcement. January 10, 2000. Steve Case and Gerald Levin announce the $182B AOL-Time Warner merger. Peak-bubble corporate theatre; universally remembered as the worst merger in business history.
53. 2001-01-15 — Wikipedia Launches. January 15, 2001. Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launch Wikipedia. By 2024: 60M+ articles in 300+ languages; the most-visited reference site in human history. Operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation.
54. 2001 — iPod Keynote — Steve Jobs. October 23, 2001. Steve Jobs pulls the iPod from his jeans pocket: "1,000 songs in your pocket." The keynote template for every Apple launch that followed.
55. 2001-10-23 — iPod. October 23, 2001. Apple launches the iPod — "1,000 songs in your pocket." 450M units sold over its lifetime; the device that brought Apple back from the brink and led directly to the iPhone.
56. 2002 — Firefox 1.0. November 9, 2004. Mozilla Firefox 1.0 — the browser that broke Internet Explorer's 95% market share. By 2010, ~30% global market share. Established the open-web alternative throughout the 2000s.
57. 2003-04-28 — iTunes Music Store. April 28, 2003. Apple launches the iTunes Music Store with 200,000 songs at $0.99 each. By 2010 the world's largest music retailer. Killed Napster, paved the way for Spotify, transformed how music was sold.
58. 2003 — iTunes Music Store Launch. April 28, 2003. Steve Jobs introduces the iTunes Music Store. 200,000 songs at $0.99. The first commercially-viable legal digital music store.
59. 2003 — Second Life Launches. June 23, 2003. Linden Lab launches Second Life. By 2007: 1M residents, branded "metaverse" before the term was popular. The early-2000s template for every later virtual-world platform.
60. 2003-07-01 — Tesla Founded. July 1, 2003. Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning found Tesla Motors. Elon Musk leads the 2004 Series A. Roadster ships 2008; Model S in 2012. The most consequential automotive disruption since Henry Ford.
61. 2004-02-04 — Facebook Founded. February 4, 2004. Mark Zuckerberg launches "thefacebook.com" from his Harvard dorm room. By 2012: 1 billion users. By 2024 (as Meta): 3.9 billion across its family of apps. The most consequential social network ever built.
62. 2004-04-01 — Gmail Launches. April 1, 2004. Google launches Gmail — 1 GB inbox at a time when Hotmail offered 2 MB. Many assumed it was an April Fool's joke. Invite-only until 2007; redefined what webmail could be.
63. 2004 — Zuckerberg on Facebook in 2004. 2004 Harvard-newspaper interviews with 20-year-old Mark Zuckerberg about thefacebook.com. The unguarded early footage from before he became one of the most-watched CEOs alive.
64. 2004 — Web 2.0 Conference Keynote. October 2004. Tim O'Reilly's "What is Web 2.0?" — coined the term that defined the next decade of internet startups. AJAX, mashups, user-generated content as a programming paradigm.
65. 2005-02-14 — YouTube Founded. February 14, 2005. Three former PayPal employees — Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, Jawed Karim — launch YouTube. First video: "Me at the zoo" (April 23, 2005). Acquired by Google for $1.65B (Oct 2006) — 18 months after launch.
66. 2005 — Me at the Zoo (First YouTube Video). April 23, 2005. Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo. 19 seconds, 350M+ views. The video that proved YouTube's concept and started the platform's 20-year run.
67. 2005 — Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement. June 12, 2005. Steve Jobs's commencement address at Stanford. "Stay hungry. Stay foolish." The most-quoted commencement speech ever delivered by a technologist; viewed 100M+ times.
68. 2005 — Reddit Co-Founders Pitch. 2005 Y Combinator interviews of 22-year-olds Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian pitching Reddit. The founding archive of YC's defining era.
69. 2005-06-23 — Reddit Founded. June 23, 2005. Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian launch Reddit. By 2024: "the front page of the internet," 73M daily active users. IPO'd March 2024.
70. 2006-03 — AWS Born. 2002. Amazon launches Amazon Web Services as an internal toolkit. The S3 + EC2 public launches in 2006 created the modern cloud-computing industry. By 2024 AWS revenue: $107B annual.
