;;; Thu Sep 1 13:39:27 1994 by Mark Kantrowitz ;;; timeline.txt -- 18461 bytes ;;; **************************************************************** ;;; Milestones in the Development of Artificial Intelligence ******* ;;; **************************************************************** This timeline lists milestones in the development of AI, in the context of other relevent events. AI-specific events are marked with an asterisk (*). Available as ftp.cs.cmu.edu:/user/ai/pubs/faqs/ai/timeline.txt Comments to mkant+ai-faq@cs.cmu.edu. Any suggestions for additional entries, especially since 1989? ---------------------------------------------------------------- 1637: Descartes "I think, therefore I am." 1726: Jonathan Swift's Gulliver Travels -- fictional machine that writes books 1811: Luddite movement founded on jobs versus automation issue 1818: Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" 1835: Electric relay invented (Joseph Henry) 1847: Boole develops symbolic logic, and later binary logic 1855: Mercury pump invented, for creating good vacuum tubes 1859: Darwin's "The Origin of Species" 1876: Alexander Graham Bell receives patent on telephone (US Patent 174,465) 1879: Edison invents light bulb 1879: Frege invents predicate calculus 1887: First gas-fueled automobile sold in Germany ---------------------------------------------------------------- 1901: Sigmund Freud's "The Interpretation of Dreams" 1904: First vacuum tube, a diode (John Ambrose Fleming) 1913: Henry Ford introduces notion of assembly line production 1915: Einstein's general theory of relativity ---------------------------------------------------------------- 1917* Karel Capek coins the term 'Robot' (in Czech 'robot' means 'worker', but the 1923 English translation retained the original word) 1928* John von Neumann's minimax theorem (later used in game playing programs) 1930: Shannon demonstrates Boolean logic using switching circuits 1930: Vannevar Bush builds the analog Differential Analyzer at MIT 1931: Godel's incompleteness theorem 1932: RCA demonstrates cathode-ray TV picture tube 1936: Regular public television in the UK 1937: Turing publishes "On Computable Numbers" (Turing Machine) 1939: Dickinson files patent for electronic storage element ---------------------------------------------------------------- 1940: Atanasoff and Berry build first electronic computer, the ABC 1940: Robinson is the first operational computer in the UK, based on relays; used to decode Nazi codes 1940: First color television broadcast 1941: Zuse builds the Z3 in Germany, the first programmable computer 1943: 'Colossus' uses electronic tubes to help British crack German codes 1943* McCulloch and Pitts propose neural-network architectures for intelligence 1944: Aiken completes the 'Mark I', first American programmable computer 1945: Grace Murray Hopper discovers first "bug" on 9-SEP-45 15:45 1945: Vannevar Bush publishes "As we may think" in Atlantic Monthly (hypertext) 1946: Eckert & Mauchley build "ENIAC", the first electronic programmable digital computer 1946: TV enters American life 1946: John von Neumann publishes EDVAC paper on the stored-program 1947: ACM founded 1947: Schockley, Brittain, and Ardeen invent the transistor at Bell Labs 1948: Norbert Wiener's "Cybernetics" 1949: Wilkes builds EDSAC, first stored-program computer 1949: Eckert & Mauchley build BINAC a little later 1949: Orwell publishes "1984", in which computers used to enslave population 1949: Shannon introduces Information Theory ---------------------------------------------------------------- 1950* Isaac Asimov, "I, Robot" 1950* Shannon proposes chess program 1950* Turing Test proposed (Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intelligence") 1950: Commercial color TV in USA 1950: Eckert & Mauchley market UNIVAC, first commercial computer 1951: Census Bureau buys Remington-Rand UNIVAC for $159,000 (later $250,000) 1951: EDVAC completed at University of Pennsylvania 1951: IEEE Computer Society founded 1951: Transcontinental black-white TV in U.S.A. 1952: Alan Turing dies 1952: CBS uses UNIVAC to predict Eisenhower-Stevenson election 1952: First computer used by DoD (IBM 701) 1952: Grace Murray Hopper describes compiler 1952: Pocket transistor radio introduced 1952: Rochester designs IBM 701 1953: Watson and Crick discover chemical structure of DNA 1954* Isaac Asimov, "The Caves of Steel" (Robot Science Fiction) 1954: Alan Turing died. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 1955* Newell, Shaw, and Simon develop "IPL-11", first AI language 1955: IBM introduces first transistor calculator 1955: Sperry-Rand merger 1956* Newell, Shaw, and Simon create "The Logic Theorist", solves math problems 1956* AI named at Dartmouth computer conference, first meeting of McCarthy, Minsky, Newell, and Simon 1956* CIA funds GAT machine-translation project 1956: FORTRAN invented at IBM (Backus) 1956: First commercial banking system (ERMA) at Bank of America 1956* Ulam develops "MANIAC I", first chess program to beat a human being 1957* Chomsky writes "Syntactic Structures" 1957* Newell, Shaw, & Simon create General Problem Solver (GPS), means-ends analysis 1957: Digital Equipment Corporation and CDC Corporation founded 1957: Chomsky's "Syntactic Structures" 1958* McCarthy introduces "LISP" at MIT 1958: ALGOL 58 1958: DARPA founded 1958: Jack St. Clair Kilby invents integrated circuit 1959* Minsky and McCarthy establish MIT AI Lab 1959* Rosenblatt introduces Perceptron 1959* Samuel's checkers program wins games against best human players 1959: DEC anounces PDP-1 at $159,000 1959: Kurtz & Kemeny introduce time sharing 1959: COBOL (Hopper) 1959: Robert Noyce of TI invents integrated circuit independent of Kilby ---------------------------------------------------------------- 1960: Defense computer mistakes moon for incoming missiles 1960: LINC is the first "minicomputer" with integral CRT (Lincoln Labs) 1960: Tape drive 1960* Bar-Hillel publishes paper describing difficulty of machine translation 1961: DEC sells PDP-1 at $120,000 1961: JFK proposes Project Apollo to Congress 1962* McCarthy moves to Stanford, founding Stanford AI Lab in 1963 1962: Purdue establishes first CS department offering a PhD 1962: Murphy & Greenblatt's TECO text editor on PDP1 at MIT 1962* First commercial industrial robots 1962: Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolutions" 1962: Hintikka's "Knowledge and Belief" 1962: Kripke's "Possible Worlds Semantics" 1963* ARPA gives $2 million grant to MIT AI Lab 1963: American Airlines SABRE System (first airline reservation system) 1963* Sutherland's SKETCHPAD: drawing tool (CAD), constraint solver, WYSIWYG 1963* M. Ross Quillian (semantic networks as a knowledge representation) 1963: MIT Project MAC 1963* Susumo Kuno's parser tested on "Time flies like an arrow" 1963* Minsky's "Steps Towards Artificial Intelligence" 1964: DEC PDP-8 is first mass-produced minicomputer 1964: IBM introduces 360 series 1964: Kemeny & Kurtz introduce "BASIC" 1964: McLuhan writes "Understanding Media", predicts global electronic village 1964: PL/1, BASIC 1964* Bobrow's STUDENT (solves high-school algebra word problems) 1964* Development of BBNLisp begins at BBN ---------------------------------------------------------------- 1965: APL 1965* Buchanan, Feigenbaum & Lederberg begin DENDRAL expert system project 1965* Iva Sutherland demonstrates first head-mounted display (virtual reality) 1965* Simon predicts "by 1985 machines will be capable of doing any work a man can do" 1965* Dreyfus argues against the possibility of artificial intelligence 1966* Donald Michie founds Edinburgh AI lab 1966* Weizenbaum's ELIZA 1967* Greenblatt's MacHack defeats Hubert Deyfus at chess 1967: IBM separates hardware and software 1967: Papert develops LOGO 1968* "HAL" stars in Clarke and Kubrick's "2001" 1968: Dijkstra's CACM letter "GO TO statement considered harmful" 1968: Englebart demonstrates mouse, windows, multiple raster monitors 1968: First PhD in computer science (Wexelblat at Univ. of Penn.) 1968* Minsky's "Semantic Information Processing" 1968* Chomsky and Halle's "The Sound Pattern of English" 1969: John McCarthy and Pat Hayes "Philosophical problems from the standpoint of Artificial Intelligence" (Situation Calculus) 1969: Alan Kay's Ph.D. thesis describes theoretical personal computer 1969: FTC antitrust suit against IBM 1969: Green's planner using a theorem prover. 