Pinpointing the most pivotal moments in Kendall Square history is like naming the all-time greatest Celtics players. Tough choices.

For the Celtics, Bird or Havlicek? Parish or McHale? Cousy or Pierce?

For Kendall Square, Google’s arrival or Novartis’s move? MIT moving to Cambridge or NASA almost moving to Cambridge?

This year marks 100 years since the Massachusetts Institute of Technology moved from a small campus near Copley Square in Boston across the Charles River to a larger campus in Cambridge. But the roots for that move were planted more than a century earlier, when the West Boston Bridge opened on Nov. 27, 1793. That span connected Boston’s Beacon Hill neighborhood with East Cambridge.

The bridge was rebuilt in 1854 and widened, and soon the first street railway in New England traveled over it in 1856. A few years later, the Cambridge Tunnel opened, linking Park Street to Harvard Square, and a few years after that, Deacon Edward Kendall founded the Kendall Boiler and Tank Co.

In 1912, the Kendall Square T station opened, and that year MIT’s leaders purchased 46 acres in Cambridge for $775,000. Ever since that move, Kendall Square has been on a centurylong roll that shows no signs of slowing down. Here are a few highlights.

1916 MIT relocates from Boston to Cambridge.

1936 The Badger Engineering and Construction Co. moves into Kendall Square, signaling a shift in the neighborhood’s DNA to engineering and research, from manufacturing.

1938 Kendall Square candy maker NECCO releases its Skybar (chocolate covering peanut, caramel, fudge, vanilla) and sweet tooths rejoice.

1947 The Radarange Microwave is released by Raytheon. And parents rejoice.

1948 Polaroid’s Model-95, its first instant-picture camera, is manufactured.

1956 MIT gets a patent for a “multicoordinate digital information storage device.’’ A what? It becomes the key to the modern-age computer.

1958 MIT’s research nuclear reactor, MITR-1, starts operating.

1959 Cambridge joins with MIT to plan the building blocks for an urban renewal project they call Technology Square.

1964 NASA establishes an Electronics Research Center in Cambridge to develop technologies for spacecraft guidance, control, communications, and information display.

1966 Cambridge clears out 15 acres to allow NASA to build a new campus in Kendall Square that is expected to employ close to 1,000 people.

1968 The seeds of the Internet are planted as Bolt Beranek and Newman Technologies (now BBN, a part of Raytheon) begins to develop software to create a processor that would connect computers from multiple locations.

1969-70 President Nixon slashes the NASA budget, and NASA’s headquarters is switched to Houston. Cambridge instead gets the Volpe Transportation Center, named for the former governor and DOT chief.

1971 BBN engineer Ray Tomlinson uses the @ symbol to send a message from one machine to another. E-mail is born. “They were all test messages, and whatever came to hand as I put my fingers on the keyboard is what I would send,’’ he said in an interview shortly before his death in March.

1974 The Cambridge City Council approves a plan to redevelop Kendall Square from an industrial district to mixed-use and research and development.

1975 The Charles Stark Draper Laboratory takes over 555 Technology Square.

1977 Cambridge passes an ordinance regulating DNA research, the first such rule in the country, opening the door for biotech firms to invade Kendall Square with vigor.

1981 Construction begins on the Cambridge Center complex. Today it’s home to Google, VMware, Akamai, Biogen, and Microsoft, among others.

1982 The Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research is founded and quickly establishes itself as one of the world’s leading genomic research facilities.

1982 Mitch Kapor founds Lotus, and the spreadsheet world begins

1983 Biogen lands in Cambridge.

1995 IBM buys out Lotus for $3.5 billion, one of the earliest signs of what’s to come in Kendall Square.

1997 The beginning of the Amazon Kindle: E Ink is incorporated and creates a new electrophoretic display for screens.

1998 An MIT professor founds Akamai to help speed up the Internet. A year later it goes public and raises $234 million.

1999 Cambridge Innovation Center opens at One Broadway, and it quickly becomes a startup magnet.

2001 The first draft of the human genome is published, biomedical research explodes, and three years later the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard is born.

2002 Novartis AG says it will be shifting its global research headquarters to Kendall Square from Basel, Switzerland.

2003 Genzyme’s global headquarters opens.

2004 The beehive-looking, Frank Gehry-designed Ray and Maria Stata Center is finished and instantly becomes the iconic building of Kendall Square.

2005 Google buys Android and opens a Kendall Square office.

2007 Microsoft opens its NERD Center (New England Research & Development).

2011 Jobs. Edison. Gates. Seven entrepreneurial titans are honored with a “Walk of Fame’’ steps from the MBTA station in Kendall Square.

2011 The new David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research facility opens, with a vow to support 500 researchers and more than 40 laboratories.

2012 Amazon leases 105,000 square feet in Kendall Square and posts three dozen job openings for software engineers and other tech professionals.

2012 More than 2 million square feet of new lab and research buildings are under construction in Kendall, mainly for life-sciences companies.

2013 Nine years after Facebook was launched out of a Harvard dorm room and went on to explode in Silicon Valley, it returns to open an engineering office in Kendall Square.

2013 The City of Cambridge’s planning department releases the so-called K2 Report, suggesting new uses, including housing and a park, for some of the Volpe Center’s underutilized land.

2014 Twitter opens a Kendall Square office.

2014 Philanthropist Ted Stanley announces a commitment to the Broad Institute of $650 million to galvanize research into the biological causes of mental health. It is the largest gift ever in the field of psychiatric research.

2015 MIT presents its Kendall Square Initiative, a $1.2 billion proposal for development, that includes six new buildings, to the Cambridge Planning Board.