Chronology of Events - 1970s

The following is a chronological listing of significant events in the development of the field of Information Technology law during the 1970s:

1970
1970 &mdash; The adoption of the Mansfield Amendment in Defense Authorization Act  prohibits military funding for any research that does not have a "direct or apparent relationship to a specific military function or operations."

1970 &mdash; Edgar F. Codd publishes "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks."

January 1, 1970 &mdash; IBM unbundling becomes effective in the United States.

June 1970 &mdash; Xerox opens the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).

June 26, 1970 &mdash; The FCC regulates the cable television industry,  barring access of TV networks to CATV.

July 1970 &mdash; Alohanet, the first packet radio network, is operational at the University of Hawaii.

December 1970 &mdash; The Network Working Group (NWG) finishes the initial ARPANET Host-to-Host protocol called the Network Control Protocol (NCP).

1971
1971 &mdash; Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney create the first arcade game called "Computer Space." It is based on Steve Russell's earlier game of Spacewar!.

1971 &mdash; Ray Tomlinson of BBN creates an email program that is able to send messages across a distributed network.

1971 &mdash; Intel releases the 4004, the first single-chip CPU.

1971 &mdash; The magnetic stripe and barcode technologies are developed.

1971 &mdash; Project Gutenberg is started by Michael Hart with the purpose of making copyright-free works, including books, electronically available. The first text is the U.S. Declaration of Independence.

1971 &mdash; The Geneva Convention for the Protection of Producers of Phonograms Against Unauthorized Duplication of Their Phonograms is enacted.

1971 &mdash; The Creeper virus infects DEC PDP-10 computers running the TENEX operating system. Creeper gained access via the ARPANET and copied itself to the remote system.

'''April 27. 1971''' &mdash; Clements Auto Co. v. Service Bureau Corp., 444 F.2d 169 (8th Cir. 1971)(full-text) is decided.

May 18, 1971 &mdash; The Computer Law Group, predecessor to the Computer Law Association, is founded.

July 1971 &mdash; ALOHANET, the first wireless local area network, (WLAN) is launched. It connects seven University of Hawaii computers on four islands via packet-based radio.

November 2, 1971 &mdash;  The first formal meeting of the Computer Law Group is held in Washington, D.C.

1972
1972 &mdash; The first commercial video game console that could be played at home, the "Odyssey," was released by Magnavox. It came programmed with twelve games.

1972 &mdash; TELNET, a commercial version of ARPANET, became the first Public Packet Data Service.

1972 &mdash; ARPA officially changes its name to DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency).

1972 &mdash; Network Control Protocol is introduced to allow computers running on the same network to communicate with each other.

March 1972 &mdash; Ray Tomlinson (of Bolt, Baranek & Newman) modifies his email program for ARPANET (SNGMSG and READMAIL), the precursor to the Internet. It quickly becomes a powerful collaboration tool connecting researchers on ARPANET. He uses @ to distinguish between the sender's name and network name in the email address.

June 27, 1972 &mdash; Atari releases the first arcade game, Pong, developed by Nolan Bushnell and Al Alcorn.

July 1972 &mdash; The FTP Protocol Specification (RFC 354) is released.

November 20, 1972 &mdash; Gottschalk v. Benson, 409 U.S. 63, 175 U.S.P.Q. (BNA) 673 (1972)(full-text) is decided by the U.S. Supreme Court. The court holds where a method for converting numerical information from one format to another, for use in programming general-purpose digital computer, is merely a mathematical algorithm it does not constitute patentable subject matter.

1973
1973 &mdash; Researchers at Xerox Corp.'s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) creates the Alto computer, which is the first computer to combine all the elements of the modern graphical user interface ("GUI").

1973 &mdash; An ARPA study shows that e-mail composing 75% of all ARPANET traffic.

1973 &mdash; Ethernet is developed. It became a popular way of connecting PCs and other computers together to enable them to share data and devices such as printers.

1973 &mdash; FTP (the "file transfer protocol") is introduced.

1973 &mdash; Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn develop the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP).

January 12, 1973 &mdash;  The Computer Law Group became the Computer Law Association.

March 1973 &mdash; ARPANET is first connected to international hosts &mdash; University College of London (England) and NORSAR (Norway).