71. 2006-03-21 — Twitter Launches. March 21, 2006. Jack Dorsey sends the first tweet: "just setting up my twttr." Becomes the de-facto public-square of the early 2010s; rebranded "X" 2023 after Elon Musk's $44B acquisition.
72. 2006 — First Tweet. March 21, 2006. Jack Dorsey: "just setting up my twttr." The first tweet ever. Sold as an NFT in 2021 for $2.9M; bidder later tried to resell for $48M and got bids of $277.
73. 2006 — AWS S3 + EC2 Launch. 2006. Amazon launches S3 (March) and EC2 (August) as public services. Modern cloud computing begins. By 2024 AWS revenue: $107B annual.
74. 2007-06-09 — iPhone Keynote. January 9, 2007. Steve Jobs unveils the iPhone at Macworld. "An iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator." Shipped June 29, 2007. The most consequential consumer product launch of the 21st century.
75. 2007 — iPhone Keynote — Macworld 2007. January 9, 2007. Steve Jobs unveils the iPhone. "An iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator." The 90-minute keynote routinely voted the greatest product unveiling in tech history.
76. 2007 — iPhone — "Hello" Commercial. June 2007. The "Hello" iPhone commercial: a montage of classic film/TV characters saying hello on the phone. Aired during the 79th Academy Awards.
77. 2007 — Kindle Launch — Bezos on Charlie Rose. November 2007. Jeff Bezos demoing the first Kindle on Charlie Rose. "Wireless delivery in 60 seconds." The product that proved e-readers had a market.
78. 2007-10-19 — GitHub Launches. April 10, 2008. Tom Preston-Werner, Chris Wanstrath, PJ Hyett launch GitHub. The default home of open-source software within five years. Microsoft acquires for $7.5B (2018).
79. 2008 — First Android Phone. September 23, 2008. HTC Dream / T-Mobile G1 — the first Android phone. By 2024, 3+ billion active Android devices. The platform that ate the rest of the smartphone market.
80. 2008 — HTC Dream / T-Mobile G1 Launch. September 23, 2008. T-Mobile launch event for the HTC Dream. The first Android phone; physical keyboard, trackball, side-slide form factor.
81. 2008 — Airbnb Founded. August 2008. Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, Nathan Blecharczyk found Airbnb. Initially "AirBed & Breakfast" — air mattresses in their San Francisco apartment during a conference. By 2024: 4M+ hosts, 220+ countries.
82. 2008 — App Store Launches. July 10, 2008. Apple announces the App Store with 500 apps. Created the entire modern mobile-software industry within two years.
83. 2008 — Spotify Launches in Sweden. October 7, 2008. Daniel Ek launches Spotify in Stockholm. The first legal, ad-supported, on-demand streaming service that actually worked. By 2024: 615M users, 256M paying.
84. 2008 — Tesla Roadster Launch. 2008. Tesla Roadster — the first highway-legal electric car with lithium-ion batteries and 200+ mile range. Elon Musk's personal investment that nearly bankrupted him.
85. 2009-01-03 — Bitcoin Genesis Block. January 3, 2009. Satoshi Nakamoto mines Bitcoin's genesis block. The first cryptocurrency. Reaches $69,000 per coin (Nov 2021), $100,000 (Dec 2024). The financial-industry tremor of the 2010s.
86. 2009-01 — WhatsApp Founded. February 24, 2009. Jan Koum and Brian Acton found WhatsApp. By 2014, 600M users; Facebook acquires for $19B — the largest tech acquisition of the decade. By 2024: 2 billion monthly active users.
87. 2009-03 — Uber Founded. March 2009. Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp found UberCab. Black-car service in San Francisco; pivots to peer-to-peer (UberX) in 2012. By 2024, operates in 70+ countries; the most consequential transportation disruption since the airline industry.
88. 2009-03-24 — Pale Blue Dot — Voyager 1. February 14, 1990. Voyager 1 takes the "Pale Blue Dot" photograph from 6 billion km away. Carl Sagan's narration of the image became one of the most quoted speeches about Earth.
