Timeline of communication technology

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.

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