text:
A Timeline of the 20th century
The major artistic, cultural, social, scientific and political events
World News | Politics | History | Editor | Correspondence
(Copyright © 2009 Piero Scaruffi)
This a synthesis of the various timelines that you can find on this website:
History, Art, Music, Cinema, Literature, Philosophy, Science.
1885: William Le Baron Jenney builds a ten-story building in Chicago
1885: Benjamin Keith and Edward Albee set up a nation-wide chain of vaudeville theaters, the first infusion of capitalism into mass entertainment
1885: William Burroughs develops an adding machine
1887: The Lick Observatory is erected near San Jose, the world's first permanently occupied mountain-top observatory
1888: George Eastman introduces the first consumer camera, the "Kodak"
1889: Andrew Carnegie writes "The Gospel of Wealth", encouraging philanthropy
1890: The population west of the Mississippi is 16,776,000
1890: William James publishes "The Principles of Psychology"
1890: Hermann Hollerith's tabulator is chosen for the national census
1891: Governor Leland and Jane Stanford found Stanford University near Palo Alto
1891: John Burgess founds the first graduate school at Columbia University
1892: Edward Doheny strikes oil in Los Angeles
1892: John Muir founds the "Sierra Club", the first environmental organizations
1892: The "Great Northern Railroad" is completed
1893: An economic depression causes unemployment and bankrupcies
1893: Ragtime pianists are a sensation at the Chicago World Fair
1896: The comic strip "Yellow Kid" by Richard Outcault debuts
1896: USA architect Louis Sullivan proclaims that "form follows function"
1897: The first car is sold in Los Angeles
1898: The USA defeats Spain and gains Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines, while Cuba becomes independent but de facto a USA protectorate
1898: The USA annexes Hawaii
1884: The French writer Joris Huysmans publishes the novel "Against the Grain"
1885: The French writer Emile Zola publishes the novel "Germinal"
1885: An international conference at Berlin divides Africa among the European powers
1886: Leopold II of Belgium establishes the Congo Free State and enacts a policy of forced labor and ethnic cleansing that would reduce the population from 20 million to 8 million by 1908 because of disease, torture or executions
1886: German engineer Karl Benz builds a gasoline-powered car
1886: Friedrich Nietzsche publishes "Beyond Good and Evil"
1887: Henri Poincare publishes the first study of chaotic behavior in Physics
1887: Heinrich Herz discovers radio waves
1887: Emile Berliner builds the first gramophone, that plays sound recorded at 78 RPM on a flat record
1888: The Nicaraguan poet Ruben Dario writes "Azul"
1888: The Swedish playwright August Strindberg stages "Miss Julie"
1889: The Italian writer Giovanni Verga publishes the novel "Mastro don Gesualdo"
1889: French engineer Gustave Eiffel builds an iron tower as the entrance arch for the World's Fair in Paris
1889: Giuseppe Peano publishes "Arithmetices Principia Nova Methodo Exposita"
1889: Henri Bergson publishes "Time And Free Will"
1889: Vincent VanGogh paints "Starry Night"
1889: Republican revolution in Brazil
1889: Auguste Rodin sculpts "The Burghers of Calais"
1890: German company AEG develops the alternating-current motor and generator
1890: The Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen stages "Hedda Gabler"
1891: Georges Seurat paints "Le Cirque", a masterpiece of "Pointillism"
1891: Armand Peugeot builds the first French car
1892: Rudolf Diesel invents the internal combustion engine
1892: Britain tonnage and seatrade exceeds the rest of the world's combined
1892: The German playwright Gerhart Hauptmann stages "The Weavers"
1892: The Neuschwanstein Castle, designed by Christian Jank, is completed in Germany
1892: Petr Tchaikovsky composes "The Nutcracker"
1893: Antonin Dvorak composes "Symphony 9"
1896: Giacomo Puccini composes the opera "La Boheme"
1893: Edvard Munch paints "The Scream"
1894: Claude Debussy composes "Prelude a l'Apres-midi d'un Faune"
1894: Auguste and Louis Lumiere invent cinema
1894: The Norwegian writer Knut the novel "Hamsun" Pedersen publishes the novel "Pan"
1894: The French playwright Alfred Jarry stages "Ubu Roi"
1895: The British playwright Oscar Wilde stages "The Importance of Being Ernest"
1895: The Czech poet Vaclav Jebavy "Otokar Brezina" writes "Mysterious Distances"
1895: The German writer Theodor Fontane publishes the novel "Effi Briest"
1895: Emile Durkheim publishes "The Rules of Sociological Method"
1895: The "Art Nouveau" movement is started in Paris by Czech artist Alfons Mucha's poster advertising Victorien Sardou's play "Gismonda"
1895: The German scientist Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen discovers X rays
1896: The French philanthropist Pierre Decoubertin revives the Olympic Games
1896: The French physicist Antoine Henri Becquerel discovers radioactivity
1896: Richard Strauss composes "Also Sprach Zarathustra"
1896: The Russian playwright Anton Chekhov stages "The Sea Gull"
1896: The Austrian playwright Arthur Schnitzler stages "Hands Around"
1897: Henri Rousseau paints "Sleeping Gypsy"
1897: German chemist Felix Hoffmann invents aspirin
1897: Joseph-John Thompson discovers that electricity is due to the flow of invisible negatively charged particles called electrons
1898: A group of photographers in Munich exhibit their work under the title of "Secessionists"
1899: The Brazilian writer Machado de Assis publishes the novel "Don Casmurro"
1900: The first mass-market camera, the "Brownie" is introduced by Kodak
1900: 2,300 automobiles are registered in the USA
1900: 5% of USA households own a telephone
1900: Life expectancy in the USA is 47.3
1901: One million people emigrate from Europe to the USA in just one year
1901: 16,000 patents are filed in just one year
1902: Irrigation of the western lands begins
1902: USA architect Daniel Burnham designs the "Flatiron" in New York
1903: Wilbur and Orville Wright fly the first airplane
1903: Edwin Porter directs the film "The Great Train Robbery"
1904: The USA writer Henry James publishes the novel "The Golden Bowl"
1904: Harvey Hubbell invents the electrical plug and socket
1905: Expressionism is born in Dresden with the group "Die Bruecke"
1905: The comic strip "Little Nemo" by Winsor Mccay debuts
1906: Lee deForrest invents the vacuum tube
1906: The San Francisco earthquake and fire
1907: Leo Baekeland invents the first plastic ("bakelite")
1907: Florenz Ziegfeld's "Ziegfeld Follies" debut
1908: Ford introduces the Model T, the first mass vehicle
1908: William D'Arcy discovers oil in Iran
1908: Durant founds General Motors in Detroit
1909: The average hourly salary in the USA is $0.19
1909: The Metlife tower in Madison Square is the tallest building in the world
1909: Stanford University's president David Starr Jordan invests $500 in Lee deForrest's audion tube, the first major venture-capital investment in the region
1909: Charles Herrold in San Jose starts the first radio station in the USA with regularly scheduled programming
1909: Cyril Elwell founds the Federal Telegraph Corporation (FTC) in Palo Alto to create the world's first global radio communication system
1900: Sigmund Freud publishes "The Interpretation of Dreams"
1900: Edmund Husserl publishes "Logical Investigations"
1900: Max Planck postulates that energy is exchanged in discrete packets
1900: Sergej Rachmaninov composes "Piano Concerto 2"
1900: The anti-western Boxer/ Yihetuan rebellion in China is crushed by foreign troops
1900: Mendel's theory of genes is rediscovered
1901: Queen Victoria of Britain dies
1901: Guglielmo Marconi conducts the first transatlantic radio transmission
1901: The first Nobel Prize is awarded
1901: The German writer Thomas Mann publishes the novel "Buddenbrooks"
1902: Georges Melies creates the short film "Voyage to the Moon"
1902: Gustav Klimt paints the "Beethovenfries"
1902: The Croatian playwright Ivo Vojnovic stages "The Dubrovnic Trilogy"
1903: The first "Tour de France" of cyclism takes place
1903: The "suffragette" movement is founded in Britain
1903: Marie Curie becomes the first woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize
1904: The Trans-Siberian Railroad is completed
1904: The British writer Joseph Conrad publishes the novel "Nostromo"
1904: The Italian writer Luigi Pirandello publishes the novel "The Late Mattia Pascal"
1904: The German playwright Frank Wedekind stages "The Book of Pandora"
1905: Leon Trotsky presents the theory of "Permanent Revolution"
1905: Japan wins a war against Russia, the first time that an Asian power beats a European power
1905: Albert Einstein merges Mechanics and Electromagnetism in his Relativity
1905: Alfred Stieglitz founds the art gallery "Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession", later renamed "291"
1906: Ferdinand de Saussure begins teaching the "Course of General Linguistics" in which he pioneers "structuralism"
1906: Paul Cezanne paints "Mont Saint Victoire"
1906: Henri Matisse paints "Joy of Life" , a masterpiece of "Fauvism"
1907: Alfred Stieglitz takes the photograph "The Steerage"
1907: Pablo Picasso paints "The Yound Women of Avignon , a masterpiece of "Cubism"
1907: The Irish playwright John Synge stages "The Playboy of The Western World"
1908: The Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler publishes the novel "The Road Into the Open"
1908: Swiss textile engineer Jacques Brandenberger invents cellophane
1908: Cubism is the new artistic fad in Paris
1908: The Austrian architect Adolf Loos proclaims that architectural ornament is criminal
1909: Filippo Marinetti publishes the "Futurist Manifest" in Paris
1909: Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev revives ballet in Paris with the establishment of the "Ballets Russes"
1910: The NAACP is founded to protect the rights of African Americans
1910: Los Angeles opens the first international airport in the USA
1910: California produces 22% of the world's oil (more than any country in the world)
1910: The first Nickelodeon (movie theater) theater opens in Los Angeles
1910: David-Ward Griffith directs the film "Old California" in the little village of Hollywood, north of Los Angeles
1911: General Electric introduces the first commercial refrigerator
1911: Hollerith's Tabulating Machine Company is acquired by a new company that will change name to International Bussiness Machines or IBM in 1924
1912: Mack Sennett founds the "Keystone Studios" to produce "slapstick" films
1913: John Rockefeller is worth $212 billions, 1/44th of the USA economy
1913: The "Ziegfeld Follies" launch the first "dance crazy", the "foxtrot"
1913: Ford installs the first assembly line (at Highland Park)
1913: USA architect Cass Gilbert designs the Woolworth Building in New York
1914: Marcus Garvey founds the "Universal Negro Improvement Association"
1914: The USA and Panama open the Panama Canal
1915: The USA has 100 million people, of which 13-15% are foreign-born
1915: The majority of USA films are made in the Los Angeles area
1915: William Simmons founds the racist "Ku Klux Klan"
1915: The Panama-Pacific International Exposition is held in San Francisco, for which Bernard Maybeck builds the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco
1915: David-Ward Griffith directs the film "The Birth of a Nation"
1916: Charles Ives composes his "Symphony 4"
1916: William Boeing founds a company to manufacture airplanes
1917: Edwin Pridham and Peter Jensen found the electronics company Magnavox in Napa
1917: Columbia University establishes the Pulitzer Prize
1917: 40% of USA households own a telephone
1917: The Original Dixieland Jass Band makes the first recording of "dixieland jazz"
1917: The USA accounts for 67% of the world's oil output
1917: The USA enters World War I
1918: An epidemics of influenza kills 20 million people worldwide (500,000 in the USA)
1919: The USA overtakes Europe as total industrial output
1919: Barnum and Bailey's circus merges with the Ringling Brothers to form the "Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus"
1910: Gustav Mahler composes his "Symphony 9"
1910: The British writer Edward-Morgan Forster publishes the novel "Howards End"
1910: Aleksander Skryabin composes "Prometheus" featuring an instrument projecting light instead of playing sound
1910: The Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore writes "Song Offerings"
1910: Heike Kamerlingh Onnes discovers superconductivity
1910: Mexican dictator Porfino Diaz is deposed ("Mexican revolution")
1910: Japan annexes Korea
1910: August Sander begins the project "Man of the Twentieth Century" of photographs of ordinary Germans
1911: Sonia Terk, Robert Delaunay and Frantisek Kupka begin painting in the "Orphic" style
1911: Ernest Rutherford discovers that the atom is made of a nucleus and orbiting electrons
1911: Jan Sibelius composes "Symphony 4"
1911: Igor Stravinskij composes the ballet "Petrushka"
1911: Marc Chagall paints "I and the Village"
1912: Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel opens a boutique of fashion design
1912: Carl Jung publishes "Psychology of the Unconscious"
1912: Marcel Duchamp paints "Nude Descending a Staircase #2"
1912: Sun Yatsen deposes the last emperor and installs a republic in China
1912: The Russian writer Boris Bugayev the novel "undrey Bely" publishes the novel "Petersburg"
1912: The Spanish poet Antonio Machado-y-Ruiz writes "Fields of Castilla"
1912: The "Titanic" sinks in the Atlantic ocean
1913: Indian poet Tagore becomes the first Nobel laureate of Asia
1913: The French poet Guillaume Apollinaire writes "Alcools"
1913: Vasilij Kandinskij paints "Composition VII"
1913: Aleksei Kruchenykh writes a libretto in zaum language and Malevich designes the stage for Mikhail Matyushin cubist-futurist opera "Victory Over the Sun"
1913: The Italian "futurist" Luigi Russolo publishes "L'Arte dei Rumori", proclaiming noise to be the sound of the 20th century
1913: Louis Feuillade directs the film "Fantomas"
1913: Marcel Duchamp realizes the first kinetic sculpture, "Bicycle Wheel"
1913: Danish architect Peter-Jensen Klint designs the Gruntvig Church in Copenhagen
1914: The Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa writes "Triumphal Ode"
1914: World War I breaks out in the Balkans, pitting Britain, France, Italy, Russia, Serbia and Japan against Austria, Germany and Turkey
1915: The Austrian writer Franz Kafka publishes the novel "The Trial"
1915: Egon Schiele paints "Death and the Maiden"
1915: Oskar Kokoshka paints "Der Irrende Ritter"
1915: Vladimir Tatlin's art launches "Constructivism" in Russia
1915: Kazimir Malevich's art launches "Suprematism" in Russia
1915: Tristan Tzara founds the Dada movement in Zurich
1915: Albert Einstein expands his theory to gravitation as "General Relativity"
1915: The Ottoman empire massacres 1.2 millions of Armenians
1916: Karl Schwarzschild realizes that Einstein's equations predict the existence of "black holes"
1916: Hugo Ball founds the nightclub "Cabaret Voltaire" in Zurich
1916: Constantin Brancusi sculpts three memorials at Targu Jiu
1916: Paul Strand holds the first exhibition of his photographs at the "291" art gallery
1917: The art magazine "De Stijl" begins publication
1917: Manuel de Falla composes the ballet "The Three-Cornered Hat", produced by Serge Diaghilev with set design and costumes by Pablo Picasso
1917: Giorgio DeChirico paints "Il Grande Metafisico"
1917: The French poet Paul Valery writes "Le Jeune Parque"
1917: The czar abdicates and Vladimir Lenin's "Bolsheviks" seize power in Russia
1918: The first World War ends
1919: Andre Breton experiments with "automatic writing" in his "Magnetic Fields"
1919: Walter Gropius founds the Bauhaus school in Weimar
1919: Afghanistan gains independence from Britain
1920: Universal female suffrage in the USA
1920: Mamie Smith makes the first blues recording
1921: The first fax is sent by Western Union
1921: Ansel Adams publishes his first photographs of Yosemite
1922: There are 60,000 radios in the USA
1923: The "Cotton Club" opens in Harlem, featuring only black entertainers but catering to a white-only audience
1923: James Johnson's musical "Runnin' Wild" launches the dance craze of the "charleston"
1925: Frederick Terman joins Stanford University to teach electronics electrical engineering and encourages his students to start businesses in California
1925: The "Revue Negre" in Paris introduces African-American entertainer Josephine Baker dancing the "charleston"
