| timeline we have left to be any good......
c3,000,000,000 BC: DNA provides symbolic 'memory' of useful proteins
c1,000,000,000 BC: mental models anticipate natural events
c500,000,000 BC: behavioral models anticipate creatures' reactions
memory molecules start each generation with tabula rasa
c100,000,000 BC: nocturnal dreams manifest poetic symbolism
7,000,000 BC: chimp-level society, imitative culture, gesture and facial-expressions, limited tool-use
artifacts embody intuitive sense of measure
nonverbal community knowledgebase: local personalities, local geography, shelter-skills, food and medicine skills, hunting skills, war and defense skills
selection for throwing-aim? (intuitive ballistics) 'throwing madonna' hypothesis: [etext]
2,700,000 BC: australopithecus keeps pebble that resembles a face [info]
2,340,000 BC: sophisticated stone tools (homo habilis?) [info]
100,000 BC? African diaspora; toolkit includes fire, bow and arrow, woven nets, dogs
language slowly extended to describe all important phenomena
storytelling evolves; divination employs vocabulary of probable outcomes
80,000 BC: earliest intentional burial? (hypothesis of afterlife) [info]
70,000 BC: geometric scratchings on amber [info]
40,000 BC: beads as body-ornaments [info]
35,000 BC: cave-paintings
30,000 BC: 'fertility' figurines
30,000 BC: moon-phases tracked on notched bones? [info] [more]
15,000 BC: cave painting tracks moon phases [cite]
10,000 BC? hypothetical symbolic 'language of the goddess' in southeast Europe [info]
8000 BC: navigation of Aegean (limited obsidian trade)
6500 BC: possible discovery of prime numbers? [bone]
6000 BC: desertification of Sahara [cite]
4000 BC: Egyptian bureaucracy begins to grow up around Nile-irrigation
4000 BC: accounting via clay tokens in Sumer [info]
3700 BC: complex symbols scratched on account-tokens
3500 BC: cylinder seals
3400 BC: 1st writing in Egypt (timeline of dynasties?)
3300 BC: numerical notation on tablets; cuneiform
3300 BC: Iceman carries antibiotic mushrooms [info]
3200 BC: astronomical megalith at Newgrange, Ireland
3000 BC? water clock in China
2800 BC: epic of Gilgamesh
2800 BC: construction of pyramids requires engineering and accounting
armies require increasingly sophisticated record-keeping
tax rolls; contracts, wills, banking
astrology
Aegean sea-trade (oil, wine, opium?)
2200 BC: Stonehenge (astronomical megalith) [info]
2000 BC: earliest sails
1900 BC: Sinuhe of Egypt (1st autobiography?) [etext]
1800 BC: Sumerian kinglist (early history)
1750 BC: Code of Hammurabi (legal-knowledge representation) [etext]
1700 BC: 1st consonantal alphabet, proto-canaanite [info]
wisdom literature (earliest social science?)
medical treatises
magical literature
recipes
wordlists (proto-thesaurus)
1500 BC: earliest known sundial in Egypt [cite]
1500 BC: Mesopotamian recipe for glaze written in code [cite]
1350 BC: Akhnaten's artistic revolution (realistic sculpture)
1250 BC: proto-canaanite alphabet adapted by Phoenicians [info] [pic]
1200 BC: Hierombalus of Beirut writes about Phoenician religion [cite]
1200 BC: Trojan war? hypothetical ecological collapse in Greece
1100 BC: Tiglath-pileser I of Assyria collects literature into library incl. 'humanised' version of Gilgamesh flood-epic [cite]
1000 BC: I Ching in China (binary notation, story-skeletons)
800 BC: monotheism emerges in mideast [cite]
750 BC: Homeric epics (storytelling breakthru), Hesiod's mythology
750 BC: Greeks innovate democratic ideal [cite]
700 BC: touchstone makes uniform coinage possible
pre-600 BC: abacus [cite]
Sparta innovates mandatory schooling
lyric poetry
Ionian rationalist philosophy [cite] 1st book in prose by Anaximander
650 BC: Nineveh library contains Gilgamesh [cite]
622 BC: Josiah's book of the law (proto-Deuteronomy)
600 BC? Zoroaster's metaphysical dualism
594 BC: Solon's lawcode [info]
580 BC: Aesop's fables
556 BC: Nabonidus of Babylon pursues antiquarian researches
550 BC: Pythagorean dualism (evil of flesh) nature as mathematical
534 BC: 1st Greek tragedy-competition (storytelling breakthru)
c450 BC: tragedies of Aeschylus
440 BC: histories of Herodotus
440 BC: Democritus proposes atom
432 BC: Greek calendar reform [info]
Athenian political speeches preserved
c425 BC: Socratic method of teaching
420 BC: pigeon-automaton of Archytas
c400 BC: Hippocratic medicine
c400 BC: Polyclitus, Greek sculptor (realism breakthru?)
400 BC: Ezra's Old Testament
331 BC: library at Alexandria
330 BC: Aristotle's survey of all knowledge
300 BC: Euclid's geometry
260 BC: Aristarchus of Samos estimates distance and size of moon
250 BC: Archimedes (plagiarises ancient Egyptians? debate)
240 BC: Eratosthenes measures radius of Earth
200 BC: accurate Egyptian water clock
100 BC: 1st poetry anthology, Stephanos
Rome manages Empire via bureaucracy (and army)
Roman army trains with simulated opponents? [cite]
65 BC: Antikythera mechanism simulates planetary motions [info]
c0: Strabo's Geography
horologies
candle clock
navigation
70 AD: Pliny the Elder's 39-volume universal encyclopedia
c100 AD: Epictetus
150 AD: Ptolemy synthesizes astronomical knowledge in "Mathematike Syntaxis"
200 AD: Galen
230 AD: 1st Roman actuarial table [cite]
721: Abu Hayyan prepares nitric acid, et al
750: Al Yahmadi's book on cryptography [cite]
985: astrolabe copied from Arabs
1086: Domesday Book
1098: Cistercian monastic order synthesizes self-sufficient domestic efficiency
1100: Piscan Document 1st systematic bookkeeping [cite]
c1100: Salerno first university
1160: English tally sticks offer versatile bookkeeping system [cite] [more]
c1200: Moses Maimonides codifies Talmudic law
c1200: development of kabbalah (pseudo-mathematical mysticism)
1250: Baltic traders improve ship designs
1260: Roger Bacon set the basis of empiricism
1280: water-powered paper mill in Italy
c1285: verge-and-foliot system permits mechanical clockworks
pre-1300: double-entry bookkeeping in Italy [cite]
c1300: 1st cannon smash castles
1307: Raymond Lully's combinatorial 'Ars Magna' [pic] [info] [comp sci] ditto
1314: Dante's Inferno (9-level ethical classification) [info]
1347: Occam's Razor [cite]
various revolutions in artistic realism
c1450: spring-driven clocks using sprung metal
1457: Gutenburg prints Psalter with moveable type
1466: Alberti's cypher disk [cite]
1480-1494 Leonardo de Vinci
1494: Pacioli writes 1st accounting textbook, "Summa de Arithmetica, Geometrica, Proportioni et Proportionalite" [info]
c1500: Europe adopts decimal notation [cite]
1537: Fontana's gunner's quadrant for aiming cannon
1540: Toriano's mandolin-playing automaton
1543: Copernicus
Francis Bacon critiques imprecision of natural languages [cite]
1546: Hieronymus Francastorius discovers contagious infection [cite]
1553: Belaso invents code using passphrase [cite]
1556: Agricola's "De Re Metallica" synthesizes knowledge of metals
1571: Digges' theodolite for surveying and aiming
1579: Saxton's atlas of England
1581-1632? Galileo's experiments
1595: Dutch introduce efficient 'fluyt' design for merchant ships
1600: William Gilbert's "De Magnete" synthesizes magnetism, predicts vacuum in space
1608: Lippershey invents telescope; Galileo makes astronomical observations
1605: Cervantes' Don Quixote (storytelling breakthru)
1616: Harvey discusses circulation of blood [cite]
1617: John Napier's "Napier's bones"; logarithms [cite]
1629: 20Nov: Descartes discusses universal language [cite]
1632: 1st sliderule, William Oughtred [cite]
1642: Blaise Pascal's Pascaline (automatic calculating machine) [cite]
1644: Toricelli's barometer explains puzzle re pumping out mines
1660: 1st banknotes issued by English goldsmiths [cite]
1661: Becher proposes 'mechanical dictionary' for translation [cite]
1662: Boyle's law [cite]
1668: John Wilkins proposes universal language [cite]
1671 (1694?): Leibnitz's multiplying machine [cite]
1672: Guericke's "Experimenta Nova Magdeburg." vacuum pump, static elec.
