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38,000 BCE
Pre-Industrial Ages (Before 1700s)
Because of the painting drawings on cave walls and ceilings seen in Eurasia, this era is also known as "Parental Art." According to research, the paintings discovered were primarily used for communication as well as religious or ceremonial purposes. -
3500 BCE
Cave Paintings
Prior to the pre-industrial age, people were discovering new things they didn't know before, as well as discovering things that helped them on a daily basis. -
3500 BCE
Proto-writing
Early pictographic writing first appeared on cave walls. The more formalized, Cuneiform, was created by the Sumerians around 3500 BCE using pictures to tell stories on clay tablets. Simultaneously, the Egyptians created Hieroglyphics to identify tombs, document religious myths and stories, share medical remedies and practices, and recount events, like battles or deaths. -
3000 BCE
Development of Writing
Writing was one of the first channels ever used by man in recorded history. -
3000 BCE
Stone Carvings
Stone carving is an activity in which rough natural stone pieces are shaped by controlled removal of stone. Because of the durability of the material, stone work from our prehistory has survived. This is because paper had not yet been discovered at the time. They used it to communicate, store information, and express themselves artistically. -
2500 BCE
Papyrus
Papyrus is a thick paper-like material that was used as a writing surface in ancient times. It was created from the pith of the wetland sedge Cyperus papyrus. -
2400 BCE
Clay Tablets
Throughout the Bronze Age and well into the Iron Age, clay tablets were used as a writing medium, particularly for cuneiform writing. -
2000 BCE
Manuscript
It is any document that is handwritten or typewritten rather than mechanically printed or reproduced in some indirect or automated way. These are old handwritten writings on paper. Mostly for educational purposes. -
1500 BCE
Phoenician Alphabet
Proto-Canaanite (or Proto-Sinaitic) was the first consonantal alphabet after Hieroglyphics, with 22 acrophonic "letters" or glyphs in 1450 BCE. This writing evolved into the Phoenician alphabet. Many written languages, including Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, and Roman, were built on this alphabet. -
200 BCE
Mailing Service
Despite the fact that mailing was invented a long time ago, it was the dominant mode of communication during the medieval era, and it was so widely used that courier service became a profession. To communicate with distant receivers, people used horse-drawn couriers. -
131 BCE
Acta Diurna
The Acta Diurna were daily Roman official notices, similar to a daily gazette. They were carved on stone or metal and displayed on message boards in public places such as Rome's Forum. -
2
Dibao
Dibao, literally "reports from the [official] residences," were a type of publication issued by imperial China's central and local governments. While they are similar to gazettes in form and function, they have also been referred to as "palace reports" or "imperial bulletins" in the Western world. -
5
Codex in Mayan
Maya codices are folding books written in Maya hieroglyphic script on Mesoamerican bark cloth by the pre-Columbian Maya civilization. Professional scribes working under the patronage of deities such as the Tonsured Maize God and the Howler Monkey Gods created the folding books. -
7
Printing Press using Wood Blocks
Woodblock printing is a technique for printing text, images, or patterns that originated in antiquity in China as a method of printing on textiles and later paper. The earliest surviving examples of woodblock printing on cloth date from before 220 AD, and it remained the most common East Asian method of printing books and other texts, as well as images, until the 19th century. -
1400
Industrial Age
The Industrial Age is a historical period that encompasses the changes in economic and social organization that began around 1760 in Great Britain and later spread to other countries, and was characterized primarily by the replacement of hand tools with power-driven machines such as the power loom and the steam engine, as well as the concentration of industry in large establishments. -
1400
Paper
Tsai Lun creates paper. The invention of paper vastly improved our ability to communicate. Along with writing, civilizations created books, letters, and a variety of other tools used in modern communication. -
1440
Printing Press
In 650 AD, the Tang Dynasty in China discovered the concept of printing. The printing press gained popularity after Johannes Gutenberg, a European, invented the device in 1440 to print an old German poem. As the literate population grew and newspapers became more widely available, the printing press enabled unprecedentedly large-scale production. -
Newspaper
In Germany, the first regularly published newspaper appeared in 1609. The World Association of Newspapers recognizes Relation, published by Johann Carolus, as the mother of our modern newspaper. It also established the newspaper as a necessary tool for disseminating daily information. -
London Gazette
The London Gazette is one of the British government's official journals of record, and the most important among such official journals in the United Kingdom, where certain statutory notices are required to be published. The London Gazette claims to be the oldest surviving English newspaper and the longest continuously published newspaper in the United Kingdom, having been first published as The Oxford Gazette on November 7, 1665. -
Telegraph
An electrical telegraph was a point-to-point text messaging system that was used from the 1840s until the late twentieth century, when it was gradually supplanted by other telecommunication systems. Switches at the sending station connected a current source to the telegraph wires. -
Camera
In 1827, Joseph Nicephore Niepce used heliography to capture the first image with an 8-hour exposure. It wasn't until Niepce's son and Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre developed the Daguerreotype method in 1839 that the exposure time was reduced to less than 30 minutes without the image disappearing, paving the way for modern photography. Since the invention of photography, our society has become increasingly visual in its consumption of information. -
Typewriter
A typewriter is a mechanical or electromechanical machine that produces characters similar to those produced by movable type in a printer. It was used by artists and writers in their works of art and literature. It also functions as a form of letter writing that can be used for communication. -
Telephone