1925: Burroughs introduces a portable adding machine
1925: Louis Armstrong forms the Hot Five in Chicago
1925: The USA writer Francis-Scott Fitzgerald publishes the novel "The Great Gatsby"
1925: George Antheil composes the "Ballet Mecanique"
1926: Films with synchronized voice and music are introduced
1926: Alexander Calder creates the kinetic sculpture "Cirque Calder"
1927: Philo Farnsworth invents the television in San Francisco
1927: Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein create the musical "Show Boat"
1927: The first talking movie is "The Jazz Singer"
1927: Lindberg flies from New York to Paris
1929: 78% of the world's cars are in the USA
1929: There are 10 million radios in the USA
1929: Stock markets crash around the world and beginning of the "Great Depression"
1929: The Museum of Modern Art is founded in New York
1929: The comic strip "Popeye" by Elzie Crisler Segar debuts
1929: The comic strip "Buck Rogers" by Phil Nowlan & Dick Calkins debuts
1920: Erik Satie composes "furniture music", music that is meant not to be listened to
1920: The Polish poet Boleslaw Lesmian writes "Meadow"
1920: Mahatma Gandhi founds the non-violent liberation movement Satyagraha in India
1920: European countries control almost 90% of the Earth's surface
1921: Ireland becomes independent except for northern Ireland that remains British
1921: The German playwright Ernst Toller stages "Masses Man"
1921: The Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello stages "Six Characters in Search of an Author"
1921: Ludwig Wittgenstein publishes "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus"
1921: Fernand Leger paints "Grand Lunch"
1921: Alban Berg composes the opera "Wozzeck"
1921: Sergej Prokofev composes the opera "The Love of Three Oranges"
1922: Benito Mussolini, leader of the Fascist Party, seizes power in Italy
1922: Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau directs the film "Nosferatu"
1922: The Irish writer James Joyce publishes the novel "Ulysses"
1922: The French writer Marcel Proust publishes the novel "In Search of Lost Time"
1922: The Russian playwright Velemir Khlebnikov stages "Zangezi"
1922: The USA poet Thomas-Stearns Eliot writes "The Waste Land"
1922: Lenin creates the Soviet Union by uniting Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Transcaucasus (Armenia, Georgia, Azerbajan)
1922: The "British Broadcasting Company" (BBC) begins broadcasting
1922: Egypt declares its independence from Britain
1922: Le Corbusier designs a futuristic city, the "Contemporary City"
1923: Mustafa Kemal "Ataturk" abolishes the Ottoman empire, declares Turkey a republic
1923: The Russian poet Maximilian Voloshin writes "The Ways Of Cain"
1923: The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke writes "Duineser Elegien"
1923: The Italian writer Italo Svevo publishes the novel "Zeno's Conscience"
1923: Arnold Schoenberg completes a 12-tone system of composition, "dodekaphonie", the first form of "serialism"
1923: Jean Piaget publishes "Le Langage et la Pensee Chez l'Enfant"
1923: German architect Walther Bauersfeld builds the "Zeiss I Planetarium" in Jena, the first projection planetarium and the first geodesic dome
1924: Louis DeBroglie discovers that matter is both particles and waves
1924: Lenin dies and Joseph Stalin seizes power in the Soviet Union
1924: Joan Miro` paints "The Tilled Field"
1924: Andre Breton writes the "Surrealism Manifesto"
1925: Alberto Giacometti paints "Torso", one of the first surrealist paintings
1925: Sergei Eisenstein directs the film "Bronenossets Potyomkin/ Battleship Potemkin "
1925: John Watson publishes "Behaviorism"
1925: The French writer Andre' Gide publishes the novel "The Counterfeiters"
1925: The "International Exposition of Modern Industrial and Decorative Art" in Paris launches "art deco"
1926: Man Ray photographs "Kiki and the Mask"
1926: Leos Janacek composes "Glagolitic Mass"
1926: Vladimir Vernadsky publishes "The Biosphere"
1926: Spanish architect Antoni Gaudi dies without having finished the "Sagrada Familia" in Barcelona
1926: Fritz Lang directs the film "Metropolis"
1926: Ivan Pavlov publishes "Conditioned Reflexes"
1926: Claude Monet paints the "Nimphees"
1927: Achmad Sukarno founds the Nationalist Party with the mission to gain independence for Indonesia
1927: The Spanish poet Federico Garcia-Lorca writes "Romancero Gitano"
1927: The Estonian poet Marie Under writes "Voice from the Shadows"
1927: The German playwright Bertold Brecht stages "The Threepenny Opera"
1927: The French writer Julien Green publishes the novel "Adrienne Mesurat"
1927: The British writer Virginia Woolf publishes the novel "To the Lighthouse"
1927: Martin Heidegger publishes "Being and Time"
1927: Werner Heisenberg discovers the "Uncertainty Principle"
1927: The Soviet Union establishes the State University of Circus and Variety Arts to train performers for the Moscow Circus
1928: David Hilbert publishes "The Principles of Theoretical Logic"
1928: Rene' Magritte paints "False Mirror"
1928: The Romanian writer Mihail Sadoveanu publishes the novel "Ancuta's Inn"
1928: The French playwright Paul Claudel stages "The Satin Slipper"
1928: The Irish poet William-Butler Yeats writes "The Tower"
1928: Kurt Weill composes the opera "The Three-Penny Opera"
1928: William Randolph Hearst's news empire reaches a circulation and revenue peak
1929: The comic strip "Tintin" by Herge` debuts
1929: The Spanish poet Rafael Alberti writes "Concerning the Angels"
1929: Edwin Hubble discovers that the universe is expanding in all directions
1929: Stalin orders the persecution of "kulaks", causing the death of 6.5 million peasants
1929: Kazimierz Podsadecki creates the photomontage "City Mill of Life"
1930: The comic strip "Mickey Mouse" by 1930, Walt Disney & Ub Iwerks debuts
1930: The USA poet Hart Crane writes "The Bridge"
1930: USA architect William van Alen designs the Chrysler Building in New York
1931: The comic strip "Dick Tracy" by 1931, Chester Gould debuts
1931: The Empire State Building, the tallest building in the world of all times, opens in New York
1931: Duke Ellington's "Creole Rhapsody" takes both sides of a 7" record
1931: Ernest Lawrence designs the first successful cyclotron and founds the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories
1932: The USA writer William Faulkner publishes the novel "Light in August"
1932: A Duke Ellington hit features the word "swing" in the title
1933: The Marx Brothers make the film "Duck Soup"
1933: President Franklin Roosevelt launches the "New Deal"
1933: The experimental university Black Mountain College is founded in North Carolina with an interdisciplinary approach
1933: The comic strip "Brick Bradford" by 1933, Clarence Gray & William Ritt debuts
1933: The Navy opens a base at NAS Sunnyvale (later renamed Moffett Field)
1934: The "Apollo" night-club opens in Harlem
1934: George-Herbert Mead publishes "Mind, Self and Society"
1934: The comic strip "Flash Gordon" by Alex Raymond debuts
1934: The comic strip "Li'l Abner" by Al Capp debuts
1934: The comic strip "Secret Agent X-9" by Dashiell Hammett & Alex Raymond debuts
1935: Wallace Carothers invents nylon, the first totaly synthetic fibre
1935: A concert by the Benny Goodman's jazz orchestra is broadcast live
1935: George Gershwin composes the folk opera "Porgy And Bess", influenced by black music
1935: The Eastman Kodak Company introduces the "Kodachrome", the first color film
1936: Georgia O'Keeffe paints "Summer Days"
1936: Charles Chaplin directs the film "Modern Times"
1936: Martha Graham choreographes the ballet "Chronicle"
1936: San Francisco builds the longest bridge in the world, the "Bay Bridge"
1936: Alan Turing describes a machine capable of performing logical reasoning, the "Turing Machine"
1936: John Lawrence, brother of Lawrence Berkeley Labs' founder, starts the Donner Laboratory to conduct research in nuclear medicine
1937: Fred Terman's students William Hewlett and David Packard start a company to produce their audio-oscillator
1937: Stanford University's professor William Hansen teams with brothers Sigurd and Russell Varian to develop the klystron tube, used in the early radars
1937: The Golden Gate Bridge is completed in San Francisco
1937: Chester Carlson invents the photocopier
1938: Charles Morris publishes "Foundations of the Theory of Signs"
1938: Howard Hawks directs the film "Bringing Up Baby"
1938: The comic strip "Superman" by Jerome Siegel and Joe Shuster debuts
1938: The comic strip "Mandrake" by Lee Falk and Phil Davis debuts
1938: John Atanasoff at at Iowa State College conceives the electronic digital computer
1939: Walt Disney becomes the first customer of Hewlett-Packard, purchasing their oscillator for the animation film "Fantasia"
1939: Ernest Lawrence is awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics
1939: The USA government establishes the Ames Aeronautical Laboratory (later renamed Ames Research Center) at Moffett Field
1939: John Ford directs the film "Stagecoach"
1939: Pan American inaugurates the world's first transatlantic passenger service, flying between New York and Marseilles
1939: John Cage composes "Imaginary Landscape N.1" for magnetic tape
1939: The comic strip "Batman" by Bill Finger and Bob Kane debuts
1930: John Maynard Keynes publishes his "Treatise" of Economics
1930: Ronald Fisher publishes "The Genetic Theory of Natural Selection" that heralds the synthesis of Darwin and Mendel
1930: Josef von Sternberg directs the film "The Blue Angel"
1930: The Polish writer Stanislaw Witkiewicz publishes the novel "Insatiability"
1930: Paul Klee paints "Ad Marginen"
1930: The first World Cup of football is held in Uruguay
1930: Maurice Ravel composes "Concerto for the Left Hand", influenced by jazz
1930: Haile Selassie ascends to the throne of Ethiopia
1931: Edgar Varese composes "Ionisation" for percussion instruments
1931: Kurt Goedel proves that all logical systems contain a statement that cannot be proven
1931: Japan invades China
1931: The Czech writer Vladislav Vancura publishes the novel "Marketa Lazarova"
1931: Australia and Canada become independent democracies
1932: Iraq becomes an independent kingdom
1932: The French writer Louis-Ferdinand Celine publishes the novel "Journey to the End of the Night"
1932: John Von Neumann argues that, according to Quantum Mechanics, classical reality does not exist until the conscious observer observes it
1932: Frederic Bartlett publishes "Remembering", a study on human memory
1933: Adolf Hitler, leader of the Nazist party, is appointed chancellor of Germany
1933: The Spanish writer Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo publishes the novel "San Manuel Bueno Martir"
1933: The Austrian writer Robert Musil publishes the novel "The Man Without Qualities"
1933: The Danish poet Gustaf Munch-Petersen writes "The Lowest Country"
1933: Five million people in Ukraine die of a famine caused by Stalin's forced collectivization
1933: Andre Kertesz creates the photograph series "Distortion"
1934: South Africa is granted independence by Britain
1934: Stalin launches the "great purges" of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union that will kill 2.5 million people and send thousands of intellectuals to the "gulags"
1934: Lev Vygotsky publishes "Thought and Language"
1934: Karl Popper publishes "The Logic of Scientific Discovery"
1934: Mao Zedong leads the "Long March" of the communist "Red Army" in China
1934: The Czech writer Karel Capek publishes the novel "An Ordinary Life"
1934: The Dutch poet Martinus Nijhoff writes "Awater"
1934: The Spanish poet Pedro Salinas writes "My Voice Because of You"
1935: The Greek poet George Seferis writes "Legend"
1935: The Spanish poet Vicente Aleixandre writes "Destruction or Love"
1935: Paul Hindemith composes the opera "Mathis der Maler"
1935: The German writer Elias Canetti publishes the novel "Auto Da Fe"
1935: Robert Watson-Watt builds the first radar in Britain
1936: The "Queen Mary" transatlantic linear travels from Southampton to New York in four days
1936: A civil war that will kill 600,000 people erupts in Spain between the socialists and Francisco Franco's nationalists
1936: Bela Bartok composes composes "Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta"
1936: The Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz writes "Three Winters"
1936: The Spanish poet Juan-Ramon Jimenez writes "The Total Season"
1937: Salvador Dali paints "Metamorphose de Narcisse"
1937: Henri Cartier-Bresson publishes his first photojournalist photographs
1937: Jean Renoir directs the film "La Grande Illusion"
1937: Carl Orff composes "Carmina Burana"
1937: The French playwright Jean Giraudoux stages "Electra"
1938: The world's first major film festival is held in Venezia/Venice
1938: The French writer Jean-Paul Sartre publishes the novel "Nausea"
1938: Volkswagen introduces the "Beetle"
1939: World War II breaks out pitting Germany, Italy and Japan against Britain
1939: Russian aviator Igor Sikorsky invents the helicopter
1939: Germany invades Poland, starting World War II
1939: Yves Tanguy paints "Furniture of Time"
1939: The Irish writer Flann O'Brien publishes the novel "At Swim-two-birds"
1939: The Austrian writer Joseph Roth publishes the novel "The Legend of the Holy Drinker"
1939: The Mexican poet Jose Gorostiza writes "Endless Death"
1940: The first freeway is built in Los Angeles
1940: The comic strip "Spirit" by Will Eisner debuts
1940: Peter Goldmark invents color television
1940: Friz Freleng's cartoon "You Ought to Be in Pictures" combines live action and animation
1940: John Von Neumann makes a distinction between data and instructions
1941: Stanford University's professor Fred Terman is put in charge of the top-secret Harvard Radio Research Laboratory
1941: First casino opens on on what would become the Las Vegas Strip
1941: Glenn Seaborg and Edwin McMillan at UC Berkeley produce a new element, plutonium
1941: Walker Evans publishes the photograph series "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men"
1941: Orson Welles directs the film "Citizen Kane "
1941: Japan attacks Pearl Harbor (Hawaii) and the USA enters World War II
1941: Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk and Kenny Clarke jam in a new jazz style, "bebop"
1942: Enrico Fermi achieves the first nuclear reaction in Chicago
1942: The USA poet Wallace Stevens writes "Notes Towards A Supreme Fiction"
1942: The USA government launches the "Manhattan Project" to build a nuclear bomb under the direction of Robert Oppenheimer, a professor of Physics at UC Berkeley
1943: Tommy Flowers and others build the Colossus, the world's first programmable digital electronic computer
1943: Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts describe an artificial neuron
1943: The first "New York Fashion Week" or "Press Week" is held in New York, the world's first fashion show
1944: Everette DeGolyer announces that the Arabian peninsula, Iraq and Iran hold colossal reserves of oil
1944: Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein create the musical "Oklahoma", choreographed by Agnes de Mille
1944: The world's monetary system is anchored to the dollar and the dollar to gold ("Bretton Woods agreement")
1944: Frank Malina founds the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)
1944: Howard Aiken of IBM unveils the first computer programmed by punched paper tape, the Harvard Mark I
1945: Germany surrenders and is divided in a Western and a Soviet area, while Soviet troops occupy Eastern European countries
1945: The USA drops two atomic bombs on Japan (Hiroshima and Nagasaki) and World War II ends
1945: The United Nations Organization is founded in New York
1945: Earl Tupper founds Tupperware to make polyethylene plastic containers for home use
1945: Jackson Pollock begins experimenting a "drip" technique of painting that heralds the age of Abstract Expressionism
1945: Wiliam de Kooning paints "Pink Angels"
1945: Mark Rothko paints "Slow Swirl at Edge of Sea"
1945: Vannevar Bush proposes the "Memex" desk-based machine
1946: Frank Capra directs the film "It's A Wonderful Life "
1946: The first venture capital firms are founded in the USA, American Research and Development Corporation (ARDC) by former Harvard Business School's dean Georges Doriot, J.H. Whitney & Company by John Hay Whitney, Rockefeller Brothers by Laurance Rockefeller (later renamed Venrock)
1946: The first two venture capital firms are founded in the USA, American Research and Development Corporation (ARDC) and J.H. Whitney & Company.