1680: Leibnitz wants to collate all knowledge; proposes resolving disputes by calculation: "Calculemus" [bio]
1683: 'bill of credit' encourages investment, leads to Bank of England
1683: Leewenhoek discovers microscopic life [cite]
1687: Newton's Principia
1688: Lloyd's coffeeshop will become Lloyd's insurance
1701: Leibnitz publishes work on binary arithmetic
1725: Vico's "New Science" calls for universal thesaurus of concepts
1725: Bouchon's automated silk loom
1726: Swift parodies Lully's(?) AI in 'Gulliver's Travels' [etext] [pic]
"These Bits of Wood were covered on every Square with Papers pasted on them; and on these Papers were written all the Words of their Language in their several Moods, Tenses. and Declensions, but without any Order. The Professor then desired me to observe, for he was going to set his Engine at work..." [quote]
1728: Chambers' "Cyclopaedia: or, An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences"
1736: Euler's differential equations for mechanics
1740: Huntsman makes crucible steel, enabling accurate watches
c1740: Halley fails to calculate comet's path [cite]
1757? comet's path calculated after many months [cite]
Industrial Revolution allows UK productivity to grow 2%/yr for next 150 yrs [cite]
Rothschild banking dynasty begins
1751-1772: Diderot's Encyclopedia
1770: Wedgwood analyses cost accounting [info]
1772: Lavoisier proposes conservation of mass in chemical reactions
1773: London Stock Exchange [cite]
1774: Jesse Ramsden innovates fast, accurate machining for sextants
1775: Wilkinson bores cylinders in cannon with guide-bar
1776: Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" (invisible-hand metaphor)
1777: Stanhope's logic demonstrator
1786: Muller's difference engine [cite]
1787: Watts' steam engine with feedback-governor
1790: metric system introduced in France
1798: Malthus's Essay on the Principles of Population.
c1800: 19 volumes of math tables prepared over 6 years in France [cite]
c1800 Jacquard loom
1800: London has just eleven 'accomptants' [cite]
1803: Robertson and Lloest measure weather in a balloon at 23,000 feet
1811: Avogadro proposes numerical constant [cite]
1817: Bessel introduces Bessel functions for three-body problem [bio]
1819: Blanchard lathe
1820: Oersted connects electricity and magnetism
1821? Babbage's paper "Observations on the Application of Machinery to the Computation of Mathematical Tables"
1821: Faraday's electric motor
1822: Babbage's Difference Engine (not completed)
1822: Thomas machine mass-produced [cite]
1824: Carnot founds thermodynamics [cite]
1825: Sturgeon's electromagnet
1830-1840: Justus von Liebeg applies quantitative analysis to biological systems [cite]
1832: Babbage's Analytic Engine (never built)
c1835: UK Royal Observatory employs computing team [cite]
1837: telegraph
1838: US Congress requires inspection of steam boilers [cite]
1839: Verhulst models population growth [cite]
1839: Babbage's Difference Engine to solve differential equations
Babbage's analytic engine planned to hold partial results in 'mill', branching via 'control', input on punched cards, printed output [cite]
1844: Britain requires system of auditors [cite]
1846: faster telegraphy using punched tape
1846: Joule demonstrates mechanical nature of heat [cite]
1847: Boole's symbolic logic (1854?)
