Computing
The transistor
Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley demonstrate the point-contact transistor at Bell Labs. Every chip, model, robot and ledger on this site descends from it.
From transistor to token
Innovation timeline
Nothing on this site is new. Every token has a ledger behind it, every robot a motor, every model a transistor. This is the long line those stories sit on.
Track
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1947
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1956
Artificial intelligence
The Dartmouth workshop
A summer workshop at Dartmouth College gives the field its name: artificial intelligence. The proposal expects significant progress in one summer.
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1958
Computing
The integrated circuit
Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments builds the first integrated circuit; Robert Noyce at Fairchild follows with the planar version that can be manufactured at scale.
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1961
Robotics
Unimate goes to work
The first industrial robot, Unimate, starts unloading die-casting machines at a General Motors plant in New Jersey. The robot arm becomes a factory tool.
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1969
Computing
The first ARPANET message
A message is sent between UCLA and Stanford over the ARPANET. The network that will carry every token transaction begins with two nodes.
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1971
Money and markets
The dollar leaves gold
The United States ends the convertibility of the dollar into gold. Money becomes a matter of policy rather than metal, and the long argument about what backs it begins.
Computing
The microprocessor
Intel ships the 4004, a complete processor on one chip. Computing becomes something that can be put into anything.
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1974
Money and markets
Gold ownership returns
Americans may own gold bullion again from the end of 1974, and gold futures begin trading in New York. Gold becomes a traded market rather than a state reserve.
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1976
Crypto and tokens
Public-key cryptography
Diffie and Hellman publish a way for two strangers to agree on a secret in public. Digital signatures, wallets and every blockchain rest on this idea.
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1981
Computing
The IBM PC
The personal computer becomes a standard product with an open architecture. The desk, not the data center, becomes the place where most computing happens for the next forty years.
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1986
Artificial intelligence
Backpropagation
Rumelhart, Hinton and Williams show how multi-layer neural networks can learn from their errors. The method behind every modern model is on paper.
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1989
Computing
The World Wide Web
Tim Berners-Lee proposes a hypertext system at CERN. The web turns the internet into a public place.
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1997
Artificial intelligence
Deep Blue beats Kasparov
An IBM machine defeats the world chess champion in a match. Search and compute beat intuition in a narrow domain; the general version takes another quarter century.
Energy, space, matter
Sojourner drives on Mars
A small rover leaves the Pathfinder lander and drives on another planet. Autonomous machines in places people cannot reach become a program, not a dream.
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2000
Robotics
ASIMO walks
Honda presents ASIMO, a humanoid that walks, climbs stairs and shakes hands. It is a research platform and a promise; the working humanoid is still two decades away.
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2002
Robotics
A robot in the living room
The Roomba vacuum cleaner goes on sale. The first robot most households ever buy is a disc that bumps into furniture and does its job anyway.
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2005
Robotics
Stanley finishes the desert
Stanford’s autonomous car wins the DARPA Grand Challenge, 132 miles through the Mojave without a driver, a year after every entrant failed. The robotaxi industry starts here.
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2006
Computing
The cloud opens
Amazon Web Services rents out computing by the hour. Servers become a utility, and every startup on this timeline after this year is built on rented machines.
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2007
Artificial intelligence
CUDA turns graphics chips into computers
Nvidia releases CUDA, a way to program graphics processors for general work. The chip built for games becomes the chip that trains neural networks.
Computing
The iPhone
A phone with a full web browser and a touchscreen. Within a decade the phone is the primary computer of most of humanity and the wallet of a growing part of it.
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2008
Money and markets
Lehman Brothers fails
The financial crisis peaks with the largest bankruptcy in history. Trust in intermediaries collapses in the same weeks that a pseudonymous paper proposes money without them.
Crypto and tokens
The Bitcoin white paper
On 31 October, Satoshi Nakamoto publishes nine pages describing a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. The double-spending problem is solved with a chain of proof-of-work blocks.
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2009
Crypto and tokens
The genesis block
On 3 January the first Bitcoin block is mined. It carries a newspaper headline about a bank bailout. The network has one user.
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2010
Energy, space, matter
Falcon 9 flies
SpaceX launches its Falcon 9 for the first time. The rocket that will make launch reusable begins as an expendable one.
Crypto and tokens
Two pizzas for 10,000 bitcoin
The first documented purchase of goods with bitcoin. The price it implies is a fraction of a cent; the anniversary is still celebrated every 22 May.
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2011
Artificial intelligence
Watson wins Jeopardy
IBM’s question-answering system beats the two best human players on live television. Language, not chess, becomes the next frontier.
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2012
Artificial intelligence
AlexNet
A deep convolutional network trained on two gaming GPUs wins the ImageNet competition by a wide margin. Deep learning goes from a niche to the field.
Crypto and tokens
The first halving
The Bitcoin block reward drops from 50 to 25 coins. The supply schedule that everyone can read in advance does exactly what it said.
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2013
Robotics
Atlas is unveiled
Boston Dynamics presents the hydraulic Atlas humanoid for the DARPA Robotics Challenge. A decade of falling over on video begins, and ends with a robot that does back flips.
Crypto and tokens
The Ethereum white paper
Vitalik Buterin describes a blockchain with a built-in programming language. Tokens, smart contracts and decentralised finance become possible on paper.
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2014
Crypto and tokens
Mt. Gox collapses, Tether launches
The largest bitcoin exchange fails with hundreds of thousands of coins missing. The same year, the first dollar-pegged token appears. Custody and stability become the industry’s two long problems.