1946: Churchill delivers in the USA the "Iron Curtain" speech, virtually opening the "Cold War" against the Soviet Union
1946: George Marshall envisions a plan to promote the economic recovery of European democracies
1946: RCA Victor releases the first vinyl record
1946: TWA and United begin transcontinental flights from New York to California
1946: The Stanford Research Institute is founded
1946: John Northrop and Wendell Stanley of UC Berkeley are awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry
1946: Fred Terman returns to Stanford University as the dean of the engineering school and founds the Electronics Research Lab (ERL), mostly founded by the USA military
1946: The first non-military computer, ENIAC, or "Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer", is unveiled, built by John Mauchly and Presper Eckert of the Sperry-Rand Corporation
1947: AT&T Bell Telephone Laboratory's engineers John Bardeen, William Shockley and Walter Brattain demonstrate the principle of amplifying an electrical current using a solid semiconducting material, i.e. the "transistor"
1947: Norbert Wiener founds Cybernetics
1947: John Von Neumann describes a self-reproducing automata
1947: The first widely publicized sighting of a UFO
1947: Edwin Land invents Polaroid, the first instant camera
1947: The USA sets up the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
1947: The USA playwright Tennessee Williams stages "A Streetcar Named Desire"
1948: The Varian brothers found Varian Associates
1948: The "American Society of Human Genetics" (ASHG) is established
1948: Claude Shannon founds Information Theory and coins the term "bit"
1949: William Giauque of UC Berkeley is awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry)
1948: Invention of "xerography" (copying machines) by Chester Carlson
1948: Senator Joseph McCarthy launches a "witch hunt" against intellectuals suspected of being communist
1949: NATO is formed by western European countries and USA
1949: The USA playwright Arthur Miller stages "Death of a Salesman"
1949: Miles Davis' nonet inaugurates "cool jazz"
1949: The first foreign car, the Volkswagen Beetle, is sold in the USA, which is also the first "compact" ever sold in the USA
1949: John Parsons designs the first numerical-control system for machine tools
1949: The USA government funds the project for a "Semi Automatic Ground Environment" (SAGE) for enemy bomber detection, mainly developed by IBM ("Project AN/FSQ-7") and the MIT ("Project Whirlwind")
1940: Olivier Messiaen composes the "Quartet for the End of Time"
1940: The Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov publishes the novel "The Master and Margarita"
1941: The Birkenau camp is inaugurated for the mass extermination of Jews, Gypsies, Poles and Russians
1941: Goffredo Petrassi composes "Coro di Morti"
1941: Michael Tippett composes "A Child Of Our Time"
1941: Germany invades the Soviet Union
1941: The Baath Party is founded in Damascus with the mission to unify the Arab world
1942: The French writer Albert Camus publishes the novel "The Stranger"
1942: The first missile enters outer space, a German V2 designed by Wernher von Braun
1942: Albert Camus and JeanPaul Sartre establish existentialism
1943: A military coup begins Juan Peron's era in Argentina
1942: Max Ernst paints "Europa After the Rain II"
1944: Erwin Schroedinger publishes "What is Life"
1945: The Austrian writer Hermann Broch publishes the novel "The Death of Virgil"
1945: Roberto Rossellini's film "Roma Citta` Aperta" inaugurates "Neorealism"
1945: Marcel Carne` directs the film "Les Enfants du Paradis/ Children of Paradise"
1945: Diego Rivera finishes painting the mural "Mexico a Traves de los Siglos" at the National Palace in Ciudad de Mexico
1946: Francis Bacon paints "Painting"
1946: The city of Damstadt in Germany opens a school for avantgarde music
1946: The Cannes Film Festival debuts
1946: The comic strip "Lucky Luke" by Maurice De Bevere debuts
1946: Ralph Vaughan Williams composes "Symphony 6"
1945: The French writer Julien Gracq publishes the novel "A Dark Stranger"
1947: India and Pakistan are partitioned and declared independent, causing communal violence that kills one million people
1947: Hungarian engineer Dennis Gabor invents the hologram in Britain
1947: The British writer Malcolm Lowry publishes the novel "Under the Volcano"
1947: The Jews are granted their own country in Palestine, Israel
1948: French composer Pierre Schaeffer sets up a laboratory for "musique concrete"
1948: Arab countries attack Israel and lose
1948: The Japanese writer Tanizaki Junichiro publishes the novel "Makioka Sisters"
1948: The white government of South Africa creates apartheid to segregate blacks from whites
1948: Mahatma Gandhi is assassinated by a Hindu extremist
1949: China invades Tibet
1949: Indonesia declares independence from Holland
1949: The Soviet Union detonates its first atomic bomb and the nuclear arm race begins
1949: Mao Zedong wins the civil war in China and Chiang Kai-shek founds a separate state in Taiwan
1949: Ghose Aurobindo publishes "The Human Cycle"
1949: Frida Kahlo paints "The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth, Myself, Diego and Senor Xolotl"
1949: The Brazilian poet Cecilia Meireles writes "Natural Portrait"
1949: The Mexican poet Octavio Paz writes "Sun Stone"
1949: Henry Moore sculpts "Family Group"
1950: United Nations troops led by the USA push back Chinese troops in Korea
1950: The comic strip "Charlie Brown" by Charles Schulz debuts
1950: Billy Wilder directs the film "Sunset Boulevard "
1950: Turing proposes a test to determine whether a machine is intelligent or not
1950: Remington purchases Eckert-Mauchly Computer
1951: The Stanford Industrial Park is conceived
1951: Charles Ginsburg of Ampex Corporation builds the first practical videotape recorder
1951: Glenn Seaborg and Edwin McMillan are awarded the Nobel Prize
1951: The first commercial computer is built, the Univac
1951: A team led by Jay Forrester at the MIT builds the "Whirlwind" computer, the first real-time system and the first computer to use a video display for output
1951: John Huston directs the film "The African Queen"
1951: William Boyle invents the credit card
1951: USA architect Philip Johnson designs the Lever House in New York
1951: The first rock and roll record, Ike Turner's "Rocket 88", is released
1951: Carl Djerassi invents synthetic progesterone, "the birth-control pill", at Syntex of Mexico City
1952: 73% of world cars are produced in the USA
1952: Art critic Harold Rosenberg coins the term "action painting"
1952: A concert of electronic music by Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky at New York's Museum Of Modern Art is broadcasted live
1952: IBM opens its first West Coast laboratory in San Jose
1952: Felix Bloch of Stanford University is awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics
1952: The Atomic Energy Commission establishes a Livermore Laboratory as a branch of the UC Berkeley's Radiation Laboratory
1953: Varian is the first tenant of the Stanford Industrial Park
1953: Electronics manufacturer Sylvania opens its Electronic Defense Lab (EDL) in Mountain View
1953: Lawrence Ferlinghetti founds a bookstore in San Francisco, "City Lights", that becomes the headquarters of alternative writers
1953: Remington Rand introduces UNIVAC 1103, the first computer with Random Access Memory or "RAM"
1953: Merce Cunningham at the Black Mountain Collegeforms the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, that uses chance operations to choreograph ballets and set designs by painter Robert Rauschenberg
1953: The USA and Britain engineer a coup to remove Iran's prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh
1953: The USA playwright Eugene O'Neill stages "Long Day's Journey"
1953: Francis Crick and James Watson discover the double helix of the DNA
1954: The first commercial transistor radio, the Regency TR-1, is introduced by IDEA, using circuits by Texas Instruments
1954: Art Blakey and Horace Silver form the Jazz Messengers and coin "hard bop"
1954: Elia Kazan directs the film "On the Waterfront"
1955: The first conference on Artificial Intelligence is held at Dartmouth College, organized by John McCarthy
1955: Allen Ginsberg's recitation of his poem "Howl" transplants the "Beat" aesthetic to San Francisco
1955: Private investors or "angels" (including John Bryan, Bill Edwards and Reid Dennis) establish "The Group" to invest together in promising companies
1955: Alexander Schure founds the New York Institute of Technology
1955: Remington Rand merges with Sperry to form Sperry Rand
1955: Stanford University merges the Applied Electronics Laboratory and the Electronics Research Laboratory into the Systems Engineering Laboratory under the direction of Fred Terman and focusing on electronic warfare
1955: Harry Olson and Herbert Belar at RCA's Princeton Labs unveil the first "electronic music synthesizer"
1955: Rock and roll records climb the charts
1955: The first McDonald's restaurant opens near Chicago
1955: Chuck Berry cuts his first rock and roll records, the first ones to have the guitar as the main instrument
1955: Ray Charles invents "soul" music
1955: Disneyland opens in Los Angeles
1955: The USA writer William Gaddis publishes the novel "The Recognitions"
1955: The first numerical-control machine tool, controlled by the "Numericord NC5", is deployed by the Giddings and Lewis Machine Tool Company
1955: Martin Luther King organizes non-violent protests against racial segregation
1956: USA architect Frank Lloyd Wright designs the Guggenheim Museum in New York
1956: Don Siegel directs the film "Invasion of the Body Snatchers "
1956: William Shockley founds the Shockley Transistor Corporation in Mountain View to produce semiconductor-based transistors to replace vacuum tubes, and hires Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore and others
1956: Aircraft company Lockheed opens an electronics research laboratory in the Stanford Industrial Park and a manufacturing facility in Sunnyvale
1956: Werner Buchholz of IBM coins the term "byte"
1957: Several engineers (including Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore) quit the Shockley Transistor laboratories and form Fairchild Semiconductor in Mountain View, using funding from Fairchild Camera and Instrument, to mass-produce "integrated circuits" (micro-sized silicon devices containing a large number of electronic switches)
1957: Former SAGE engineer Ken Olsen founds the Digital Equipment Corporation
1957: Max Mathews begins composing computer music at Bell Laboratories
1957: Dean Watkins of Stanford's ERL founds Watkins-Johnson, one of the first venture-capital funded companies in the Santa Clara Valley
1957: Allen Newell and Herbert Simon develop the "General Problem Solver"
1957: Frank Rosenblatt conceives the "Perceptron", a neural computer that can learn by trial and error
1957: Morton Heilig invents the "Sensorama Machine", a pioneering virtual-reality environment
1957: Jean-Paul Getty is the richest man in the USA and its only billionaire
1957: Albert Sabin develops the polio vaccine
1957: 4.5 million babies are born in the USA, the highest number in its history (the "baby boomers")
1957: A computer composes the Illiac Suite , using software created by Lejaren Hiller
1957: LaMonte Young composes music for sustained tones
1957: Noam Chomsky speculates that humans have an innate universal grammar that is a based on logical rules
1958: IBM starts production of the AN/FSQ-7 computer, the largest computer ever built, for the SAGE project
1958: Robert Frank publishes the photograph series "The Americans"
1958: The USA poet William-Carlos Williams writes "Paterson"
1958: The USA's gross national product is 50% of the world's national product
1958: The USA government sets up the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA) as well as the the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)
1958: John Kenneth Galbraith publishes "The Affluent Society"
1958: Robert Noyce (at Fairchild) and Jack Kilby (at Texas Instruments) invent the integrated circuit
1958: Charles Townes of Columbia theorizes about an optical maser and his student Gordon Gould builds one and names it "LASER" or "Light Amplification by the Stimulated Emission of Radiation"
1958: Draper, Gaither and Anderson is founded, the first venture-capital firm in California
1958: Jim Backus of IBM invents the FORTRAN programming language, the first machine-independent language
1958: NASA opens a research center near Mountain View
1959: War erupts between Soviet-sponsored regime of North Vietnam, led by Ho Chi Minh, and the USA-sponsored regime of South Vietnam
1959: The MIT launches the "Computer-Aided Design Project"
1959: The first commercial Xerox machine goes on sale
1959: Dancer and mime Ron Davis founds the San Francisco Mime Troupe as an experimental project of the now-legendary Actors' Workshop
1959: Arthur Kornberg of Stanford University is awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine
1959: Emilio Segre and Owen Chamberlain of the Lawrence Berkeley Labs are awarded the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the antiproton
1959: Frank Chambers founds the venture-capital company Continental Capital
1959: GTE buys Sylvania
1959: Mattel introduces the doll "Barbie"
1959: Allan Kaprow launches the vogue of "happenings" (performance art) with "18 Happenings in 6 Parts"
1959: Ornette Coleman's "The Shape of Jazz to Come" debuts free-jazz
1959: John Cage performs "live electronic music"
1959: Lithuanian-born artist George Maciunas organizes the "Fluxus" art movement in New York, inspired by Dada
1959: USA writer William Burroughs and British painter Brion Gysin develop the "cut-up" technique
1959: Alfred Hitchcock directs the film "North By Northwest"
1959: The first numerical-control machine controlled by "Automatically Programmed Tool" or APT, a programming language for numerical control, is demonstrated by the MIT
1950: Akira Kurosawa directs the film "Rashomon "
1950: The Italian writer Cesare Pavese publishes the novel "The Moon and the Bonfire"
1950: The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda writes "Canto General"
1950: Germany's GDP between 1950 and 1955 grows at an average annual rate of 9.1% (the "Economic Miracle")
1951: Karlheinz Stockhausen begins composing "electronic music"
