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; Intel introduces the world's first dynamic RAM (random access memory) chip and the first microprocessor, the Intel 4004.

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.

March 1970 &mdash; The fifth node of the Internet is installed at BBN in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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; The FCC issues its "Specialized Common Carrier" decision, deregulating private-line communications.

1971 &mdash; The pocket calculator is invented by Sharp Corporation.

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; 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.

1971 &mdash; The Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) is invented by James Fergason.

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

May 18, 1971 &mdash; The Computer Law Group, predecessor to the Computer Law Association, is founded (full-text).

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

November 20, 1971 &mdash; The 8-inch floppy disk is introduced.

1972
1972 &mdash; The first commercial video game console that could be played at home, the "Odyssey," is released by Magnavox. It comes 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; VCR home videocassette format developed.

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

1972 &mdash; The Compact disc (CD) is invented.

January 1972 &mdash; Robert E. Kahn publishes an Internal BBN memorandum on a communications-oriented set of operating system principles titled "Communications Principles for Operating Systems."

January 21, 1972 &mdash; Telex files an antitrust lawsuit against IBM over IBM's practices relating to disk drives.

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; Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Inc. develops the CP/M operating system.

1973 &mdash; British scientists Clifford Cocks and James Ellis develop a cryptographic public key mechanism.

1973 &mdash; Researchers at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) create 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; The specification for the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is published (RFC 454).

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).

April 1973 &mdash; The U.S. District Court issues its decision in a patent infringement case between Honeywell and Sperry Rand (Honeywell v. Sperry Rand) on a patent issued on the ENIAC computer in 1964. The court invalidates the patent, which covered the essential design and features of all digital computers.

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.

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

October 17, 1973 &mdash; Martin Cooper from Motorola files a patent application for a cellular radiotelephone.

October 19, 1973 &mdash; A federal court establishes that Eckert-Mauchly derived ENIAC from Atanasoff's works, denying Sperry's claims against Honeywell and Control Data for violating ENIAC's patents.

1974
1974 &mdash; Intel releases the 8080 processor.

1974 &mdash; Charles Simonyi coins the term WYSIWYG ("What You See Is What You Get") to describe the ability to display a file or document exactly as it will be printed or viewed.

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.

1974 &mdash; DoD launches the first satellite of a proposed 24-satellite GPS system called NAVSTAR.

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
1975 &mdash; The FCC authorizes customers to use their private telephones on the Bell System.

January 1975 &mdash; The MITS (Micro Instruments and Telemetry Systems) Altair 8800, based on Intel 8080 with 256 bytes of memory and S-100 bus, is introduced.

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 $180,000. This is the first computer language program written for a personal computer.

April 4, 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. Satellites are owned by a consortium of nations, 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.

March 26, 1976 &mdash; Queen Elizabeth II sends an email from the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment (RSRE) in Malvern, U.K.

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; Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Andleman invent the cryptography RSA function.

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 released.

1977 &mdash; The text adventure game Zork is created by Blank, Daniels, Anderson and Lebling.

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

1978
1978 &mdash; Congress enacts the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which established a secret federal court empowered to issue wiretap warrants in national security cases.

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 is sent by Gary Thuerk, an employee at Digital Equipment, who was advertising the new DECSYSTEM-2020, 2020T, 2060, AND 2060T on ARPANET (full-text).

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.

1979 &mdash; ARPA establishes the Internet Configuration Control Board (ICCB).

1979 &mdash; Atari releases the Asteroids arcade game.

1979 &mdash; Fiber-optic cable systems are first introduced.

1979 &mdash; The British Post Office introduces Prestel videotex service.

1979 &mdash; The Packet Radio Network (PRNET) is launched with DARPA funding.

1979 &mdash; INMARSAT, an international organization for maritime communications, is created.

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.