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2015
Energy, space, matter
A rocket lands
On 21 December a Falcon 9 first stage returns to land at Cape Canaveral after launching a payload. Reusability turns from an argument into a schedule.
Crypto and tokens
Ethereum goes live
The Ethereum mainnet launches on 30 July. Within two years it hosts thousands of tokens and the first decentralised exchanges.
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2016
Artificial intelligence
AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol
DeepMind’s program wins four of five games against one of the best Go players in history. Move 37 becomes shorthand for a machine finding something humans had not.
Crypto and tokens
The DAO is drained
A flaw in the code of the first large decentralised fund lets an attacker take a third of its ether. Ethereum splits over whether to reverse it. Code is law meets the rollback.
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2017
Artificial intelligence
Attention is all you need
Eight Google researchers publish the transformer architecture. Every large language model since is a descendant of this paper.
Crypto and tokens
Bitcoin futures in Chicago
The CME lists bitcoin futures in December as the price approaches 20,000 dollars. Wall Street gets a regulated way to short it, and does.
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2020
Artificial intelligence
GPT-3
A 175-billion-parameter language model writes passable prose from a prompt. Scale, not architecture, becomes the headline.
Crypto and tokens
Third halving and DeFi summer
The block reward drops to 6.25 bitcoin in May. Over the summer, lending and trading protocols on Ethereum lock up billions and coin the phrase yield farming.
Money and markets
Zero rates, everywhere
Central banks cut rates to zero and buy assets to steady economies shut by the pandemic. Cheap money finds its way into every risk asset on this timeline.
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2021
Crypto and tokens
A country adopts bitcoin
El Salvador makes bitcoin legal tender in September. Two months later, bitcoin reaches a record near 69,000 dollars.
Robotics
Tesla announces Optimus
A humanoid robot is announced at an AI event, initially as a person in a suit. Within three years, prototypes are moving parts in a factory and every large carmaker has a humanoid program.
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2022
Artificial intelligence
ChatGPT
On 30 November a chat interface to a language model reaches a hundred million users in about two months. Artificial intelligence becomes a consumer product.
Money and markets
The fastest hikes in a generation
Central banks raise rates at the fastest pace since the early 1980s to fight inflation. The cost of money becomes the dominant input into every valuation on this site.
Crypto and tokens
The Merge
On 15 September Ethereum switches from proof of work to proof of stake and cuts its electricity use by more than 99 percent. Two months later the FTX exchange collapses and the industry’s custody problem returns.
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2023
Artificial intelligence
GPT-4 and the model race
A model that passes professional exams launches in March. Within the year, every large technology company has a frontier model and a plan for the chips to train the next one.
Energy, space, matter
The first CRISPR medicine
Regulators in the United Kingdom and the United States approve a gene-editing therapy for sickle cell disease. Editing the genome becomes a treatment rather than a technique.
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2024
Energy, space, matter
A booster is caught in mid-air
In October a Starship booster returns to its launch tower and is caught by mechanical arms. Full reuse of the largest rocket ever built becomes a matter of iteration.
Robotics
Atlas goes electric
Boston Dynamics retires the hydraulic Atlas and shows a fully electric humanoid built for factory work. Humanoids move from research to pilot lines.
Artificial intelligence
Blackwell, and the AI Act
Nvidia presents its Blackwell generation of AI chips in March. In August, the European Union’s AI Act enters into force with obligations phased in over the following years.
Crypto and tokens
MiCA applies, bitcoin passes 100,000
On 5 December bitcoin trades above 100,000 dollars for the first time. On 30 December the European Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation applies in full, with licences for issuers and service providers.
Artificial intelligence
Nobel prizes for neural networks
The physics prize goes to Hopfield and Hinton for the foundations of machine learning, the chemistry prize to Hassabis and Jumper for protein structure prediction. In December, Google’s Willow chip shows quantum error correction improving with size.
Crypto and tokens
Spot Bitcoin ETFs in the United States
On 10 January the SEC approves spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds; trading starts the next day. Bitcoin becomes a line item in ordinary brokerage accounts.
Crypto and tokens
The fourth halving
In April the block reward drops to 3.125 bitcoin. Mining margins tighten, hashrate keeps rising, and the argument about the cycle starts again.
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2025
Crypto and tokens
A stablecoin law in the United States
The GENIUS Act, signed in July, sets federal rules for dollar stablecoins: full reserves, disclosures, licensed issuers. The quiet giants of crypto get a rulebook.
Money and markets
Gold above 4,000 dollars, bitcoin above 120,000
Central bank buying, rate cuts and debt worries lift gold past 4,000 dollars an ounce in October. Bitcoin sets its record in the same month. Both hedges rise together, then argue about which one is real.
Artificial intelligence
Reasoning models and the DeepSeek shock
Models that think before they answer become standard. In January a Chinese lab releases a reasoning model trained at a fraction of the expected cost, and chip stocks lose hundreds of billions in a day.
Robotics
Robotaxis without a driver in more cities
Driverless ride services expand across American cities and a carmaker launches its own in Austin. Amazon announces its millionth warehouse robot.
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2026
Money and markets
The board goes live
inotok opens with a live board for the six prices that summarise the week and forty long reads behind it. The timeline continues in the departments.
Years are dated to the event, not the announcement. Where a date is disputed we use the one in the primary source.