The defining moments in computing and video game history — verified, dated, and sourced.
Tim Berners-Lee's first website had already been running quietly at CERN since December 1990. In August 1991, he posted a public invitation to collaborate — the moment the web actually became something the wider world could join.
Priced at $1,565 with 16KB of RAM and no disk drive, the IBM 5150 didn't look like a revolution on paper. Its open architecture is what made it one anyway.
Shawn Fanning's peer-to-peer file-sharing tool went live in June 1999, launched out of a small Hull, Massachusetts office. Within two years it would be shut down by court order — but not before changing the music industry permanently.
A company with no profit went public at $28 a share and closed its first day at $58.25, more than doubling in value in hours. Many historians point to this single afternoon as the moment internet mania actually began.
Facing a losing battle against Internet Explorer, Netscape made an unprecedented move for a major commercial software company: giving away the source code to its flagship product, and creating Mozilla to steward it.
Through 1983, US video game console and cartridge sales began an unprecedented decline that would erase roughly 97% of the market's value within two years, taking Atari's fortunes down with it.
ARPANET was one research network among several incompatible experiments in the 1970s. TCP/IP is the specific technical decision that let it absorb all the others into a single, unified internet.
In the mid-1990s, which browser you used determined how much of the web actually worked for you. Here's how a startup's early dominance collapsed against a bundled competitor in under four years.
One of computing's most-repeated quotes has no verified source, and Gates has explicitly and repeatedly denied ever saying it. Here's what the actual paper trail shows — and what he really said instead.
One of the most repeated political misquotes in tech culture. Here's the exact sentence Gore actually said, on the record, and how three days of mockery turned it into something he never claimed.