(Lines in parentheses are about events that did not take place in the Bay Area but affected the development of computers)
(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
(1890: Hermann Hollerith's tabulator is chosen for the national census)
1891: Leland and Jane Stanford found Stanford University near Palo Alto
(1906: Lee DeForest invents the vacuum tube)
1906: The San Francisco earthquake and fire
1909: Stanford University's president David Starr Jordan invests $500 in Lee DeForest'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
(1911: Hollerith's Tabulating Machine Company is acquired by a new company that will change name to International Bussiness Machines or IBM in 1924)
1915: The Panama-Pacific International Exposition is held in San Francisco, for which Bernard Maybeck builds the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco
1916: General Motors opens a large Chevrolet automobile factory in Oakland
1917: Edwin Pridham and Peter Jensen found the electronics company Magnavox in Napa
1921: Ansel Adams publishes his first photographs of Yosemite
1925: Frederick Terman joins Stanford University to teach electronics electrical engineering and encourages his students to start businesses in California
(1925: Burroughs introduces a portable adding machine)
(1925: AT&T and Western Electric form the Bell Labs in New York)
1927: Philo Farnsworth invents all-electronic television broadcasting while in San Francisco
(1927: Fritz Pfleumer in Germany invents the magnetic tape)
1929: The physicist Robert Oppenheimer joins UC Berkeley
1931: Ernest Lawrence designs the first successful cyclotron and founds the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories
1933: The Navy opens a base at NAS Sunnyvale (later renamed Moffett Field)
1934: The first lesbian nightclub opens in San Francisco, "Mona's"
(1935: Germany's AEG introduces the first tape recorder)
1936: San Francisco builds the longest bridge in the world, the "Bay Bridge"
1936: Joe Finocchio opens the gay bar "Finocchio's" in San Francisco
(1937: 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: 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
(1938: John Atanasoff at Iowa State College conceives the electronic digital computer)
1939: Fred Terman's students William Hewlett and David Packard start a company to produce their audio-oscillator
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
1941: Stanford University's professor Fred Terman is put in charge of the top-secret Harvard Radio Research Laboratory
1941: Glenn Seaborg and Edwin McMillan at UC Berkeley produce a new element, plutonium
1942: The USA government launches the "Manhattan Project" to build a nuclear bomb under the direction of Robert Oppenheimer
1942: The health-care organization Kaiser Permanente is founded in Oakland
(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)
1944: Frank Malina founds the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)
1944: Alexander Poniatoff founds Ampex
(1944: Howard Aiken of IBM unveils the first computer programmed by punched paper tape, the Harvard Mark I)
(1945: Vannevar Bush proposes the "Memex" desk-based machine)
(1945: John Von Neumann designs a computer that holds its own instructions, the "stored-program architecture")
(1945: IBM establishes the (later Watson Research Center) Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory at Columbia University in New York)
1946: The Stanford Research Institute is founded
1946: Blacks constitute about 12% of Oakland's population
(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: 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 at the University of Pennsylvania
(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 self-reproducing automata)
1947: Ampex introduces a magnetic tape recorder
1948: The Varian brothers found Varian Associates
(1948: Claude Shannon founds Information Theory and coins the term "bit")
1949: William Giauque of UC Berkeley is awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry)
1950: Turing proposes a test to determine whether a machine is intelligent or not
(1950: Remington Rand purchases Eckert-Mauchly Computer)
1951: The Stanford Industrial Park is conceived
1951: Glenn Seaborg and Edwin McMillan of U.C. Berkeley 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)
1952: IBM opens its first West Coast laboratory in San Jose (later Almaden Research Center)
1952: Felix Bloch of Stanford University is awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, the first for Stanford
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: The CIA finances a project named "MkUltra" to study the effects of psychoactive drugs
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
(1954: Remington Rand introduces UNIVAC 1103, the first computer with magnetic-core RAM
(1954: IBM introduces its first computer model, the 704
1954: David Bohannon opens the Hillsdale Shopping Center, a suburban shopping mall
1956: IBM's San Jose labs invent the hard-disk drive
Mar 1956: Berkeley's professor Harry Huskey designs Bendix's first digital computer, the G-15
(1954: George Devol designs the first industrial robot, Unimate)
