From Cave Paintings to the Internet A Chronological and Thematic Database on the History of Information and Media Electronic Media Timeline

Francis Ronalds builds the first working electric telegraph.

This was the first "electric" medium for communication.

Samuel F. B. Morse invents a practical form of electromagnetic telegraph using an early version of his “Morse code.” (See Reading 5.2.)

Samuel F. B. Morse transmits the first message on a United States experimental telegraph line (Washington to Baltimore) using the “Morse code” that will become standard in the United States and Canada. The message, taken from the Bible, Numbers 23:23, and recorded on a paper tape, had been suggested to Morse by Annie Ellworth, the young daughter of a friend. It was “What hath God wrought?”

The Morse Code became the first widely used data code.

The Atlantic Cable is proposed.

William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone perfect a single-needle telegraph apparatus, soon adopted throughout England.

John and Jacob Brett lay the first telegraph cable between England and France.

After a French fisherman cut the cable, thinking it was a new kind of seaweed, they installed an armored cable in 1851 that lasted for many years.

Paul Julius Reuter founds the Reuters news agency in London using telegraph lines, and a fleet of carrier pigeons that grows to exceed 200.

Reuter opened an office in London’s financial center close to the main telegraph offices. He transmitted stock market quotations and news between London and Paris over the new Dover-Calais submarine telegraph cable, using his "telegraph expertise."

Paris and London are connected by telegraph.

Cyrus Field organizes the New York, Newfoundland, and London Electric Telegraph Company with the intention of laying an Atlantic Cable.

David Edward Hughes invents the first perfected mechanism for printing telegraph messages, using a keyboard in which each key causes the corresponding letter to be printed at a distant receiver.

Hughes's printing mechanism worked something like a "golfball" typewriter, but it was produced before the typewriter was invented.

The Atlantic Telegraph Company is formed by Cyrus Field in the United States and Charles Bright, John Brett, and Jacob Brett in England.

The first attempt to lay the Atlantic Cable using the American sailing ship Niagara and the British sailing ship Agamemnon fails.

Reuters opens offices all over Europe, following telegraph lines.

The second attempt to lay the first Atlantic Cable using the American sailing ship Niagara and the British sailing ship Agamemnon initially succeeds.

Communication is established on the Atlantic Cable but it fails within three weeks.

Telegraph lines connect New York and San Francisco.

Johann Philipp Reis, a German schoolteacher and physicist, announces his invention of the telephone in a lecture before the Physical Society of Frankfurt. He publishes "Ueber Telephonie durch den galvanischen Strom" in Jahres-Bericht des physikalischen Vereins zu Frankfurt am Main fur des Rechungshahr 1860-1861 (1861). 

Reis' transmitter worked by alternatively making and breaking connection with a battery, while his receiver was designed to operate on the principle of magnetorestriction -- the property of ferromagnetic material such as iron to change shape on applicate of a magnetic field. Neither of these principles was adequate for constructing a successful speech-transmitting telephone, which requires continous contact and an undulating current; however,

"If the sound entering a Reis transmitter is not too strong, contact between the metal point and the metal strip will not be broken. Instead, the pressure of the former on the latter will fluctuate with the sound causing fluctuations in the electrical resistance and therefore in the current. Similarly the receiver will respond to continuously fluctuating as well as to intermittent currents (but not by magnetorestrction). The sensitivity, however, is extremely low. . . ." (Encyclopedia Brittanica, 15th edition.)

This may explain the partial but real success of Reis's telephone in transmitting intelligible speech.

Between 1858 and 1863 Reis constructed three different models of his telephone, the third and best-known of which was demonstrated to scientific societies throughout Europe and America. One of those who saw Reis's machine was Alexander Graham Bell, who was shown Reis's telephone at the Smithsonian Institution in March 1875, and who might have seen an earlier model demonstrated in Edinburgh as early as 1862.