89. 2009 — Palantir Founded. 2003. Peter Thiel + Alex Karp + Joe Lonsdale + Stephen Cohen + Nathan Gettings found Palantir. Funded by In-Q-Tel (CIA's VC arm). The most controversial data-analytics company of the 21st century.
90. 2009 — Bitcoin Explained — Early Footage. Early-period documentary explainers of Bitcoin from 2009-2011. The community that mined Bitcoin on laptops before any exchange existed.
91. 2009 — Kickstarter Launches. April 28, 2009. Kickstarter launches in NYC. Crowdfunding becomes a real category; Pebble (2012) raises $10M; Oculus VR (2012) raises $2.4M and gets acquired by Facebook for $2B.
92. 2009 — Bill Gates Releases Mosquitoes at TED. February 4, 2009. Bill Gates releases mosquitoes into the TED audience during his malaria talk. "Not only poor people should experience this." Most-quoted single moment in TED history.
93. 2009-10-30 — Netscape IPO on CNN. August 9, 1995. Netscape IPO opens at $28; closes at $58.25. CNN financial-news coverage as the bubble inflates in real time.
94. 2010 — Stripe Founded. 2010. Patrick and John Collison found Stripe in Ireland, ages 22 and 19. Simplifies online payments to 7 lines of code. By 2024: $70B valuation; processes ~10% of global e-commerce.
95. 2010 — iPad Keynote — 2010. January 27, 2010. Steve Jobs introduces the iPad. "A truly magical and revolutionary product." 15M units sold in year one; created the modern tablet category.
96. 2010 — Instagram Launch Demo. October 6, 2010. Kevin Systrom's Instagram launch — square photos, filters, one-tap sharing. 1M users in 2 months; sold to Facebook 18 months later for $1B.
97. 2010 — Uber's First Ride. Early Uber-app demo videos from 2010-2011 — when "UberCab" was just a black-car booking service. The pitch that became one of the most consequential platform shifts of the 2010s.
98. 2010 — Samsung Galaxy S Launches. June 2010. Samsung Galaxy S launches — first major Android challenger to the iPhone. By 2024 Samsung has shipped 1+ billion Galaxy units; the most successful non-Apple smartphone family.
99. 2011-01-17 — Apple II Launch Commercial. 1977 Apple II commercials — Steve Jobs in suit-and-tie, Steve Wozniak demoing colour graphics. The dawn of consumer computer marketing.
100. 2011-04-21 — Zoom Becomes the World's Office. March 2020. Zoom's daily active users go from 10M (Dec 2019) to 300M (April 2020) as the world locks down. The pandemic-era video-conferencing standard; "Zoom fatigue" enters the cultural lexicon.
101. 2011 — Siri Demo — iPhone 4S Keynote. October 4, 2011. Apple's Siri demo at the iPhone 4S keynote — first major voice-assistant baked into a consumer phone. Set the bar for Alexa, Google Assistant, and the modern voice-AI category.
102. 2011 — IBM Watson vs Jeopardy Champions. February 14-16, 2011. IBM Watson beats Ken Jennings + Brad Rutter at Jeopardy. The first widely-recognised modern-AI public win.
103. 2012 — Tesla Model S Launch. June 22, 2012. Tesla Model S launch event. The car that took Tesla from a Roadster boutique to the most valuable automaker in the world.
104. 2012 — Oculus Rift Kickstarter Demo. August 1, 2012. Palmer Luckey's Oculus Rift Kickstarter video — duct-taped prototype on his head. Raised $2.4M; revived VR after a 20-year coma.
105. 2012 — Megaupload Raid. January 19, 2012. NZ police raid Kim Dotcom's mansion at FBI request; shut down Megaupload (4% of global internet traffic at the time). The largest copyright-enforcement action in internet history.
106. 2012 — Tim Berners-Lee at the Olympics. July 27, 2012. Tim Berners-Lee at the London Olympics opening ceremony: "This is for everyone." Live-tweeted from the stage. The most-watched moment in the web's public history.