1951: David Bohm hypothesizes that Quantum Mechanics requires a fifth dimension
1951: Andre Bazin founds the film magazine "Cahiers du Cinema"
1951: The cinema magazine "Cahiers du Cinema" is founded by critic Andre Bazin
1952: French architect LeCorbusier designs the Chandigarh High Court in India
1952: The German poet Paul Celan writes "Poppy and Memory"
1952: The British poet David Jones writes "The Anathemata"
1952: The Irish playwright Samuel Beckett stages "Waiting for Godot"
1952: Japanese companies license the technology of the transistor from the USA
1952: The Mau Mau guerrillas pledge to drive white people out of Kenya
1952: Gamal Nasser abolishes the monarchy and seizes power in Egypt
1952: Peron's wife Eva dies of cancer in Argentina as millions mourn her as a saint
1953: Lev Rudnev designs the Lomonosov University in Moscow
1953: The Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier publishes the novel "The Lost Steps"
1954: The "Front de Liberation Nationale" (FLN) of Algeria begins an independence war against France
1954: European countries found CERN, the "Centre Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire"
1954: Benjamin Britten composes the opera "Turn Of The Screw"
1954: Iannis Xenakis composes "Metastasis", with independent parts for every musician of the orchestra
1954: Pierre Boulez composes "Le Marteau Sans Maitre"
1954: Jiro Yoshihara founds the "Gutai Group" in Japan that pioneers performance art
1955: Arnold Bode founds the "Documenta" exhibition of art in Germany
1955: The Spanish writer Rafael Sanchez-Ferlosio publishes the novel "The River El Jarama"
1956: The Italian poet Eugenio Montale writes "The Storm"
1956: The Hungarian poet Sandor Weores writes "The Tower of Silence"
1956: The Czech poet Vladimir Holan writes "A Night with Hamlet"
1956: Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt nationalizes the Suez Canal
1956: The Swiss playwright Friedrich Duerrenmatt stages "The Visit"
1956: Atsuko Tanaka's "Electric Dress" pioneers performance-art
1956: Luigi Nono composes "Canto Sospeso"
1956: Brazilian president Juscelino Kubitschek founds a new capital, Brasilia
1956: An anti-communist uprising led by Imre Nagy in Hungary is crushed by Soviet troops
1956: The first world congress of Human Genetics is held in Copenhagen
1957: Ghana becomes the first black African country to win independence from a European power
1957: The Soviet Union launches the Sputnik, the first artificial satellite
1957: Bruno Maderna's "Musica su Due Dimensioni" is the first "electro-acoustic" composition, mixing traditional instruments and electronic tape
1957: Italy, Germany, France and others found the European Economic Community
1957: Ingmar Bergman directs the film "Wild Strawberries"
1957: The Italian writer Elsa Morante publishes the novel "Arthur's Island"
1957: The Australian writer Patrick White publishes the novel "Voss"
1957: German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe builds the Seagram Building in New York
1957: The Italian poet Pierpaolo Pasolini writes "The Ashes of Gramsci"
1957: Asger Jorn and Guy Debord lead the "Situationist International" in Italy, an international group of intellectuals and artists inspired by Marxism and Surrealism
1958: The Swiss playwright Max Frisch stages "Biedermann"
1958: Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer designs the Congress Complex in Brasilia
1958: Claude Chabrol's film "Le Beau Serge" inaugurates the "Nouvelle Vague" of French cinema
1958: Wolf Vostell creates the first "Decollage" happening in Paris
1959: Tatsumi Hijikata's "Forbidden Colours" invents "butoh" dance
1959: The Dalai Lama of Tibet flees to India
1959: The British Motor Corporation introduces the "Mini"
1959: 38 million Chinese starve to death because of the 1959-62 famine caused by Mao's "Great Leap Forward"
1959: Fidel Castro leads a communist revolution in Cuba
1959: The comic strip "Asterix" by Rene' Goscinny and Albert Uderzo debuts
1959: The Paraguayan writer Augusto Roa-Bastos publishes the novel "Son of Man"
1959: The French writer Raymond Queneau publishes the novel "Zazie in the Metro"
1959: Louis Kahn designs the Salk Institute in La Jolla
1959: Giacinto Scelsi composes "Quattro Pezzi per Una Nota Sola", micro-music for only one note
1959: The French playwright Eugene Ionesco stages "Rhinoceros"
1959: The British playwright John Arden stages "Serjeant Musgrave's Dance"
1959: The Greek poet Odysseus Elytis writes "Worthy It Is"
1960: Jean Tinguely creates a kinetic sculpture, "Homage to New York", that destroys itself
1960: John Whitney pioneers computer animation
1960: William Fetter of Boeing coins the expression "computer graphics"
1960: Theodore Maiman of the Hughes Research Laboratory demonstrates the first working laser
1960: Donald Glaser of the Lawrence Berkeley Labs is awarded the Nobel Prize
1961: Roy Lichtenstein paints "Look Mickey"
1961: Roger Reynolds, Robert Ashley and Gordon Mumma organize the first "ONCE" festival of avantgarde music at Ann Arbor in Michigan
1961: James Tenney composes the computer music of "Noise Study"
1961: Lou Harrison composes "Concerto in Slendro"
1961: Charles Bachman at General Electric develops the first database management system, IDS
1961: Philco unveils the first head-mounted display
1961: IBM owns more than 81% of the computer market
1961: General Motors unveils "Unimate", the first industrial robot
1961: Robert Hofstadter of Stanford University is awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics
1961: Melvin Calvin of the Lawrence Berkeley Labs is awarded the Nobel Prize
1961: Tommy Davis founds one of Santa Clara Valley's first venture-capital firms with Arthur Rock, Davis & Rock
1962: The San Francisco Tape Music Center for avantgarde music is established by composers Morton Subotnick and and Ramon Sender
1962: Helen Gurley Brown publishes "Sex and the Single Girl"
1962: Andy Warhol exhibits his pop-art work "Marilyn Diptych"
1962: The USA lifts into orbit the first telecommunication satellite, the Telstar
1962: The comic book "Spiderman" by Stan Lee debuts
1962: Itek introduces the first commercial CAD system, "Electronic Drafting Machine", built by former SAGE engineers
1962: Paul Baran proposes a distributed network as the form of communication least vulnerable to a nuclear strike
1962: Stanford University founds the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
1963: Douglas Engelbart at the Stanford Research Institute builds the first prototype of the "mouse"
1963: Edward Zajac of Bell Labs creates a computer-generated film
1963: The "American Standard Code for Information Interchange" or "ASCII" is introduced
1968: Stewart Brand publishes the first "Whole Earth Catalog"
1963: Ivan Sutherland of the MIT demonstrates "Sketchpad", a computer graphics program, and the first program ever with a graphical user interface
1963: President John Kennedy is assassinated
1963: Bob Dylan releases "Blowin' In The Wind"
1963: Bell Labs introduces the touch-tone phone
1963: Lukas Foss composes "Echoi", that employs improvisation
1963: Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc sets himself on fire in a busy street of South Vietnam's capital
1964: Milton Babbitt composes "Ensembles For Synthesizer"
1964: Syntex introduces the birth-control pill
1964: The USA writer Saul Bellow publishes the novel "Herzog"
1964: Engineer Michael Callahan, painter Stephen Durkee and poet Gerd Stern found USCO ("The Company of Us"), a multimedia art collective that employs electronic devices
1964: Charles Csuri creates the first computer art
1964: IBM introduces the first "mainframe" computer, the 360, and the first "operating system", the OS/360
1964: Robert Moog begins selling his synthesizer
1964: Mario Savio founds the "Free Speech Movement" and leads student riots at the Berkeley campus
1964: Ken Kesey organizes the "Merry Pranksters" who travel around the country in a "Magic Bus", live in a commune in La Honda and experiment with "acid tests" (LSD)
1964: John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz (at Dartmouth College invent the BASIC programming language)
1964: American Airlines' SABRE reservation system, developed by IBM, is the first online transaction processing
1964: Former Sylviania employee Bill Perry founds computer-based electronic-intelligence company ESL
1964: The "Tonkin Gulf Incident", presented by the USA as an attack on its warships, triggers a massive escalation of USA intervention in Vietnam
1965: Gordon Moore predicts that the processing power of computers will double every 18 months
1965: Former Ampex employee Ray Dolby founds the Dolby Labs while in Britain (relocating it to San Francisco in 1976)
1965: Ron Davis of the San Francisco Mime Troupe publishes the essay "Guerrilla Theatre"
1965: The Family Dog Production organizes the first hippie festival in San Francisco
1965: Terry Riley composes "In C", music based on repetition of simple patterns ("minimalism")
1965: Edward Feigenbaum leads development of the expert system "Dendral" at Stanford University
1965: George Hunter of the Charlatans introduces the "light show" in rock concerts
1965: The Digital Equipment Corporation unveils the first mini-computer, the PDP-8, that uses integrated circuits
1965: Alan Hovhaness composes "Fantasy on Japanese Woodprints"
1965: Robert Aldrich directs the film "Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte"
1966: Frederic Rzewski, Alvin Curran and Richard Teitelbaum form the ensemble of live electronic music Musica Elettronica Viva in Rome
1966: The USA writer John Barth publishes the novel "Giles Goat Boy"
1966: Fluxus member Dick Higgins coins the term "Intermedia" to describe art that straddles multiple genres
1966: The first "Summer of Love" of the hippies is held in San Francisco
1966: Hewlett-Packard enters the business of general-purpose computers with the HP-2115
1966: Willie Brown organizes the Artists Liberation Front of San Francisco-based artists at the Mime Troupe's Howard Street loft
1966: The first issue of the San Francisco Oracle, an underground cooperative publication, is published
1966: Emmett Grogan and members of the Mime Troupe found the "Diggers", a group of improvising actors and activists whose stage was the streets and parks of the Haight-Ashbury and whose utopia was the creation of a Free City
1966: Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, Angela Davis and other African-American activists found the socialist-inspired and black-nationalist "Black Panther Party" at Oakland
1966: There are 2,623 computers in the USA (1,967 work for the Defense Department)
1966: Donald Buchla develops a voltage-controlled synthesizer for composer Morton Subotnick, the Buchla Modular Electronic Music System
1966: The Asian Art Museum of San Francisco is inaugurated
1967: Jack Kilby (at Texas Instruments develops the first hand-held calculator)
1967: Ray Browne founds the "Center for the Study of Popular Culture" at Bowling Green, that popularizes the term "pop culture"
1967: Darryl McCray, or "Cornbread", creates graffiti art in Philadelphia
1967: A "Human Be-In" is held at the Golden Gate Park in San Francisco
1967: Monterey hosts a rock festival
1967: Nam June Paik pioneers video art with his "Participation TV", an interactive video installation
1967: Frank Stella paints "Harran II"
1967: The USA has 200 million people, of which 9.7 million are foreign-born
1967: USA architect Buckminster Fuller designs a geodesic dome for the USA Pavillion at the Expo in Montreal
1967: Bands such as the Velvet Underground, the Doors and Pink Floyd launch psychedelic-rock
1968: Harold Morowitz publishes "Energy FLow in Biology"
1968: Roman Polanski directs the film "Rosemary's Baby"
1968: USA troops massacre 500 civilians at My Lai in Vietnam
1968: Stanley Kubrick directs the film "2001 A Space Odyssey"
1968: Martin Luther King is assassinated
1968: 520,000 USA troops are in Vietnam
1968: Anthony Braxton, a member of the Chicago Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, releases his improvisations "For Alto Saxophone"
1968: Louis Meisel founds the painting movement "Photorealism"
1968: Philip Noyce, Gordon Moore and Andy Grove found Intel ("Integrated Electronics") to build memory chips
1968: John Portman designs the Embarcadero Center in San Francisco
1968: Frank Malina founds Leonardo ISAST in Paris, an organization devoted to art/science fusion
1968: John Bryan and Bill Edwards found the investment company Bryan & Edwards
1968: Doug Engelbart of the Stanford Research Institute demonstrates the NLS ("oN-Line System"), the first system to employ the mouse
1968: Luis Alvarez of the Lawrence Berkeley Labs is awarded the Nobel Prize
1969: Gary Starkweather of Xerox invents the laser printer
1969: Frank Oppenheimer founds the San Francisco Exploratorium as a museum of science, art and human perception
1969: Construction begins at 3000 Sand Hill Road, in Menlo Park, soon to become the headquarters of the venture-capital community
1969: Ted Codd of IBM invents the relational database
1969: Bell Labs unveils the Unix operating system developed by Kenneth Thompson and Dennis Ritchie
1969: The computer network ArpaNET is inaugurated with four nodes, three of which are in California (UCLA, Stanford Research Institute and UC Santa Barbara)
1969: Howard Wise organizes the exhibition "Television As A Creative Medium"
1969: Charles Wuorinen composes the electronic poem "Time's Encomium"
1969: USA astronaut Neil Armstrong becomes the first man to set foot on the Moon
1969: A huge crowd marches on Washington to demand an end to the Vietnam war
1969: Miles Davis invents jazz-rock
1969: Sam Peckinpah directs the film "The Wild Bunch "
1969: Claes Oldenburg creates the interactive sculpture "Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks"
1960: Nelson Mandela organizes an armed resistance against the white regime of South Africa
1960: Federico Fellini directs the film "La Dolce Vita"
1960: The Swedish poet Gunnar Ekeloef writes "A Molna Elegy"
1960: The Guyanese writer Wilson Harris publishes the novel "Palace of the Peacock"
1960: Japan begins a spectacular economic growth with average annual GDP increase of 10.4%
1960: Nigeria becomes independent, and soon all the other British colonies in Africa become independent
1960: All French colonies of black Africa become independent
1960: Belgian Congo becomes independent under Patrice Lumumba
1960: Jean Arp sculpts "Demeter"
