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In 1970 Corning Glass announces it has created a glass fiber so clear that it can communicate pulses of light. GTE and At&T soon begin experiments to transmit sound and image data using fiber optics, which completely transforms the communications industry. -
Nolan Bushnell, who at the time was 28 years old, created Pong, a table-tennis themed game, which was one of the first mass-produced video games. He also went on to found Atari. -
In 1974 the very first barcoded items were shipped out to grocery stores. Barcodes are read by laser scanners, and they made the old hand-punch type cash registers obsolete. -
In 1975 old high school friends Bill Gates and Paul Allen form Microsoft. They sell their first software to Ed Roberts at MIT, which produced the first microprocessor based computer. -
In 1976 Cray Research, Inc. introduces the first supercomputer, the Cray-1, which can perform operations at a rate of 240,000,000 calculations per second.