107. 2012 — Tinder Launches. September 2012. Tinder launches at USC. By 2023: 50M+ users in 190 countries. Reshaped human dating; the swipe gesture became a universal UI verb.
108. 2012 — Doudna & Charpentier CRISPR Paper. June 2012. Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier publish the CRISPR-Cas9 paper in Science. Programmable DNA editing for any organism. Nobel Prize 2020.
109. 2013-03-13 — Docker Released. March 20, 2013. Solomon Hykes releases Docker. Application containers redefine software deployment within 3 years. By 2024, Kubernetes (which depends on container patterns Docker mainstreamed) runs the majority of production cloud workloads.
110. 2013-06-02 — Shawn Fanning at Napster. 2000 60 Minutes / MTV coverage of 19-year-old Shawn Fanning during Napster's peak — 80M users, music industry in panic.
111. 2013 — Snowden Leaks. June 2013. Edward Snowden, NSA contractor, leaks classified documents revealing global surveillance programs to Glenn Greenwald + Laura Poitras. The single most consequential whistleblowing event in modern computing.
112. 2013 — Snowden Hong Kong Interview. June 9, 2013. The Glenn Greenwald + Laura Poitras Hong Kong hotel interview with Edward Snowden, days after the first NSA leaks. The most-watched investigative-journalism video of the decade.
113. 2014 — Twitch Plays Pokemon. February 2014. Twitch Plays Pokemon — 1.16M people typing inputs to control a single Game Boy emulator. The 16-day collective experiment that put Twitch on the cultural map; led to Amazon's $970M acquisition six months later.
114. 2014 — Apple Watch — "One More Thing". September 9, 2014. Tim Cook ends the iPhone 6 keynote with "we have one more thing" — Apple Watch. Apple's first new product category since the iPad.
115. 2014 — Tim Cook on Privacy. September 2014. Tim Cook's open letter on privacy: "Our business is not based on collecting personal data." The differentiation pitch against Google + Facebook that defined Apple's brand for the next decade.
116. 2014 — Satya Nadella Becomes Microsoft CEO. February 4, 2014. Satya Nadella succeeds Steve Ballmer as Microsoft CEO. Within 5 years, Microsoft passes Apple to become world's most valuable company. The most successful tech-CEO transition of the decade.
117. 2014 — Vitalik Buterin Pitches Ethereum. January 25, 2014. 19-year-old Vitalik Buterin unveils Ethereum at the Bitcoin Miami conference. "World computer." Ethereum mainnet ships July 30, 2015.
118. 2014-11-20 — Intel 4004. November 1971. The Intel 4004 — first commercial microprocessor on a single chip. 2,300 transistors; designed by Federico Faggin. The chip that started the microcomputer revolution.
119. 2015-04-14 — VisiCalc Demo. Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston demoing VisiCalc — the killer app that made the Apple II a business machine.
120. 2015 — Falcon 9 First Landing — Live Stream. December 21, 2015. SpaceX Falcon 9 lands at Cape Canaveral after delivering payload to orbit. The control-room eruption is one of the most rewatched moments in modern aerospace.
121. 2015-06-15 — NBC Today Show: "What is the Internet?". January 1994. Bryant Gumbel asks "What is the internet, anyway?" on the Today Show. Defines the pre-web mainstream understanding of what was coming.
122. 2015 — Discord Launches. May 13, 2015. Jason Citron launches Discord — initially for gamers; becomes the default community platform of the late 2010s. 200M monthly active by 2024.
123. 2015-10-08 — Bill Gates on the Altair. 1975 interviews with the 19-year-old Bill Gates explaining BASIC for the Altair. The founding pitch of Microsoft.
124. 2016 — AlphaGo vs Lee Sedol — Move 37. March 2016. Game 2 Move 37 — AlphaGo's creative shoulder hit. Commentators thought it was a bug. Lee Sedol left the room. The single most-discussed AI move ever made.
125. 2016 — Figma Public Beta. October 2016. Figma — collaborative browser-based design tool — exits beta. By 2024: industry-standard product-design platform; Adobe's $20B acquisition attempt blocked by antitrust 2023.