1852: Roget's Thesaurus
1855: spring: Rockefeller studies bookkeeping [bio]
1855: France establishes network of weather stations
1855: Silliman distills various useful fractions from petroleum [cite]
1855: Andrew Carnegie and JE Thomson develop sophisticated cost accounting [cite] [more]
1856: Flaubert's Madame Bovary (storytelling breakthru) [info]
1860: Pasteur's germ theory [cite]
1861: Francis Galton's book of weather maps
1863: 1st patent for player piano
1867: Karl Marx 'Das Kapital' (socioeconomic model) [etext]
1869: Bagehot's "Physics and Politics or Thoughts on the Application of the Principles of 'Natural Selection' and 'Inheritance' to Political Society"
1869: WS Jevons' Logical Piano
1869: periodic table of Mendeleev
1873: Dewey Decimal System
1874: WT Odhner's calculator 1st to use much-copied pinwheel principle (30k sold)
1874? Albert Fink innovates cost-per-ton-mile for railroad accounting [cite] [bio]
1870s: US Nautical Almanac, Harvard Observatory employ computing teams [cite]
1876: Lord Kelvin's analyzer
1877: Edison's phonograph
1878: Muybridge's zoopraxiscope
1878: Verea's multiplying machine
1879: Frege's notation for predicate calculus
1881: Frederick Taylor's time-motion studies
1881: Marquand's logic machine
1883: Reynolds publishes theory of Reynolds number [cite]
1884: Galton's 1st anthropometric lab (statistical physical anthropology)
1884: Felt models 1st 'Comptometer' in macaroni box [pg-imgs]
1884: international standardisation of 24 timezones (to accommodate telegraph and railroads) [info]
1885: Burroughs adding machine [cite]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
digital era
1886: CS Pierce proposes electrical version of Marquand's logic machine
(the full world of meanings previously embodied in images, words, numbers and algorithms now had to be rethought as bits)
pre-1890: US Census (Hollerith and Powers) innovates keypunch, sorter, tabulator [cite]
1889: Bollee's Multiplier (multiplication machine)
1890: Venn diagrams
1890: 30Aug: Scientific American features Hollerith's punched-card computer (13M cards for 60M individuals)
1891: rotary-dial telephone replaces human operator [passim]
1892: Galton publishes study of fingerprints [cite]
1893: Torres' algebraic equation solver can find roots of 9th-degree polynomials
1893: Steiger's 'Millionaire' calculating machine sells 4655 by 1935
1893: Edison's kinetoscope
1895: Gore's actuarial punchcard system
1897: Durkheim's 'Suicide' surveys theory of 'social contagion' [history]
1898: Michelson-Stratton 80-element harmonic analyzer
1899: Veblen's "Theory of the Leisure Class"
1899? early Burroughs machines unworkable
1900: Polti's "36 Dramatic Situations" (story skeletons)
1901: 1st issue of Karl Pearson's 'Biometrika: a journal for the statistical study of biological problems'
1901: Davis' Handbook of Chemical Engineering [cite]
1902: Rechnitzer calculator multiplies and divides [cite]
1903: Pastore's belt-driven syllogism-processor
1903: DuPont innovates cost accounting (return on investment) [cite]
1903: 28Dec: Janos 'John' von Neumann born in Hungary [bio]
1904: Bjerknes' "Weather Forecasting as a Problem in Mechanics and Physics"
1905: Einstein's miracle-year (relativity, etc)
tickertape
telephone switches [history]
Steinmetz uses complex numbers to analyse electrical circuits [passim]
1910: Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica
1910: Bjerknes' "Dynamic Meteorology and Hydrography"
1912: Vannevar Bush's Profile Tracer automates surveying of elevations
1913: HG Wells' "Little Wars" rulebook for miniatures wargames [timeline]
1914: IBM's sales force popularizes computation in business
1914: Pearson's 'Tables for Statisticians and Biometricians'
1914: Fischer and Harris's tide predictor tracks 37 tidal components
WWI: computing teams on both sides produce shipping statistics, propellor-stress analysis, map grids, surveying aids, navigation tables and artillery tables [cite] (Norbert Wiener works at Aberdeen Proving Ground)
US War Industries Board headed by Bernard Baruch regulates all US production
1915? Torres' chess-machine plays endgame
1915: Arthur Little breaks down chemical engineering into 'unit operations' [cite]
1917: Thorndike and Yerkes' psych-tests for military
1917: Lanchester's 'Aircraft in Warfare' uses math analysis
1918: 14Jul: Jay Forrester born in Nebraska [bio]
1919: Pearson's textbooks for human-computers 'Tracts for Computers'
1919: Eccles-Jordan design flip-flop [cite]
1919: Lewis Fry Richardson's 'Mathematical Psychology of War' [site]
US Dept of Agriculture hires computing team [cite] to process farm data
1920: Monroe desk calculator [cite]
1920: Torres' electromechanical arithmometer solves problems typed in at keyboard, prints answers, theoretically supports time-sharing
1922: James Joyce's "Ulysses" (18-part psychological encyclopedia) [info]
1922: Minorsky analyses autopilot ('gyropilot') for ships
1922: Richardson's 'Weather Prediction by Numerical Process' [cite] [site]
1923: Alfred Sloan at General Motors innovates cost accounting [info] raids DuPont for talent
1923: Enigma code-machine marketed [cite]
1923: Ogden and Richards "The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism" [info]
c1925: Vannevar Bush's Product Integraph integrates complex curves using analog electronics
analog computers use voltage, resistance, translation and rotation as metaphors [passim]
1926: Jan: 1st issue of 'Industrial Psychology: the journal of human engineering'
1926: Dodd's Correlators used to predict hybrid yields, for industrial psych and vocational guidance
1926: FR Moulton's mathematical analysis of ballistics
1927: 'The Jazz Singer' 1st talking picture
1927: Propp's "Morphology of the Folktale" (story skeletons) [31 functions] [monomyth]
1927: USSR's 5yr-plan relies on punchcard technology
1927: Von Neumann's formalisation of quantum mechanics
1927-1930: Vannevar Bush builds 1st mechanical differential analyzer [cite]
1928: education-theorist Ben D Wood inventories 'baccalaureate mind'
1928: Von Neumann pioneers game theory
1929: Ed Link's flight simulator (evolved into Blue Box Link Trainer) [tech] [pic] [bio]
1929: Roeder's patent application describes advanced flight-sim concepts [cite]
1929: Cannon coins term 'homeostasis'
1930: Ogden and Richards' Basic English offers reduced 850-word vocabulary [website]
1930s: systematic study of industrial chemical reactions [cite]
1930-1936: LJ Comrie replaces human computing teams with mechanical calculators at UK Naval Almanac Office [cite] (Brunsvigas, Burroughs Class 16, National-Ellis 16, National Accounting Machines, Hollerith punched cards; capacity matches Babbage's plans) also used for geographical triangulation
1932: 1st ballistics calculations using Bush differential analyzer [cite] [more] (full 'firing tables' by 1936, later 'bombing tables')
each weapon-ammunition combination, each different terrain requires revised tables; complex enough to account for the fact that the projectile is a rigid body acted on by several forces and moments
1933: Georges Artsrouni and Petr Troyanskii separately apply for patents on translation-machines [cite] (electric dictionaries)
1934: US Army Air Corps adopts Link's flight trainer [info]
1935: Bush begins revised analyzer with electrical re-programmability [cite]
1930s: radiation counters [cite]
1930s: Eckert's electronic multiplier for IBM [cite]
no-date: Eckert measures electric fields and records measurements on film [cite]
1930s? Mauchly's Harmonic Analyzer for weather statistics [cite]
1933: Hooton's anthropometric study of criminals uses Hollerith machine
1934: Hazen's 'Theory of Servo-Mechanisms'
1934: John Wilbur's Simultaneous Equation Solver
1935: Zipf's "Psychobiology of Languages" calls memes 'actemes' [passim]
1935: Gallup pioneers statistical opinion-sampling
1935: IBM 805 is 1st test-scoring machine (reads pencil-marks)
1935: Ray-O-Lite target-shooting game uses photo-tube to detect lightbeam [history]
1936: Chaplin's 'Modern Times' protests automation
1936: Lovejoy's "Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea" landmark in history of ideas (proposes concept of 'unit-ideas' passim)
1936: Social Security program tracks 26M US employees using 80-column punchcards
1936: Keynes' "General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money" (macroeconomic representation-breakthru)
1936: LJ Comrie founds Scientific Computing Service [cite] helps locate German radio guidance transmitters in WW2, prepares wind graphs for sound-ranging analysis [cite]
