-
30,000 BCE
Cave Paintings
Cave paintings were the earliest form of communication for man. Most of these paintings involve images of animals. -
Period: 30,000 BCE to
Media Evolution
"Man has always had a need to communicate." -
3300 BCE
Bamboo Inscriptions
It uses bamboo as its writing medium for documentation. It originated in China. -
3200 BCE
Hieroglyphics
Hieroglyphs were the Ancient Egypt's formal writing system. It is similar to the cave paintings in which is carved on rocks or clay tablets. -
2500 BCE
Egyptian Papyrus
Papyrus is a plant that is used a writing medium in ancient times. It is similar to a thick paper. The word paper comes from word papyrus. -
2400 BCE
Clay Tablets
Clay Tablets were used as a writing medium for cuneiform. Cuneiform characters were imprinted on a wet clay surface using a stylus often made of reed. -
130 BCE
Acta Diurna
It was the Romans' first daily official notices. It is a Latin term meaning Daily Acts. They were carved on stone or metal and presented in message boards in public places like the Forum of Rome. -
101
China's Dibao (邸報)
(2nd Century) Dibao is somewhat the equivalent of the Western's gazette. They are publications issued by central and local governments in imperial China. They are also called "palace reports" or "imperial bulletins". -
219
Woodblock Printing
It is a technique for printing text, images or patterns used widely throughout East Asia and originating in China in antiquity as a method of printing on textiles and later paper. -
401
Mayan Codex
(5th Century) These are folding books stemming from the pre-Columbian Maya civilization, written in Maya hieroglyphic script on Mesoamerican paper, made from the inner bark of certain trees, the main being the wild fig tree or Amate (Ficus Glabrata). -
The London Gazette
The London Gazette is one of the official journals of record of the British government, and the most important among such official journals in the United Kingdom, in which certain statutory notices are required to be published. The London Gazette claims to be the oldest surviving English newspaper and the oldest continuously published newspaper in the UK, having been first published on 7 November 1665 as The Oxford Gazette. -
Cylinder Press
Friedrich Gottlob Koenig and Andreas Friedrich Bauer build their first cylinder press, which is much faster than the existing flatbed presses. One of the first customers is John Walter of The Times. The first issue of The Times that is printed with the new presses is published in 1814. -
Telegraph
Invented by Samuel Morse. The telegraph revolutionized long-distance communication. It worked by transmitting electrical signals over a wire laid between stations. In addition to helping invent the telegraph, Samuel Morse developed a code that assigned a set of dots and dashes to each letter of the English alphabet and allowed for the simple transmission of complex messages across telegraph lines. -
Typewriter
Cristopher Latham Sholes invented the typewriter with the help of Carlos Glidden and Samuel W. Soule. Although other important inventors had tried to make a typewriter, they weren't commercially successful. But Cristopher Shole's typewriter was certainly the first commercially successful one, invented in 1867. -
Telephone
Alexander Graham Bell is the inventor of the first practical telephone. The classic story of him saying "Watson, come here! I want to see you!" is a well-known part of the history of the telephone. This showed that the telephone worked, but it was a short-range phone. -
Motion Picture Photography
As a result of the work of Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey, inventors in the late 19th century began to realize that the making and showing of photographic 'moving pictures' of a more useful or even indefinite length was a practical possibility. -
Television
The invention of the television was the work of many individuals in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Individuals and corporations competed in various parts of the world to deliver a device that superseded previous technology. -
Transistor Radio
A transistor radio is a small portable radio receiver that uses transistor-based circuitry. Following their development in 1954, made possible by the invention of the transistor in 1947, they became the most popular electronic communication device in history. -
EDSAC
The electronic delay storage automatic calculator (EDSAC) was an early British computer. Inspired by John von Neumann's seminal First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC, the machine was constructed by Maurice Wilkes and his team at the University of Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory in England. -
IBM 704
The IBM 704 Data Processing System was a large-scale computer designed for engineering and scientific calculations. Its predecessor was the 701, and its sister computers were the 702 and 705 Data Processing Systems, designed primarily for commercial applications. -