126. 2016-07-09 — Sony Walkman 1979 Commercial. The original TPS-L2 Walkman commercial. 30,000 units sold in two months in Japan; gave public space its first portable soundtrack.
127. 2016-09 — TikTok Goes Global. August 2018. ByteDance merges Musical.ly into TikTok internationally. By 2021, the most-downloaded app in the world. The first non-American social platform to achieve global Western mainstream scale.
128. 2017 — Tesla Model 3 Launches. July 28, 2017. Tesla Model 3 ships. By 2023, the best-selling EV in the world. Made electric cars mainstream; forced every legacy automaker to commit to EVs by mid-decade.
129. 2017 — Tesla Model 3 Reveal. July 28, 2017. Tesla Model 3 launch event at the Fremont factory. The car that took Tesla mass-market; ~$35,000 starting price; over 500,000 reservations within a week.
130. 2018 — TikTok Launches Globally. August 2018. ByteDance merges Musical.ly into TikTok. Within 3 years: most-downloaded app in the world.
131. 2018 — Falcon Heavy Starman Launch. February 6, 2018. First Falcon Heavy launch. Payload: Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster with a mannequin in a spacesuit ("Starman") on a heliocentric orbit past Mars.
132. 2018 — Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower. March 17, 2018. Christopher Wylie's Cambridge Analytica disclosure on Channel 4 News. The interview that turned data-privacy into a global political issue and accelerated GDPR enforcement.
133. 2018 — Zuckerberg Senate Testimony. April 10-11, 2018. Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress over Cambridge Analytica. "Senator, we run ads" became one of the defining viral exchanges of 2010s tech politics.
134. 2018 — Fortnite + Marshmello Concert. February 2, 2019. Marshmello plays a virtual concert inside Fortnite to 10M+ concurrent players. The first widely-attended metaverse event; predated Meta's rebrand by 32 months.
135. 2019 — WeWork S-1 + Adam Neumann. August 2019. WeWork files S-1. Within weeks: IPO postponed, Adam Neumann ousted, valuation crashes from $47B to $8B. The defining late-decade Silicon Valley fall-from-grace.
136. 2019-08-04 — Apollo Guidance Computer. The MIT-built AGC that landed Apollo 11. 64 KB of memory; software written by Margaret Hamilton's team. The first software ever called "software engineering."
137. 2019-10-09 — Java Launch Demo. 1995. James Gosling and the Sun team demoing Java — the "write once, run anywhere" promise that would define enterprise software for 25 years.
138. 2020 — Zoom CEO Eric Yuan on the Pandemic. March-April 2020. Eric Yuan interviews as Zoom DAU goes from 10M to 300M. "Zoom fatigue" enters the lexicon; remote work becomes a category.
139. 2020 — Snowflake IPO. September 16, 2020. Snowflake goes public; largest software IPO in history at $33B valuation. Defined the cloud-data-warehouse category.
140. 2020 — Apple M1 Reveal. November 10, 2020. Apple's M1 reveal. First Apple Silicon in a Mac. 16-hour battery life on a MacBook Air; Intel's 14-year run inside Mac ends.
141. 2021 — Facebook Rebrands as Meta. October 28, 2021. Mark Zuckerberg rebrands Facebook's parent company to Meta, signalling a "metaverse" pivot. Reality Labs has lost $50B+ on metaverse R&D through 2024 — but Meta's 2024 AI pivot recovers most market-cap losses.
142. 2021 — GitHub Copilot Reveal. June 29, 2021. GitHub Copilot launches in technical preview. First widely-used AI pair-programmer; built on OpenAI Codex. The product that proved generative AI could do real software-engineering work.
143. 2021 — Jeff Bezos Goes to Space. July 20, 2021. Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin New Shepard flight on the 52nd anniversary of Apollo 11. "Best day ever!" Critics: $5.5B+ on a 10-minute joyride.
144. 2021 — Roblox IPO. March 10, 2021. Roblox direct-lists at $45B valuation. By 2024: 80M daily active users (over half under 13). The first true mass-market metaverse platform.