no-date: journal "Mathematical Tables and other aids to computation" [cite]
1937: Artsrouni's electric dictionary demoed at Paris world's fair [cite]
1937: Leontief equations for economic predictions
1937: Talcott Parsons' "The Structure of Social Action" ("could not be modeled at all because of the unclarity and inconsistencies in Parsons' use of concepts" cite)
1937: Turing conceives Turing machine
1937: Aiken proposes using punchards for control (not just for data) in Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (cites Babbage's design) [cite]
1937: Japanese 'Purple' code-machine uses relays [cite]
1938: Shannon's "Symbolic Analysis of Switching Circuits"
1938-1942: Gertrude Blanch directs WPA's mathematical tables project [bio] ballistics calculations for the Army, navigation tables for the Navy, and fundamental calculations for the Manhattan Project
1930s: math tables distributed as punchcard decks [cite]
1938: advances in ballistics theory require new tables [cite]
1939: Joyce's "Finnegans Wake" (universal psychological indexing-system?) [info]
1939: Richardson's 'Generalized Foreign Politics: a study in group psychology' [site]
1939: Stibitz's Complex Number Computer for Bell Labs [history] used to design telephone circuits (amplifiers and filters)
1939: German mechanical simulation of A-4 (V2) rocket [cite]
WW2: computing teams calculate ballistics trajectories, shock wave propagation, stresses on airframes, navigation tables, efficient bombing plans, radar reflections, optimal production strategies, and likely cipher keys [cite]
Cambridge Math Lab explores high-explosives theory [cite]
Manchester group calculates heat flow in rocket tubes, a study of servomechanisms in fire control equipment, the propagation of blast waves and many other investigations [cite]
Royal Aircraft Establishment pressed for permission to install Hollerith punched card machines in their structural and mechanical engineering department, to help to solve the large sets of simultaneous equations arising from their work on structural stress in aircraft bodies [cite]
Nautical Almanac Office undertakes calculation involved in mine design [cite]
Mine Department of HMS Vernon uses human to do calculations concerning electrical circuits
1939-1944: Aiken's Mark I Relay Computer (Automatic Sequence-Controlled Calculator) [cite] calculates tables of Bessel functions [history]
1940: 22yo Jay Forrester works at MIT's Servomechanisms Lab [cite]
1940: Rediffusion builds 1st air-navigation trainer [cite] related developments for gunnery instruction, torpedo attack trainer, tank trainer, night vision tester, Fixed-Gun Trainer
1940: 11Sep: remote demo of Bell's Complex Number Computer witnessed by von Neumann, Wiener, Erdos, Birkhoff, Courant [cite]
1940: Atanasoff and Mauchly compare notes (applying same tech to different domains) [cite]
1941: Atanasoff-Berry Computer solves linear equations for theoretical physics [cite]
1941: electronic analog simulation of A-4 rocket [cite]
1941: 25yo Robert McNamara teaching management-via-statistics at Harvard, consults extensively for War Dept until 1945
1941: Dec: Zuse's Z3 built to solve wing-flutter design problem [cite] 1st use of floating-point representation
1942: Colossus models German code-machine [cite]
1942? Bell's M-9 Gun Director uses analog electronics [info] developed using simulations which inspired 1943's Relay Interpolator
1942: Mauchly's "The Use of Vacuum Tube Devices for Calculating" [cite] [more]
no-date: Travis mechanical-serial adding machines
no-date: analog-controls for antiaircraft guns [passim] [more]
1940s: V2-rocket guidance simulated electronically [cite]
1943: McCulloch and Pitts' "Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity" [info]
1943: Zuse's S1 for fine-tuning of flying bombs [info]
1943: Bell Telephone Labs PBM-3 electronic flight trainer
1943: 02Apr: Mauchly's electronic differential analyzer proposal [cite] [history] became Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer (ENIAC) cost $500k [tech]
1943: 06Sep: Churchill advocates Basic English for propaganda? [cite]
1943-1945: Admiralty Computing Service investigates theory of supersonic flow, stresses in turbines, and a statistical investigation into the night vision capabilities of naval personnel [cite]
1944: Von Neumann and Morgenstern "Theory of Games and Economic Behavior"
1944: Jun: John von Neumann consults with ENIAC team on stored programming [cite]
"suggested that code selection be made by means of switches so that cable connections could remain fixed for most standard trajectory problems" [cite]
1944: Forrester undertakes design of reprogrammable analog computer for aviation design and flight simulation for Navy [cite] Airplane Stability and Control Analyzer (ASCA) [info]
1944-1951: work on EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Calculator/Computer) [cite] used mercury-quartz delay lines with 1k-words storage capacity, 1MHz, binary representation, teletype-and-magnetic-wire i/o, cost $500k [history]
"1. Exterior ballistics problems such as high altitude, solar and lunar trajectories, computation for the preparation of firing tables, and guidance control data for Ordnance weapons, including free-flight and guided missiles.
2. Interior ballistics problems, including projectile, propellant and launcher behavior, e.g., physical characteristics of solid propellants, equilibrium composition and thermodynamic properties of rocket propellants, computation of detonation waves for reflected shock waves, vibration of gun barrels and the flow of fluids in porous media.
3. Terminal ballistics problems, including nuclear, fragmentation, and penetration effects in such areas as explosion kinetics, shaped charge behavior, ignition, and heat transfer.
4. Ballistic measurement problems, including photogrammetric, ionospheric, and damping of satellite spin calculations, reduction of satellite doppler tracking data, and computation of satellite orbital elements.
5. Weapon systems evaluation problems, including antiaircraft and antimissile evaluation, war game problems, linear programming for solution of Army logistical problems, probabilities of mine detonations, and lethal area and kill probability studies of missiles."
1945: Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think" 1st knowledge interface design (inspires 20yo Englebart)
1945? McNamara and fellow whiz-kids move from US military to Ford
1945: 01Oct: start of Project RAND [history]
1945: Nov: ENIAC test-runs simulate nuclear chain-reactions [cite] neutron diffusion modeled using Monte Carlo method (in 1947?) [cite] for hydrogen bomb [cite] requires 1M punched cards for input [cite]
could store ten 10-digit decimal numbers, i/o via card-reader/card-punch
"The ENIAC was built primarily for integration of the equations of external ballistics by a step-by-step process, but it was flexible enough to be applied to a wide range of large-scale computations other than numerical integration of differential equations... weather prediction, atomic energy calculations, cosmic ray studies, thermal ignition, random number studies, wind tunnel design, and other scientific uses." [cite]
1946: Jan: Engineering Research Associates (ERA) is 'privatised' Navy crypto lab [cite]
1946: Feb: 1st public demo of ENIAC [cite] War Dept pr describes "The Uses of Computers in Industry"
1946: Jul: ENIAC simulates wing aerodynamics [cite]
1940s: punchcard autopilot demonstrated [cite]
no-date: Bell Relay Computers [cite]
1947: RAND begins recruiting social scientists [cite]
1947: 04Mar: machine-translation discussed by Weaver and Wiener [info]
1948: Wiener's Cybernetics
1948: Richardson's 'War Moods' (mathematical model of arms race) [info]
1948: 14May: RAND incorporates as nonprofit [history]
1948: Jul: US Army initiates General Research Office (later Operations Research Office) to apply operations research to tactics [cite]
1949: RAND's Handbook on the Theory of Games
1949: Wilkes' EDSAC
1949: Ed Link's F-80 jet simulator uses electronic analog computer [cite] [more]
1949: ERCO (Engineering and Research Corp) builds electronic flight sims [cite]
1949: Jay Forrester's Whirlwind [pix]
1949-1952: ORDVAC [history] can be operated semi-remotely via teletype
"Ballistic computations, such as firing and bombing tables and trajectories for guided missiles and rockets, formed forty percent of the work done by ORDVAC. Vulnerability computations and data reductions formed twenty-five percent and twenty percent respectively. Research problems formed ten percent and systems tests formed five percent of the work."
