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COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language)
A team drawn from several computer manufacturers and the Pentagon develop COBOL—an acronym for Common Business-Oriented Language. Many of its specifications borrow heavily from the earlier FLOW-MATIC language. Designed for business use, early COBOL efforts aimed for easy readability of computer programs and as much machine independence as possible. Designers hoped a COBOL program would run on any computer for which a compiler existed with only minimal modifications. -
Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS) is Demonstrated
The increasing number of users needing access to computers in the early 1960s leads to experiments in timesharing computer systems. Timesharing systems can support many users – sometimes hundreds – by sharing the computer with each user. CTSS was developed by the MIT Computation Center under the direction of Fernando Corbató and was based on a modified IBM 7090, then later 7094, mainframe computer. -
CDC 6600 supercomputer introduced
The Control Data Corporation (CDC) 6600 performs up to 3 million instructions per second —three times faster than that of its closest competitor, the IBM 7030 supercomputer. The 6600 retained the distinction of being the fastest computer in the world until surpassed by its successor, the CDC 7600, in 1968. Part of the speed came from the computer´s design, which used 10 small computers, known as peripheral processing units, to offload the workload from the central processor. -
C programming language is released
The C programming language is released. Dennis Ritchie and his team created C based on the earlier language BCPL (Basic Combined Programming Language) and soon after re-wrote the source code for Unix in C. As such, Unix was easily ported to other computers and spread swiftly. C is still widely used today. -
Birth of modern mobile networks
In 1973, ARPA funds the outfitting of a packet radio research van at SRI to develop standards for a Packet Radio Network (PRNET). As the unmarked van drives through the San Francisco Bay Area, stuffed full of hackers and sometimes uniformed generals, it is pioneering wireless, packet-switched digital networks, including the kind your mobile phone uses today. A related set of experiments test out Voice Over IP (like the later Skype). -
100,000 hosts: The Internet Comes From Behind
At its official 1983 launch, the Internet had been a modest experimental network of networks owned by the U.S. government. As late as 1989, even insiders are betting against it – OSI is the official favorite for the future of internetworking, or connecting networks together. But in the meantime the Internet has quietly grown to 100,000 host machines, each with multiple users. By 1992 the Internet will have emerged as the new global standard, linking a million computers.