Reis had no interest in profiting from his telephone, freely giving out information on it to anyone who asked, and selling models of it at a reasonable price. Reis died of tuberculosis in 1874 at the early age of 40.

Using the Great Eastern steamship, the attempt to lay the second Atlantic Cable takes place.

The cable snapped after twelve hundred miles.

The Great Eastern lays the third and successful Atlantic Cable, connecting the cable at Heart’s Content, a fishing village in Newfoundland.

Communication by electric telegraph between Europe and America was finally established. The first message sent over the cable was “A treaty of peace has been signed between Austria and Prussia."

Edward A. Calahan of the American Telegraph Company invents the first stock telegraph printing instrument.

The distinct sound of this telegraph printing instrument eventually earned it the name of “stock ticker.”

9,158,000,000 telegraph messages are sent in the United States.

British telegraph systems are nationalized.

Alexander Graham Bell invents the telephone, and applies for the patent. In his invention of the telephone Bell was preceded by Philip Reis, who perfected his device in 1861, and numerous other inventors played lesser or greater roles. However, Bell was the first to create a telephone that could reproduce intelligible speech at the receiving end, and was also the first to patent the telephone. Because of the numerous other inventors involved there was unusually extensive and historic litigation over the telephone patents, culminating in Bell's victory. Among the controversies was the question of the priority of Elisha Gray in the invention.

As the well-known story goes, on March 10, 1876 Bell spoke the first words through the instrument to his assistant, Thomas A. Watson, in the next room. Bell said, "Mr. Watson— come here— I want to see you." (See Reading 5.3

Bell presented his first report on the telephone to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences on May 10, 1876. His report, "Researches in telephony," was published in Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, new series 4 (whole series 12) (1877) 1-10.  Bell's telephone did not become commercially viable until 1878.

Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science & Medicine (1991) no. 164.

The American Library Association (ALA) is founded in Philadelphia.

Construction of the first regular telephone line is completed. It runs from Boston to Somerville, Massachusetts.

The first telephone switchboard is set up in Boston.

Emile Berliner invents the microphone.

It was used as a telephone speech transmitter.

Thomas Alva Edison invents the phonograph.

In the first test of the machine Edison recited the nursery rhyme, "Mary had a little lamb."

Edison's phonograph recorded on a metal cylinder wrapped with metal foil. He applied for the patent on December 24.

An aspect of this invention that has been observed is that before Edison invented the phonograph few people ever imagined a need for such a device.

David Edward Hughes invents the loose-contact carbon microphone.

Hughes's microphone was vital to telephony and later to broadcasting and sound recording.

The first regular telephone exchange is set up in New Haven, Connecticut.

"The switchboard was built from "carriage bolts, handles from teapot lids and bustle wire" and could handle two simultaneous conversations" (Wikipedia article on telephone exchange, accessed 04-22-2009).

In an article published in the North American Review Thomas Edison describes future uses for his phonograph:

1. Letter writing and all kinds of dictation without the aid of a stenographer.
2. Phonographic books, which will speak to blind people without effort on their part.
3. The teaching of elocution.
4. Reproduction of music.
5. The "Family Record"--a registry of sayings, reminiscences, etc., by members of a family in their own voices, and of the last words of dying persons.
6. Music-boxes and toys.
7. Clocks that should announce in articulate speech the time for going home, going to meals, etc.
8. The preservation of languages by exact reproduction of the manner of pronouncing.
9. Educational purposes; such as preserving the explanations made by a teacher, so that the pupil can refer to them at any moment, and spelling or other lessons placed upon the phonograph for convenience in committing to memory.
10. Connection with the telephone, so as to make that instrument an auxiliary in the transmission of permanent and invaluable records, instead of being the recipient of momentary and fleeting communication."

Eleven months after its foundation, The Connecticut District Telephone Company issues the world's first telephone book.

