Technology Age Calculator

How the list is built and how the time is counted

A small list, on purpose. The list has 53 milestones in four groups: hardware and devices, software, internet and web standards, and space and history (kept only so that technology can be compared with familiar dates). An entry is included only when a page or document that we could read states its date; each row links to that page. If we could not confirm a date from a source like that, the item is not on the list, so a well-known product may be missing simply because we could not check it. The list makes no claim to be complete and does not rank anything.

What each date means. A date is not always a launch. For a web standard it is when the document was published, for a software project it may be a release or an announcement, and for a device it may be the day it was announced rather than the day it went on sale. The line under the result says exactly which event the date refers to. Where a device was released in different countries on different days we use the original announcement or first sale that the source names, and say which.

Precision. Older RFCs give only a month, and some sources give only a year. We never make a date more exact than its source: a month-only date is counted in whole months, a year-only date in whole years, and both are marked "about". Exact days are shown only for dates known to the day. When you compare two milestones, the tool says so if their dates are too coarse to tell which came first (for example, two events in the same month).

Counted to today. The elapsed time is measured to today's date on your device, using calendar years, months and days (for example, from 9 January to 26 September is 8 months and 17 days). Nothing is stored or sent. Comparisons are only between milestones on this list.

For the difference between any two dates of your own, use the Date Difference Calculator; for a person's age, the Age Calculator.

Source / Last verified (26 September 2026): each entry's source, the page we read, and its date are in the table above and in the data file for this tool. Sources are the publisher's own pages where we could read them (standards bodies and the RFC Editor, NASA, Apple, IBM, Microsoft, Mozilla, Google, the Python, Go, Rust, PHP and SQLite projects, and others). Two are copies rather than the original: the Linux announcement (a university-hosted copy of the Usenet post) and Tim Berners-Lee's 1989 proposal (W3C's HTML copy); those rows say so. Web pages change, so a source's wording may differ from what we read.