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Period: 36,000 BCE to 1300
Pre-Industrial Era
Pre-industrial society refers to social attributes and forms of political and cultural organization that were prevalent before the advent of the Industrial Revolution. -
35,000 BCE
Cave Painting
Cave paintings are a type of parietal art (which category also includes petroglyphs, or engravings), found on the wall or ceilings of caves. -
2500 BCE
Egyptian Papyrus
Papyrus is a material similar to thick paper that was used in ancient times as a writing surface. -
2400 BCE
Mesopotamian Clay Tables
In Mesopotamia, writing began as simple counting marks, sometimes alongside a non-arbitrary sign, in the form of a simple image, pressed into clay tokens or less commonly cut into wood, stone or pots. -
130 BCE
Roman Acta Diurna
Acta Diurna were daily Roman official notices, a sort of daily gazette. They were carved on stone or metal and presented in message boards in public places like the Forum of Rome. They were also called simply Acta. In many ways, they functioned like an early newspaper for the Roman citizenry. -
200
Chinese Dibao
Dibao, literally "reports from the [official] residences", were a type of publications issued by central and local governments in imperial China. -
220
Printing Press Using Woodblocks
Woodblock printing (or block printing) 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. -
500
Mayan Codices
Maya codices are folding books written by the pre-Columbian Maya civilization in Maya hieroglyphic script on Mesoamerican bark paper. The folding books are the products of professional scribes working under the patronage of deities such as the Tonsured Maize God and the Howler Monkey Gods. -
Period: 1400 to
Industrial Age
The Industrial Revolution, now also known as the First Industrial Revolution, was the transition to new manufacturing processes in Europe and the United States, in the period from about 1700 to sometime between 1820 and 1840. -
1440
Gutenberg Printing Press
A printing press is a mechanical device for applying pressure to an inked surface resting upon a print medium (such as paper or cloth), thereby transferring the ink. It marked a dramatic improvement on earlier printing methods in which the cloth, paper or other medium was brushed or rubbed repeatedly to achieve the transfer of ink, and accelerated the process. In Germany, around 1440, goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press, which started a printing revolution. -
The London Gazette
The London Gazette is one of the official journals of record or Government gazettes 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. -
Typewriter
A typewriter is a mechanical or electromechanical machine for writing characters similar to those produced by a printer's movable type. Typically, a typewriter has an array of keys, and each one causes a different single character to be produced on the paper, by means of a ribbon with dried ink struck against the paper by a type element similar to the sorts used in movable type letterpress printing. -
Punch Cards
A punched card or punch card is a piece of stiff paper that can be used to contain digital information represented by the presence or absence of holes in predefined positions. The information might be data for data processing applications or, in earlier examples, used to directly control automated machinery. The first machine to use the punch card is the Jacquard Loom -
Telegraph
Telegraphy (from Greek: τῆλε têle, “at a distance” and γράφειν gráphein, “to write”) is the long-distance transmission of textual or symbolic (as opposed to verbal or audio) messages without the physical exchange of an object bearing the message. Thus semaphore is a method of telegraphy, whereas pigeon post is not. -
Motion picture photography/projection
The history of film technology traces the development of film technology from the initial development of "moving pictures" at the end of 19th century to the present time. Motion pictures were initially exhibited as a fairground novelty and developed into one of the most important tools of communication and entertainment in the 20th century. -
Commercial Motion Picture
1913 was a particularly fruitful year for film as an art form, and is often cited one of the years in the decade which contributed to the medium the most, along with 1917. -
Motion Picture with Sound
A sound film is a motion picture with synchronized sound, or sound technologically coupled to image, as opposed to a silent film. The first known public exhibition of projected sound films took place in Paris in 1900, but decades passed before sound motion pictures were made commercially practical. -
Transistor
A transistor is a semiconductor device used to amplify or switch electronic signals and electrical power. It is composed of semiconductor material usually with at least three terminals for connection to an external circuit. -
Period: to
Electronic Age
The Dawn of an Electronic Era. The computer age began when ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator) was completed in 1945. However, the Electronic Age truly began on the 1930s when the transistor was invented -
Television
A television (also known as a TV) is a machine with a screen. Televisions receive broadcasting signals and change them into pictures and sound. It was invented by Philo Farnsworth. -
Large Electronic Computer (EDSAC)
Short for Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator, EDSAC is an early British computer considered to be the second stored program electronic computer, after the SSEM. It was created at the University of Cambridge in England, performed its first calculation on May 6, 1949. -