The telephone directory contains the names and addresses of 391 subscribers who paid $22 per year for service. There are no phone numbers, but there are advertisements and listings of businesses in the back of the book—the first, embryonic "yellow pages." The advertisers include physicians and carriage companies. Customers are limited to three minutes per call and no more than two calls an hour without permission from the central office.

"Besides rules, the embryonic phone book also featured pages of tips on placing calls — pick up the receiver and tell the operator whom you want — and how to talk on this gadget. Having a real conversation, for example, required rapidly transferring the telephone between mouth and ear.“When you are not speaking, you should be listening,” it says at one point. You should begin by saying, “Hulloa,” and when done talking, the book says, you should say, “That is all.” The other person should respond, “O.K.” Because anybody could be on the line at any time, customers should not pick up the telephone unless they want to make a call, and they should be careful about what others might hear. “Any person using profane or otherwise improper language should be reported at this office immediately.”

George R. Carey proposes one of the earliest systems of television transmission. (See Reading 5.5.)

Adriano de Paiva, a professor of chemistry and physics at the Polytechnic Academy at Porto (Portugal) issues the first separate publication on television: La telescopie électrique basée sur l'emploi du selenium, a 48-page pamphlet published in Porto.

Paiva's paper represents the first theoretical formulation of the possibility of using selenium to transmit images at a distance. Paiva became interseted in the possibility of transmitting images by wire after the demonstration of Alexander Graham Bell's telephone in Lisbon in November 1877.

American Telephone and Telegraph Corporation (A T & T) is established to run the United States long-distance telephone network.

Emile Berliner invents the flat disc Gramophone. This eventually replaced the Edison wax cylinder as a recording and playback device, and enabled the birth of the recording industry.

Herman Hollerith patents an electromechanical machine for tabulating information stored on punched cards.

Hollerith's electric punched card tabulator was used in the 1890 United States census — the first major data-processing project to use electrical machinery. It reduced data-processing time by 80 percent over manual methods. (See Reading 4.3.)

The AT&T long-distance telephone network extends from New York to Chicago.

Heinrich Hertz publishes his collected papers on electromagnetic waves.

In this form Guglielmo Marconi learned about Hertz’s work and began work on the development of radio.

Guglielmo Marconi invents wireless telegraphy (radio). (See Reading 5.4.)

About 240,000 telephones are in use in the United States.

To improve data processing of the 1900 census, Herman Hollerith adds an automatic card feed to his electric punched card tabulating machine. 

The telegraph now connects most of the civilized world.

Canadian-American physicist Reginald A. Fessenden is the first to transmit human speech over radio waves using a spark-gap transmitter. He says:

“One, two, three, four, is it snowing where you are Mr. Thiessen? If it is, would you telegraph back to me?”

Mr. Thiessen, one mile way, heard the transmission.

Fessenden’s voice was the first ever to be transmitted by radio waves and heard by another person.

Arthur Korn invents an effective system of telephotography, or fax, called the Bildtelegraph.

Bildtelegraph became "widespread in continental Europe especially since a widely noticed transmission of a wanted-person photograph from Paris to London in 1908, used until the wider distribution of the radiofax. Its main competitors were the Bélinograf by Édouard Belin first, then since the 1930s the Hellschreiber, invented in 1929 by Rudolf Hell, a pioneer in mechanical image scanning and transmission" (Wikipedia article on Fax, accessed 04-22-2009).

Guglielmo Marconi believes that he hears the letter “S” transmitted by Morse Code from Poldhu to Signal Hill, St. John's Newfoundland.

For many years this feat was considered the first transatlantic radio transmission, but later researchers concluded that the reception may not have been possible, and that Marconi may have heard static caused by lightning instead of transmitted information.

Reginald A. Fessenden makes the first audio radio broadcast of entertainment and music to a general audience, broadcasting from Brant Rock on the coast of Massachusetts.

The program included Fessenden playing the song O Holy Night on the violin and reading a passage, Luke Chapter 2, from the Bible. The main audience for this transmission was an unknown number of shipboard radio operators along the Atlantic Coast. This is considered the beginning of amplitude modulation broadcasting, or AM radio.