1969: Knuth's Art of Programming Vol. 1 1969* Minsky & Papert's "Perceptrons" (limits of single-layer neural networks) 1969: UNIX (Thomson and Ritchie at AT&T) 1969* Hearn & Griss define Standard Lisp to port the REDUCE symbolic algebra system ---------------------------------------------------------------- 1970* PROLOG (Colmerauer) 1970: Floppy diskettes introduced 1970: Negroponte forms the Architecture Machine Group 1970* Pople and Myers begin INTERNIST (aid in diagnosis of human diseases) 1970* Terry Winograd's SHRDLU (Natural Language Processing, Blocks World) 1970* Winston's ARCH ---------------------------------------------------------------- 1971* Colby's PARRY 1971: Nils Nilsson and Rich Fikes - STRIPS - the first planning system. 1971: ARPA launches SUR projects (Spoken Language Understanding) - precursor for the HEARSAY (and blackboard architectures), HARPY and HWIM systems. 1971: First microprocessor in U.S. (Intel 8008) 1971: First pocket calculator (Poketronic) 1971: Pascal ---------------------------------------------------------------- 1972* Dreyfus publishes "What Computers Can't Do" 1972* Smalltalk developed at Xerox PARC (Kay) 1972: Cray Research formed 1972: Hewlett Packard introduces HP-35 for $395. 1972: Nolan Bushell's PONG -- first video game ---------------------------------------------------------------- 1973* Lighthill report kills AI funding in UK 1973* Schank and Abelson develop scripts 1973: First bit-mapped graphics-oriented monitor 1973: Widespread distribution of UNIX to universities 1973: Xerox PARC builds "Alto" with first hand-held mouse ---------------------------------------------------------------- 1974* Edward Shortliffe's thesis on MYCIN 1974* First computer-controlled robot 1974* Minsky's "A Framework for Representing Knowledge" 1974* SUMEX-AIM network established (applications of AI to medicine) 1974: Ahl Publishes "Creative Computing" 1974: First SIGGRAPH 1974: Nelson writes "Computer Lib" ---------------------------------------------------------------- 1975* Cooper & Erlbaum found Nestor to develop neural net technology 1975: First issue of BYTE 1975: First microcomputer BASIC by Gates and Allen 1975: First personal computer Altair 8800 (256 bytes of memory) 1975* DARPA launches image understanding funding program 1975* Larry Harris founds Artificial Intelligence Corp. (NLP) ---------------------------------------------------------------- 1976* Adventure (Crowther and Woods) -- first adventure game. 1976* Greenblatt creates first LISP machine, "CONS" 1976* Kurzweil introduces reading machine 1976* Lenat's AM (Automated Mathematician) 1976* Marr's primal sketch as a visual representation 1976: Cray-1 supercomputer, 138 megaflops 1976: Dynabook paper (Kay and Goldberg) ---------------------------------------------------------------- 1977: Wozniak and Jobs design and build Apple Computer 1977* 3CPO and R2D2 star in "Star Wars" 1977: Apple II, Radio Shack TRS80, Commodore PET 1977: Conway & Mead codify VLSI design 1977: First computer camp for children 1977: Microsoft is founded ---------------------------------------------------------------- 1978* Marr and Nishihara propose 2-1/2 dimensional sketch 1978: Bricklin writes VisiCalc 1978: Hayes announces Micromodem 100 1978: SRI's PROSPECTOR discovers molybdenum vein 1978* Xerox LISP machines ---------------------------------------------------------------- 1979: "Pac Man" introduced 1979: Compuserve and The Source are founded 1979: ADA 1979: Pat Hayes: "The Naive Physics Manifesto" 1979: Steve Jobs visits Xerox PARC 1979* Raj Reddy founds Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University 1979* MYCIN as good as medical experts (Journal of American Medical Assoc.) 