Beginner's All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code (BASIC) is developed at Dartmouth College.

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

Generalized Markup Language (GML) is introduced.

The programming languages C and FORTRAN 66 are created.

Ohio State University introduces one of the first online catalogs.

Queen Elizabeth II becomes the first world leader to send an e-mail.

Bill Gates drops out of Harvard to devote his full attention to Microsoft.

Dallas Public Library introduces one of the first online public catalogs (OPACs).

FORTRAN 77 programming language is created.

LZW image compression algorithm is developed and is adopted for compression of modem communications and TIFF, GIF, PDF, Zip, and Postscript files. Belated assertion of the LZW patent in GIF files leads to the development of the PNG image file format in 1995.

As personal computers become more powerful, people become accustomed to faster machines and graphical interfaces. Use shifts from centralized mainframes to personal computers distributed over a network.

More than 30 million computers are in use in the United States.

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) becomes the first supercomputer center in the US.

TEI P1 "Guidelines for the Encoding and Interchange of Machine Readable Texts" are published.

The early 1990s see an explosion in online publishing and a rush to digitize print materials.

The HTML 1.0 standard is published.

CERN releases the World Wide Web into the public domain.

Java, an object-oriented programming language, is announced by Sun.

Netscape announces Javascript, an object-oriented scripting language.

HTML 2.0, the first formal HTML standard, is published.

Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) 1.0 is introduced.

Dublin Core Metadata Initiative originates.

Internet2 project is formed to provide a high-bandwith network for the national research community.

The search engine is officially launched.

The Long Now Foundation purchases part of a mountain in Nevada to build the 10,000-year clock that “ticks once a year, bongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out every millennium." The Foundation also sponsors the Long Server, Rosetta Disk, and 10,000-year Library projects.

and are launched as digital archives of life sciences, biological, and medical journal literature.

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.

75% of journals are online in Science Citation Index.

The amount of information transmitted globally over the Internet is projected to double each year.

The annual production of materials in Web-ready formats is projected to be "too large to estimate."

A British Library study predicts that by 2007 at least 50% of all theses and dissertations will be submitted digitally.

Annual publication rates of electronic-only formats grow faster than paper-only formats.

Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher publishes her archives online, a first in politics.

55% of adult internet users have broadband at home or work.

The NITLE Blog Census, begun in May 2003 in order to characterize the burgeoning blogshere, estimates the presence of 1,208,351 active blogs in April 2004.