In a letter written to the journal Nature, A.A. Campbell-Swinton describes his concept of electronic television using the cathode ray tube which had been invented in 1897 by the German physicist and Nobel Prize winner Karl Ferdinand Braun.

Swinton "proposed using an electron beam in both the camera and the receiver, which could be steered electronically to produce moving pictures. He lectured on the subject in 1911 and displayed circuit diagrams, but no one, including Swinton, knew how to realize the design. Although his system was never built, the cathode ray tube did come to be used to display images in almost all television sets and computer monitors until the invention of the LCD panel."

Edward Kleinschmidt invents the teletype, which replaces Morse code clickers in delivering news to newspapers. The teletype was first used by United Press.

The AT&T long-distance telegraph network begun in 1885 finally reaches from New York to San Francisco, allowing Alexander Graham Bell in New York and Thomas J. Watson in San Francisco to participate in the first transcontinental telephone call.

"Four locations participated in the first call. Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone and co-founder of AT&T, led a group of dignitaries in New York. His one-time assistant Thomas Watson, led a group in San Francisco. AT&T President Theodore Vail spoke from Jekyll Island, Ga. And U.S. President Woodrow Wilson spoke from the White House.  

At one point during the call, someone asked Professor Bell if he would repeat the first words he ever said over the telephone. He obliged, picking up the phone and repeating 'Mr. Watson, come here, I want you.' To which Watson, in San Francisco, replied, 'It would take me a week now.' "(http://www.corp.att.com/history/nethistory/transcontinental.html, accessed 01-24-2010).

Leon Theremin invents the Theremin, one of the first electronic musical instruments, and the first musical instrument that is played without being touched.

"The controlling section usually consists of two metal antennas which sense the position of the player's hands and control radio frequency oscillator(s) for frequency with one hand, and volume with the other. The electric signals from the theremin are amplified and sent to a loudspeaker. The theremin is an electrophone, a subset of the quintephone family.

"To play, the player moves his or her hands around the antennas, controlling frequency (pitch) and amplitude (volume). The theremin is associated with an "eerie" sound, which has led to its use in movie soundtracks such as those in Spellbound, The Lost Weekend, and The Day the Earth Stood Still. Theremins are also used in art music (especially avant-garde and 20th century "new music") and in popular music genres such as rock."

"The theremin was originally the product of Russian government-sponsored research into proximity sensors. The instrument was invented by a young Russian physicist named Lev Sergeivich Termen (known in the West as Léon Theremin) in 1919 after the outbreak of the Russian civil war. After positive reviews at Moscow electronics conferences, Theremin demonstrated the device to Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin. Lenin was so impressed with the device that he began taking lessons in playing it, commissioned six hundred of the instruments for distribution throughout the Soviet Union, and sent Theremin on a trip around the world to demonstrate the latest Soviet technology and the invention of electronic music. After a lengthy tour of Europe, during which time he demonstrated his invention to packed houses, Theremin found his way to the United States, where he patented his invention in 1928 (US1661058 ). Subsequently, Theremin granted commercial production rights to RCA."

The first radio news program is broadcast by station 8MK in Detroit, Michigan.

KDKA, a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Westinghouse station, transmits the first commercial radio broadcast.

The British Broadcasting Company, the first national broadcasting organization, is formed for radio broadcasting by a group of British telecommunications companies. Its first broadcast from Marconi House in London occured on November 14.

Vladimir Zworykin, a Russian immigrant to the United States, patents the iconoscope, the first electronic television camera. His design, however, is incomplete:

"Vladimir Zworykin is also sometimes cited as the father of electronic television because of his invention of the iconoscope in 1923 and his invention of the kinescope in 1929. His design was one of the first to demonstrate a television system with all the features of modern picture tubes. His previous work with Rosing on electromechanical television gave him key insights into how to produce such a system, but his (and RCA's) claim to being its original inventor was largely invalidated by three facts: a) Zworykin's 1923 patent presented an incomplete design, incapable of working in its given form (it was not until 1933 that Zworykin achieved a working implementation), b) the 1923 patent application was not granted until 1938, and not until it had been seriously revised, and c) courts eventually found that RCA was in violation of the television design patented by Philo Taylor Farnsworth, whose lab Zworykin had visited while working on his designs for RCA. 