145. 2022-03-04 — DEC PDP-11. Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP-11 — the workhorse minicomputer that Unix was written on. 600,000+ sold; defined the architecture of every computer that followed.
146. 2022 — Crypto Super Bowl Commercials. February 13, 2022. Super Bowl LVI runs $400M of crypto ads — FTX, Crypto.com, Coinbase. Larry David in FTX's "Don't miss out." Eight months later FTX collapsed; the commercial became one of the all-time advertising disaster reels.
147. 2022 — Musk Walks Into Twitter HQ With a Sink. October 26, 2022. Elon Musk walks into Twitter HQ carrying a kitchen sink: "Let that sink in!" Days before he closes the $44B acquisition. The first of many viral moments from his Twitter ownership.
148. 2022 — Stable Diffusion — Launch Demo. August 2022. Emad Mostaque's Stability AI releases Stable Diffusion. Open-source; runs on a consumer GPU. The first generative-image model anyone could run locally.
149. 2022 — ChatGPT Launch Tweet. November 30, 2022. Sam Altman: "today we launched ChatGPT. try talking with it here." 100M users in 60 days — fastest consumer-product growth in history.
150. 2022-08-22 — Stable Diffusion. August 22, 2022. Stability AI releases Stable Diffusion — the first generative-image model anyone can run on a consumer GPU. Open-source. Triggers the AI-art era; transforms the entire creative industry within months.
151. 2023-03-14 — GPT-4 Released. March 14, 2023. OpenAI releases GPT-4. Multimodal (text + image input), substantially more capable than GPT-3.5. Bar-exam-passing capability. The first AI model that knowledge workers built daily workflows around.
152. 2023 — Gemini Fake Demo Controversy. December 6, 2023. Google's Gemini intro video edited to look more real-time than it was. The first major AI-marketing credibility scandal; framed how every subsequent AI launch was scrutinised.
153. 2023 — Sam Altman Fired (and Rehired). November 17-22, 2023. OpenAI board fires Sam Altman on Friday. By Tuesday, 700+ OpenAI employees threaten to follow him to Microsoft. The board reverses. The five wildest days in 21st-century tech.
154. 2023 — NVIDIA Hits $1 Trillion. May 30, 2023. NVIDIA market cap crosses $1 trillion. AI-training GPU demand drives it to $3.6T by Dec 2024 — the most valuable company in the world. CEO Jensen Huang becomes one of tech's most consequential CEOs of the decade.
155. 2023 — NVIDIA Hits $1 Trillion. May 30, 2023. NVIDIA crosses $1T market cap on AI demand. Within 18 months: $3.6T — the most valuable company in the world.
156. 2023 — Jensen Huang Computex Keynote. May 2023. Jensen Huang's Computex keynote in Taipei. The leather jacket. The H100 explainer. The moment NVIDIA stopped being a "gaming card" company and became the AI infrastructure company.
157. 2023 — Sundar Pichai on Bard Launch. February 6, 2023. Sundar Pichai announces Bard — Google's ChatGPT competitor — three months after ChatGPT. Google's stock drops $100B the next day on a factual error in the demo.
158. 2023 — iPhone 15 Pro USB-C. September 12, 2023. iPhone 15 Pro switches to USB-C — Apple's response to EU charging-port mandate. The end of Lightning after 11 years.
159. 2023 — Hank Green iPhone Demo. 2023-2024 viral genre. Tech YouTubers demoing one feature in extreme depth. Hank Green, MKBHD, iJustine, Linus all in their stride. The era when tech reviews became a genre rivaling cable news.
160. 2024-02-02 — Apple Vision Pro. February 2, 2024. Apple Vision Pro ships at $3,499. The most-talked-about consumer tech launch of 2024 but commercial disappointment. Marks the AR/VR plateau and Apple's first major product flop in the modern era.
161. 2024-02-15 — OpenAI Sora. February 15, 2024. OpenAI demos Sora — minute-long photorealistic video from text prompts. Veo (Google, May 2024) and Runway Gen-3 (June 2024) follow within four months. The first commercial-quality text-to-video models.