1949: BINAC (flight simulation?)
1949: Jul: Warren Weaver speculates on a universal language to aid machine translation [info]
1950: 10Jan: Reifler proposes machine translation be assisted by human 'pre-editor' markup [cite]
1950: SEAC developed by Samuel Alexander at the National Bureau of Standards
1950: Remington Rand acquires Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation
1950: Alan Turing "Computing Machinery and Intelligence"
1950: Forrester's Whirlwind research redirected to SAGE (Semi-Automated Ground Environment) [history]
1950: ENIAC finally generates numerical weather-forecast based on Bjerknes's 1910 principles
1950: 30Nov: Kaplan proposes machine-translation take into account the words before and after the target word [cite]
1950s: Amundson and Aris advocate mathematical modeling for chemical engineers [cite]
1951: Engineering Research Associates' ERA 1103 (1st to market)
1951: UNIVAC (one to Census Bureau, two to Air Materiel Command: cite)
1951: Bar-Hillel surveys potential of machine translation [info] emphasizes problem of semantic ambiguity, recommends artificial exchange-language
1951: JE Holmstrom astutely predicts failure of machine-translation dream [cite]
1951: preprogrammed plugboards added to ENIAC [cite]
1951: Cybernetics Congress held in Paris
1952: Raydac for missile testing [passim]
1952:Jun: 1st machine-translation conference at MIT [account] Bar-Hillel stresses syntactic parsing (Jay Forrester attends)
1952: Nov: Univac predicts Eisenhower landslide [cite]
1953: Shannon gives 26yo Marvin Minsky and 26yo John McCarthy summer jobs at Bell Labs
1953: RAND pioneers dynamic programming [cite]
1953: RAND study "Efficiency and Economy in Government Through New Budgeting and Accounting Procedures" [cite]
1954: 07Jan: demo of Georgetown-IBM machine translator [account] Russian to English, 250-word vocab, IBM 701
1954: GE buys a Univac for accounting, manufacturing planning and control functions [cite] Arthur Andersen handles the payroll software [cite]
1954: Link Aviation merges with General Precision Equipment [cite]
1954? magnetic drum memory
1955: 1st industrial-robot design
1955: RAND publishes book of 1M random digits [cite]
1955: Computer Usage Corporation simulates oil-flow [cite]
1955: at Aberdeen, EDVAC, ORDVAC, and ENIAC together are unable to keep up with ballistic calculations for artillery, rockets, and guided missiles [cite]
aviation design
expanding bureaucracies of the federal government-- military logistics and procurement operations of the USAF Air Material Command and the Office of Air Comptroller; records keeping of the Census Bureau, U.S. Patent Office, or the Social Security Administration
1956: Weed's Problem-Oriented Medical Record [info]
1956: Ulam's chess program Maniac I
1956: Kleene's "Representation of events in nerve nets and finite automata" [info]
1956: Institute For Mathematics And Computers In Simulation (IMACS) founded as AICA?
1956: Rockefeller funds Minsky and McCarthy's AI conference at Dartmouth
1956: Forrester switches from SAGE to business [bio] invents 'system dynamics'
1956: Aiken's "The Future of Automatic Computing Machinery" [cite]
"... if it should ever turn out that the basic logics of a machine designed for the numerical solution of differential equations coincide with the logics of a machine intended to make bills for a department store, I would regard this as the most amazing coincidence that I have ever encountered."
1956: JL Austin's "A Plea for Excuses" (ordinary language analysis) [bio] demonstrated that our 'ear' for language-use has a subtle wisdom of its own
1956: Jun: CIA funds GAT machine-translation project (General Analysis Technique, or Georgetown Automatic Translation) [info] domain-specific for organic chemistry
1956: Newell, Shaw, and Simon's Logic Theorist
1957: Newell, Shaw, and Simon's General Problem Solver
1957: RAND's IPL (Information Processing Language) [cite]
1957: RAND spins off nonprofit Systems Development Corp [cite] focused on software for SAGE [cite] larger than rest of RAND; trains 10k in compsci by 1963 [cite]
1957: RAND undertakes machine-translation project [passim]
1957: machines being developed by IBM, Sperry Rand, the Universities of Illinois and California, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the National Bureau of Standards [cite]
1957: Chomsky's "Syntactic Structures"
1957: 1st issue of 'Journal of Conflict Resolution'
1957: Sputnik galvanises US scientific priorities
1957: Jack Scruby launches War Game Digest [timeline]
1957: Sep: 1st issue of journal 'Information and Control' [tocs] [more] [most]
1958: ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) founded for long-range high-risk research [cite] ballistic missile defense, nuclear test detection, propellants, and materials
1958: NASA founded
1958: Avalon Hill publishes 1st modern military board games [timeline]
1958: EDVAC gets FPU [cite]
1958: 25Mar: 1st fly-by-wire aircraft [cite]
1958: SAGE becomes operational, uses CRT displays and lightpens [cite] (ultimate cost $10B)
no-date: CRTs generate vector-graphics using 'display list' of primitive objects (points, lines, curves) [info]
1958: Nov: McCarthy proposes 'Advice Taker' which morphs into LISP [cite]
1959: Minsky and McCarthy establish MIT AI Lab
1959: Frank Rosenblatt introduces Perceptron
1959: RAND pioneers linear programming, Simplex algorithm [cite]
1959: Samuel's checkers program
1959: computer-control of chemical plants demonstrated [cite]
1959? Project Mercury analog flight simulator for NASA astronaut training [info]
1959: Nov: Society for Computer Simulation International (SCS) (formerly the Simulation Councils, then Society for Computer Simulation)
1960: Bar-Hillel's "Demonstration of the Nonfeasibility of Fully Automatic High-Quality Translation (FAHQT)" deflates dreams of easy machine translation [info] points out that (impractical) 'universal encyclopedia' will be prerequisite
1960: Robert McNamara impressed by RAND's "The Economics of Defense in the Nuclear Age", hires 'whiz kids' (aka 'happy little hotdogs') incl Charles Hitch and Alain Enthoven (Office of Systems Analysis) [cite] implements RAND's Planning-Programming-Budgeting System (PPBS) [crit]
used measures like "maximum enemy harm inflicted per dollar spent"; rated biz-school training far above military experience
1960: RAND starts JOHNNIAC Open Shop System (JOSS) [cite]
1961: historical monograph "Electronic Computers within the Ordnance Corps" [etext]
"Almost every commodity industry such as oil, steel, and rubber is utilizing computing equipment for both scientific and commercial applications. Service industries, such as banking, transportation, and insurance have applied large scale computing systems toward the solution of problems in the fields of accounting, reservations control, and bookkeeping. Manufacturers have used computing systems for design engineering and scientific research. Many systems are being utilized for inventory and stock control. The determination of manufacturing plant location and stock parts storage are being made by linear programming methods. Electronic computers are used by the construction industry for design and location of structures and road nets. Many digital computers form a part of closed loop industrial process control systems."
