Timeline of digital work

Modern work is in a state of flux as part of the discontinuous change brought on by the information revolution. Perhaps, by considering the factors that shaped the ways we work today we can better understand what its future might look like and whether a dominant design will emerge or whether work will continue changing.

2024
March 13
EU AI Act
2023
November 30
AI Safety Institute created following the UK’s first AI safety summit
2022
November 30
ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot, launched
2021
May 1
The term “The Great Resignation” is first used by Anthony Klotz, organisational psychologist and professor at Texas A & M University
2020
April 9
National lockdowns and enforced working from home force many workplaces to quickly adopt digital technology and remote working practices
2019
September 30
Beyond Command and Control by John Seddon is published
April 16
Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Handbook of Silicon Valley’s Bill Campbell by Alan Eagle, Eric Schmidt, and Jonathan Rosenberg is published
2018
May 25
General Data Protection Regulation
2016
July 15
3.7 billion people are connected to the Internet
July 7
1,000,000,000 websites on the Internet
2012
July 15
The population of the Internet reached 2 billion
April 13
Union membership in the UK drops below 6 million for the first time since the 1940s
2011
April 1
The phrase Fourth Industrial Revolution was introduced by Kagermann, Lukas and Wahlster,
2009
April 23
Tina Brown coins the term ‘Gig economy’
2007
April 13
First iPhone and the start of the smart phone revolution
2005
July 15
The population of the Internet reached 1 billion
2003
July 15
Myspace launched
2001
September 12
The agile manifesto for software development is written
April 19
FANUC, a Japanese robotics company, begins operating as a ‘lights-out’ factory where robots build other robots
2000
July 14
10,000,000 websites on the Internet
1998
September 4
Google incorporated
1996
July 18
1,000,000 websites on the Internet
1991
November 1
Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers, by Geoffrey Moore is published
April 18
Invention of WiFi
1988
December 2
Ron Westrum creates a typology of organizational culture
January 1
Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production by Taiichi Onho is published
1986
January 1
The New New Product Development Game by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka is published in Harvard Business Review
January 1
Out of the Crisis by W. Edwards Deming is published and launches the Total Quality Management movement
1985
April 5
Symbolics Computer Company is the first business to register a commercial dot-com domain name
1983
July 21
High Output Management, by Andy Grove is published
July 15
Motorola created the first mobile phone, the Motorola DynaTac
1980
April 10
First laptop
1976
April 1
Apple founded
1975
April 4
Microsoft founded
1973
April 20
First portable cell phone
1972
April 20
The term “telecommuting” is coined
January 1
On Purposeful Systems by Russell Ackoff and Frederick Edmund Emery is published
January 1
The Limits to Growth by Donella Meadows is published
1970
July 21
Andy Grove introduces the idea of OKRs at Intel
April 10
Equal Pay Act in the U.K.
1966
July 15
ELIZA, the first natural language processing chatbot, is developed by Joseph Weizenbaum
1964
January 1
Xerox introduces the Fax Machine
1963
July 15
The term “hacker” originates with MIT pranks
April 11
Equal Pay Act in the U.S.
1960
April 21
Open plan office layout widely adopted
1959
November 12
The term “knowledge worker” was introduced by Peter Drucker in The Landmarks of Tomorrow
1957
October 1
Fairchild semiconductor founded
1956
July 31
The Dartmouth workshop, a pivotal event in establishing AI as an academic discipline, is organized by Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy
1950
July 14
Computing Machinery and Intelligence, landmark paper by Alan Turing
April 11
Cross-functional teams
1948
July 14
Claude Shannon, a Bell Labs mathematician, is credited for having laid out the foundations of digitalization in his pioneering 1948 article, A Mathematical Theory of Communication
1947
December 23
The transistor is invented by William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain.
July 15
Schumpeter argued that the innovation and technological change of a nation come from the entrepreneurs or wild spirits. He coined the word Unternehmergeist, German for “entrepreneur-spirit”, and asserted that “… the doing of new things or the doing of things that are already being done in a new way” stemmed directly from the efforts of entrepreneurs.
1939
January 1
Hewlett Packard founded
1935
December 13
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes is published
1932
January 1
USA officially adopts the five-day working week
1931
July 9
Neil H McElroy, of P&G, invented the concept of a Product Manager
1926
January 1
James McKinsey founded consultancy firm, McKinsey & Company
1924
November 1
Creative Experience by Mary Parker Follett is published
1911
May 1
The Principles of Scientific Management by Frederick Winslow Taylor is published
1885
November 11
Stanford university founded
1848
September 13
The first computer program is written by Ada Lovelace
1821
September 1
English mathematician Charles Babbage conceives of a steam-driven calculating machine that would be able to compute tables of numbers
1801
September 30
Manufacturing of interchangeable parts introduced by Eli Whitney
1784
September 15
The first factory opened in Cheshire by textile merchant Samuel Greg
1776
March 9
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith is published