162. 2024-05-13 — GPT-4o Multimodal. May 13, 2024. OpenAI releases GPT-4o — natively multimodal across text, image, audio. Real-time voice conversation. The first AI assistant that feels like the science-fiction default.
163. 2024 — Mira Murati Founds Thinking Machines. October 2024. Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati founds Thinking Machines Lab — the highest-profile AI-research spinoff of the decade. Raises $1B at $9B valuation within 4 months. Signals AI talent's ongoing diffusion across labs.
164. 2024 — OpenAI Sora — Tokyo Walk Demo. February 15, 2024. OpenAI demos Sora — first commercially-quality text-to-video model. The "Tokyo Walk" demo went viral globally; reshaped the AI-video debate overnight.
165. 2024 — GPT-4o Demo — Live Voice. May 13, 2024. OpenAI demos GPT-4o's real-time voice mode. The Spring Update — natural speech, interruptions, emotional inflection. The first AI assistant that felt like sci-fi default.
166. 2024 — Claude 3.5 Sonnet Demo — Artifacts. June 20, 2024. Anthropic launches Claude 3.5 Sonnet with Artifacts (side-pane previews of generated code/docs). Reframed AI chat as a workspace. Becomes the developer-AI of choice for the next year.
167. 2024 — Apple Vision Pro Launch Day. February 2, 2024. Apple Vision Pro ships at $3,499. Launch-day photographs from Apple stores; viral "guy wearing it in public" videos. The most-talked-about flop of 2024.
168. 2024 — Humane AI Pin Demo. April 2024. Humane AI Pin launch reviews — Marques Brownlee's "Worst Product I've Ever Reviewed" became one of the most-cited tech-review takedowns of the decade.
169. 2024 — Apple Intelligence Keynote. June 10, 2024. Apple announces Apple Intelligence at WWDC 2024. "AI for the rest of us." Partnership with OpenAI; on-device processing.
170. 2024 — Meta Llama 3 Launch. April 18, 2024. Meta releases Llama 3 — open-source flagship LLM. Mark Zuckerberg: "open-source is the future of AI." Sets the open-vs-closed-AI battle for the next 18 months.
171. 2024 — Devin AI — First Software Engineer Agent. March 12, 2024. Cognition Labs unveils Devin — pitched as the first AI software engineer. Demo videos go viral; controversies follow about how doctored some demos were. Defined the agentic-AI hype cycle.
172. 2024 — Mira Murati Announces Thinking Machines. October 2024. Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati announces Thinking Machines Lab. Within 4 months: $1B raise at $9B valuation. Most-watched AI-lab founding announcement since OpenAI.
173. 2024 — Cursor IDE Goes Viral. June 2024. Cursor — the AI-native VS Code fork — goes viral in tech-Twitter. By end of 2024, $100M ARR. The first AI-native IDE to find product-market fit.
174. 2024 — Sam Altman on Lex Fridman. March 18, 2024. Sam Altman's second Lex Fridman podcast. 2.5 hours. Covers the November 2023 board firing, Q*, AGI timelines. One of the most-referenced AI interviews of 2024.
175. 2024 — WWDC 2024 Keynote. June 10, 2024. Apple WWDC 2024. Apple Intelligence reveal. Tim Cook in person; massive emphasis on on-device processing as differentiator from cloud-AI competitors.
176. 2024 — NVIDIA GTC 2024 — Blackwell Reveal. March 18, 2024. Jensen Huang reveals NVIDIA Blackwell at GTC. The chip that powered every flagship AI model launched in late 2024 and 2025.
177. 2024 — Starship IFT-5 Booster Catch. October 13, 2024. SpaceX catches the returning Super Heavy booster with the launch tower's chopstick arms. The most replayed aerospace footage of the decade.
178. 2024 — Claude Computer Use Demo. October 22, 2024. Anthropic ships "Computer Use" — Claude can take screenshots and control a mouse + keyboard. The first widely-deployed AI agent that operates a real computer. Defines the 2025 agent-AI roadmap.