1961: strategy game Diplomacy [timeline]
1961? Mortimer Adler's Great Ideas [info] (philosophical knowledge representation)
1961: IBM's Stretch supercomputers used for nuclear weapons research [cite]
1961: development of Simula begun [history] [timeline]
1961: 27Sep: IBM releases Gordon's block-based General Purpose Systems Simulator (GPSS) [cite] [history] FAA simulates weather-bulletin transmission
block-types: originate, generate, call, advance, branch, seize, release, hold, interrupt, preempt, return, enter, leave, store, queue, split, match, assign, mark, tabulate, tag, transfer, gate, write, terminate [theory]
1960s: GE innovates activity-based costing (ABC) [info]
1962: Iverson's APL optimised for matrix math
1962: ARPA starts Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) under JCR Licklider [cite]
1962: 1st industrial robots
1962: McCarthy moves to Stanford, creates Stanford AI Lab in '63
1962: RAND's SimScript language [cite] Harry Markowitz, Bernard Hausner and Herbert Karr, to simulate inventory problems
In England J. Buxton and J. Laski developed CSL, the Control and Simulation Language. Don Knuth and J. McNeley produced SOL- A symbolic Language for General Purpose System Simulation [cite]
1962: Oct: Doug Engelbart's "Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework" [etext] [history]
1963: journal 'Simulation'
1963: Tocher's "Art of Simulation"
1963: wargamers innovate algorithm for 'infectious morale' [timeline]
1963: AT&T starts using digital switches [cite]
1963: Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad 1st object-oriented graphics editor [info] [ideas] [constraints?]
"It was not just a tool to draw things. It was a program that obeyed laws that you wanted to be held true." --Alan Kay [cite]
"It allowed users to define and draw new shapes by specifying and applying constraints to standard shapes chosen from a pallette. This system included point constraints, linkage constraints, and angular constraints and solved these constraints through an interactive relaxation technique. A user viewed an animated sequence of the constraint solution as it forced the object to transform to a desired shape." [cite]
1963: Quillian lays groundwork for semantic nets
1963: ARPA gives $2 million grant to MIT AI Lab
1963: Project Gemini analog/digital flight simulator [info]
1964: Bobrow's "Student" solves math word-problems
1964: Napoleonic wargame innovates historically accurate rules [timeline]
1964: Feb: Simula's 'process' concept emerges after multiple stacks added to Algol [cite] will be renamed 'object'
process-object states and facilities: Active, Suspended, Passive, Terminated; Activate, Reactivate, Hold, Passivate, Cancel, Wait
1964: Mar: workshop on Simulation Languages at Stanford [cite]
1964: IBM's SABRE system for airline reservations (evolved from SAGE) [cite]
1964: ADR creates semi-automated flowcharting app 'AutoFlow' for RCA [history]
1964: McNamara's Vietnam strategy based on graphs of bodycounts, observed enemy activity, weapons captured, etc (overlooks morale?)
1965: Feigenbaum takes over SAIL; Noftsker takes over MIT AI Lab
1965: Feigenbaum and Lederberg begin DENDRAL expert system project (molecular-structure analysis)
1965: wargamers introduce algorithm for positive morale [timeline]
1965: LBJ implements RAND's Planning-Programming-Budgeting System (PPBS) thruout executive branch [cite]
"In health care, systems analysis was used for the design and experimental testing of health insurance systems; in education, design and experimental testing of school voucher systems; in housing, for the analysis of rent control and the design of a housing allowance system; and in design of public systems for transportation, water supply and communications. Internationally, especially at IIASA (International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis: 1972), they were used for climate modeling and other global problems... [but] most of the planning problems of most of the civilian departments, like those of higher education, were far different from those military planning problems which had proved susceptible to systems analysis."
Urban Institute was modeled after RAND and headed by RAND and Defense Department alumnus William Gorham. The Office of Economic Opportunity's Research, Program Planning and Evaluation Office was run by a succession of RAND alumni. [cite]
1966: Weizenbaum and Colby create ELIZA
1966? development of Project Apollo flight simulators begins [info]
1966: Nov: Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee (ALPAC) report "Languages and machines: computers in translation and linguistics" kills funding for machine translation [account] focuses exclusively on US govt translation of Russian documents, concludes humans are cost-effective at less than 6c/word (post-editing slower than direct translation) more than $10M had been spent so far by US govt
systems tested: Bunker-Ramo; Computer Concepts; USAF Foreign Technology Division; Euratom
1966: Simula is 1st object-oriented programming language
1966: 1st role-playing game uses WW2 setting [timeline]
1967? Ken Thompson adds regexps to QED [history] (generalised representation of string-patterns)
1967: Boole & Babbage's Problem Program Evaluator [cite] later Configuration Utilization Evaluator
1967: Greenblatt's MacHack defeats Hubert Deyfus at chess
1967: RAND statistical models predict the number and skill mix of aircraft mechanics required for unscheduled maintenance [cite]
1967: May: Simula-67 renames activities and processes as classes and objects [cite] [intro]
1967: Jef Raskin's thesis "A Hardware-Independent Computer Drawing System Using List-Structured Modeling: The Quick-Draw Graphics System" [info]
1967: Sep: Tunnicliffe [obit] proposes separation of formatting from document-content? [history]
1967: Nicholas Negroponte starts Architecture Machine Group (ArchMac) at MIT (morphs into Media Lab by 1985) [info] to create tools for collaboration between designer and computer
no-date: Alan Kay reads Sketchpad-thesis and Simula-docs while getting PhD at Utah under Evans [cite] [history]
"I suddenly realized that Simula was a programming language to do what Sketchpad did. I had never really understood what Sketchpad was. I get shivers now thinking of it. It rotated my point of view through a different dimension and nothing has been the same since. I suddenly understood the purpose of higher level languages."