1979* Publication of Weinreb and Moon's MIT AI Lab memo on Flavors, an OOP offering advanced capabilities still not generally unavailable outside the Lisp language family. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 1980* Expert systems up to a thousand rules 1980* First AAAI conference at Stanford 1980* Greenblatt & Jacobson found LMI; Noftsker starts Symbolics 1980* Hofstadter writes "G\"odel, Escher, Bach", wins Pulitzer 1980* McDermott's XCON for configuring VAX systems (DEC and CMU) 1980* First biannual ACM Lisp and Functional Programming Conference 1980: Prototype of Dipmeter Advisor 1980: Scribe, first word processor 1980: Xerox, DEC, & Intel announce Ethernet ---------------------------------------------------------------- 1981: Allen Newell "The Knowledge Level" 1981: IBM introduces Personal Computer (PC) 1981* Kazuhiro Fuchi announces Japanese Fifth Generation Project 1981* MITI wants intelligent computers by 1990 1981* Teknowledge founded by Feigenbaum 1981* PSL (Portable Standard Lisp) runs on a variety of platforms 1981: Xerox Star (Desktop publishing) 1981* Lisp machines from Xerox, LMI, and Symbolics available commercially, making dynamic OOP technology available on a widespread basis. 1981* Grass roots definition of Common Lisp as the common aspects of the family of languages -- Lisp Machine Lisp, MacLisp, NIL, S-1 Lisp, Spice Lisp, Scheme ---------------------------------------------------------------- 1982* Publication of British government's "Alvey Report" on advanced information technology, leading to boost in AI (Expert Systems) being used in industry. 1982* Japan's ICOT formed 1982* John Hopfield resuscitates neural nets 1982* SRI's PROSPECTOR finds major deposit of molybdenum 1982: Hayes 300 Smartmodem with AT command set 1982: IBM PC 1982: Kapor develops "Lotus 1-2-3" ---------------------------------------------------------------- 1983* Asimov writes "Robots of Dawn" 1983* Feigenbaum & McCorduck publish "The Fifth Generation" 1983* DARPA announced Strategic Computing Initiative 1983* IntelliGenetics markets KEE 1983* MCC consortium formed under Bobby Ray Inman 1983: 6,000,000 computers sold 1983: AT&T breakup 1983: Apple LISA 1983: IBM announces PCjr 1983: Sony announces compact disc technology ---------------------------------------------------------------- 1984-86: Corporations invest some $50 million in AI startups 1984* Publication of Steele's "Common Lisp the Language" 1984* Chamberlain's RACTER 'writes' book 1984* Doug Lenat begins CYC project at MCC 1984* European Community starts ESPRIT program 1984* GM puts $4 million into Teknowledge 1984* Gold Hill creates Golden Common LISP 1984* TI wins MIT contract for LISP machines away from Symbolics 1984* "Wabot-2" reads sheet music and plays organ 1984: Apple introduces the Macintosh 1984: IBM's megabit RAM chip 1984: Optical disks introduced 1984: Perez & Rapaport start Neuron Data, selling Nexpert for the Mac 1984: Phil Cooper founds Palladian ---------------------------------------------------------------- 1985* GM and Campbell's Soup don't use Lisp for expert systems 1985* Kawasaki robot kills Japanese mechanic during malfunction 1985* MIT Media Lab founded 1985* Minsky publishes "The Society of Mind" 1985* Palladian sells Financial Adviser 1985* Teknowledge abandons LISP and PROLOG for C 1985* Xerox wins $20 million contract for LISP machines, later cancelled 1985: C++ 1985: Commodore AMIGA, ATARI 520 ST 1985: Graphic interfaces widely available 1985: Microsoft Windows ships ---------------------------------------------------------------- 1986* X3J13 forms to produce a draft for an ANSI Common Lisp standard 1986* AI industry revenue now $1,000,000,000 1986* Anderson's robotic ping-pong player wins against human 1986* Borland offers Turbo PROLOG for $99 1986* CMU's HiTech chess machine competes at senior master level 1986* Dallas Police use robot to break into an apartment 1986* First OOPSLA conference on object-oriented programming, at which CLOS is first publicized outside the Lisp/AI community. 