On March 12, 1989, Tim Berners-Lee submitted a proposal at CERN titled 'Information Management: A Proposal.' His manager wrote 'Vague, but exciting.' Two years later, that vague idea became the World Wide Web.
On March 11, 1985, Connecticut launched ConnNet — one of the earliest statewide public computer networks in the United States. Years before the web, anyone with a modem could dial in and access library catalogs, government databases, and reference information from home.
On March 10, 2000, the NASDAQ reached 5048 points — the peak of the dot-com bubble. Within weeks the crash began. By 2002 the index had lost nearly 78% of its value, wiping out hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of companies. The survivors became the foundations of the modern internet.
Fifty days ago the IT History Journal started with a simple idea: every day, look at the calendar and find what happened in computing on that exact date. This is a reflection on what those first fifty days covered — and why the calendar structure makes it different.
On March 9, 2016, AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol — one of the strongest Go players in the world. Go had long been considered beyond the reach of computers. The match became a global media event and marked the beginning of a new era in artificial intelligence.
Howard Aiken was born on March 8, 1900. He built the Harvard Mark I — one of the first large-scale automatic computers in the United States — and in doing so helped transform computing from a theoretical idea into a practical engineering discipline.
On March 7, 1986, Richard Hamming delivered a talk called "You and Your Research" at Bell Communications Research. It became one of the most widely circulated reflections on how important work actually happens — and why so few scientists produce truly great results despite sufficient talent.
On March 6, 1992, the Michelangelo virus was scheduled to activate on infected computers worldwide — the first global cybersecurity scare. Fewer machines were damaged than feared, but the incident pushed antivirus software into mainstream use and made computer security a public topic.
On March 5, 1957, IBM officially published FORTRAN — the first widely adopted high-level programming language. It let scientists write mathematical formulas directly instead of machine code, and its compiler produced output so efficient it convinced the industry that high-level languages were practical for real work.
On March 4, 2000, Sony released the PlayStation 2 in Japan. It became the best-selling video game console in history at over 155 million units, and for many households it doubled as their first DVD player — accelerating the global adoption of the format.
Alexander Graham Bell was born on March 3, 1847 in Edinburgh. His work on the telephone created the network infrastructure that later carried modems, influenced packet switching, and gave birth to Bell Labs — the research organization that produced the transistor, Unix, and information theory.
On March 2, 1993, The New York Times covered the growing competition between NEC and Cray Research in the supercomputer market — a careful, strategic rivalry that reflected broader tensions between American and Japanese technology industries at the dawn of parallel computing.
On March 1, 1960, John McCarthy published the first official description of LISP — a language where code and data shared the same structure, and recursion was a central concept. It became the foundation of early AI research and influenced nearly every functional language that followed.
On February 26, 1943, Charles P. Thacker was born — the lead hardware engineer behind the Xerox Alto (the first computer with a graphical interface, windows, and a mouse) and an early builder of Ethernet hardware at Xerox PARC, whose quiet work laid the foundation for every modern personal computer.
On February 24, 1955, Steve Jobs was born in San Francisco — the co-founder of Apple who drove the Macintosh, iPhone, and iPad to market, reshaped multiple industries through relentless focus on design and simplicity, and left behind the company that became the first to reach a $1 trillion valuation.
On February 22, 1978, Kernighan and Ritchie published 'The C Programming Language' — a 270-page book so authoritative it served as the language's de facto specification for over a decade, teaching precision and clarity to a generation of programmers and shaping nearly every major language that followed.
On February 20, 1991, Guido van Rossum released Python 0.9.0 on Usenet — a small, readable language built over the Christmas holidays that prioritized human clarity over machine efficiency, and grew into one of the most widely used programming languages in the world.
On February 19, 1990, Adobe Photoshop 1.0 was released for Macintosh, making high-quality image editing accessible on a personal computer for the first time and setting in motion a cultural transformation so complete that 'to photoshop' became a verb in everyday language.
On February 18, 1977, SCCS — the Source Code Control System — was released as part of Unix at Bell Labs, introducing structured revision history stored as deltas rather than full copies, the foundational idea that would evolve through RCS, CVS, Subversion, and ultimately Git.
On February 17, 2008, researchers published details about the Mocmex trojan — a sophisticated piece of malware preinstalled on digital photo frames at the factory, one of the earliest high-profile supply chain attacks, warning the industry that the threat can already be inside the product when you buy it.
