Arithmetic Language version 0 was created by legendary computer pioneer Grace Hopper in the early 1950s. It was the first compiler ever made for an electronic computer, and was written for the the UNIVAC I, which Hopper also had a hand in developing. She began developing A-0 in 1951, and…
Launched in 2010 as a closed beta, Pinterest allowed users to gather, organize, and collect images referred to as “pins” by posting them on personalized pages called “boards”. It was conceptualized in December 2009 by co-founders Ben Silbermann, Evan Sharp and Paul Sciarra, using concepts related to visual bookmarking. After…
Vine was founded in 2012 and in just a few short months was acquired by Twitter after becoming immensely popular with teens and young adults. Created by Dom Hofmann, Rus Yusupov, and Colin Kroll, it allowed users to create short videos up to six seconds long. In January 2013 it…
Developed in 1992 at the University of Kansas, Lynx was a text based hypertext tool for use as part of a campus wide information server and as a Gopher browser. It was released to UseNet in July, and later added an internet interface the following year. Support for other protocols…
Created by NewTek, the Video Toaster was a software and hardware based tool used for video editing and debuted on the Commodore Amiga 2000 PC in 1990 as an add-on card. It’s ability to work with standard definition video made it a revolutionary hit in television and film production, earning…
Microsoft’s Exchange Server was born out of the company’s move from a Xenix based messaging system to a new client-server based application that delivered electronic mail, calendaring, contacts, and tasks. This was originally used internally as Exchange Server Beta 1, and by April of 1996, a large portion of the…
Founded in February 2005 by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, all three having worked for PayPal at the time. Venture firm Sequoia Capital invested $11.5 million in 2005, helping fund the startup, who’s early headquarters was above a pizzeria in California. The domain name was registered in Feburary…
Twitter was created in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, who at the time worked for the podcasting company Odeo. Inspired by TXTMob, it later became a massively popular social networking and microblogging site. Users post text based messages of up to 140 characters on their pages via the site or a…
In 2004, the first official version of the popular Firefox browser was released. Finally out of beta, it began slowly taking away market share from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, which development of had been stagnant for four years. Born from the Mozilla Project launched by Netscape in 1998, Firefox took the…
In 1999, Shawn Fanning created a peer to peer file sharing program called Napster that let people share files by sharing and swapping files from a centralized server using the client software. It became the hottest P2P network on the planet, especially for music, and took the internet world by…