Timeline of Computing and AI

The Mechanical Age (1800s)

Year	Milestone
1822	Babbage begins the Difference Engine
1833	Babbage conceives the Analytical Engine
1843	Ada Lovelace publishes her Notes, including the first algorithm
1854	George Boole publishes An Investigation of the Laws of Thought

Foundations (1930s–1940s)

Year	Milestone
1936	Turing publishes “On Computable Numbers”—the Turing machine
1943	McCulloch and Pitts propose the first mathematical model of a neuron
1945	Von Neumann describes the stored-program computer architecture
1948	Shannon publishes “A Mathematical Theory of Communication”

The Birth of AI (1950s–1960s)

Year	Milestone
1950	Turing publishes “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”—the Turing Test
1956	Dartmouth Conference—“artificial intelligence” coined as a field
1957	Rosenblatt demonstrates the Mark I Perceptron
1958	McCarthy creates LISP, the language of AI research

Winters and Revivals (1970s–1980s)

Year	Milestone
1969	Minsky and Papert publish Perceptrons—the first AI winter begins
1973	Lighthill Report cuts AI funding in Britain
1980	Expert systems boom begins
1986	Rumelhart, Hinton, and Williams publish the backpropagation paper

The Statistical Turn (1990s–2000s)

Year	Milestone
1997	Hochreiter and Schmidhuber introduce LSTM
1997	Deep Blue defeats Kasparov at chess
1998	LeCun demonstrates convolutional networks for document recognition
2006	Hinton’s deep belief networks reignite interest in deep learning

The Deep Learning Revolution (2010s)

Year	Milestone
2012	AlexNet wins ImageNet—deep learning’s breakout moment
2014	Bahdanau introduces the attention mechanism for machine translation
2014	Generative adversarial networks (GANs) proposed
2017	“Attention Is All You Need”—the transformer architecture
2018	BERT and GPT establish the pre-training paradigm

The Transformer Era (2020s)

Year	Milestone
2020	GPT-3 demonstrates few-shot learning at scale
2022	InstructGPT / RLHF aligns language models with human intent
2022	ChatGPT launches—LLMs enter mainstream awareness
2023–present	Rapid proliferation of large language models and multimodal AI