Communications Achievement Chronology, 1960-1975

1960

• Global navigation satellite system developed at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab
• Paul Baran of the Rand Corporation develops the principle of “packet switching” attempting to design a decentralized, redundant communications system survivable in a nuclear attack. Work summarized in an 11-volume report entitled On Distributed Communications, published by Rand, 1964.
• John Francis Mitchell joins elements of Motorola’s walkie-talkie with automobile radio technologies to create the first transistorized pager.

1961

• American FM radio stations start to broadcast in stereophonic sound.
• The Selectric typewriter introduced by IBM with a rotating ball printing letters on a page with a fixed carriage.

1962

• NASA launches Telstar, the first active communications satellite.

1963

• After two years, MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory creates an artificial ionosphere to ensure military communications in case the Soviet Union cuts undersea cables (Project West Ford or Project Needles); shelved due to advances in satellites. 
• NASA launches the first geosynchronous satellite, the Syncom II, on a Delta rocket A direct telephone link, called the “hot line” or red telephone, is established between the White House and the Kremlin.

1964

• International Telecommunications Satellite Organization (Intelsat) founded.

1965

• Early Bird (Intelsat 1), the first commercial communications satellite put into geosynchronous orbit. Launched by the United States for the Communications Satellite Corp (COMSAT); could relay 240 telephone conversations at the same time.
• Teri Pall invents the cordless telephone, later patented by George Sweigert in 1969.
• Sony introduces the first portable video recorder, the CV-2000.

1966

• Donald Davies first describes the concept of an ”Interface computer” at the UK’s National Physical Laboratory – known today as a router – that sits between the user equipment and the packet network (which he described in 1965).

1967

1968

1969

1970

1971

• Ray Tomlinson of Bolt, Beranek, and Newman (BNN) sends the first e-mail between host computers and introduces the @ sign.

1972

1973

• Marty Cooper makes first cell phone call on the Motorola DynaTAC (the “brick”)

1974

1975