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A US judge has ruled that Google acted unlawfully to crush competition and maintain a monopoly on online search and related advertising. Google was sued by the US Department of Justice in 2020 for its control of about 90% of the online search market.

ChatGPT launches online, racking up its first million users in less than a week. Its mimicking of human conversation has sparked speculation about its potential to displace professional writers, revolutionize software writing, and even threaten Google’s core search business. The organization behind it, co-founded by

The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, completes his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter. Mr. Agrawal and two other executives were escorted out of Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters earlier that evening.

Electronics demand soars amid a “perfect storm”: As working and learning from home has become the norm during COVID-19, the growing demand for electronics devices—from consoles to PCs to smartphones to connectivity—has skyrocketed. The industry already had long lead times (about 18 weeks) and building

The production of electronic chips rises to 1100 billion devices per year. This is an increase of 13% compared to the previous year. But the explosion in demand, also due to Covid-19, triggers a fearful crisis due to a shortage of chips. In fact, the

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

The US administration is tightening restrictions on Chinese mobile phone and electronics maker Huawei, severely limiting its ability to use American electronic technology.

Global Foundries (also financed with capital from the Persian Gulf) cancels its program to develop EUV (Extreme Ultra Violet) technology that makes it possible to manufacture chips with 7nm technology. At this point, only TSMC (Taiwan), Samsung (South Korea), Intel (USA) remain on the world

ATT buys Time Warner for 85 BLN USD

Disney buys 20th Century Fox for 71 BLN USD

The United States passes the Export Control Reform Act (ECRA), which limits the export of certain goods, particularly next-generation semiconductor technologies for the manufacture of electronic chips.

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

The scientific article “Attention Is All You Need” by researchers from Google Brain and Google Research: Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Aidan N. Gomez, Lukasz Kaiser, Illia Polosukhin is published. This is the foundation of the “Transformers” technique that will

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

ABB buys B&R for EUR 2 billion

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg releases a bold manifesto on the need to build global community, and Facebook’s role in that effort. He wants to make community building easier, and make it global, bringing different parts of the world closer together.

Microsoft buys Linkedin for a whopping $26.2 billion.

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

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

American AMD is selling 85% of its semiconductor manufacturing, testing and chip packaging capacity in Penang, Malaysia and Suzhou, China to a Chinese company for $371 million.

In 2015, statistics say that 56% of American teenagers talk on the phone while driving. 2,715 of them die in 2015 and 221,313 are injured in car accidents, half of them with a single vehicle involved. On the contrary, also in 2015, self-driving cars (not

Shuji Nakamura (中村 修二) receives the Nobel Prize Together with Isamu Akasaki and Hiroshi Amano, for having invented the blue light LED, a task that seemed impossible, and that only his determination allowed to achieve, determination to work on the project often against the will

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 among numerous categories. For example, it is able to tell not only if it is a dog or a cat,

The e-book Automation Story is published at 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, image caption generation, speech recognition / text-to-speech synthesis / prosody detection algorithms

Artificial Intelligence (AI): GANs (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 is making an initial release, limited to developers, of Google Glasses, a wearable computer that enables augmented reality.

Netflix launches the series “House of Cards”. It’s not just a TV series. It’s the result of an in-depth statistical analysis and Artificial Intelligence (Machine Learning and Deep Learning) of customer preferences in film, which began a few years earlier when Netflix sent DVDs to

Apple wins landmark lawsuit against Samsung in San Diego, requiring the latter to pay $1.05 billion for infringing three Apple patents.

Physicists have measured the tiny amount of heat released when a single bit of data is erased for the first time. Although the value was first predicted more than 50 years ago, it is so small that measuring it has proved impossible — until now.

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 Apple’s Steve Jobs

Evvia, a Greek restaurant in Palo Alto, California. Dinner hosted by Steve Jobs of Apple and featuring 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

Apple and Google, for the first time, spend more on lawsuits and patent payments than on Research and Development. The history of Electronics has always oscillated between two development models: the one that made the fortune of the Internet for example, based on sharing information

Washington DC. The Italian Federico Faggin, together with the Americans Marcian E. Hoff Jr., Stanley Mazor, receives the National Medal of Technology and Innovation directly from the hands of the President of the United States of America, Barack Obama, for the invention of the microprocessor.