"The controversy over whether it was first Farnsworth or Zworykin who invented modern television is still hotly debated today. Some of this debate stems from the fact that while Farnsworth appears to have gotten there first, it was RCA that first marketed working television sets, and it was RCA employees who first wrote the history of television. Even though Farnsworth eventually won the legal battle over this issue, he was never able to fully capitalize financially on his invention" (http://www.statemaster.com/encyclopedia/Colour-television, accessed 12-22-2009).

The research organization that would in 1925 be known as Bell Labs develops the first high-fidelity sound recording. It extends the reproducible sound range by more than an octave on the high and low end.

David Sarnoff of Radio Corporation of America (RCA) creates the National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) for radio broadcasting.

John Logie Baird gives the world's first demonstration of his electromechanical television system to fifty scientists assembled in his attic workshop.

Fritz Pfleumer invents magnetic tape for recording sound, coating very thin paper with iron-oxide using lacquer as glue. He sold the rights to AEG in 1932.

Bell Labs and the U.S. Department of Commerce conduct the first long distance test of television between Washington D.C. and New York City, sending images of Herbert Hoover (soon to be President) over telephone lines.

American inventor Philo T. Farnsworth succeeds in transmitting an image through purely electronic means of a device called an "image dissector."

This was the first all-electronic television.

"When Philo T. Farnsworth was 13, he envisioned a contraption that would receive an image transmitted from a remote location—the television. Farnsworth submitted a patent in January 1927, when he was 19, and began building and testing his invention that summer. He used an "image dissector" (the first television camera tube) to convert the image into a current, and an "image oscillite" (picture tube) to receive it. On this day his tests bore fruit. When the simple image of a straight line was placed between the image dissector and a carbon arc lamp, it showed up clearly on the receiver in another room. His first tele-electronic image was transmitted on a glass slide in his S[an] F[rancisco] lab at 202 Green St" (http://www.timelines.ws/subjects/Television.HTML, accessed 12-22-2009).

General Electric (GE) begins regular television broadcasting in the United States with a 24-line system from a station that will become WGY in Schenectady, NY.

Programs were transmitted Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday afternoons from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m. By the end of 1928 over 15 stations were licensed for TV broadcasting;

William S. Paley takes over the failing United Independent Broadcasters network with its 16 affiliate stations and reorganizes it as the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) for radio broadcasting.

John Logie Baird begins the first experimental television service at the German Post Office using his 30 line mechanical system.

Congress establishes  the talking-book program, intended to help blind adults who couldn’t read print.

This program was called "Books for the Adult Blind Project." The American Foundation for the Blind developed the first talking books in 1932. One year later the first reproduction machine began the process of mass publishing.

Emanuel Goldberg of Zeiss Ikon receives U.S. Patent No. 1,838,389 for a "Statistical Machine."

The patent, applied for in 1928, and similar patents obtained in other countries, describe an electronic machine for searching through data encoded on reels of film, using "radiating energy to actuate a recorder when the explored indications upon the search plate and record element are identical, the indications on one of said elements being penetrable by the rays and the indication on the other element being impenetrable by the rays."

Vannevar Bush incorporated technology similar to this in the Rapid Selector machine on which he began development in 1938. The existence of Goldberg's patent prevented Bush from patenting his Rapid Selector. Bush's machine became famous after publication in 1945 of his article, "As We May Think" describing the Memex.

The BBC begins public television broadcasting in England.

By 1935 the transmissions reached only the 2000 homes with television sets within a 35-mile range of Alexandria Palace. Each TV set cost £100—roughly the cost of a small car.

