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Demand for electronics skyrockets due to a “perfect storm”: as working and learning from home became the norm during COVID-19, the growing demand for electronic devices for consoles, PCs, smartphones, connectivity, and gone to the stars. The industry already had long production and delivery times (around

Frank Wilzek ​​of MIT proves the existence of the “Anyons”, the third realm of elementary particles, in addition to the “Fermions” and the “Bosons”. The Anyons, are only two-dimensional, and form at very low temperatures. They are actually quasi-particles, ie they have the properties of particles, but

ATT buys Time Warner for 85 BLN USD

Disney buys 20th Century – Fox for 71 BLN USD

Milestone for Artificial Intelligence (AI). Google’s AlphaZero program defeats the Stockfish 8 program, world chess champion since 2016, in chess. The latter had access to the brute force of centuries of human game experience accumulated in his memory. It was capable of calculating 70 billion positions per

Google, in a conference, declares that the automatic recognition of language by an Artificial Intelligence (AI) has reached parity with humans, with an error rate of 4.9% in the dictation (it was 20-30% in 2013).

ABB buys B&R for EUR 2bn

Mark Zuckerberg, of Facebook, publishes a bold manifesto on the need to build a global community, and on the role of Facebook in this project. He wants to simplify the construction of communities, and make them global, bringing the different parts of the world closer together.

Microsoft buys Linkedin for an amount of 26.2MLD USD.

Google’s AI program, AlphaGo, demonstrates a significant advance in operational capabilities, beating a (human) champion of Go (a much more complex game than chess).

Elon Musk’s Tesla announces that each of its new vehicles will be equipped with all the necessary hardware for autonomous driving.

In 2015, statistics show that 56% of teenage Americans talk on the phone while driving. 2715 of them died in 2015 and 221313 are injured due to road accidents, half of them are with only one vehicle involved. On the contrary, still in 2015, self-driving cars (not

Google engineers publish a neural network model, called “Inception”, capable of automatically recognizing and cataloging an image, with few false alarms and missed alarms and across numerous categories. For example, it is not only able to tell if it is a dog or a cat, but

The Automation Story e-book is published on the occasion of the SPS fair in Parma. http://www.automationstory.com/ This is the first Italian e-book on the history of industrial automation

Machine Learning: Google, Microsoft, IBM use LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory Recurrent Neural Networks) to implement and improve machine translation algorithms, image caption generation, speech recognition / text-to-speech synthesis / prosody detection

Artificial Intelligence (AI): GAN (Generative Adversarial Networks: Goodfellow et al.) Are invented, with two networks competing in a zero-sum game, with one playing to undermine the second (in practice a GAN is self-supervised).

Google makes a first release, limited to developers, of Google Glasses, a wearable computer that enables augmented reality.

Netlfix launches the serious “House of Cards”. It’s not just a television series. This is the result of an in-depth statistical analysis and with Artificial Intelligence (Machine Learning and Deep Learning) of customer preferences in film matters, which began some earlier when Netlfix sent DVDs to customers,

Apple wins a historic lawsuit in San Diego with Samsung in which the latter must pay 1.05 billion USD for infringing three Apple patents.

For the first time, physicists have measured the miniscule amount of heat released when a single bit of data is erased. Although the value was first predicted more than 50 years earlier, it is so small that measuring it has proved impossible – until now. The experiment,

Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie, inventor of the C language and the Unix operating system, dies; printf (“Dennis Ritchie:% d-% d”, 1941, 2011); / * RIP * /

Steve Jobs, founder of Apple, dies.

Apple launches new iCloud web service

San Francisco, California. Ipad2 is presented by Steve Jobs of Apple

Evvia, a Greek restaurant in Palo Alto, California. Dinner organized by Steve Jobs of Apple with guests President Barack Obama, Eric Schmidt of Google, Carol Bartz of Yahoo, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, John Chambers of Cisco, Larry Ellison of Oracle, Art Levinson of Genentech, Reed Hastings

Apple and Google, for the first time, spend more on lawsuits and patent payments than on R&D. The history of electronics has always fluctuated between two development models: the one that made the fortune of the internet, for example, based on the sharing of information and

The market value of Apple exceeds that of Microsoft.