A telephone is a type of telecommunications device that allows two or more users to communicate when they are too far apart to be heard directly. -
Microphone
Emile Berliner invented the microphone in 1876 as a telephone voice transmitter, shortly after the telephone was first displayed in the United States. In the same year, there is a Centennial Exposition. When the radio was invented, new broadcasting microphones were developed, and the ribbon microphone for radio broadcasting was developed soon after in 1942. -
Phonograph
A phonograph, also known as a gramophone or, since the 1940s, a record player, or, more recently, a turntable, is a device for mechanically recording and reproducing sound. -
Kinetoscope
The Kinetoscope was an early device for displaying motion pictures. The Kinetoscope was intended to be used by one person at a time to view films through a peephole viewer window at the top of the device. -
Electronic Age
The information age or the digital age are other terms for the electronic age. It began in the 1970s and has continued to the present. This is a transitional period from traditional industry to an economy based on information computerization. -
Punch Cards
A code-perforated card used to control the operation of a machine, as in voting machines and previously in programming and data entry into computers. -
Transistor Radio
Depending on who you ask, either Nikola Tesla or Guglielmo Marconi invented the radio. Regardless of who was the true inventor, the radio was one of the first mass communication devices used in a variety of professional fields. Radio messaging was used to communicate with planes, broadcast important events and speeches, tell stories, and connect countries around the world. -
Television
Philo Farnsworth invented television by breaking an image into horizontal lines and reassembling those lines into a picture on the screen. Following the public introduction and marketing of television at the 1939 World's Fair, regular broadcasts of sports coverage, variety shows, and feature films began. Appearance and image were now as important as the message. Body language has become an important part of any public speech, particularly in politics. -
Computer
J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly completed the first computer, ENIAC, in 1946. Its primary function was to solve arithmetic equations digitally. The computer as we know it in the twenty-first century did not exist until 1976, when Apple I was introduced. The computer altered how we processed data, transmitted and received information, conducted research, and entertained ourselves. -
Fax Machihne
Xerox developed the fax machine for general business use in the mid 1960s. During the 1980s, when the fax machine was at its peak of popularity, it became a standard communication tool, allowing businesses and individuals to send documents more efficiently via wire transfer rather than snail mail. -
Floppy Disk
When IBM introduced the floppy disk in 1971, it was an instant success. The memory device was regarded as revolutionary because of its portability, which provided a new method of transporting data between computers. The floppy disk laid the groundwork for CDs, DVDs, flash drives, and the Internet of Things. -
Video Recording
Although Charles Ginsberg of the Ampex Corporation invented the videotape recorder in 1951, it wasn't until 1971 that Sony released the first VCR to the public that the entertainment industry was transformed. Visual and audio documentation in public or private settings, such as conferences and interviews, was made possible by videotape recording. -
Cellphone
Cellphones were invented in 1973, but the Motorola DynaTAC 8000x was the first mobile phone small enough to carry around in 1983. Because of its portability, the mobile phone gained popularity in the 1980s and 1990s. For the first time, people could communicate without leaving their homes, businesses, or pay phones. The invention of the cell phone laid the groundwork for the well-known iPhone and Android smart devices. -
Information Age (21st Century)
The Information Age (also known as the Computer Age, Digital Age, or New Media Age) is a historical period that began in the mid-twentieth century and was characterized by a rapid epochal shift from traditional industry established by the Industrial Revolution to an economy based primarily on information technology. -
Internet
Although the Internet concept originated with ARPANET in the 1960s, its craze didn't truly take shape until 1990, when Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. When the concept of "information sharing" was heightened and popularized by the introduction of social media in 2002, the Internet played a significant role. While the Internet has enabled us to connect in new ways, it has also introduced a number of issues concerning privacy, intellectual property, misinformation, and hacking. -
Mobile Phones
A mobile phone is a portable telephone that can make and receive calls while the user is moving within a telephone service area using a radio frequency link. Phones are used for both messaging and calling, as well as online communication via the internet. -
Websites
A website is a collection of related web pages, including multimedia content, that are usually identified by a common domain name and are hosted on at least one web server. Websites, because they focus on a single site, provide a much more direct form of communication on the internet. -
Google
Google is a multinational technology company based in the United States that specializes in Internet-related services and products. Online advertising technologies, search, cloud computing, software, and hardware are examples. -
Social Media
Social media are computer-mediated technologies that allow people to create and share information, ideas, career interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks. -
WordPress
WordPress was released on May 27, 2003, as a fork of b2/cafelog by its founders, American developer Matt Mullenweg and English developer Mike Little. The software is distributed under the GNU General Public License version 2 (or later). -
Blogspot
Blogger is an American online content management system which enables multi-user blogs with time-stamped entries. Pyra Labs developed it before being acquired by Google in 2003. Google hosts the blogs, which can be accessed through a subdomain of blogspot.com. Blogs can also be accessed from a user-owned custom domain (such as www.example.com) by using DNS facilities to direct a domain to Google's servers -
Laptops
In 1981, Adam Osborne invented the laptop. Though the Osborne 1 was recognized as the first laptop, Alan Kay introduced the concept of a portable computer in 1968.