Edwin Howard Armstrong develops wide-band frequency modulation, FM radio, which delivers clearer sound, free of static. 

Armstrong received a patent on wideband FM on December 26, 1933.

"Armstrong conducted the first large scale field tests of his FM radio technology on the 85th floor of RCA's (Radio Corporation of America) Empire State Building from May 1934 until October 1935. However RCA had its eye on television broadcasting, and chose not to buy the patents for the FM technology.  A June 17, 1936, presentation at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) headquarters made headlines nationwide. He played a jazz record over conventional AM radio, then switched to an FM broadcast. 'If the audience of 50 engineers had shut their eyes they would have believed the jazz band was in the same room. There were no extraneous sounds,' noted one reporter. He added that several engineers described the invention 'as one of the most important radio developments since the first earphone crystal sets were introduced' " (Wikipedia article on Edward Howard Armstrong, accessed 07-12-2009).

Armstrong's first paper on FM radio was "A Method of Reducing Disturbances in Radio Signaling by a System of Frequency Modulation," presented to the New York section of the Institute of Radio Engineers on November 6, 1935, and first published in Proceedings of the IRE, 24, no. 5, (1936) 689–740.

Engineers at AEG develop the Magnetophon K1.

The K1 was the first practical reel-to-reel magnetic tape recorder, using magnetic tape invented by Fritz Pfleumer.

Homer Dudley and a team of engineers at Bell Labs produce the first electronic speech synthesizer, called the Voder.

The Voder was demonstrated at the 1939 World's Fair by experts who used a keyboard and foot pedals to play the machine and emit speech.

Orson Wells and the Mercury Theatre broadcast over CBS radio H. G. Wells' 1898 novel, The War of the Worlds.

The broadcast was heard by 6,000,000 people, some of whom believed that the story of the invading Martians was real. To the extent that a large number of people were deceived, this may be one of the earliest examples of mass hysteria induced by electronic media.

Use of telegraphy peaks in the United States with the transmission of "236,169,000,000" messages during this year.

There are six television stations in the United States.

Columbia Records introduces the 33 1/3 rpm Long Playing microgroove record with 17 minutes of music on each side.

John Walston introduces cable television, initially in the mountains of Pennsylvania.

10,000,000 television sets have been sold.

Ralph R. Shaw, Director of Libraries for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in collaboration with Engineering Research Associates of St. Paul, Minnesota, using funds provided by the Office of Technical Services of the Department of Commerce, develops the Rapid Selector machine for the electronic searching of information recorded in reels of film.

Shaw's device incorporated technology developed by Emanuel Goldberg in 1928-1931, and by Vannevar Bush starting in 1938. Shaw's Rapid Selector was an attempt to realize goals described in Bush's 1945 publication, As We May Think.

According to Asa Brigg’s The History of British Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Vol. 4, p. 524, newspaper circulation in Britain as a distribution medium for news reached its peak in 1950 and 1954. Thereafter more news was distributed over radio and television than through print.

The Ferranti Mark 1 performs  Baa Baa Black Sheep and a truncated version of In the Mood in Manchester, England. The recording of these brief performances, which you can listen to from the BBC website at this link, are thought to be the oldest known recordings of computer-generated music.

William Higinbotham, head of the Instrumentation Division at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, invents the first video game, "Tennis for Two" run on an analog computer hooked up to an oscilloscope.

Lejaren Hiller and Leonard Isaacson publish the first book on computer-generated music: Experimental Music: Composition with an Electronic Computer, based on work done on the University of Illinois’s ILLIAC computer.

The U.S. Navy launches NAVSAT, also known as TRANSIT.

NAVSAT was the first operational satellite navigation system. Using a constellation of five satellites, the system was primarily used to obtain accurate location information by ballistic missile submarines, and was also used as a general navigation system by the Navy, and in hydrographic and geodetic surveying. Since there was no computer small enough to fit through a submarine’s hatch, a new computer was designed, named the AN/UYK-1. It was built with rounded corners to fit through the hatch, was about five feet tall, and sealed to be water-proof.