1967: Nov: Conference on Application of Simulation using GPSS [cite]
1968: Evans and Sutherland founded to build graphical simulations [history] [more]
1968: Peter Toma starts Systran software project [timeline]
1968: GE 1st nuclear power-plant simulator [cite]
1968: GPE (flight sims) merges with Singer [cite]
1968: Apr: JCR Licklider and Robert Taylor's "The Computer as a Communication Device" [history]
1968: Kubrick's "2001" introduces AI to mass audience
1968: 09Dec: Doug Englebart demos "Augment/NLS" hypertext-editing sys (w/tiled windows?) [RealVid] [history] Alan Kay is present
"In Augment two windows can show two aspects of the same object. A change to an object via either window may be seen thru both windows." [cite]
1968: Dec: 2nd Conference on Application of Simulation using GPSS [cite] 700 attendees
1969: Alan Kay and Edward Cheadle design Flex system [cite] windows (non-overlapping?), tablet for input
1969: Minsky & Papert's "Perceptrons" kills funding for neural net research
1969: Schelling's "Models of Segregation" at RAND (cellular automata model) [info] [French site]
1969: crude anesthesia simulator flops [info]
1969: Apollo Lunar Module uses fly-by-wire [cite]
1969: Joel Moses writes MacSyma in Lisp [cite] (symbolic-math representation)
1969: 1st Summer Computer Simulation Conference
1969: G Spencer Brown's "Laws of Form" (boolean arithmetic) [info]
1969: IBM asks Charles Goldfarb to implement database of legal documents; need for standard markup leads to Goldfarb-Mosher-Lorie Generalized Markup Language (GML) [cite]
1969: Buckminster Fuller launches utopian 'World Game' [info]
1970: Terry Winograd's SHRDLU, minor NLP success
1970: 'Marseille Prolog' inspired by Colmerauer [cite]
1970? development of Space Shuttle simulators begins [info]
1970: US Air Force uses Systran machine-translation [cite]
1970: Pople and Myers' Internist (diagnosis of diseases)
1970: Feistel's Lucifer-cypher (leads to DES) [cite]
1970: Xerox (under CEO Peter McColough) founds Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) to develop office of the future, under George Pake and Robert Taylor [history] 50 top thinkers hired
1970: 17Mar: Stanley Rice proposes structural markup? [cite]
1970: Jun: Codd's 'relational' database design resolves messy kludges [etext]
1970: Evans and Sutherland simulate Volkswagen Beetle [cite]
1970: Emshoff's "A Computer Simulation Model of the Prisoner's Dilemma"
1970: Conway invents cellular automaton 'Life' [timeline]
1970: 15Oct: Goldfarb, Mosher, and Peterson's "Online System for Integrated Text Processing" will lead to SGML [etext]
1971: 17yo Jorn Barger's 1st behavioral sim (dorm friendships) in Fortran [passim]
I assigned a hypothetical 'potential liking' value to each pair of students in my dorm, and then generated random meeting-events in which their 'actual' liking-value gradually converged on that level.
Limits to Growth [pic source]
1972: spring: 'Limits to Growth' by Club of Rome (eco-sim) [history] [model]
1972: DARPA cancels funding for robotics at Stanford (Shakey)
1972: Cohen, March and Olson's Garbage Can Model of Organizations
1972: Xerox launches Alto project [info]
1972: Oct: Alan Kay's Smalltalk-72, for Dynabook project at Xerox [info] written in Basic, 1000 lines, ported to assembly in December
1973: Lighthill report kills AI funding in UK
1973: Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson create Dungeons and Dragons for TSR (Tactical Studies Rules) [history]
1973: LOGO funding scandal: Minsky & Papert turn MIT lab over to Winston
1973-1975: Bravo wordprocessor at Xerox by Butler Lampson, Charles Simonyi et al [info]
1974: Edward Shortliffe's thesis on MYCIN (prescribing antibiotics)
1974: Minsky reifies the 'frame' [outline]
1974? DEC's TYPESET-10 and TYPESET-11 w/video display editing and powerful macro abilities, letterspacing, kerning, etc. [info]
1975: David Canfield Smith's Pygmalion programming environment [info]
1975: John Gaffney working under John Warnock at Evans and Sutherland creates 'E&S Design System' (Forth-like language for 3D databases, leads to PostScript) [info] [more] Gaffney learned stack-oriented programming on Burroughs at U of Illinois
1975: Intl Society for Ecological Modeling (ISEM) formed in Denmark [info]
1975: Space Shuttle engine simulator [cite]
1976: DARPA cancels funding for speech understanding research
1976: Greenblatt creates first LISP machine, "CONS"
1976: Doug Lenat's AM (Automated Mathematician)
1976: Marr's "primal sketch" improves computer vision
1976: Smalltalk-76 adds inheritance, click-n-drag popup menus [paper] [Horn]
1976: Stallman writes first Emacs in TECO (screen-oriented?)
1976: Dawkins' "Selfish Gene" popularises sociobiological modelling
1976: Leibenstein's "Beyond Economic Man: A New Foundation for Microeconomics"
1976: public-key crypto [cite] (RSA algorithm 1977)
1976: 'Meteo' translates weather reports [cite]
1977? Borning's ThingLab (Smalltalk simulation app) [docs]
1977? Bob Sproull and William Newman at Xerox create device-independent page-image description scheme for dot-matrix printers called 'Press format' [cite] (leads to PostScript)
1978: Marr & Nishihara's "2.5-D sketch"
1978 (1982?): SRI's Prospector discovers molybdenum vein
1978: Patrick Hayes' "Naive Physics Manifesto"
1978: Schelling's "Micromotives and Macrobehavior" w/Residential Tipping Model
1978: Xerox begins using Systran [timeline]
1979: VisiCalc
1979? Temple of Apshai dungeon-game for Apple
1979: Bruce Artwick's 1st Flight Simulator for Apple and TRS-80 [history]
1979: Dec: Larry Tesler at Xerox PARC demos Smalltalk for Apple (at Raskin's instigation: cite) inspiring windows & mouse for Lisa&Mac
c1980: CAD-CAM (?) enjoys price drop, popularity [cite]
1980: Jorn Barger's Anti-Math [etext] (story representation language)
1980: Smalltalk-80 uses model-view-controller architecture [theory]
1980: First AAAI conference at Stanford
1980: McDermott's XCON for configuring VAX systems
1980? Chris Crawford's Energy Czar [passim]
c1980: US accounting procedures too rigid, Japanese sieze advantage [cite]
1981: May: pre-release of Matlab? (Matrix Lab) [abstract]
1981: Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman "Sociocultural Transmission and Evolution: A Quantitative Approach"
1981: Kazuhiro Fuchi announces Japanese Fifth Generation Project
1981: Hyprotech's Hysim, 1st chemical-process simulation software for IBM PC (later: DESIGN II, ASPEN, SIMSCI (PROII), & CHEMCAD) [cite]
1981: Cham's Phoenics for computational fluid dynamics [cite] (modules added for heating and ventilating of buildings, electronics-cooling, chemical-vapour-deposition reactors, river-oil-spill analysis, steam-condenser simulation, and cooling-tower design)
1981: Wizardry for Apple ][
1981: Chris Crawford's Eastern Front for Atari 800
