Moore's Law established - Gordon Moore correctly predicts that the number of transistors on a microprocessor will double approximately every 18 months.

CP/M Operating system developed by Digital Research Corporation becomes the dominant standard for the personal computer in business, but incompatible floppy disk formats and the success of MS-DOS and the IBM PC in 1981 eventually led to its demise.

A "worm" program that searches out other computers copies itself then self-destructs is invented by two Xerox PARC researchers.

Laserdiscs begin to develop "Laser rot" due to oxidation of the aluminum layer.

University of Southern California professor Fred Cohen creates alarm when he warns the public about computer viruses.

CDs outsell vinyl records.

The Internet Worm virus temporarily shuts down 10% of the world's Internet servers.

Proprietary file formats proliferate. Competing word processing software and file formats lead to rapid obsolescence.

Australian Center for Remote Sensing (ACRES) rescues aging space datafrom disintegration by migrating from high-density magnetic tapes to optical tape.

National Science Foundation dismantles NSFnet and replaces it with a commercial Internet backbone.

World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) copyright treaty protects databases as literary works and makes fair use optional.

EU Database direction provides copyright protection to databases, even if the content is in the public domain.

A human error at Network Solutions causes the Domain Name System (DNS) table for .com and .net domains to become corrupted, making millions of systems unreachable.

BITNET is retired.

Digital Millennium Copyright Act is passed in the US, setting off a chain of confusion and controversy over its implications toward electronic media.

US Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act retroactively extends the duration of copyright to the life of the author plus seventy years. It is unclear whether extended copyright term will aid preservation (a position taken by the MPAA) or hurt it (as argued by library and archival associations).

An RLG study finds that 2/3 of archives, libraries, museums, and other repositories had assumed responsibility for digital information, but 42% lacked the capacity to mount, read, and access some of this material.

239 3.5" floppy disks are given to the Archaeology Data Service for restoration. Many files are corrupted, lack documentation, and were created using obsolete software. The data is recovered, and many insights about digital preservation come from the project.

Apple introduces the iMac, which revolutionized the PC industry with its design, along with some key feature such as the inclusion of USB ports and the purposeful exclusion of a floppy drive.

Due to adequate preparation, the Year 2000 bug causes few glitches, no catastrophes.

After 21 years of selling hard drives, Quantum switches to higher-level storage products and services.

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act is signed into law. "The goal of the act was to protect investors by improving the accuracy and reliability of corporate disclosures." The law requires publicly traded companies to closely monitor electronic and paper document retention and imposes criminal sanctions for the destruction or loss of certain electronic records.

A report by CLIR estimates that the average Web page has a life span of 44 days.

The Public Library of Science (PLoS), a science journal archive and alternative publisher, is launched.

Microsoft addresses a security vulnerability in Internet Explorer's code for the gopher protocol by turning support for gopher off by default, thereby rendering most remaining gopher sites inaccessible to the majority of Internet users.