179. 2024 — Tesla Cybercab + Robovan Reveal. October 10, 2024. Tesla's "We, Robot" event. Cybercab two-seater autonomous taxi + Robovan. Stock drops 9% next day. Defines the autonomy-vs-execution debate in EVs.
180. 2024 — Figure 01 + OpenAI Demo. March 13, 2024. Figure 01 humanoid robot demo with OpenAI conversation backend. Asked to identify items, hand over an apple, explain why. The most-viewed humanoid-robot demo since Boston Dynamics.
181. 2024 — Tesla Optimus Walks Among Crowd. October 2024. Tesla Optimus humanoids serve drinks at the "We, Robot" event. Skeptics quickly determined they were tele-operated; controversy around AI vs. teleoperation framing.
182. 2024 — Boston Dynamics Atlas Goodbye + Hello. April 16-17, 2024. Boston Dynamics retires the hydraulic Atlas with a "farewell" video; reveals all-electric Atlas the next day. The most-watched robotics handoff in history.
183. 2024 — OpenAI Sora API Open. December 9, 2024. OpenAI ships Sora to ChatGPT Plus + Pro subscribers. First widely-available text-to-video product to consumers.
184. 2024-10-18 — Margaret Hamilton on Apollo Software. Late 1960s footage of Margaret Hamilton — first person to use the term "software engineering" — standing next to the printed AGC source code, taller than she was.
185. 2025 — DeepSeek is a Game Changer for AI — Computerphile. In January 2025 the open-source DeepSeek R1 reasoning model rivalled the best proprietary models at a fraction of the cost, upending the AI industry.
186. 2025 — GPT-4o Image Generation. March 25, 2025. OpenAI releases GPT-4o's native image generation. Within hours: "Ghibli-style" pictures of every famous photograph flood social media. The most-discussed AI release of 2025.
187. 2025 — Manus AI Agent Demo. March 2025. Chinese startup Manus releases an autonomous AI agent demo that goes viral globally. The agent-AI hype cycle peaks; thousands sign up for invite-only access in 24 hours.
188. 2025 — Claude Code Released. February 2025. Anthropic releases Claude Code — agentic coding from the terminal. Within months, default daily-driver for many engineers; the productivity-AI category continues its consolidation around Claude.
189. 2025 — Claude Opus 4 Launch. May 2025. Anthropic ships Claude Opus 4 — frontier reasoning model. Sustained 7-hour autonomous coding tasks. The release that solidified Anthropic's position alongside OpenAI at the AI frontier.
190. 2025 — Gemini 2.5 Pro Released. March 2025. Google DeepMind ships Gemini 2.5 Pro — first to top LMSYS leaderboard above OpenAI/Anthropic in all major categories. Google's comeback in the AI race becomes real.
191. 2025 — Apple Foundation Models. June 9, 2025. WWDC 2025: Apple opens its on-device Foundation Models to third-party developers. The first major mobile-AI platform shift since the iPhone.
192. 2025 — Cursor Hits $100M ARR. January 2025. Cursor (Anysphere) crosses $100M ARR; closes $105M Series C at $2.6B valuation. The first AI-native IDE to scale to enterprise revenue.
193. 2025 — GPT-5 Launch Demo. August 2025. OpenAI ships GPT-5 — unified model spanning text + image + code + reasoning. The model-class boundary that closed most measurable gaps to human-expert performance.
194. 2025-08-07 — GPT-5. 2025. OpenAI ships GPT-5 — extended thinking, agentic workflows, unified text+image+code reasoning. The model class that closes most measurable gaps between AI and human-expert performance.
195. 2025-10-10 — The Transistor Explained. Archival footage explaining the point-contact transistor — Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley's 1947 Bell Labs invention.
196. 2026-05-22 — Doug Engelbart Demos the Mouse. Pre-1968 footage of Doug Engelbart prototyping the computer mouse at SRI. The patent was filed November 17, 1970.
197. 2026-05-24 — Flickr Launches. February 10, 2004. Stewart Butterfield's Flickr — the photo-sharing site that defined Web 2.0. Acquired by Yahoo! for $25M in 2005.

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