1955: The first conference on Artificial Intelligence is held at Dartmouth College, organized by John McCarthy
Sep 1955: The Stanford Research Institute demonstrates the ERMA computer
1955: The "Daughters of Bilitis" is founded in San Francisco, the first exclusively Lesbian organization in the USA
1955: Stanford University hires Carl Djerassi
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
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: Charles Ginsburg of Ampex Corporation builds the first practical videotape recorder
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")
(Apr 1957: John Backus of IBM introduces the FORTRAN programming language, the first practical machine-independent language)
Oct 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
(1957: ARDC invests $70,000 in Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)
(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: Former SAGE engineer Ken Olsen founds the Digital Equipment Corporation)
(1958: Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments invents the integrated circuit, a micro-sized silicon device containing a large number of electronic switches)
(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 professional venture-capital firm in California
1958: NASA opens a research center near Mountain View
1959: The first commercial Xerox plain-paper photocopier goes on sale
1959: Eveready (later renamed Energizer) introduces the alkaline battery
1959: Jean Hoerni at Fairchild Semiconductor invents the planar process that enables great precision in silicon components, and Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor designs a planar integrated circuit
1957: Rockefeller Brothers invests in Fairchild Semiconductor, the first venture-funded startup of the Bay Area
(1959: The MIT launches the "Computer-Aided Design Project")
1959: Dancer and mime Ron Davis founds the San Francisco Mime Troupe
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: Several Stanford students volunteer to take part in the CIA project "MkUltra" to study the effects of psychoactive drugs
(1960: William Fetter of Boeing coins the expression "computer graphics")
(1960: Digital Equipment introduces the first minicomputer, the PDP-1 (Program Data Processor), that comes with a keyboard and a monitor
(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
1960: Wayne Thiebaud at U.C. Davis pioneers "pop art"
1960: John McCarthy speculates that "computation may someday be organized as a public utility"
(1961: Joe Orlicky of JI Case pioneers Material Requirements Planning or MRP)
1961: Laurence Spitters founds Memorex
(Sep 1961: Max Palevsky forms Scientific Data Systems)
(1961: Charles Bachman at General Electric develops the first database management system, IDS)
(1961: Philco unveils the first head-mounted display)
(1961: Fernando Corbato at the MIT creates the first working time-sharing system, CTSS or "Compatible Time Sharing System", that allowed to remotely access a computer, an IBM 7090/94)
(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 Ramon Sender
(1962: Paul Baran proposes a distributed network as the form of communication least vulnerable to a nuclear strike)
(1962: Steve Russell and others at the MIT implement the computer game "Spacewar" on a PDP-1)
1962: Stanford University founds the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC)
1962: Bill Draper and Franklin Johnson form the venture-capital firm Draper and Johnson Investment Company
1962: Michael Murphy founds the "Esalen Institute" at Big Sur to promote spiritual healing
(1962: The first commercial modem is manufactured by AT&T)
1963: Douglas Engelbart at the Stanford Research Institute builds the first prototype of the "mouse"
1963: John McCarthy moves to Stanford
1963: Syntex, a pioneer of biotechnology, moves from Mexico City to the Stanford Industrial Park
(1963: The "American Standard Code for Information Interchange" or "ASCII" is introduced
(1963: Ivan Sutherland of the MIT demonstrates "Sketchpad", a computer graphics program, and the first program ever with a graphical user interface)
(1964: IBM introduces the first "mainframe" computer, the 360, and the first "operating system", the OS/360)
1964: Syntex introduces the birth-control pill
1964: Tymshare starts one of the most popular time-sharing service and creates a circuit-switched network
(1964: Robert Moog begins selling his synthesizer)
1964: Mario Savio founds the "Free Speech Movement" and leads student riots at the Berkeley campus
1964: Bill Draper and Paul Wythes form Sutter Hill Ventures
1964: MkUltra's alumnus 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
1965: Gordon Moore predicts that the processing power of computers will double every 18 months ("Moore's law")
Sep 1965: Ben Jacopetti inaugurates the Open Theater as a vehicle devoted to multimedia performances for the Berkeley Experimental Arts Foundation
1965: Owsley "Bear" Stanley synthesizes crystalline LSD
1965: Ed Feigenbaum implements the first "expert system", Dendral
1965: Lotfi Zadeh invents Fuzzy Logic
1965: George Hunter of the Charlatans introduces the "light show" in rock concerts
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: The Digital Equipment Corporation unveils the first successful mini-computer, the PDP-8, that uses integrated circuits)
