See also: Timeline of the History of Computing, This Year in History and History
2020
- 7 February – AMD releases the Ryzen Threadripper 3990X, the first 64 core CPU for consumer market based on the Zen 2 microarchitecture.[1]
- 26 March – After the largest one of the first and largest public volunteer distributed computing projects SETI@home announced its shutdown by 31 March 2020 and due to heightened interest as a result of to the COVID-19 pandemic, the distributed computing project Folding@home becomes the world’s first system to reach one exaFLOPS.[2][3][4] The system simulates protein folding, is used for medical research on COVID-19 and achieved a speed of approximately 2.43 x86 exaFLOPS by 13 April 2020 – many times faster than the fastest supercomputer Summit.[5]
- 20 April – Researchers demonstrate a diffusive memristor fabricated from protein nanowires of the bacterium Geobacter sulfurreducens which functions at substantially lower voltages than previously described ones and may allow the construction of artificial neurons which function at voltages of biological action potentials. The nanowires have a range of advantages over silicon nanowires and the memristors may be used to directly process biosensing signals, for neuromorphic computing and/or direct communication with biological neurons.[6][7][8]
- 22 May – Australian computer scientists report achieving, thus far, the highest internet speed in the world from a single optical chip source over standard optical fiber, amounting to 44.2 Terabits per sec, or “downloading 1000 high definition movies in a split second”.[9][10][11]
- 27 May – A study shows that social networks can function poorly as pathways for inconvenient truths, that the interplay between communication and action during disasters may depend on the structure of social networks, that communication networks suppress necessary “evacuations” in test-scenarios because of false reassurances when compared to groups of isolated individuals and that larger networks with a smaller proportion of informed subjects can suffer more damage due to human-caused misinformation.[12][13]
- June – The Linux operating systems market share breaks the 3% desktop usage marker for the first time in June 2020, reaching 3.57% in July 2020.[14][15]
- 6 July – [Novel protocol/standard] – The Versatile Video Coding standard (H.266) is finalised, designed to halve the bitrate of previous formats, reducing data volume and especially useful for on-demand 8K streaming services.[16][17]
- 28 August – Elon Musk reveals a model of the prototype brain–computer interface chip, implanted in pigs, that his company Neuralink has been working on.[18][19]
- 3 September – Scientists report finding “176 Open Access journals that, through lack of comprehensive and open archives, vanished from the Web between 2000-2019, spanning all major research disciplines and geographic regions of the world” and that in 2019 only about a third of the 14,068 DOAJ-indexed journals ensured the long-term preservation of their content themselves, with many papers not getting archived by Web archiving initiatives such as the Internet Archive.[20][21][22]
- 18 September – Media reports of what may be the first publicly confirmed case of a civilian fatality as a nearly direct consequence of a cyberattack, after ransomware disrupted a hospital in Germany.[23]
- 25 September – [Novel application of computing / software] – Chemists describe, for the first time, possible chemical pathways from nonliving prebiotic chemicals to complex biochemicals that could give rise to living organisms, based on a new computer program named ALLCHEMY.[24][25]
2021
- 19 February – [Meta/Policy/Philosophy] – Thomas Metzinger, a German philosopher of cognitive science and applied ethics, calls for a “global moratorium on synthetic phenomenology” which, “until 2050”, precautionarily bans “all research that directly aims at or knowingly risks the emergence of artificial consciousness on post-biotic carrier systems” – and could be gradually refined. The paper does not describe mechanisms of global enforcement of such proposed regulations which do not consider biotic or semi-biotic systems and aims to limit suffering risks.[26][27]
Deaths
2020
- January 2 – Robert M. Graham, American computer scientist (b. 1929)
- January 3 – Joseph Karr O’Connor, American computer scientist (b. 1953)
- January 8 – Peter T. Kirstein, British computer scientist (b. 1933)
- February 11 – Yasumasa Kanada, Japanese computer scientist (b. 1949)
- February 16
- Larry Tesler, American computer scientist (b. 1945)
- John Iliffe, British computer designer (b. 1931)
- February 18 – Bert Sutherland, American computer scientist (b. 1936)
- March 2 – Vera Pless, American mathematician (b. 1931)
- March 15 – Olvi L. Mangasarian, Iraqi-American computer scientist and mathematician (b. 1934)
- April 7
- Mishik Kazaryan, Russian physicist (b. 1948)
- Adrian V. Stokes, British computer scientist (b. 1945)
- April 11 – John Horton Conway, British mathematician (b. 1937)
- April 25 – Thomas Huang, American computer scientist (b. 1936)
- May 9 – Timo Honkela, Finnish computer scientist (b. 1962)
- June 5 – Deborah Washington Brown, American computer scientist (b. 1952)
- July 10 – Michael M. Richter, German mathematician and computer scientist (b. 1938)
- July 26 – Bill English, American computer engineer and co-developer of the computer mouse (b. 1929)
- August 4 – Frances Allen, American computer scientist, first woman to win the Turing Award (b. 1932)
- August 11 – Russell Kirsch, American computer scientist and inventor of the first digital image scanner (b. 1929)
- August 25 – Rebeca Guber, Argentine mathematician and computer scientist (b.1926)
- October 2 – Victor Zalgaller, Russian-Israeli mathematician (b. 1920)
- November 7 – Chung Laung Liu, Taiwanese computer scientist (b. 1934)
- November 14 – Peter Pagé, German computer scientist (b. 1939)
- November 23 – Konrad Fiałkowski, Polish computer engineer (b. 1939)
- December 1
- Norman Abramson, American computer scientist and engineer (b. 1932)
- Eric Engstrom, American software engineer and co-creator of DirectX (b. 1965)
- December 14 – Claudio Baiocchi, Italian mathematician (b. 1940)
- December 22 – Edmund M. Clarke, American computer scientist (b. 1945)
- December 23 – Lars Arge, Danish computer scientist (b. 1967)
2021
- January 2 – Brad Cox, American computer scientist and inventor of the Objective-C programming language (b. 1944)
- January 28 – Alice Recoque, French computer scientist (b. 1929)
- February 1 – Walter Savitch, American computer scientist and theoretical mathematician (b. 1943)
- February 6 – Ioan Dzițac, Romanian computer scientist and mathematician (b. 1953)
- March 6 – Lou Ottens, Dutch engineer and inventor of the cassette tape (b. 1926)
- April 1 – Isamu Akasaki, Japanese engineer and physicist, and inventor of the blue LED (b. 1929)
- April 16 – Charles Geschke, American computer scientist and co-founder of Adobe Inc. (b. 1939)
- April 23 – Dan Kaminsky, American computer security researcher (b. 1979)
” (WP)
Sources:
- WP – Timeline of computing 2020–Present: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_computing_2020%E2%80%93present
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:2010s_in_computing