1981: Zeeman's "Dynamics of the Evolution of Animal Conflicts"
1982: John Hopfield resuscitates neural nets
1982: Maynard Smith's "Evolution and the Theory of Games"
1982: Weed founds PKC for medical problem-knowledge couplers [info]
1982: Bob Sproull, Butler Lampson, and John Warnock at Xerox merge 'Press format' with 'JaM' to make Interpress (Xerox's version of PostScript) [cite]
1982: RAND begins automated war-gaming in which computer models can substitute for human players [cite]
1983: Bill Budge's Pinball Construction Set for Apple II, 1st object-oriented 8-bit? [interview] [more]
1983? Chris Crawford's demo 'Gossip' [cite]
1983: CMU's 'Soar' (State, Operator And Result) (cognitive model/AI environment) [faq]
1983: SLAM II simulation software for IBM PC [cite]
1983: MCC consortium formed under Bobby Ray Inman
1983: DARPA's Stategic Computing Initiative commits $600 million over 5 yrs
1984: Jan: Apple intros Macintosh
1984: 15Mar: 1st PostScript manual shipped [cite] [theory] [links]
1984: 25Apr: Xerox abruptly decides to release Interpress specs [cite]
1984: Austin AAAI conference launches AI into financial spotlight
1984: Doug Lenat begins Cyc project at MCC
1984: Mathworks' Matlab [quickstart]
1984: Wolfram popularises 1-D automata [cite]
1984: Axelrod's "Evolution of Cooperation" [info] [critique] inspires 'Axelrod industry'
1984: Braitenberg's "Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology"
1984: Dewdney and Jones's Core Wars
1984: Santa Fe Institute founded [website]
1984: Jun: Robert Scheifler extends W and calls it X (v1) [GooJa] [ditto] [crit]
1984-86: Corporations invest some $50 million in AI startups
no-date: Bill Budge gives up idea of 'Construction Set Construction Set' [cite]
1985: GM and Campbell's Soup find expert systems don't need LISP machines
1985? earliest netnews mention of George A Miller's WordNet [searchpattern]
1985: Chris Crawford's 'Balance of Power' [cite] (geopolitical sim)
1986: "Information and Computation" journal replaces 'Information and Control' [tocs]
1986: Reynolds' 'Boids' models flocking [website]
1986: Thinking Machines Inc introduces Connection Machine
1986: Oct: Sun introduces NeWS [cite]
1987: 'AI Winter' sets in, bottom drops out of LISP-machine market due to saturation, 386 chip brings PC speeds into competition [info]
1987: Chris Crawford's 'Trust and Betrayal' [cite]
1987: Automated Fingerprint Identification System
1987: Aug: HyperCard
1987: Text Encoding Initiative launched [cite] (semantic etext-markup)
1987: Paul Fishwick [bio] starts Simulation Digest ezine [archives] [faq]
1987: Axelrod's Evolution of Prisoner's Dilemma Strategies using Genetic Algorithm
1988: AI revenues reach $1 billion
1988: Apr: comp.simulation newsgroup formed [annc] [early posts]
1988: Jorn Barger's Solace: a textbook of romantic psychology [etext] (psych-knowledge representation)
1988? Wolfram's Mathematica
1988: Singer sells Link to CAE [cite] renamed Link Tactical Simulation
1988: Schank forced to resign from Yale and Cognitive Systems, limps to Northwestern (hires Barger: memoir)
1988: Sep: early PR from Adobe about Display Postscript [post]
1989: Jun: Wil Wright's SimCity
1989: Chris Crawford's 'Guns and Butter' [cite]
1990: Smalltalk redesigned to run under other window-managers (ObjectWorks) [cite]
1990: Chris Crawford's 'Balance of the Planet' [cite]
c1990: Human Patient Simulator [info]
1991: Be, Inc [pix]
1991: Jorn Barger's fractal-thicket indexing [faq] (post-hierarchical topical indexing)
1991: March's Organizational Code Model
1991: Tom Ray's Tierra (corewars with mutation)
1992: Alvin and Foley's Decentralized Market
1992: Anderson's ACT-R (cognitive model/AI environment) [website]
1992: Japanese Fifth Generation Project ends with a whimper
1992: Japanese Real World Computing Project begins with a big-money bang
1992: 'Socionics' movement in Germany (sociology plus informatics) [intro]
1992: Steven Levy's "Artificial Life: A Report from the Frontier Where Computers Meet Biology"
1992: Danielson's "Artificial Morality: Virtuous Robots for Virtual Games" [info]
1993: Jan: newsgroup comp.soft-sys.matlab [earliest]
1993: John Hiles' 'SimHealth' simulates healthcare policy [info] [pic] [GooJa]
1993: "Economic and Financial Modeling with Mathematica" ed Varian
1993: FinCEN AI System (FAIS) does datamining for money-laundering [info]
1993: Dec: Doom, for VGA [history]
1994? Grady Ward's Moby tools [GooJa] (semantic databases)
1994: 22Jul: Landay and Myers' SILK tool for sketching uifs [paper]
1994: "KidSim: Programming Agents Without a Programming Language" by Smith et al (based on AgentSheets: cite)
1994: Kauffman, Macready and Dickenson's NK Patch Model
1994: Gaylord and Nishidate's "Modeling Nature-- Cellular Automata Simulations with Mathematica"
1994: Visual Thinking's 'Simul8' [review] "widely used to simulate workflows in production, distribution and office environments"
typical inputs: cycle time, staff levels, arrival/order rates, average order size
typical outputs: inventory, throughput, bottleneck utilization, productivity [cite]
1995: ecological modeling newsletter ECOMOD [2 issues]
1995: AgentSheets (spreadsheets built from agents) [intro] [website]
1995: McFadzean's SimBioSys [sourcecode]
1995: "Artificial Societies: The Computer Simulation of Social Life" ed Gilbert and Conte
1995: Pollock's "Cognitive Carpentry" leads to OSCAR agent-architecture [website]
1996: Epstein and Axtell's "Growing Artificial Societies: social science from the bottom up" describes alife 'Sugarscape' [background] [book]
1996: Santa Fe's 'Swarm' simulation system [intro] [multi]
1996: online political sims "Reinventing America" (budget) and "President '96" (platforms) [Markle]
1997: Riolo's Prisoner's Dilemma Tag Model
1997: "Simulating Social Phenomena" ed Conte et al [long review]
1997: Axelrod's "The Complexity of Cooperation: Agent-Based Models of Competition and Collaboration"
1998: Jan: Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (JASSS) founded [archives]
1998: "Simulating Society-- A Mathematica Toolkit for Modeling Socioeconomic Behavior" by Gaylord and D'Andria [review]
1998: Chris Crawford's Erasmatron story-engine [cite] (withdrawn)
1999: Ross Hammond's alife model of social ethics [info]
1999: Gumerman and Dean's alife model of Anasazi population dynamics [info] [citeseer]
1999: MLS toolkit for social simulations in Lisp-Stat [intro]
no-date: BioNumerik models drug-interactions on Crays [cite]
2000: human genome mostly sequenced
2000: IBM launches life-sciences division for bioinformatics [cite]
2001: Apr: Jorn Barger launches Internet Timelines Project (history representation) [info]
2002: Interoperable Informatics Infrastructure Consortium's Life Science Identifier [cite]
you can grab the whole thing @
http://www.robotwisdom.com/ai/timeline.html |