(1965: European computer manufacturer Olivetti introduces the first affordable programmable electronic desktop computer, the P101)
Jan 1966: Steward Brand organizes the "Trips Festival" putting together Ken Kesey's "Acid Test", Jacopetti's Open Theater, Sender's Tape Music Center and rock bands
1966: John McCarthy opens the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL)
1966: The first "Summer of Love" of the hippies is held in San Francisco, and a three-day "Acid Test" is held in San Francisco with the Grateful Dead performing
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: A "Human Be-In" is held at the Golden Gate Park in San Francisco
1967: Monterey hosts a rock festival
1968: Stewart Brand publishes the first "Whole Earth Catalog"
1968: David Evans and Ivan Sutherland form Evans & Sutherland
Jul 1968: Philip Noyce, Gordon Moore and Andy Grove found Intel ("Integrated Electronics") to build memory chips
(1968: The hypertext system FRESS created by Andries van Dam at Brown University for the IBM 360 introduces the "undo" feature)
(1968: ARDC's investment in Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) is valued at $355 million
(1968: Computer Science Corp becomes the first software company to be listed at the New York stock market)
(1968: Dutch mathematician Edsger Dijkstra writes "GO TO Statement Considered Harmful")
(1968: Barclays Bank installs networked "automated teller machines" or ATMs)
1968: John Portman designs the Embarcadero Center in San Francisco
1968: William Hambrecht and George Quist found the investment company Hambrecht & Quist 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
May 1969: Xerox buys Scientific Data Systems (SDS)
1969: Advanced Micro Devices is founded by Jerry Sanders and other engineers from Fairchild Semiconductor
1969: The Stanford Research Institute (SRI) demonstrates Shakey the Robot
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: Leo Laurence in San Francisco calls for the "Homosexual Revolution"
1969: Four Stanford students found ROLM to design computers for the military
1970: Intel introduces the first commercially successful 1K DRAM chip
1970: 1970 Lee Boysel at Four Phase Systems designs the AL1, a commercial microprocessors (an 8-bit CPU)
1970: The first "San Francisco Gay Pride Parade" is held in San Francisco
1970: Gays and lesbians start moving to the "Castro" district of San Francisco in large numbers
(1970: The first practical optical fiber is developed by glass maker Corning Glass Works)
(1970: Edgar Codd at IBM introduces the concept of a relational database)
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
1970: Alan Kay joins Xerox PARC to work on object-oriented programming
1970: Stanford's Ed Feigenbaum launches the Heuristic Programming Project for research in Artificial Intelligence
1971: Cetus, the first biotech company, is founded in Berkeley
1971: The government bans AT&T from entering the data-processing business
1971: Pierluigi Nervi builds St Mary's Cathedral in San Francisco
1971: Berkeley's nuclear physicist Donald Glaser founds Cetus Corporation, the first biotech company of the Bay Area
1971: Film director George Lucas founds the film production company Lucasfilm
1971: David Noble at IBM 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 build the first universal 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
1972: At least 60 semiconductor companies have been founded in Silicon Valley between 1961 and 1972, mostly by former Fairchild engineers and managers
1972: European manufacturer Olivetti establishes an Advanced Technology Centre (ATC) in Cupertino
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, followed by Don Valentine of Fairchild Semiconductor who founds Capital Management Services, later renamed Sequoia Capital
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 at Bolt, Beranek and Newman invents email for sending messages between computer users, and invents a system to identify the user name and the computer name separated by a "@")
(1972: IBM engineers in Mannheim, Germany, found Systemanalyse und Programmentwicklung or SAP)
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")
1973: Lynn Hershman creates the first site-specific installation, "The Dante Hotel"
1973: Efrem Lipkin, Mark Szpakowski, and Lee Felsenstein start the "Community Memory", the first public computerized bulletin board system
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: Vietnamese-born engineer Andre Truong Trong Thi uses the 8008 to build the computer Micral)
(1973: Japan's Sharp develops the LCD or "Liquid Crystal Display" technology)
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's Bob Metcalfe coins the term "Ethernet" for a local area network
1973: The Arpanet has 2,000 users
1973: Gary Kildall in Monterey invents the first operating system for a microprocessor, the CP/M
1974: Ed Roberts invents the first personal computer, the Altair 8800
1974: Donald Chamberlin at IBM's San Jose laboratories invents SQL
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
continued
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