How did we get to ChatGPT? The inventions, ideas and rules that made today’s AI, from the first electronic switches to reasoning models. Follow what each milestone built on and what it led to, right up to our news.
100 milestones · 1904 to today · each checked in at least 2 sources
When it happened
Each square is one decade. The brighter the square, the more milestones of that kind: progress was slow for decades, then sped up. Choose a theme to see only its milestones, or a decade to jump to it.
Milestones per theme per decade, from the 1900s to the 2020s
In July 1945, Vannevar Bush published “As We May Think” in The Atlantic Monthly. It described the memex, a desk that held books and records on microfilm and let a user link items into trails.
Why it matters Its idea of linked trails of information influenced later computer pioneers such as Douglas Engelbart.
Note The memex was a proposal for a future device, not a working machine. Engelbart read a reprint in 1945, but the essay shaped Engelbart’s own research only from about 1959.
In July 1948, Claude Shannon published “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” in the Bell System Technical Journal. It showed how to measure information in bits and how much a noisy channel can carry.
Why it matters It became the foundation of digital communication and today shapes systems from compact discs to deep-space probes.
Note The paper was printed in two parts, in July and October 1948; the date given is the first part. John W. Tukey suggested the word “bit”.
On 29 October 1969, a computer at UCLA sent the first message over the ARPANET to a computer at SRI. It was meant to be “LOGIN”, but the SRI computer crashed after “LO”; the full login worked within an hour.
Why it matters It joined the first two nodes of the ARPANET, the research network that later grew into the internet.
Note Often called the first message on the internet. The ARPANET was an early network that later became part of the internet.
On 1 January 1983, every computer on the ARPANET switched from the older protocol, NCP, to TCP/IP. A 1981 plan by Jon Postel set the deadline, and the change went surprisingly smoothly.
Why it matters TCP/IP let many separate networks link up under shared rules: the basis of the internet that followed.
Note The date is firm, but the move was staged: under RFC 801, computers ran both protocols during 1982.
Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist at CERN, wrote a proposal for a system of linked documents, so the lab would stop losing track of its information. Based on hypertext, it asked CERN’s managers to back the idea.
Why it matters It grew into the World Wide Web, which soon became the main way people used the internet.
Note The 1989 text did not yet use the name World Wide Web; Berners-Lee chose it in 1990. CERN and the W3C give only the month, March 1989.
In 1998, Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Stanford described Google, a search engine that ranks pages by the links pointing to them. Google Inc. was incorporated in California in September 1998.
Why it matters Ranking pages by their links, not only by keywords, became the foundation of Google’s search.
Note The paper is from the April 1998 issue. Google ties its birth to an investor’s cheque in August 1998, and its 2004 stock-market filing gives September 1998 for incorporation.
In June 2009, Fei-Fei Li and colleagues at Princeton presented ImageNet at the CVPR conference. It held 3.2 million labelled images in 5,247 categories, found online and checked by crowd workers.
Why it matters It supplied the data that AlexNet was trained on in 2012, a breakthrough for image recognition.
Note The Computer History Museum dates the project’s start to 2006. The database kept growing; ImageNet now lists more than 14 million images.
A milestone goes in when it changed what AI can do, the tools AI is built with, how many people use AI, or the rules for AI. It must be at least a year old: newer events are news.
We checked every milestone in at least two sources and read them: the original paper, patent, announcement or law where it exists, and a history source such as a museum, an encyclopedia or a report from the time. We never cite Wikipedia. Many “firsts” are disputed, so we say when they are, and dates are only as exact as the sources agree.
Last checked 4 October 2026. Found a mistake? Tell us, and we will correct it. How we report