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WORLD HISTORY
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The war in Korea starts and Sen. Joseph McCarthy begins lobbing charges of communism in the U.S.
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1950
Genesis of the computer
Flashback looks at the past 50 years in computing.
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The U. S. Atomic Energy Commission builds the first nuclear reactor, in Idaho Falls, Idaho.
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1951
Machines on a mission
Univac, the first mass-produced computer
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Jonas Salk announces a vaccine for immunization against polio.
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1952
Univac predicts winner of 1952 election
First for television and information technology
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Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are executed as spies. The Soviet Union announces that it has detonated a hydrogen bomb.
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1953
IBM's empire takes hold
IBM's decades-long reign over the computer industry began in 1953.
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First TV dinner is introduced: It costs 98 cents and contains turkey, dressing, gravy, peas and sweet potatoes.
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1954
Fortran born of frustration
Inventor of first popular computer language wanted to avoid tedium of machine language programming.
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NASA and the U.S. military begin to fund major computer research projects.
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1955
IBM customers form the first computer user group
Early IBM mainframe users find fellow early adopters a fine support network.
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Woody Guthrie composes "This Land Is Your Land"
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1956
Little-known computer creates vast legacy
A little-known computer came out of MIT's Lincoln Laboratories
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Born in 1957: Chris Carter, creator of "The X Files"
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1957
Digital Equipment scales computers down in size, price
So much lore surrounds Digital Equipment Corp.
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A 1958 Gallup Poll says 88% of Americans own a television
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1958
The birth of integrated circuits
The Fairchild Eight weren't thinking a lot about their legacy in 1958.
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The BMW 600 costs $1,498, accelerates up to 65 mph and gets 50 miles per gallon.
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1959
The creation of Cobol
You know that little year 2000 problem? Well, it all began 40 years ago.
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Average price of a movie ticket is 75 cents
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1960
Sabre takes off
A team of American Airlines and IBM programmers set out in 1960...
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East Germany erects the Berlin Wall along its border with West Germany.
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1961
Learning to share
It's the late 1950s, and you're a computer operator at MIT...
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Ringo Starr joins the Beatles; the group releases its first hit, 'Love Me Do,' in the U.K.
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1962
Degree of distinction
A spirited, irascible salesman, H. Ross Perot, left IBM in 1962...
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Best Actor Oscar: Sidney Poitier for Lilies of the Field. He was the first African-American male to receive a best actor Oscar.
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1963
The debut of ASCII
If it weren't for a particular development we wouldn't have e-mail...
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Sara Lee Corp., maker of frozen pastries, opens the first automated factory.
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1964
Mixed blessing
A single product announcement ushered in a new era of computing.
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The New York Jets sign University of Alabama quarterback Joe Namath for a reported $400,000.
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1965
The promise of packet switching
Realizing the inadequacies of the data communications capabilities...
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The first Star Trek episode, "The Man Trap," is broadcast.
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1966
HP's radical move
Hewlett-Packard Co.'s first foray into the computer market in 1966...
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In the first Super Bowl, the Green Bay Packers defeat the Kansas City Chiefs, 35-10.
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1967
The mighty mouse
Doug Engelbart applied for a patent on his X-Y Position Indicator...
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60 Minutes, now television's longest-running prime-time newsmagazine, debuts on CBS.
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1968
Inside Intel
Like many early Silicon Valley start-ups, Intel was born of ...
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Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin and Michael Collins travel to the moon aboard Apollo 11. Armstrong becomes the first man to walk on the moon.
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1969
Unix and the Net, 60's brainchildren
Arpanet -- the network that we now know as the Internet
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President Nixon signs a law that in the next year will ban cigarette ads on radio and TV.
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1970
Grocery scanners check in
In a Kroger's supermarket just outside Cincinnati in early 1970
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Don Hoefler, a California journalist, dubs the valley between San Francisco and San Jose "Silicon Valley" because of its proliferation of technology companies.
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1971
IBM fashions the floppy
The floppy disk was developed in 1971 to solve a problem IBM faced.
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American Bobby Fischer defeats Soviet Boris Spassky for the international chess crown.
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1972
Xerox Parc and the Alto
'You know, we're going to make this thing obsolete,'
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