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The LASER
An acronym for "Light Amplification by Stimulate Emission of Radiation," the laser had been proposed several times in the years before, but it wasn't until May 1960, that Theodore Maiman operated the world's first functioning laser. This technology has been used for countless things since, from the medical field to the field of art and design. -
The first Commercial Satellite, Telstar
While many governments and countries had began sending satellites into space beforehand, a combination of efforts by Bell Labs, AT&T, France Telecom, NASA, and others had launched their own satellite, aimed at broadcasting media. Days after it's launch, it had displayed pictures and within a few months, sent the first live public TV pictures of a baseball game between the Cubs and Phillies (by accident, as the stream was ready before President Kennedy's planned speech!) -
BASIC Programming Language Appears!
A coding language meant to allow more people access to the emerging computer technology, the "Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code" was created by Thomas Kurtz and John Kemeny. This started the shift between giant mainframe computers towards more instant results, along with other technological improvements of the time. -
Dynamic Random Access Memory
Towards the end of the 60s, Robert Dennard invented a little chip that drastically increased the efficiency and speed of computing across the board. Serving as a way to perform read/write operations without committing the information to a HDD, it improved the flexibility in which computer dealt with data. This technology is still a foundational piece of any computer equipment. -
UNIX
As the 60s were ending, we see the beginnings of UNIX, a computer operating system coded in C and Assembly with a focus on multiple users and multitasking. Several researchers from the Bell Labs Center came together to create this convenient OS, which was the world's first portable OS, allowing it to be used to develop software both on and for various platforms.