1960: Vera Molnar founds the art movement "Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel" (GRAV)
1961: Yves Saint Laurent opens a boutique of fashion design in Paris
1961: The Austrian performance artists Hermann Nitsch, Gunter Brus and Otto Muehl found "Aktionismus"
1961: Nasser of Egypt launches a program of "Arab socialism"
1961: Amnesty International is founded by British lawyer Peter Benenson to promote human rights worldwide
1961: Soviet troops build a wall to isolate West Berlin and discourage people from fleeing Eastern Germany
1961: The magazine "Mersey Beat" is founded in Liverpool to cover the local rock scene
1961: Yuri Gagarin becomes the first astronaut
1961: The Argentinian writer Ernesto Sabato publishes the novel "Of Heroes and Tombs"
1961: The Polish poet Tadeusz Rozewicz writes "The Nameless Voice"
1961: The Czech poet Zbigniew Herbert writes "Study of the Object"
1962: The Russian poet Anna Akhmatova writes "Poem Without A Hero"
1962: The Dutch writer Hugo Claus publishes the novel "Amazement"
1962: Finnish architect Eero Saarinen builds the TWA terminal in New York
1962: The comic strip "Barbarella" by Jean-Claude Forest debuts
1962: The Soviet Union and the USA risk a nuclear war over Cuba
1962: Algeria obtains independence after the death of about 100,000 Frenchmen and about one million Algerians
1962: The shah Reza Pahlevi of Iran introduces a series of democratic reforms (the "white revolution")
1962: Mao's China breaks with the Soviet Union
1962: A coup installs a military junta in Burma
1962: Brazil declares football player Pele an "official national treasure"
1962: Warren Buffett acquires Berkshire Hathaway, the beginning of his multibillion dollar empire
1963: The first conference of the Organisation of African Unity (later "African Union") is held in Addis Abeba
1963: The Baath Party seizes power both in Iraq and in Syria
1963: "Beatlemania" sweeps the world
1963: The Italian writer Beppe Fenoglio publishes the novel "A Private Question"
1963: The Italian writer CarloEmilio Gadda publishes the novel "Acquainted with Grief"
1963: The Albanian writer Ismail Kadare publishes the novel "The General of the Dead Army"
1963: The New Zealand writer Janet Frame publishes the novel "Scented Gardens For The Blind"
1963: The Argentinian writer Julio Cortazar publishes the novel "Hopscotch"
1963: Wolf Vostell pioneers video art with "6 TV De-coll/age"
1964: Sonia Terk becomes the first living woman to have a retrospective at the Louvre
1964: The German playwright Peter Weiss stages "Marat Sade"
1964: The Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes publishes the novel "The Death of Artemio Cruz"
1964: Herbert Marcuse publishes "The One-dimensional Man"
1964: Roland Barthes publishes "Elements of Semiology"
1964: Ennio Morricone composes the film soundtrack "Per Un Pugno di Dollari"
1964: The Shinkansen (a bullet train) is inaugurated in Japan
1964: Mao's China becomes the first nuclear power in Asia
1964: Marshall McLuhan describes how the medium affects the communication ("the medium is the message") and talks about a "global village"
1965: Cuban hero Che Guevara leaves Cuba to promote revolutions in other countries
1965: Joseph Mobutu Sese Seko seizes power in Congo
1965: Mary Quant launches the mini-skirt
1965: The first computer art exhibition is held in Stuttgart, Germany
1965: The Vienna Action Group is founded to perform "body art"
1965: Dutch anarchists found the countercultural movement "Provo"
1965: The Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz publishes the novel "Cosmos"
1965: Gyorgy Ligeti composes "Requiem", an example of almost total chromaticism
1965: Sylvano Bussotti composes the opera "La Passion Selon Sade", whose score includes graphical notations,
1965: Krysztof Penderecki composes "Saint Luke Passion", a religious work that employs avantgarde techniques and that addresses a communist nation
1965: The Czech playwright Slawomir Mrozek stages "Tango"
1965: The Italian poet Vittorio Sereni writes "The Human Instruments"
1965: Joseph Beuys creates the art-performance "How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare"
1966: The Irish poet Seamus Heaney writes "Death of a Naturalist"
1966: The Cuban writer Jose Lezama-Lima publishes the novel "Paradise"
1966: The Peruvian writer Mario Vargas-Llosa publishes the novel "The Green House"
1966: The Spanish writer Miguel Delibes publishes the novel "Five Hours with Mario"
1966: Mao launches the "Cultural Revolution" that will kill one million people and destroy thousands of monuments
1966: Michel Foucault publishes "The Order of Things"
1966: Michelangelo Antonioni directs the film "Blow-Up "
1966: Mohammed Suharto seizes power in Indonesia and proceeds to execute hundreds of thousands of communists
1967: Biafra secedes from Nigeria, spawning a bloody civil war
1967: The first "automatic teller machines" is deployed by Barclays Bank
1967: The French playwright Fernando Arrabal stages "The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria"
1967: Rudi Dutschke leads student riots in West Berlin
1967: Luis Bunuel directs the film "Belle de Jour "
1967: Israel wins a third war against the Arabs, and occupies the lands of the Palestinians (Gaza Strip and West Bank)
1967: The Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia-Marquez publishes the novel "One Hundred Years of Solitude"
1967: The Czech writer Milan Kundera publishes the novel "The Joke"
1967: The Mexican writer Octavio Paz publishes the novel "White"
1967: The German writer Thomas Bernhard publishes the novel "Gargoyles"
1967: Guy Debord publishes "The Society of the Spectacle"
1967: Raduz Cincera creates "Kinoautomat", the the first interactive film
1967: Eikoh Hosoe creates the photograph series "Kamaitachi"
1967: "Art et Informatique" is founded at the Institut d'Esthetique et des Sciences de l'Art in Paris
1968: Luciano Berio composes "Sinfonia", that employs quotations
1968: Student riots in France escalate into a national uprising, soon followed by similar protests in Germany and Italy
1968: Sergio Leone directs the film "Once Upon a Time"
1968: The Italian poet Andrea Zanzotto writes "Beauty"
1968: Soviet troops crush the democratic movement in Czechoslovakia
1968: Evan Parker and Derek Bailey form the Music Improvisation Company
1968: The exhibition "Cybernetic Serendipity" of computer art is held in London
1969: Manfred Eicher founds the ECM record label in Germany
1969: The IRA begins a campaign of terrorism against the British
1969: Willy Brandt forms a social-democratic government in West Germany and inaugurates "ostpolitik" (opening to the East)
1969: Muhammar Qaddafi seizes power in Libya
1969: British bands such as King Crimson and Soft Machine launch progressive-rock
1969: Yassir Arafat becomes leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization
1969: The Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov publishes the novel "Ada"
1969: Peter-Maxwell Davies composes the parodistic "Eight Songs For A Mad King"
1970: George Crumb composes "Ancient Voices of Children", that employs quotations
1970: The USA poet Ezra Pound writes "Cantos"
1970: Frank Zappa composes "Music For Electric Violin And Low Budget Orchestra"
1970: Alvin Lucier composes "I Am Sitting In A Room", that focuses on the role of the room
1970: Intel introduces the first 1K DRAM chip
1970: The first practical optical fiber is developed by glass maker Corning Glass Works
1970: Five of the seven largest USA semiconductor manufacturers are located in Santa Clara Valley
1970: Xerox opens the Palo Alto Research Center or PARC
1971: Cetus, the first biotech company, is founded in Berkeley
1971: Andrew Lloyd Webber scores the musical "Jesus Christ Superstar"
1971: Michael Tracy, or "Tracy 168", creates the "wild style" of graffiti art painting trains in the New York subway
1971: Michael Hart launches the "Project Gutenberg" to make digital versions of books available for free on the Internet
1971: Pierluigi Nervi builds St Mary's Cathedral in San Francisco
1971: Film director George Lucas founds the film production company Lucasfilm
1971: Alan Shugart invents the floppy disk
1971: Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney create the first arcade video game, "Computer Space"
1971: Ted Hoff and Federico Faggin at Intel invent the micro-processor, a programmable set of integrated circuits, i.e. a computer on a chip
1971: Intel unveils the first commercially available microprocessor, the 4004
1971: Morton Feldman composes "Rothko Chapel", inspired by abstract painting
1971: Steve Reich composes "Drumming", music that develops gradually via "phasing" of repetitive patterns
1971: The USA imports more oil than it exports
1971: The USA pulls out of the Bretton Woods agreement of fixed exchange rates and forces foreign currencies to float
1971: Woody and Steina Vasulka found the artist collective "The Kitchen" in New York
1971: Bob Hunter and others founds the environmental activist group Greenpeace in Canada
1972: Richard Nixon meets with communist China's leader Mao
1972: The Dow Jones index reaches 1000
1972: Xerox introduces the first object-oriented programming system, the Smalltalk
1972: Intel introduces the 8008 microprocessor, whose eight-bit word allowed to represent 256 characters, including all ten digits, both uppercase and lowercase letters and punctuation marks
1972: Magnavox introduces the first videogame console, the "Odyssey"
1972: Nolan Bushnell invents the first videogame, "Pong", an evolution of Magnavox's Odyssey, and founds Atari
1972: Venture-capitalist company Kleiner-Perkins, founded by Austrian-born Eugene Kleiner of Fairchild Semiconductor and former Hewlett-Packard executive Tom Perkins, opens offices in Menlo Park on Sand Hill Rd
1972: Electronics writer Don Hoeffler coins the term "Silicon Valley"
1972: A novel by David Gerrold coins the term "computer virus"
1972: The Global Positioning System (GPS is invented by the USA military, using a constellation of 24 satellites for navigation and positioning purposes)
1972: Ray Tomlinson invents e-mail for sending messages between computer users, and invents a system to identify the user name and the computer name separated by a "@"
1972: Bruce Buchanan leads development of the expert system "Mycin" at Stanford University
1972: European computer manufacturer Olivetti opens a research center in Cupertino (the "Advanced Technology Centre")
1972: Don Valentine of Fairchild Semiconductor founds Capital Management Services, later renamed Sequoia Capital
1973: Lynn Hershman creates the first site-specific installation, "The Dante Hotel"
1973: Stanley Cohen of Stanford University and Herbert Boyer of UC San Francisco create the first recombinant DNA organism, virtually inventing "biotechnology"
1973: Automatic Electronic Systems of Canada introduces the "AES-90", a "word processor" that combines a CRT-screen, a floppy-disk and a microprocessor
1973: Intel introduces a CPU named 8088
1973: William Pereira builds the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco
1973: Martin Cooper at Motorola invents the first portable, wireless or "cellular" telephone
1973: Vinton Cerf of Stanford University coins the term "Internet"
1973: Xerox PARC coins the term "Ethernet" for a local area network
1973: The Arpanet has 2,000 users
1973: Gary Kindall in Monterey invents the first operating system for a microprocessor, the CP/M
1973: Stanley Cohen of Stanford University and Herbert Boyer of UC San Francisco invent a technique for splicing genes
1975: Abortion is legalized in the USA
1973: The USA, defeated, leaves Vietnam
1973: The World Trade Center is inaugurated in New York, the world's tallest skyscraper
1973: The USA writer Thomas Pynchon publishes the novel "Gravity's Rainbow"
1973: USA architect William Pereira designs the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco
1973: Gloria Coates composes "Symphony 1 - Music on Open Strings"
1973: Meredith Monk composes the extended vocal solo "Education Of The Girlchild"
1974: The first SIGGRAPH conference for computer graphics is held in Colorado
1974: Alvin Curran composes "Canti E Vedute Del Giardino Magnetico", a collage for for voice, instruments, electronics and natural sounds
1974: USA architect Bruce Graham builds the Sears Towers in Chicago, the tallest skyscraper in the USA
1974: Richard Nixon is forced to resign after the Watergate scandal
1974: "New Wave" and "Punk" bands begin performing in New York
1974: Francis-Ford Coppola directs the film "The Godfather Part II "
1974: Ed Roberts invents the first personal computer, the Altair 8800
1974: Xerox's PARC unveils the "Alto", the first workstation with a "mouse"
1974: Paul Flory of Stanford University is awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry
1974: Reid Dennis and Burton McMurtry found the investment company Institutional Venture Associates
1974: Philips acquires Magnavox
1974: Tommy Davis launches the Mayfield Fund
1975: Xerox PARC debuts the first GUI or "Graphical User Interface"
1975: John Chowning and Leland Smith found the Stanford University Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA)
1975: Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith establish the Computer Graphics Laboratory at the New York Institute of Technology
1975: Ed Roberts in New Mexico introduces the Altair 8800 based on an Intel microprocessor and sold as a mail-order kit
1975: John Holland describes Genetic Algorithms
1975: Bill Gates and Paul Allen develop a version of BASIC for the Altair personal computer and found Microsoft
1975: Steve Wozniak founds the "Homebrew Computer Club"
1975: Six economic powers meet in Paris (USA, Japan, Germany, France, Britain and Italy) forming the G6
1975: The USA poet John Ashbery writes "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror:
1975: Jamaican disc-jockey Clive "Hercules" Campbell invents "rap music" and "hip hop"
1975: Robert Altman directs the film "Nashville "
1975: Pauline Oliveros composes "Horse Sings From Cloud", an example of "deep listening music" for voice and accordion
1976: Martin Scorsese directs the film "Taxi Driver "
1976: Philip Glass composes the minimalist opera "Einstein on the Beach"
1976: Jon Hassell composes the "fourth-world" music of "Vernal Equinox"
1976: Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs form Apple Computer and build the first microcomputer in Jobs' garage in Cupertino.