1986* IBM enters AI fray at AAAI, with a LISP, a PROLOG, and an ES shell 1986* Max Headroom 1986* McClelland & Rumelhart's "Parallel Distributed Processing" (Neural Nets) 1986* Neural net startup companies appear 1986* OCR now $100 million industry 1986* PICON ES group leaves LMI and starts Gensym 1986* Paperback Software offers VP Expert for $99 1986* Teknowledge goes public, amid wild optimism 1986* Thinking Machines introduces Connection Machine 1986: Adobe PostScript 1986: Motorola 68020 introduced ---------------------------------------------------------------- 1987* Symbolics pioneers the OODB market with Statice, a Flavors-based system 1987* Lisp Pointers commences publication. 1987* 1,900 working expert systems 1987* AI revenue $1.4 billion, excluding robotics 1987* NLP revenue approximately $80 million 1987* Robotic-vision revenue $300 million 1987* DEC's "XCON" configures computers doing work of 300 people using 10,000 rules 1987* Japan's AFIS (Automated Fingerprint Identification System) 1987* LMI files for bankruptcy, other bankruptcies and layoffs follow 1987* "AI Winter"; Lisp-machine market saturated 1987: Apple introduces "HyperCard" 1987: Computer trading crashes market 1987: George Lucas's Pixar signs deal with Symbolics 1987: Japan develops Automated Fingerprint Identification ---------------------------------------------------------------- 1988* Common Lisp development environments on general purpose platforms begin to rival those available on Lisp machines (e.g., native CLOS, preemptive multitasking, full suites of integerated tools, etc.) 1988* 386 chip brings PC speeds into competition with LISP machines 1988* Expert systems revenue over $400 million 1988* Hillis's "Connection Machine", capable of 65,536 parallel computations 1988* Minsky and Papert publish revised edition of "Perceptrons" 1988* Object-oriented languages are 'in' 1988* TI announces microExplorer (Macintosh with a LISP chip) 1988* Teknowledge merges with American Cimflex 1988: Morris' worm 1988: NeXT machine announced 1988: Sold this year in US: 4,700,000 micros, 120,000 minis, 11,500 mainframes ---------------------------------------------------------------- 1989* Coral sold to Apple, remarketed as Macintosh Allegro Common Lisp 1989* Palladian ceases operation 1989: 1000+ US Hospital systems die (dates overflow 16 bits since 1/1/1900) 1989: Japan wealthiest nation ---------------------------------------------------------------- 1990* Steele publishes second edition of "Common Lisp the Language" 1990* AICorp goes public 1990* Symbolics Lisp Users Group (SLUG) votes to expand its charter into an Association of Lisp Users, and to expand the scope of its annual conference correspondingly. 1990: ESPRIT to double basic research budget 1990: MacArthur Foundation gives Richard Stallman $240,000 genius grant 1990: New PC's, NeXT's, Mac's SUN's, DEC's ---------------------------------------------------------------- 1991* KnowledgeWare cancels offer to buy IntelliCorp ---------------------------------------------------------------- 1992* Apple Computer introduces Dylan, a language in the Lisp family, as its vision for the future of programming. 1992* X3J13 creates a draft proposed American National Standard for Common Lisp 1992: Japanese Fifth Generation Project ends 1992: Japanese Real World Computing Project begins 1992: More than 1000 strains of computer viruses ---------------------------------------------------------------- 1993* Kurzweil AI goes public 1993* Symbolics files for bankruptcy 1993: IBM/Apple PowerPC ---------------------------------------------------------------- 1994* Franz Inc. announces the AllegroStore OODB 1994* Harlequin's real-time CLOS is used in an announced AT&T switching system 1994* Thinking Machines files for bankruptcy 1994* (projected) ANSI Common Lisp becomes the first ANSI-standard OOPL. 1994: Justice Department antitrust suit against Microsoft ----------------------------------------------------------------