Apple’s market value exceeds that of Microsoft.

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

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 in 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 pioneer of the early years of the Internet, hopes that this will trigger a better model for remunerating content on the Internet and creating more value. The visionary Ted Nelson,

Apple Launches AppStore on iTunes for iPhone

The cover story of Forbes magazine is all about the Finnish cell phone manufacturer Nokia, and it says: “Can anyone catch the cell phone king?”. Apple has already released, in June 2007, the iPhone, the first smartphone. But apparently many people, even at the top,

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

MacWorld in San Francisco, California. Steve Jobs introduces Apple’s new product: the iPhone. By the end of 2010, Apple will have sold 90 million iPhones, taking half of the profits generated by the cell phone market, where it was previously completely absent.

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

Apple Switches From Historic Motorola Processors to Intel

Taiwan. Morris Chang resigns as CEO of TSMC, the world’s leading silicon foundry for next-generation chip technology. Morris Chang still represented the legendary generation of those who invented solid-state chips. He had been working in the lab until late with Jack Kilby (co-inventor of solid-state

California. Steve Jobs accepts the invitation to give a commencement speech at Stanford University where he is awarded an Honorary Degree. He has already been diagnosed with cancer. It is a spiritual testament to the inspiring principle of the 1968 movement that has swept the

In 2005, when Apple was working on the first generation iPhone to be launched in 2007, Steve Jobs invited Intel to propose the CPU business for the planned smartphone. Not believing Apple’s sales projections and seeing no way to profit from them, Intel turned him

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

DARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) selects 13 robots to compete in a race that covers more than 200 km in the Mojave Desert in California. The best ones cover only 6% of the course (and also take several hours to do it)

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

Robert Freitas and Ralph Merkle publish the book “Kinematic Self-Replicating Machines”. The concept is based on the ideas first of John von Neumann (von Neumann probes, 1960s) and then of Freeman Dyson (1970s), and finally on the ideas of Freitas himself (1980s), who for example

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

Steve Jobs is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He is lucky: it is operable. But he does not want to be cut. For ten months he deludes himself that he can get out of it with natural cures, a rigorous vegan diet, acupuncture, sessions with a

Wikipedia already has 100,000 articles. Created in January 2001, it has been a runaway success. It will reach 30 million by early 2014. Of which 4.4 million are in English. The Encyclopedia Britannica has 80,000 entries, or 2% of Wikipedia’s English entries. It is probably

The American Congress recognizes Meucci as the inventor of the telephone.

Second Life is born on the Internet

Apple launches the iPod. Steve Jobs’ new idea is initially greeted with skepticism, especially because of its price (399USD), but then it will establish itself with great success, 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 named Ada, after Ada Lovelace.

Wikipedia already has 10,000 articles. Created in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales, from Huntsville, Alabama, the application is based on Nupedia, written for him by Larry Sanger starting in 1999. But it does not become mature, until the two discover WikiWikiWeb by Ward Cunningham, that

Several microprocessors surpass 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 Segway Personal Transporter is introduced to the market

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

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

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

Documents relating to the first computer, Colossus, from 1943-44 and used to decrypt Nazi messages, were declassified by the American government, but not the crucial role played by Colossus in decrypting Nazi teleprinter messages, which was declassified only in 2000. The British government had released

At Bell Labs they can 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 competed for the patent for a decade) is no longer with us: “if there had been any

Bill Clinton Suppresses Selective Availability Distortion in GPS Signal

Shanghai, China. Richard Chang, a former Texas Instruments employee, founds SMIC (Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation), raising more than $1.5 billion from international investors such as Goldman Sachs, Motorola, Toshiba. He wants to replicate, in China, what TSMC has done in Taiwan.

Microsoft introduces Windows 2000

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

Bell Labs successfully transmits and receives 1.6 Tbit/s with 40 different frequencies (colors) over optical fiber (40Gbps per color)

The seventh generation of CPUs is born: AMD-K7 Athlon, Intel Pentium III (9.5 million 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 Ward Cunningham’s discovery of WikiWikiWeb, that they’ll be able to give birth to Wikipedia.