A US Air Force Jumbo 747 shoots down a ballistic missile launched from a mobile base off the Californian coast with its Laser Coil (Chemical Oxygen Iodine Laser), destroying it. The test, after the take-off of the Boeing jet from Edwards base in the Mojave desert,

iPad is presented by Steve Jobs at an Apple conference at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater in San Francisco. It will be available for sale from April 2010. In less than a month it will sell a million.

Bitcoin is born, a digital currency and peer-to-peer payment system. Andreessen, creator of Netscape, and early internet pioneer, hopes this will spark a better model for rewarding internet content and creating more value. Visionary Ted Nelson in 1963 and Vannevar Bush in the 1940s envisioned a two-way

Apple inaugurates the AppStore on iTunes for iPhone

The cover story of Forbes magazine is all about the Finnish mobile phone manufacturer Nokia, and says: “Can anyone catch the cell phone king?”. Apple has already released, in June 2007, the iPhone, the first smartphone. But still evidently many, even on the upper floors, did not

Bletchley Park, central England. Thanks to the passion of volunteers and donors, the first replica of the so-called “Bombe” machines, made during the Second World War to decrypt messages encrypted with Enigma by the Nazis, is turned on. The last Bombe had been dismantled 62 years earlier.

MacWorld of San Francisco, California. Steva Jobs presents the new Apple product: the iPhone. By the end of 2010, Apple will have already sold 90 million iPhones, occupying half of the profits generated by the mobile phone market, where it was completely absent before.

For the first time, Moore’s Law is denied: the trend in microprocessors is reversed, i.e. now the aim is to decrease the power required and reduce the number of transistors and the frequency

Apple switches from historic Motorola processors to Intel

California. Steve Jobs accepts an invitation to give a speech at Stanford University degrees where he is awarded the Laura ad Honorem

Lawrence Joseph Giacoletto dies in Michigan, who in 1969 developed an effective model of high-frequency small signal transistors, also known as the Giacoletto and Johnson model.

The Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) selects 13 robots to compete in a race covering more than 200km in the Mojave Desert in California. The best only cover 6% of the route.

Honda creates the first true humanoid robot: it is 1.2m tall, has 29 degrees of freedom and the sense of balance of a human being

Steve Jobs undergoes surgery to remove pancreatic cancer.

Intel releases the Dothan processor manufactured with 90nm technology (the distance between 360 crystalline silicon atoms), gate-length of 50nm, 1.2nm thick (5 atoms); has 140MLN of 2GHz transistors; Philips, Motorola and ST follow soon after

Apple registers patent D504889. It will be granted 14 months later. It is a rectangular electronic tablet with rounded corners. It is the patent of what will become the iPad.

Steve Jobs is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. It’s lucky: it’s operable. But he doesn’t want to get cut. For ten months he will have the illusion of being able to come up with natural cures, a strict vegan diet, acupuncture, sessions with a psychic, fruit juices, purges, hydrotherapy. When

Wikipedia already has 100,000 articles. Created in January 2001 it was an overwhelming success. They will reach 30 million at the beginning of 2014. Of which 4.4 million in English. The Encyclopedia Britannica has 80,000 entries, or 2% of Wikipedia’s English entries. This is probably the greatest collaborative project

The American Congress recognizes the authorship of the invention of the telephone to Meucci.

Second Life was born on the internet

Apple launches the iPod. Steve Jobs’ new idea is initially greeted with skepticism especially for the price (399USD) but then it will assert itself with great success by changing the market itself.

Artificial Intelligence (AI): Breiman invents the Random Forests technique

Jimmy Wales, creator of Wikipedia, and his wife become parents. Their daughter is called Ada, in honor of Ada Lovelace.

Wikipedia already has 10,000 articles. Created in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales, of Huntsville, Alabama, the application is based on Nupedia, written for him by Larry Sanger starting in 1999. But that doesn’t mature until the two discover Ward Cunningham’s WikiWikiWeb. or web pages that can

Various micro-processors exceed the GHz threshold: Pentium III – Coppermine, Pentium III Xeon – Cascades, Pentium 4 – Willamette, Celeron – Coppermine, Xeon – Foster, Duron – Morgan, Pentium III – Tualatin, Celeron – Tualatin, Pentium 4 Northwood ‘A’ (all from Intel) and Athlon –

The Personal Transporter Segway is introduced to the market

United States. Claude Shannon, who suffered from Alzheimer’s, dies. It laid the foundations of modern computer theory.