1976: William Ackerman launches "new-age music"
1976: Burton Richter of Stanford University is awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics
1976: Biochemist Herbert Boyer and venture capitalist Robert Swanson found Genentech, the first major biotech company
1976: Ed Catmull and Fred Parke's computer animation in a scene of the film "Futureworld" is the first to use 3D computer graphics
1976: Institutional Venture Associates splits into two partnerships, McMurtry's Technology Venture Associates and Dennis' Institutional Venture Partners
1977: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak develop the Apple II
1977: UC Berkeley develops the "Berkeley Software Distribution" (BSD), better known as "Berkeley Unix", a variant of the Unix operating system
1977: Larry Ellison founds the Software Development Laboratories, later renamed Oracle Corporation
1977: Atari introduces a videogame console, the 2600
1977: Dave Smith builds the "Prophet 5", the world's first microprocessor-based musical instrument, the first polyphonic and programmable synthesizer
1977: Dennis Hayes of National Data Corporation invents the modem, a device that converts between analog and digital signals
1977: Elliott Carter composes "Symphony for Three Orchestras"
1977: George Lucas directs the film "Star Wars "
1977: Woody Allen directs the film "Manhattan "
1977: The Voyager is launched to reach other galaxies
1977: The film "Saturday Night Fever" starts the disco fever by promoting disco-music beyond gays and blacks
1977: Cindy Sherman begins the photograph series "Complete Untitled Film Stills"
1978: Mark Pauline founds the Survival Research Laboratories
1978: Lydia Villa-Komaroff clones a human gene, insulin
1978: Apple launches a project to design a personal computer with a graphical user interface
1979: Dan Bricklin develops VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program for personal computers
1979: Lucasfilm hires Ed Catmull from the New York Institute of Technology to lead the Graphics Group of its Computer Division
1979: Kevin MacKenzie invents symbols such as :-), or "emoticons", to mimic the cues of face-to-face communication
1979: John Shoch of Xerox's PARC coins the term "worm" to describe a program that travels through a network of computers
1978: Lucia Dlugoszewsky composes "Tender Theatre Flight Nageire"
1979: John Zorn "composes" the aleatory strategy of "Archery"
1979: The Soviet Union invades Afghanistan and the USA organizes an Islamic resistance
1979: An accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant stops development of new nuclear power plants in the USA
1979: The USA writer Cormac McCarthy publishes the novel "Suttree"
1970: Palestinian terrorists stage spectacular attacks in Europe
1970: The French writer Michel Tournier publishes the novel "The Ogre"
1970: Mauricio Kagel composes "Staatstheatre", a "ballet for non-dancers"
1970: Witold Lutoslawski composes "Cello Concerto"
1970: Japan has become the third economic power in the world after the USA and the Soviet Union, having overtaken all European economies
1970: Pierre Boulez founds the IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique) in Paris
1970: Gilbert Proesch and George Passmore create their first "living sculpture"
1970: The Soviet "Venera 7" lands on Venus, the first spacecraft to land on another planet
1971: East Pakistan, defended by India, separates from West Pakistan and becomes the independent country of Bangladesh
1971: Dmitrij Shostakovic composes his "Symphony 15"
1971: Jacques Monod publishes "Chaos and Necessity"
1971: Finnish architect Alvar Aalto completes the Finlandia Hall in Helsinki
1971: The Italian poet Attilio Bertolucci writes "Winter Journey"
1971: The Italian poet Mario Luzi writes "On Invisible Foundations"
1971: The German band Tangerine Dream invents "cosmic music" that employs synthesizers and sequencers
1972: The Sydney Opera House, designed by Danish architect Jorn Utzon, is completed
1972: The Serbian writer Danilo Kis publishes the novel "Hourglass"
1972: Manu Dibango invents "disco music" with "Soul Makossa"
1972: Britain joins the European Economic Community
1972: The British playwright Tom Stoppard stages "Travesties"
1972: Muslim separatists begin a terrorist campaign in the Philippines
1972: The first video-cassette recorder (VCR) is introduced by Phillips
1973: Chile's president Allende is overthrown by general Augusto Pinochet
1973: The Trinidad poet Derek Walcott writes "Another Life""
1973: The Barbados poet Edward-Kamau Brathwaite writes "The Arrivants"
1973: Members of the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries impose an oil embargo against the West
1974: Kraftwerk's "Autobahn" becomes the first hit entirely played on electronic instruments
1974: Stephen Hawking proves that black holes must emit radiation
1974: Isabel Peron becomes president of Argentina, the first woman to become president in the Americas
1974: India detonates an underground nuclear weapon
1974: Mengistu Haile Mariam seizes power in Ethiopia
1975: The Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot, install a communist regime in Cambodia that will kill 1.7 million people
1975: Morocco invades Western Sahara and the "Polisario" begins an independence war
1975: Spanish dictator Franco dies and Spain becomes a democracy
1975: Angola becomes independent but civil war erupts between pro-Soviet and pro-USA groups
1975: The Greek writer Andreas Embiricos publishes the novel "The Great Eastern"
1975: The Hungarian writer Imre Kertesz publishes the novel "Fateless"
1975: The Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo publishes the novel "Juan the Landless"
1975: The Baader-Meinhof terrorizes Germany
1975: Christian and Muslim sects start a civil war in Lebanon
1975: The Italian poet Giorgio Caproni writes "The Wall of the Earth"
1976: The Canadian writer Sasha Sokolov publishes the novel "School For Fools"
1976: Richard Dawkins publishes "The Selfish Gene"
1976: British architect Richard Rogers designs the Centre Pompidou in Paris
1976: Henryk Gorecki composes "Symphony 3"
1976: Joan LaBarbara composes "Vocal Extensions"
1976: India's prime minister Indira Gandhi signs a cooperation pact with the Soviet Union
1977: Zia ul-Haq, a Muslim fundamentalist, seizes power in Pakistan
1977: The Russian poet Josif Brodsky writes "A Part of Speech"
1977: The British writer Barbara Pym publishes the novel "Quartet in Autumn"
1977: The Czech writer Josef Skvorecky publishes the novel "The Engineer of Human Souls"
1977: An execution is carried out in France, the last execution in Western Europe
1977: Toru Takemitsu composes "A Flock Descends Into The Pentagonal Garden"
1977: Arvo Part composes "Tabula Rasa"
1978: The Red Brigades terrorize Italy
1978: More than 100,000 people flee Vietnam on boats ("boat people")
1978: Brian Eno invents ambient music
1978: Brazil's GDP has quintupled since 1960 making it the eighth industrial power in the West
1978: A Polish cardinal, Karol Joseph Wojtyla, is elected Pope John Paul II
1978: Hiroshi Sugimoto begins the photograph series "Theatres"
1978: Toshihiro Nishikado creates the first blockbuster videogame, "Space Invaders"
1979: The "Green Party" is founded in Germany with an environmentalist platform
1979: Egypt and Israel sign a peace treaty
1979: Saddam Hussein seizes power in Iraq
1979: The shah of Iran is overthrown by an Islamic Revolution
1979: Jean-Francois Lyotard's treatise "The Postmodern Condition" is published
1979: The Italian writer Italo Calvino publishes the novel "If On a Winter's Night a Traveler"
1979: The Southafrican writer Nadine Gordimer publishes the novel "The Burger's Daughter"
1979: Astor Piazzolla composes the "Concerto For Bandoneon"
1979: The first Ars Electronica festival for digital art and media is held in Austria
1979: Fernando Botero paints "Los Musicos"
1980: Ted Turner launches CNN, the first cable tv devoted to world news
1980: Alvin Toffler discusses the information age in his book "The Third Wave"
1980: Sandy Skoglund creates the staged photograph "Radioactive Cats"
1980: The Arpanet has 430,000 users, who exchange almost 100 million e-mail messages a year
1980: Sonya Rapoport creates the interactive audio/visual installation "Objects on my Dresser"
1980: Seagate Technology introduces the first hard-disk drive for personal computers
1980: Doug and Gary Carlston found the videogame company Broderbund
1980: Paul Berg of Stanford University is awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry
1980: Polish writer Czeslaw Milosz of UC Berkeley is awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature
1980: Integrated circuits incorporate 100,000 discrete components
1980: The Usenet is born, an Arpanet-based discussion system divided in "newsgroups"
1980: Apple goes public for a record $1.3 billion
1980: UC Davis researchers found biotech company Calgene
1980: John Doerr joins Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield, and Byers
1981: The first cases of AIDS are documented
1981: The compact disc (CD) is introduced
1981: Juan Atkins begins making "techno" records in Detroit
1981: Jean Baudrillard's book "Simulacres et Simulation" argues that modern society is replacing reality with a simulated reality
1981: Steven Spielberg directs the film "Raiders of the Lost Ark "
1981: The USA funds "Contras" based in Honduras to fight Nicaragua's communist regime of the Sandinistas
1981: Eric Fishl paints "Bad Boy"
1981: The Xerox 8010 Star Information System is the first commercial computer that uses a mouse
1981: Arthur Schawlow of Stanford University is awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics
1981: Roger Malina relocates Leonardo ISAST from Paris to San Francisco
1981: Jim Clark of Stanford University and Abbey Silverstone of Xerox found Silicon Graphics in Sunnyvale to manufacture graphic workstations
1981: The IBM PC is launched, running an operating system developed by Bill Gates' Microsoft
1982: Robert Mapplethorpe photographs "Lady Lisa Lyon"
1982: The USA approves the first genetically-engineered drug, a form of human insulin produced by bacteria
1982: Ridley Scott directs the film "Blade Runner"
1982: David Rokeby's "Very Nervous System" pioneers interactive art
1982: The USA poet James Merrill writes "The Changing Light at Sandover
1982: Diamanda Galas composes "Litanies Of Satan"
1982: Laurie Anderson composes the multimedia opera "United States"
1982: The USA government breaks up the largest company in the world, AT&T
1982: Benoit Mandelbrot publishes "The Fractal Geometry of Nature" tha popularizes chaos theory
1982: John Warnock and Charles Geschke of Xerox PARC develop PostScript and found Adobe to commercialize it
1982: The Lotus Development Corporation, founded by Mitchell Kapor, introduces the spreadsheet program "Lotus 1-2-3" developed by Jonathan Sachs
1982: John Hopfield describes a new generation of neural networks
1982: Thomas Zimmerman of IBM Almaden builds the first commercially-available dataglove
1982: Stanford graduate students Vinod Khosla, Andy Bechtolsheim, and Scott McNealy found Sun Microsystems, named after the "Stanford University Network"
1982: Apple's employee Trip Hawkins founds Electronic Arts to create home computer games
1982: John Walker founds Autodesk to sell computer-aided design software
1982: The Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol or "TCP/IP" is chosen as the protocol for the Arpanet
1983: Paul Mockapetris invents the Domain Name System for the Internet to classify Internet addresses through extensions such as .com
1983: The Arpanet is officially renamed Internet
1983: Apple introduces the "Lisa", the first personal computer with a graphical user interface
1983: Henry Taube of Stanford University is awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry
1983: The Musical Instrument Digital Interface is introduced, based on an idea by Dave Smith
1983: Piero Scaruffi joins Olivetti's ATC
1983: William Inmon builds the first data warehousing system
1983: Gerard Debreu of UC Berkeley is awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics
1983: The USA, under president Reagan, engages the Soviet Union in a nuclear-arms race
1983: Los Angeles passes Chicago as the second largest city in the country
1983: Pioneer 10 becomes the first manmade object to leave the solar system
1984: "House" music comes out of Chicago
1984: The "Cirque du Soleil" is founded in Quebec by a group of street performers
1984: USA architect John Burgee builds the AT&T Building in New York
1984: The The Santa Fe Institute is founded to carry out interdisciplinary research
1984: Cisco is founded by Leonard Bosack and Sandra Lerner
1984: Robert Gaskins and Dennis Austin develop "Presentation", an application to create slide presentations (later renamed "PowerPoint")
1984: The "Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence" or SETI Institute is founded
1984: Michael McGreevy creates the first virtual-reality environment at NASA Ames
1984: Nicholas Negroponte and Jerome Wiesner found the MIT Media Lab
1984: Wavefront introduces the first commercial 3D-graphics software
1984: Hewlett-Packard introduces the first ink-jet printer
1984: Apple introduces the Macintosh, which revolutionizes desktop publishing
1984: William Gibson's novel "Neuromancer" popularizes the "cyberpunks"
1984: The CDROM is introduced by Sony and Philips
1985: The Nintendo Entertainment System is introduced
1985: Richard Stallman founds the non-profit organization "Free Software Foundation" (FSF)
1985: Richard Stallman releases a free operating system, "GNU"
1985: Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant create the "Whole Earth Lectronic Link" (or "WELL"), a virtual community
1985: Warren Robinett, Scott Fisher and Michael McGreevy of NASA Ames build the "Virtual Environment Workstation" for virtual-reality research, incorporating the first dataglove and the first low-cost head-mounted display
1985: Microsoft ships the "Windows" operating system
1985: Jim Kimsey founds Quantum Computer Services (later renamed America Online to provide dedicated online services for personal computers)
1985: The Arpanet is renamed Internet
1985: Jaron Lanier founds VPL Research, the first company to sell Virtual Reality products
1986: Apple's co-founder Steve Jobs buys Pixar, that becomes an independent film studio run by Ed Catmull
1986: Renzo Piano builds the California Academy of Science in San Francisco
1986: Yuan Lee of the Lawrence Berkeley Labs is awarded the Nobel Prize
1987: Chris Langton coins the term "Artificial Life"
1987: The JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group format is introduced)
1987: Tod Machover composes the opera "Valis" with electronically processed voices
1987: USA architect Paul Rudolph designs Hong Kong's Lippo building
1987: The world's first conference on Artificial Life is held at the Los Alamos National Laboratory
1987: The USA writer Joseph McElroy publishes the novel "Women and Men"
1988: "Morris", the first digital worm, infects most of the Internet