Edward Zajak at Bell Labs produces the first computer-animated film, entitled Two-Gyro Gravity-Gradient Attitude Control System.

Marshall McLuhan publishes The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man in which he divides history in four epochs: oral tribe culture, manuscript culture, the Gutenberg galaxy and the electronic age.

McLuhan argued that a new communications medium was responsble for the break between each of the four time periods. Writing before computing was pervasive in society, he was concerned with the influence of radio, television and film on print culture, and on the impact of media, independent of content, upon thinking, and social organization:

"The main concept of McLuhan's argument (later elaborated upon in The Medium is the Massage) is that new technologies (like alphabets, printing presses, and even speech itself) exert a gravitational effect on cognition, which in turn affects social organization: print technology changes our perceptual habits ('visual homogenizing of experience'), which in turn impacts social interactions ('fosters a mentality that gradually resists all but a. . . specialist outlook'). According to McLuhan, the advent of print technology contributed to and made possible most of the salient trends in the Modern period in the Western world: individualism, democracy, Protestantism, capitalism, and nationalism. For McLuhan, these trends all reverberate with print technology's principle of 'segmentation of actions and functions and principle of visual quantification."

A Delta rocket from Cape Canaveral launches the AT&T TELSTAR 1 satellite. It was the first privately owned active communications satellite,  transmitting the first direct television pictures from the United States to Europe. It became the first satellite to relay signals from the earth to a satellite and back.

Touch-tone telephone dialing is introduced, enabling calls to be switched digitally.

Canadian educator, philosopher, and media theorist Marshall McLuhan publishes Undertstanding Media: The Extensions of Man.

"In it McLuhan proposed that media themselves, not the content they carry, should be the focus of study — popularly quoted as the medium is the message'. McLuhan's insight was that a medium affects the society in which it plays a role not by the content delivered over the medium, but by the characteristics of the medium itself. McLuhan pointed to the light bulb as a clear demonstration of this concept. A light bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper has articles or a television has programs, yet it is a medium that has a social effect; that is, a light bulb enables people to create spaces during nighttime that would otherwise be enveloped by darkness. He describes the light bulb as a medium without any content. McLuhan states that 'a light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence.' More controversially, he postulated that content had little effect on society — in other words, it did not matter if television broadcasts children's shows or violent programming, to illustrate one example — the effect of television on society would be identical. He noted that all media have characteristics that engage the viewer in different ways; for instance, a passage in a book could be reread at will, but a movie had to be screened again in its entirety to study any individual part of it.

"The book is the source of the well-known phrase 'The medium is the message'. It was a leading indicator of the upheaval of local cultures by increasingly globalized values. The book greatly influenced academics, writers, and social theorists" (Wikipedia article on Understanding Media, accessed 11-14-2009)

Texas Instruments in partnership with Zenith Radio introduces the first consumer product containing an integrated circuit--a hearing aid.

Robert Moog creates the first substractive synthesizer to utilize a keyboard as a controller, and demonstrates it at the at the Audio Engineering Society convention.

The Moog synthesizer became one of the first widely used electronic musical instruments. It is a member of the quintephone family of musical instruments, which generate sounds "informatically."

Though its exact history is murky, email begins as a way for users on time-sharing mainframe computers to communicate. Among the first systems to have this facility were System Development Corporation (SDC) (Q32) and MIT (CTSS).

Self-styled "systems humanist" Ted Nelson publishes "Complex Information Processing: A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate," ACM Annual Conference/Annual Meeting archive Proceedings of the 1965 20th national conference, 84-100. 

In this paper Nelson coined the terms hypertext and hypermedia  to refer to features of a computerized information system.  He used the word "link" to refer the logical connections that came to be associated with the word "hyperlink."  