OHP Projector
Roger Appeldorn created a machine that projected the image of writing on clear film in the early 1960s, while working at 3M, according to the company's recount of the invention of the overhead projector. Appeldorn specifically reached out to businesses and teachers to push the product. -
Internet and World Wide Web
With the development of the Internet by the United States Department of Defense and the subsequent adoption of personal computers a decade later, the Information or Digital Revolution was underway. -
Nexus
The first web browser was invented in 1990 by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Berners-Lee is the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees the Web's continued development, and is also the founder of the World Wide Web Foundation. His browser was called WorldWideWeb and later renamed Nexus, and ran on NeXT Computers. -
Mosaic
Browser software was further innovated by Marc Andreessen with the release of Mosaic, "the world's first popular browser", which made the World Wide Web system easy to use and more accessible to the average person. -
Internet Explorer
Microsoft responded with its Internet Explorer in 1995, also heavily influenced by Mosaic, initiating the industry's first browser war. Bundled with Windows, Internet Explorer gained dominance in the web browser market. -
Opera
Opera debuted in 1996; it has never achieved widespread use. Its Mini version focused on the fast-growing mobile phone web browser market, being preinstalled on over 40 million phones. -
Netscape/Firefox
Netscape launched what was to become the Mozilla Foundation in an attempt to produce a competitive browser using the open source software model. That browser would eventually evolve into Firefox, which developed a respectable following while still in the beta stage of development. -
Open Diary
Bruce Ableson launched Open Diary in October 1998, which soon grew to thousands of online diaries. Open Diary innovated the reader comment, becoming the first blog community where readers could add comments to other writers' blog entries. -
LiveJournal
Brad Fitzpatrick started LiveJournal in March 1999. -
Pitas
Andrew Smales created Pitas.com in July 1999 as an easier alternative to maintaining a "news page" on a Web site, followed by DiaryLand in September 1999, focusing more on a personal diary community. -
Blogger
Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan (Pyra Labs) launched Blogger.com in August 1999 (purchased by Google in February 2003) -
Cyworld
The first mass social networking site was the South Korean service, Cyworld, launched as a blog-based site in 1999 and social networking features added in 2001. -
Friendster
Friendster was a social gaming site based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. It was originally a social networking service website. Before Friendster was redesigned, the service allowed users to contact other members, maintain those contacts, and share online content and media with those contacts. -
Safari
Apple's Safari had its first beta release in January 2003. -
Wordpress
Wordpress was released in May of 2003 -
LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a business- and employment-oriented social networking service that operates via websites and mobile apps. Founded on December 28, 2002, and launched on May 5, 2003. It is mainly used for professional networking, including employers posting jobs and job seekers posting their CVs. -
Myspace
Myspace is a social networking website offering an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music, and videos. It is headquartered in Beverly Hills, California. It is acquired by News Corporation in July 2005. From 2005 to 2008, Myspace was the largest social networking site in the world. -
Facebook
Facebook is an American for-profit corporation and an online social media and social networking service based in Menlo Park, California. The Facebook website was launched on February 4, 2004, by Mark Zuckerberg, along with fellow Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. -
Twitter
Twitter is an online news and social networking service where users post and interact with messages, called "tweets." Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams and launched in July of that year. -
Tumblr
A microblogging and social networking website founded by David Karp in 2007, and owned by Oath Inc.The service allows users to post multimedia and other content to a short-form blog. -
Chrome
The most recent major entrant to the browser market is Chrome, first released in September 2008. Chrome's take-up has increased significantly year by year. Chrome overtook Internet Explorer 8 as the most widely used web browser but still had lower usage than all versions of Internet Explorer combined.[12] Chrome's user-base continued to grow and in May 2012, Chrome's usage passed the usage of all versions of Internet Explorer combined.