OHP (Overhead Projector)
An overhead projector, like a film or slide projector, uses light to project an enlarged image on a screen. In the overhead projector, the source of the image is a page-sized sheet of transparent plastic film with the image to be projected either printed or hand-written/drawn. -
Large Electronic Computer (UNIVAC)
UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer) is a line of electronic digital stored-program computers starting with the products of the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation. Later the name was applied to a division of the Remington Rand company and successor organizations. -
Floppy Disk
Floppy disk is a removable magnetic storage medium. This is used for moving information between computers, laptops or other devices. Some early digital cameras, electronic music instruments and older computer game consoles use floppy disks. -
Portable Computers
A portable computer is a computer designed to be easily[1] moved from one place to another and included a display and keyboard. The first commercially sold portable was the 50 pound IBM 5100, introduced 1975. The next major portables were Osborne's 24 pound CP/M-based Osborne 1 (1981) and Compaq's 28 pound 100% IBM PC compatible Compaq Portable (1983). -
Personal Computer (Apple 1)
The Apple Computer 1, originally released as the Apple Computer, also known later as the Apple I, or Apple-1, is a desktop computer released by the Apple Computer Company (now Apple Inc.) in 1976. It was designed and hand-built by Steve Wozniak. The idea of selling the computer came from Wozniak's friend Steve Jobs. -
Videochat (Videotelephony)
Videotelephony comprises the technologies for the reception and transmission of audio-video signals by users at different locations, for communication between people in real time.[1] A videophone is a telephone with a video display, capable of simultaneous video and audio for communication between people in real time. Videoconferencing implies the use of this technology for a group or organizational meeting rather than for individuals, in a videoconference. -
Period: to
Information Age
The Information Age (also known as the Computer Age, Digital Age, or New Media Age) is a historic period beginning in the 20th century and characterized by the rapid shift from traditional industry that the Industrial Revolution brought through industrialization to an economy primarily based upon information technology. -
Search Engines
A web search engine or Internet search engine is a software system that is designed to carry out web search (Internet search), which means to search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a line of results, often referred to as search engine results pages. Internet search engines themselves predate the debut of the Web in December 1990. The Who is user search dates back to 1982. -
Web Browser
A web browser (commonly referred to as a browser) is a software application for accessing information on the World Wide Web. When a user requests a particular website, the web browser retrieves the necessary content from a web server and then displays the resulting web page on the user's device. The first web browser, called WorldWideWeb, was created in 1990 by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. -
Augmented Reality
Augmented reality (AR) is an interactive experience of a real-world environment where the objects that reside in the real world are enhanced by computer-generated perceptual information, sometimes across multiple sensory modalities, including visual, auditory, haptic, somatosensory and olfactory. -
Blogging (1994)
A blog (a truncation of "weblog")[1] is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order, so that the most recent post appears first, at the top of the web page. The modern blog evolved from the online diary where people would keep a running account of the events in their personal lives. Most such writers called themselves diarists, -
Social Networks
A social network is a social structure made up of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), sets of dyadic ties, and other social interactions between actors. Early social networking on the World Wide Web began in the form of generalized online communities such as Theglobe.com (1995), Geocities (1994) and Tripod.com (1995). -
Wearable Technology
Wearable technology, wearables, fashion technology, tech togs, or fashion electronics are smart electronic devices (electronic device with micro-controllers) that can be incorporated into clothing or worn on the body as implants or accessories. Modern wearable technology is related to both ubiquitous computing and the history and development of wearable computers. Wearables make technology pervasive by incorporating it into daily life. -
Cloud Computing
Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage and computing power, without direct active management by the user. The term is generally used to describe data centers available to many users over the Internet. Large clouds, predominant today, often have functions distributed over multiple locations from central servers. If the connection to the user is relatively close, it may be designated an edge server. -
Smartphones
Smartphones are a class of mobile phones and of multi-purpose mobile computing devices. They are distinguished from feature phones by their stronger hardware capabilities and extensive mobile operating systems, which facilitate wider software, internet (including web browsing[1] over mobile broadband), and multimedia functionality (including music, video, cameras, and gaming), alongside core phone functions such as voice calls and text messaging.
