Chronology of Events - 1960s

The following is a chronological listing of significant events in the development of the field of Information Technology law during the 1960s:

1960
October 1960 &mdash; UCLA hosts the First National Conference on Law and Electronics at Lake Arrowhead, California

November 1960 &mdash; Roy N. Freed publishes the first article on computer law: “A Lawyer’s Guide Through the Computer Maze” in The Practical Lawyer.

1963
1963 &mdash; The American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) is developed to standardize data exchange among computers.

1965
1965 &mdash; Ted Nelson coins the term "hypertext," which refers to text that is not necessarily linear.

1966
February ARPANET founded.

1966 &mdash; IBM develops DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory), which allows fast, compact, reliable and inexpensive data storage on computer systems. By the mid-1970s, DRAM becomes the standard for virtually all computers.

1969
1969 &mdash; AT&T Bell Laboratories develops UNIX to make porting software applications easier. It was first licensed to universities, and later to corporations. It then became the backbone of the Internet.

1969 &mdash; CompuServe, the first commercial online service, is established.

January 17, 1969 &mdash;  United States attorney general Ramsey Clark charges IBM with unlawful monopolization of the computer industry, and requests the federal courts break it up. (13 years later, the U.S. Justice Department will drop the case.)

June 23, 1969 &mdash; IBM adopts a new marketing policy that charges separately for most systems engineering activities, future computer programs, and customer education courses. This "unbundling" gives rise to a multibillion-dollar software and services industry.

September 2, 1969 First Internet node was installed at UCLA.