Timeline of communication technology

Timeline of communication technology

Graphical overview

Pre 21st Century Media Impact

• 30,000 BC – In ice-age Europe, people mark ivory, bone, and stone with patterns to keep track of time, using a lunar calendar.
• 14,000 BC – In what is now Mezhirich, Ukraine, the first known artifact with a map on it is made using bone.
• Prior to 3500BC – Communication was carried out through paintings of indigenous tribes.
• 3500s BC – The Sumerians develop cuneiform writing and the Egyptians develop hieroglyphic writing.
• 16th century BC – The Phoenicians develop an alphabet.
• AD 26–37 – Roman Emperor Tiberius rules the empire from the island of Capri by signaling messages with metal mirrors to reflect the sun.
• 105 – Tsai Lun invents paper.
• 7th century – Hindu-Malayan empires write legal documents on copper plate scrolls, and write other documents on more perishable media.
• 751 – Paper is introduced to the Muslim world after the Battle of Talas.
• 1250 – The quill is used for writing.
• 1305 – The Chinese develop wooden block movable type printing.
• 1450 – Johannes Gutenberg finishes a printing press with metal movable type.
• 1520 – Ships on Ferdinand Magellan's voyage signal to each other by firing cannon and raising flags.
• 1792 – Claude Chappe establishes the first long-distance semaphore telegraph line.
• 1831 – Joseph Henry proposes and builds an electric telegraph.
• 1836 – Samuel Morse develops the Morse code.
• 1843 – Samuel Morse builds the first long distance electric telegraph line.
• 1844 – Charles Fenerty produces paper from a wood pulp, eliminating rag paper which was in limited supply.
• 1849 – Associated Press organizes Nova Scotia pony express to carry latest European news for New York newspapers.
• 1876 – Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas A. Watson exhibit an electric telephone in Boston.
• 1877 – Thomas Edison patents the phonograph.
• 1889 – Almon Strowger patents the direct dial telephone.

20th century

• 1902 – Guglielmo Marconi transmits radio signals from Cornwall to Newfoundland.
• 1920 – Radio station KDKA based in Pittsburgh began the first broadcast.
• 1925 – John Logie Baird transmits the first television signal.
• 1942 – Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil invent frequency hopping spread spectrum communication technique.
• 1947 – Douglas H. Ring and W. Rae Young of Bell Labs propose a cell-based approach which led to "cellular phones."
• 1947 – Full-scale commercial television is first broadcast.
• 1949 – Claude Elwood Shannon, the "father of information theory", mathematically proves the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem.
• 1958 – Chester Carlson presents the first photocopier suitable for office use.
• 1963 – First geosynchronous communications satellite is launched, 17 years after Arthur C. Clarke's article.
• 1965 - First email sent (at MIT).
• 1966 – Charles Kao realizes that silica-based optical waveguides offer a practical way to transmit light via total internal reflection.
• 1969 – The first hosts of ARPANET, Internet's ancestor, are connected.
• 1971
  • Erna Schneider Hoover invent a computerized switching system for telephone traffic.
  • 8-inch floppy disk removable storage medium for computers is introduced.
• 1975 - "First list servers are introduced."
• 1976 – The personal computer (PC) market is born.
• 1977 – Donald Knuth begins work on TeX.
• 1981
  • Hayes Smartmodem introduced.
  • Nordic Mobile Telephone, the world´s first automatic mobile phone is put into operation
• 1983 - Microsoft Word software is launched.
• 1989
  • Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau build the prototype system which became the World Wide Web at CERN.
  • WordPerfect 5.1 word processing software released.
• 1991
  • Anders Olsson transmits solitary waves through an optical fiber with a data rate of 32 billion bits per second.
  • GSM is put into operation
• 1992
  • Neil Papworth sends the first SMS (or text message).
  • Internet2 organization is created.
  • IBM ThinkPad 700C laptop computer created. It was lightweight compared to its predecessors.
• 1993 - Mosaic graphical web browser is launched.
• 1994 – Internet radio broadcasting is born.
• 1996 - Motorola StarTAC mobile phone introduced. It was significantly smaller than previous cellphones.
• 1999 – 45% of Australians have a mobile phone.
• 1998 - Lotus Notes software is launched.
• 1998 - What would be the all-time most used search engine of the World Wide Web - Google - founded**
• 1999
  • Sirius satellite radio is introduced.
  • Napster peer-to-peer file sharing is launched.

21st century

• 2001 – First digital cinema transmission by satellite in Europe of a feature film by Bernard Pauchon and Philippe Binant.
• 2003 – MySpace is launched.
• 2003 – Skype video calling software is launched.
• 2004 – What would become the largest social networking site in the world, Facebook is launched.
• 2005 – YouTube, the video sharing site, is launched.
• 2006 – Twitter, microblogging

See also

• History of communication
• List of years in home video
• Timeline of photography technology
• Category:Computing timelines