May 22, 1973 &mdash;  At Xerox PARC, Bob Metcalfe and David Boggs invent the Ethernet &mdash; the first local-area network (LAN) designed to network hundreds of computers and printers inexpensively. It now dominates the world's LANs. The name "Ethernet" refers to the invention's medium-independent transmission of data packets, and is based on a discredited physical theory of an existing "ether" in space allowing transmission of light rays from the sun to the Earth.

June 28, 1973 &mdash; The First National Invitational Conference on Computer Abuse is held at Stanford Research Institute.

September 1973 &mdash; Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn present basic Internet ideas at INWG in September at Univ of Sussex, Brighton, U.K.

1974
1974 &mdash; Intel releases the 8080 processor.

1974 &mdash; The Wabbit virus makes multiple copies of itself on a single computer until it clogs the system, reduces system performance, and eventually crashing the computer.

May 1974 &mdash; The TCP/IP protocol is proposed in a paper titled "A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection," by Vinton G. Cerf and Robert E. Kahn. This is the first time the term “Internet” is used.

May 1974 &mdash; The Privacy Act of 1974 is enacted.

July 10, 1974 &mdash; The United States becomes a party to the 1971 revision of the Universal Copyright Convention, as revised at Paris, France.

1975
February 1975 &mdash;  Bill Gates and Paul Allen license their newly written BASIC to MITS, their first customer. MITS pays a small royalty with a maximum of US$180,000. This is the first computer language program written for a personal computer.

April 1975 &mdash;  Bill Gates and Paul Allen found Micro-Soft (the hyphen is later dropped).

May 19, 1975 &mdash; The Federal Government's antitrust suit against IBM goes to trial.

1975 &mdash; DARPA declares the ARPANET project (i.e., the early Internet) a success and hands its management over to the Defense Communications Agency.

1976
1976 &mdash; Fairchild released the first programmable home game console, called the Fairchild Video Entertainment System (later renamed Channel F). Channel F was one of the first electronic systems to use the newly invented microchip.

1976 &mdash; SATNET, a satellite program, is developed to link the United States and Europe, thereby expanding the reach of the Internet beyond the United States.

March 1976 &mdash; Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs finish work on a computer circuit board, that they call the Apple I computer.

April 1, 1976 &mdash; Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak incorporate the Apple Computer Company, on April Fool's Day.

October 19, 1976 &mdash; The 1976 Copyright Act is signed by President Ford.

November 1976 &mdash; The first industry standard for strong encryption &mdash; the Data Encryption Standard (DES) &mdash is developed by IBM and approved by the U.S. National Bureau of Standards. DES makes it practical to send encrypted information electronically, paving the way for e-commerce and virtual private networks.

1977
1977 &mdash; Microsoft is formed by Paul Allen and Bill Gates.

1977 &mdash; Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) &mdash; a Unix operating system derivative developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) of the University of California, Berkeley &mdash; is first released.

November 1977 &mdash; The complete e-mail specification (RFC 733) is released.

1978
1978 &mdash; Ward Christenson and Randy Suess create the first personal computer bulletin board system.

1978 &mdash; Harvard Business School students Dan Bricklin and Robert Frankston develop VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet program, for the Apple II. VisiCalc's power is that it allows non-programmers to use a personal computer to do real work.

1978 &mdash; The first bulletin board system (BBS) is launched.

January 1, 1978 &mdash; The principal provisions of the 1976 Copyright Act go into effect.

May 1, 1978 &mdash; The first spam e-mail was sent by Gary Thuerk in 1978 an employee at  Digital who was advertising the new DECSYSTEM-2020, 2020T, 2060, AND 2060T on ARPAnet.

June 22, 1978 &mdash; Parker v. Flook, 437 U.S. 584 (1978) is decided by the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court holds that where the only novel feature of the invention was the mathematical formula or algorithm, it does not describe patentable subject matter.

1979
1979 &mdash; Usenet is launched by Tom Truscott, Jim Ellis, and Steve Belovin to share information via email and message boards between Duke University and the University of North Carolina.

1979 &mdash; CompuServe launches.

October 1979 &mdash; The U.S. Federal Communications Commission enacts a set of rules for radio frequencies of personal computers as Subpart J of Part 15.