1989: UC Berkeley introduces the "BSD license", one of the first open-source licences
1989: Adobe releases Photoshop
1988: Harvard University announces the first genetically engineered animal
1988: Robert Zemeckis' "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" makes live actors and animated characters interact realistically
1980: The first Video Festival of Locarno opens
1980: Douglas Hofstadter publishes "Godel Escher Bach"
1980: Ilya Prigogine publishes "From Being to Becoming"
1980: The Indian writer Salman Rushdie publishes the novel "Midnight's Children"
1980: Humberto Maturana publishes "Autopoiesis and Cognition"
1980: Rhodesia, renamed Zimbabwe, becomes independent under Robert Mugabe
1980: The communist guerrilla group "Shining Path" begins a terror campaign in Peru
1980: The "Kurdish Worker's Party" (PKK) begins an armed struggle against Turkey
1980: Iraq attacks Iran, a war that will kill more than 500,000 people in eight years
1980: Terrorist attacks by Basque separatists kill 118 people in Spain
1980: Lech Walesa leads Polish workers on a strike
1980: The population of China is one billion
1980: Christians constitute 30% and Muslims constitute 18% of the world's population
1981: Deng Xiaoping seizes power in China and launches capitalist-style economic reforms
1981: The "TGV" (high-speed train) begins operations in France
1981: Egyptian president Sadat is assassinated by Islamic radicals for making peace with Israel
1982: Hezbollah suicide commandos organized by Iran blow up the USA and French barracks in Lebanon
1982: The Colombian writer German Espinosa publishes the novel "The Weaver of Crowns"
1983: Andrei Tarkovsky directs the film "Nostalgia"
1983: A civil war erupts in Sudan between the Christian south and the Muslim north that will kill two million people in 21 years
1983: Roy Ascott creates the networked artwork "La Plissure du Texte"
1984: Alec Jeffreys in Britain invents the DNA fingerprint that can identify an individual
1984: A leak at the Union Carbide pesticides plant in Bhopal (India) causes 14,000 deaths
1984: 900,000 people die in Ethiopia of famine
1984: Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi is assassinated by Sikh bodyguards and is succeeded by her son Rajiv
1984: The Portuguese writer Jose Saramago publishes the novel "The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis"
1984: The Iranian writer Mahmud Dowlatabadi publishes the novel "Kelidar"
1984: Canon demonstrates the first electronic camera
1985: The Japanese writer Murakami Haruki publishes the novel "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World"
1985: The Danish writer Peer Hultberg publishes the novel "Requiem"
1985: A hole in the Ozone Layer is discovered over Antartica
1985: Mikhail Gorbachev becomes the leader of the Soviet Union and launches a campaign of political openness ("glasnost") and economic restructuring ("perestroika")
1985: Economic boom of the Asian "tigers" ( Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia)
1986: The Soviet Union launches the MIR space station
1986: A nuclear accident in Chernobyl, Ukraine (part of the Soviet Union), spreads nuclear radiations around Europe
1986: Corazon Aquino ousts Philipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos
1986: Wole Soyinka becomes the first Nobel laureate of Africa
1987: First suicide bombing by a Tamil "Tiger" fighter in Sri Lanka
1987: Palestinians in the occupied territories begin an uprising against Israeli occupation (first "intifada")
1987: John Tavener composes "The Protecting Veil"
1988: Pierre Bastien builds an orchestra of musical automata to perform his "Mecanium"
1988: Theo Angelopoulos directs the film "Landscape In The Mist"
1988: Wim Wenders directs the film "Wings of Desire"
1988: The vogue of "acid-house" in Britain creates the "Madchester" phenomenon or the "second summer of love", characterized by all-night parties called "raves"
1988: The Serbian writer Milorad Pavic publishes the novel "Dictionary of the khazara"
1988: Benazir Bhutto wins the general elections in Pakistan
1988: Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan creates Al Qaeda, a worldwide alliance of Islamic fighters
1988: Fuji introduces the first digital camera, the DS-1P
1989: More than 3,000 people are murdered in Medellin alone at the peak of the power of the Colombian drug cartels
1989: The Berlin wall falls and most communist governments of Eastern Europe fall, thus ending the Cold War
1989: The Soviet Union withdraws from Afghanistan and Afghanistan plunges into chaos
1989: Students protest in Tiananmen Square in China
1989: ZKM organizes the first "Multimediale" festival in Germany
1989: Berlin holds the first "Love Parade", a festival of electronic dance music attended by one million people
1989: The Chinese writer Gao Xingjian/Xingjian publishes the novel "Soul Mountain"
1989: Romanian architect Anca Petrescu builds the Casa Poporului in Bucharest, the second largest building in the world
1989: Osvaldas Balakauskas composes "Ostrobothnian Symphony"
1990: The "Human Genome Project" is launched to decipher human DNA
1990: Richard Taylor of Stanford University is awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics and William Sharpe of Stanford University is awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics
1990: Michael West founds biotech company Geron that pioneers commercial applications of regenerative medicine
1990: Tim Berners-Lee of CERN invents the HyperText Markup Language "HTML" and demonstrates the World-Wide Web
1990: The first Internet search engine, "Archie", is developed in Montreal
1990: The Hubble Space Telescope is launched
1991: The USA leads the Gulf War against Iraq, the first war to use high-precision bombs guided by the GPS
1991: John Corigliano composes the opera "Ghosts of Versailles"
1991: The first economic recession ever strikes California
1991: The World-Wide Web invented by Tim Berners-Lee in Geneve debuts on the Internet
1991: Finnish student Linus Torvalds introduces the Linux operating system, a variant of Unix
1991: Paul Lindner and Mark McCahill of the University of Minnesota release "Gopher", a software program to access the World-Wide Web
1992: Macromedia is founded in San Francisco
1992: The Electronic Visualization Lab at the University of Illinois Chicago creates a "CAVE" ("Cave Automatic Virtual Environment", a surround-screen and surround-sound virtual-reality environment (graphics projected from behind the walls that surround the user)
1992: Gary Becker of Stanford University is awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics
1992: Calgene creates the "Flavr Savr" tomato, the first genetically-engineered food to be sold in stores
1992: Apple introduces QuickTime
1992: Jean Armour Polly coins the phrase "Surfing the Internet"
1992: Thomas Ray develops "Tierra", a computer simulation of ecology
1992: The School of Visual Arts in New York launches the "New York Digital Salon"
1992: Craig Venter founds the "Institute for Genomic Research" (TIGR)
1992: Richard Baily starts his visual-effects animation company, Image Savant
1993: Stuart Kauffman publishes "The Origins of Order" that popularizes self-organizing system
1993: 88 of the 100 most viewed films of the year around the world were made in the USA
1993: The USA, Canada and Mexico sign the "North American Free Trade Agreement" (NAFTA)
1993: Stanford University's professor Jim Clark hires Mark Andreesen
1993: Broderbund introduces the videogame "Myst"
1993: Adobe Systems introduces Acrobat and the file format PDF (or Portable Document Format)
1993: Marc Andreessen develops the first browser for the World Wide Web (Mosaic)
1994: The first genetically engineered vegetable (Flavr Savr tomato) is introduced
1994: DirecTV launches the first satellite-based television service
1994: Quentin Tarantino directs the film "Pulp Fiction "
1994: Richard Teitelbaum composes the interactive opera "Golem"
1994: Jerry Yang launches the first search engine, Yahoo
1994: John Harsanyi of UC Berkeley is awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics
1994: The "Band of Angels" is founded by "angels" to fund Silicon Valley start-ups
1994: University of North Carolina's college radio station WXYC becomes the first radio station in the world to broadcast its signal over the Internet
1994: Mark Pesce introduces the "Virtual Reality Modeling Language" or VRML
1994: Netscape, the company founded by Marc Andreesen, goes public even before earning money and starts the "dot.com" craze and the boom of the Nasdaq
1995: John Lasseter's "Toy Story" is the first feature-length computer-animated film
1995: Bill Gates becomes the richest man in the world
1995: The MP3 standard is introduced
1995: Mario Botta builds the Modern Museum of Art in San Francisco
1995: Martin Perl of Stanford University is awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics
1995: The Sony Playstation is introduced
1995: Ward Cunningham creates WikiWikiWeb, the first "wiki", a manual on the internet maintained in a collaborative manner
1995: SUN launches Java
1995: Piero Scaruffi debuts his website www.scaruffi.com
1995: Craig Newmark starts craigslist.com on the Internet, a regional advertising community
1995: Robert Fleischmann of the "Institute for Genomic Research" (TIGR) sequences a living organism's genome
1995: 36 million cars are manufactured in the world, of which 7.6 million in Japan and 6.3 million in the USA
1995: A right-wing extremist blows up a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 160 people in the worst terrorist incident in the history of the USA until then
1995: Digital artist Char Davies creates the immersive virtual-reality environment "Osmose (1995)
1995: Bulgarian-born Christo Javacheff wraps the Reichstag in Berlin
1996: Bill Viola creates the video installation "The Crossing"
1996: Former BBC employees launch "Al Jazeera", the first pan-Arab satellite news channel (from Qatar)
1996: Sabeer Bhatia launches Hotmail, a website to check email from anywhere in the world
1996: Douglas Osheroff of Stanford University is awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics
1996: Macromedia introduces Flash
1996: The first DVD player is introduced by Toshiba
1996: The Apache HTTP Server is introduced, an open-source web server
1996: 1996: Monsanto acquires Calgene
1996: Stewart Brand and Danny Hillis establish the "Long Now Foundation"
1997: Amazon.com is launched on the web as the "world's largest bookstore", except that it is not a bookstore, it is a website
1997: Myron Scholes of Stanford University is awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics
1997: Steven Chu of Stanford University is awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics
1997: Evite is founded by Stanford engineering students Al Lieb and Selina Tobaccowala
1997: David Lynch directs the film "Lost Highway"
1997: Rob Silvers publishes the photographic collages "Photomosaics"
1998: Larry Page and Sergey Brin found Google to develop a search engine
1998: Saul Perlmutter's team at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab discovers that the expansion of the universe is accelerating
1998: Celera, presided by Craig Venter of "The Institute for Genomic Research" (TIGR), is established to map the human genome (and later relocated to the Bay Area)
1998: Netscape launches the open-source project "Mozilla" of Internet applications
1998: Robert Laughlin of Stanford University is awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics
1998: America Online acquires Netscape
1998: Pierre Omidyar founds Ebay, a website to trade second-hand goods
1998: Yahoo, Amazon, Ebay and scores of Internet-related start-ups create overnight millionaires
1998: Jorn Barger in Ohio coins the term "weblog" for webpages that simply contain links to other webpages
1998: Bob Somerby starts "The Daily Howler", the first major political blog
1999: Camille Utterback's "Text Rain" pioneers interactive digital art
1999: Blogger.com allows people to create their own "blogs", or personal journals
1999: Philip Rosedale founds Linden Lab to develop virtual-reality hardware
1999: The world prepares for the new millennium amidst fears of computers glitches due to the change of date (Y2K)
1999: The recording industry sues Shawn Fanning's Napster, a website that allows people to exchange music
1999: 100 new Internet companies are listed in the USA stock market
1999: The USA has 250 billionaires, and thousands of new millionaires are created in just one year
1999: Microsoft is worth 450 billion dollars, the most valued company in the world, even if it is many times smaller than General Motors, and Bill Gates is the world's richest man at $85 billion
1998: Digital artist Mark Amerika creates "Grammatron", a virtual web-based environment
1999: Eduardo Kac's "Genesis" pioneers the use of genetics as an art medium
1999: NATO bombs Serbia to stop repression against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo
1999: Protests disrupt the meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle
1990: Saddam Hussein's Iraq invades Kuwait and the USA organizes an anti-Iraqi coalition
1990: German architect Johann Otto von Spreckelsen builds "La Grande Arche" in Paris
1990: Ieoh Ming Pei designs the Bank of China in Hong Kong
1990: The British writer Antonia Byatt publishes the novel "Possession"
1990: Namibia gains independence and becomes the first democracy of Africa
1990: The Japanese economy enters a long period of stagnation
1990: Burmese democratic leader Aung San Suu Kyi is put under house arrest
1990: Digital artist Maurice Benayoun and graphic novelist Francois Schuiten create "Quarxs", a computer-animated television series
1991: The Portuguese writer Augustina Bessa-Luis publishes the novel "Abraham's Valley"
1991: Japanese architect Kenzo Tange designs Tokyo's Metropolitan Government Office Building One
1991: The Soviet Union is dissolved and its states become independent
1991: Civil war erupts in Somalia
1991: Ethiopia's Mengitsu is deposed
1991: Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi is assassinated by Tamil separatists
1991: Digital artists Yvonne Wilhelm, Christian Hubler and Alexander Tuchacek found Knowbotic Research in Germany to create art as explorative data environments
1992: Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau pioneer "bio art" with their "Interactive Plant Growing"
1992: Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori defeats the Shining Path
1992: The German writer Winfried Georg Sebald publishes the novel "The Emigrants"
1992: The treaty of Maastricht creates the European Union out of the European Economic Community
1992: Yugoslavia plunges into civil war
1992: The army seizes power in Algeria to prevent Islamists from winning the election, thus starting a civil war that will kill 150,000 peopole in seven years
1993: The Italian poet Elio Pagliarani writes "Rudy's Ballad"
1993: Bombs set by Islamic fundamentalists kill 257 people in Mumbai, India
1993: Sebastiao Salgado publishes the photograph series "Workers"
1994: China's GDP grows at an average annual rate of about 10% between 1994 and 2000