Steve Jobs launches the iPod, a portable mini-device for listening to music downloaded from the internet (sold by Apple for $ 0.99)

Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger found wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org), an encyclopedia that lives a life of its own thanks to the contribution of readers

Documents concerning the first computer, Colossus from 1943-44 and used to decrypt Nazi messages, are decrypted by the American government, but not the crucial role played by Colossus in decrypting Nazi teletype messages which will only be declassified in 2000. The government British had released

At Bell Labs they are able to correctly transmit and receive 1022 different frequencies (colors) on the same optical fiber

Jack S. Kilby wins the Nobel Prize in Physics for the invention of the first integrated circuit. He declares: I am sorry that Noyce (with whom he has contested the patent for a decade) is no longer there: “if there had been any suspicion I would

Bill Clinton has the Selective Availability distortion suppressed in the GPS signal

Microsoft introduces Windows 2000

First MEMS (Micro Electro Mechanical Systems) in space with the Space Shuttle STS-93 mission

At Bell Labs 1.6 Tbit / s are successfully transmitted and received with 40 different frequencies (colors) over optical fiber (40Gbps per color)

The seventh generation of CPU is born: AMD-K7 Athlon, Intel Pentium III (9.5 MLN of transistors),

Jimmy Wales, of Huntsville, Alabama, hires PhD Larry Sanger to write the application for Nupedia, a user-editable online encyclopedia. But it won’t be until two years later, with the discovery of Ward Cunningham’s WikiWikiWeb, that they will be able to give birth to Wikipedia.

In fiscal 1998, Apple returns in profit: 309MLN USD. Steve Jobs is back.

Tommy Flowers, creator of the Colossus computer, dies at the end of 1943. It is the first electronic computer in history. He dies without ever having received due recognition for this, due to military secrecy until the beginning of the 21st century.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin found Google inc.

Sunday morning. Larry Page and Sergey Brin meet up with Andy Bechtolsheim, legendary Silicon Valley investor (among other things, co-founder of Sun Microsystems). They had been put in contact by their Stanford professor: David Cheriton. Bechtolsheim collects the deal and writes a check for $ 100,000 for the

Apple launches the all-in-one iMac.

Australia. Larry Page and Sergey Brin present their article at a conference. It is 20 pages long and is titled “The anatomy of large scale hypertextual web search engine”. It does not go into detail, because they already have the idea of ​​exploiting the idea for commercial purposes

Larry Page and Sergey Brin sitting at the Gourmet Mandarin restaurant in Palo Alto, California, prepare to meet Paul Flaherty of Alta Vista, to explain the merits of their Google search engine. They hope Alta Vista will finance them to gain access to their soon-to-be patented

Larry Page and Sergei Brin register the domain www.googol.com

Larry Page and his office mate Sean Anderson brainstorm to name Page’s new company. Sean proposes: “what about Googolplex? You’re trying to make a search engine that indexes a huge amount of information. Googolplex is a huge number. “. Larry likes the proposal and raises: “Why don’t we try

Second challenge between Russian chess champion Kasparov and IBM’s Deep Blue computer. The first match is played in Philadeplhia in 1996 and won by the Russian 4-2. The second, in May 1997 in New York City, was won by Deep Blue 3.5-2.5. It is the first time that

John Barger, on his web site called Robot Wisdom, coined the term weblog, which the web designer Peter Merholz will then transform into “blog” and “to blog” two years later. In 2014 there will be 847 million blogs on the net, where users express their ideas

The sixth generation of CPU is born: Intel Pentium II (7.5 MLN of transistors), AMD-K6

Artificial Intelligence (AI): the LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory: Hochreiter & Schmidhuber) technique is invented, which stores and forgets information on inputs, thus alleviating problems affecting RNN (Recurrent Neural Networks).

Cupertino, California. Steve Jobs returns to Apple Computers Corp. 11 years after his expulsion. At the end of 1996, Apple announced its intention to bring co-founder Steve Jobs back to the fold 11 years after leaving the company, acquiring the company. his startup NeXT for $

Larry Page’s web crawler project, called BackRun, now occupies half of Stanford University’s internet bandwidth. Page’s idea is simple and brilliant: to use the same criterion used for scientific articles, to classify the importance of a website, or to count how many other web pages it