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ENIAC was the first electric general-purpose computer. It was capable of being reprogrammed to solve "a large class of numerical problems".
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The IBM 350 Disk File, invented by Reynold Johnson, was introduced in 1956 with the IBM 305 RAMAC computer. This drive had fifty 24 inches (0.61 m) platters, with a total capacity of five million 6-bit characters (3.75 megabytes).
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Directing ARPA’s computer research program, Robert Taylor initiates the ARPAnet project, the foundation for today’s Internet.
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Computers became affordable for the general public in the 1970s due to the mass production of the microprocessor starting in 1971.
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Ray Tomlinson of BBN invents the email program to send messages across a distributed network. The "@" sign is chosen from the punctuation keys on Tomlinson's Model 33 Teletype to separate local from global emails, making "user@host" the email standard.
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Dr. Glenn Ricart sets up the first Internet Exchange point, connecting the original federal TCP/IP networks and first U.S. commercial and non-commercial Internet networks.
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Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn found the Internet Society. Meanwhile, hosts on the Internet pass the one million mark.
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The advent of web publishing tools available to non-technical users spurs the rise of blogs.
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Aaron Swartz co-creates RSS, a program that collects news from various web pages and puts them in one place for readers, with the goal of making information freely available to everyone.
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The Internet Society founds the Internet Hall of Fame and the first 33 members are inducted in a ceremony in Geneva, Switzerland.