1994: Palestinian terrorists begin a series of suicide attacks against Israelis
1994: Nelson Mandela wins the first free elections in South Africa and becomes its first black president
1994: The Channel Tunnel opens between England and France
1994: Almost one million people are killed in Rwanda's civil war
1994: Russian sends the army to restore order in the breakaway province of Chechnya
1994: Krzysztof Kieslowski directs the film "Rouge"
1994: Tan Dun composes the opera "Ghost Opera"
1994: Alfred Schnittke composes "Symphony 8"
1994: Oval's "Systemisch" launches "glitch" music
1994: Eastern European artists including Vuk Cosic found the "net.art" movement of artists active on the World Wide Web
1995: Emir Kusturica directs the film "Underground"
1995: Jean-Marie Jeunet directs the film "City of Lost Children"
1995: Danish film-makers Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg found the "Dogme 95" movement
1995: The Ebola virus kills entire villages in Congo (Zaire)
1995: The Aum Shinrikyo religious cult kills people with nerve gas in the Tokyo subway
1995: The Internet is used by 16 million people
1996: Pakistani-supported Islamic fundamentalists called "Taliban" seize power in Afghanistan
1996: The "mad cow disease" spreads in Britain
1996: "Manifesta 1", the first European biennale of contemporary art, opens in the Netherlands
1996: Communist guerrilla group "Fuerza Armada Revolucionaria de Colombia" (FARC) stages spectacular attacks in Colombia
1996: Al-Jazeera, the first pan-Arab satellite news channel, begin broadcasting from Qatar
1996: Jan Svankmajer directs the film "Conspirators of Pleasure"
1997: Michael Haneke directs the film "Funny Games"
1997: Britain returns its colony of Hong Kong to China, the end of the British Empire
1997: British biologist Ian Wilmut clones a sheep, Dolly
1997: Most countries of the world agree on reducing the level of greenhouse-gas emissions in order to avoid climate changes such as global warming ("Kyoto Protocol")
1997: Sofia Gubaidulina composes "Canticle for the Sun"
1997: Australian digital artist Jeffrey Shaw uses the CAVE for his installation "Configuring the CAVE"
1997: The stock markets and currencies of the Southeast Asian "tigers" collapse
1997: Laurent-Desire Kabila, helped by Rwanda, wins Zaire's civil war while Mobutu is abroad
1997: Toyota introduces the Prius, the world's first commercially mass-produced hybrid automobile
1998: Pakistan explodes a nuclear bomb
1998: Suharto is deposed in Indonesia
1998: Socialist candidate Hugo Chavez wins elections in Venezuela and starts an anti-USA foreign policy
1998: Osama bin Laden, from his base in Afghanistan, wages a holy war against the USA by bombing two USA embassies in Africa
1998: The Petronas Towers, designed by Argentine architect Cesar Pelli, are completed in Kuala Lumpur
1998: Uruguayan architec Carlos Ott builds the National Bank in Dubai
1999: Uruguyan architect Rafael Vinoly builds the Jongno Tower in Seoul
1999: A common currency, the euro, is introduced in some European countries
1999: Majid Majidi directs the film "Color Of Paradise"
1999: Terrorist attacks by Chechen separatists kill nearly 300 people in Moscow
1999: Digital artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer creates the Internet environment "Alzado Vectorial"
2000: British and USA biologists decipher the entire human DNA
2000: 25,000 people attend the Burning Man festival at Black Rock Desert, which has become a city of art installations
2000: Christopher Nolan directs the film "Memento" (2000)
2000: USA architect Hazel Wong builds the Emirates Towers in Dubai
2000: USA architect Tom Wright designs the Burj Al Arab hotel in Dubai
2000: The NASDAQ stock market crashes, wiping out trillions of dollars of wealth
2000: Daniel McFadden of UC Berkeley is awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics
2000: 10 billion e-mail messages a day are exchanged over the Internet
2000: Confinity and X.com merge to form Paypal, a system to pay online
2001: Apple launches the iPod
2001: Joseph Stiglitz of Stanford University is awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics
2001: George Akerlof of UC Berkeley is awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics
2001: Jimmy Wales founds Wikipedia, a multilingual encyclopedia that is collaboratively edited by the Internet community
2001: Hewlett-Packard acquires Compaq
2001: Pierre Levy publishes "Cyberculture"
2001: Arab terrorists affiliated with Osama Bin Laden's Al Qaeda organization blow up the World Trade Center, and the USA bombs the Taliban out of power in Afghanistan
2001: Satellite radio is introduced in the USA
2002: Wal-Mart is the biggest company in the world with over 200 billion dollars in revenues (followed by Exxon and General Motors, also USA companies)
2002: Ebay acquires Paypal
2003: Skype is founded in Europe by Niklas Zennstroem and Janus Friis to offer voice over IP, a system invented by Estonian engineers
2003: Linden Lab launches "Second Life", a virtual world accessible via the Internet
2003: The USA and Britain invade Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein from power, starting a civil war
2003: Miya Masaoka composes "While I Was Walking I Heard A Sound"
2003: Alejandro-Gonzales Inarritu directs the film "21 Grams" (2003)
2003: USA photograher Spencer Tunick photographs 7,000 naked people in Barcelona, the first of his massive "nude" installations
2003:: The "Human Genome Project" is completed
2004: Michel Gondry directs the film "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" (2004)
2004: Evidence of torture surfaces at both Iraqi and Afghan prisons (Abu Ghraib and Bagram) run by the USA military
2004: Google launches a project to digitize all the books ever printed
2004: California approves $3 billion to human embryonic stem-cell research, resulting in the founding of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), the biggest-ever public scientific program in the USA
2004: Mark Bradford creates the collage of junk "Los Moscos"
2004: Mark Zuckerberg founds the social networking service Facebook at Harvard University (soon relocated to Palo Alto)
2004: UC Berkeley establishes a Center for New Media
2004: Vinod Khosla of venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers founds Khosla Ventures to invest in green-technology companies
2005: Adobe acquires Macromedia
2005: The Internet is used by one billion people
2005: The Letterman Digital Arts Center opens in San Francisco
2005: Sales of notebook computers account for 53% of the computer market
2005: Yahoo, Google, America OnLine (AOL) and MSN (Microsoft's Network) are the four big Internet portals with a combined audience of over one billion people worldwide
2005: Ebay acquires Skipe
2005: SUN's founder Bill Joy joins venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers to invest in green technology
2005: Former Paypal employees Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim found YouTube
2005: The monthly USA trade deficit reaches $69 billion of which about 25% with China, 12% with Canada and 12% with Japan
2005: The largest solar plant in the world is inaugurated in the Mojave Desert of California
2006: Jack Dorsey creates the social networking service Twitter
2006: The first Zer01 Festival is held in San Jose
2006: Roger Kornberg of Stanford University is awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry Andrew Fire of Stanford University is awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine
2006: George Smoot of the Lawrence Berkeley Labs is awarded the Nobel Prize
2006: Tesla Motors introduces the Tesla Roadster, the first production automobile to use lithium-ion battery cells
2006: The world-wide web has 100 million websites
2006: Google acquires YouTube
2006: Walt Disney acquires Pixar
2007: Apple launches the iPhone
2007: There are 12.5 million Illegal immigrants in the USA, of which more than half are from Mexico
2007: The "The Million Book Project" led by Carnegie Mellon University digitizes more than one million books worldwide
2007: iZumi Bio is founded to develop products based on stem-cell research
2006: The USA has 300 million people, of which 35 million are foreign-born, and it is the third most populous country in the world after China and India
2006: Joel-Peter Witkin takes the photograph "The Raft of George Bush"
2007: The USA trade deficit hits a record $764 bilion
2007: The Dow Jones hits a record high of 14,164
2008: Microsoft Windows owns almost 90% of the operating system market for personal computers, while Google owns almost 70% of the Internet search market
2008: More than 10,000 people die of heroin overdose in the NATO countries in just one year, a number higher than all casualties from all NATO wars since 2001
2008: Solar-energy company Solyndra is founded with $600 million in venture funding and $1.2 billion in product orders
2008: Venture capitalists invest $4 billion into green-tech start-ups in 2008, which is almost 40% of all USA investments in high-tech
2009: Oracle buys SUN
Jan 2009: Facebook has 150,000 users in january and grows by about one million users a day, the fastest product ever to reach that many users in five years
2009: Rick DeVos establishes the ArtPrize, an art competition that takes place in multiple cities
2009: President Barack Obama appoints Steve Chu, director of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, to be Secretary of Energy
2009: LaRoche buys Genentech
2009: Google buys Yahoo
2009: Tesla Motors obtains a $465-million loan from the USA government to build the Model S, a battery-powered sports sedan
2009: Elizabeth Blackburn of UC San Francisco shares the Nobel prize in Medicine
2008: The USA stock market collapses, triggering similar collapses around the world, several USA banks are on the verge of bankruptcy, the GDP of the USA falls 6.2% in the last quarter of 2008, the worst decline in 26 years, and USA home prices drop by 15.8%, the steepest decline in 21 years
2008: Barack Obama, a black man, is elected president of the USA
2009: The USA loses 741,000 jobs in january alone, the most since 1949, and unemployment hits 9.7%, the highest rate in 26 years
2000: Boris Yeltsin resigns as president of Russia and is replaced by Vladimir Putin while the Russian economy begins a rapid expansion
2000: Berlin's "Love Parade" becomes the largest dance event in the world, attended by almost one million people
2000: The population of India is one billion
2000: Socialist candidate Ricardo Lagos wins elections in Chile
2000: Oron Catts founds "SymbioticA" in Australia, a research lab for artists involved in Biology
2001: The Kingdom Centre, designed by USA architects, opens in Riyadh
2001: Tsai Ming-Liang directs the film "What Time Is It There?" (2001)
2001: The Taliban of Afghanistan destroy the century-old Buddha statues of Bamiyan
2002: Socialist candidate Luiz Inacio Lula wins the Brazilian elections
2002: Bombs by Islamists kills 182 people in Bali
2002: 42 million people are infected with AIDS (70% in Africa) and 3.1 million people die of AIDS in 2002 alone
2002: Zhang Yimou directs the film "Hero" (2002)
2002: A magnetic levitation train is inaugurated in Shanghai
2003: British architect Norman Foster builds the Swiss Re building in London
2003: Taipei 101 becomes the tallest building in the world
2003: Millions of Europeans protest against the USA invasion of Iraq
2003: USA architect John Portman builds Tomorrow Square in Shangai
2003: Charles Taylor of Liberia is indicted for war crimes by a United Nations court
2004: Chechen terrorists stage spectacular attacks in Russia including the school massacre in Beslan
2004: The government of Sudan and John Garang's army sign a peace deal
2004: Bangalore in India has 150,000 software engineers, more than the Silicon Valley in California
2004: Arab militias carry out atrocities in Sudan's Darfur region
2004: Dubai begins construction of Burj Dubai, the tallest skyscraper in the world, designed by USA architect Adrian Smith
2004: Pedro Almodovar directs the film "Bad Education" (2004)
2004: 202 people are killed by synchronized bombs planted on trains by Islamic terrorists near Madrid
2005: Canadian architect Frank Gehry builds the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles
2005: Jean Nouvel builds the Angbar Tower in Barcelona
2005: Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava builds the Turning Torso in Malmo, Sweden
2005: Socialist candidate Evo Morales wins elections in Bolivia and becomes the first indigenous president of a South American nation
2005: Four Pakistani suicide bombers kill 55 people in London
2005: There are more than 300 skyscrapers in Shangai, up from one in 1985
2005: Rineke Dijkstra publishes the photograph series "Portraits"
2006: An attack by Pakistan-based Islamic fundamentalists kill 186 people in Mumbai
2006: North Korea explodes a nuclear bomb
2006: Taliban militants adopt the suicide attacks used by insurgents in Iraq and launch 78 suicide bombings across Afghanistan
2006: Muslims riot worldwide because a Danish newspaper published cartoons of Mohammed
2006: 34,452 Iraqi civilians are killed in just one year in the Iraqi civil war
2006: USA architect Lee Polisano builds the World Financial Center in Shanghai
2007: The Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid designs Abu Dhabi's Performing Arts Centre
2007: China overtakes the USA to become the world's second largest exporter after Germany
2007: Toyota passes General Motors as the world's largest car manufacturer and Japanese car manufacturers pass USA car manufacturers even in the USA market
2007: India's GDP grows by 9.4%
2007: China overtakes all European countries and becomes the third economic power after USA and Japan
2007: 5.4 million people have died in Congo since 1998 due to war, famine and disease
2007: There are 16 million Muslims in the European Union, out of a population of 495 million
2008: Zimbabwe's unemployment reaches 80% and inflation 2.2 million percent
2008: Suicide attacks kill 1,188 people in Pakistan between july 2007 and september 2008, including Benazir Bhutto
2008: The Large Hadron Collider, the world's most powerful particle accelerator, is inaugurated at CERN
2008: Honda unveils the first mass-market hydrogen-propelled vehicle, the "FCX Clarity"
2008: An attack by Pakistani-based Islamic fundamentalists kill 164 people in Mumbai
2008: China holds an estimated $1 trillion in USA government debt
2008: Korean auto-maker Hyundai becomes the fourth-largest automaker in the world behind Toyota, General Motors and Volkswagen
2008: Cuba's dictator Fidel Castro announces retirement
2008: An Israeli invasion of Gaza kills more than 1,300 Palestinians
2008: South Africa establishes the "Joburg Art Fair", the largest art fair of Africa
2009: Supporters of opposition leader Mir Hossein Moussavi protest against rigged elections in Iran, aided by Twitter
2009: For the first time in history, most of the world's population lives in towns and cities
2009: The Internet is used by more than two billion people