Nelson is also credited with inventing the word hyperlink, though its published origin is less specific:

"The term "hyperlink" was coined in 1965 (or possibly 1964) by Ted Nelson and his assistant Calvin Curtin at the start of Project Xanadu. Nelson had been inspired by "As We May Think", a popular essay by Vannevar Bush. In the essay, Bush described a microfilm-based machine (the Memex) in which one could link any two pages of information into a "trail" of related information, and then scroll back and forth among pages in a trail as if they were on a single microfilm reel. The closest contemporary analogy would be to build a list of bookmarks to topically related Web pages and then allow the user to scroll forward and backward through the list.

In a series of books and articles published from 1964 through 1980, Nelson transposed Bush's concept of automated cross-referencing into the computer context, made it applicable to specific text strings rather than whole pages, generalized it from a local desk-sized machine to a theoretical worldwide computer network, and advocated the creation of such a network. Meanwhile, working independently, a team led by Douglas Engelbart (with Jeff Rulifson as chief programmer) was the first to implement the hyperlink concept for scrolling within a single document (1966), and soon after for connecting between paragraphs within separate documents (1968)" (Wikipedia article on Hyperlink, accessed 08-29-2010). 

Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort, the NewMedia Reader (2003) 133-45.

American showman, songwriter, and artist Bobb Goldsteinn (Bob Goldstein) coins the term multimedia to promote the July 1966 opening of his "LightWorks at L'Oursin" show at Southampton, Long Island. "On August 10, 1966, Richard Albarino of Variety borrowed the terminology, reporting: 'Brainchild of songscribe-comic Bob (‘Washington Square’) Goldstein, the ‘Lightworks’ is the latest multi-media music-cum-visuals to debut as discothèque fare' " (Wikipedia article on Multimedia, accessed 08-29-2010).

The evolving concept of multimedia involves combinations of text, still images, video, animation, sound, and interactivity. Thus, technically an illustrated book could be considered a multimedia object with a combination of texts and images; however, multimedia primarily implies combinations of electronic media.

Working at Bell Labs, Willard Boyle and George E. Smith invent the charge-coupled device (CCD), a sensor for recording images.

In 2009 Boyle and Smith shared half of the Nobel Prize in Physics "for the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit – the CCD sensor." The Nobel Prize Committee prepared a report putting the discovery of the CCD in perspective. It may be accessed at http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2009/phyadv09.pdf

"The lab [Bell Labs] was working on the picture phone and on the development of semiconductor bubble memory. Merging these two initiatives, Boyle and Smith conceived of the design of what they termed 'Charge "Bubble" Devices'. The essence of the design was the ability to transfer charge along the surface of a semiconductor. As the CCD started its life as a memory device, one could only "inject" charge into the device at an input register. However, it was immediately clear that the CCD could receive charge via the photoelectric effect and electronic images could be created. By 1969, Bell researchers were able to capture images with simple linear devices; thus the CCD was born. Several companies, including Fairchild Semiconductor, RCA and Texas Instruments, picked up on the invention and began development programs. Fairchild was the first with commercial devices and by 1974 had a linear 500 element device and a 2-D 100 x 100 pixel device. Under the leadership of Kazuo Iwama, Sony also started a big development effort on CCDs involving a significant investment. Eventually, Sony managed to mass produce CCDs for their camcorders. Before this happened, Iwama died in August 1982. Subsequently, a CCD chip was placed on his tombstone to acknowledge his contribution" (Wikipedia article on Charge-coupled device, accessed 10-06-2009).

Books on Tape Corporation starts rental plans for audio books distribution.

IBM’s first operational application of speech recognition enables customer engineers servicing equipment to “talk” to and receive “spoken” answers from a computer that can recognize about 5,000 words.

Ray Tomlinson at BBN develops email for ARPANET: SNDMSG and READMAIL, choosing the “@” sign as a key email address component.

Probably the world's first online community begins to emerge through online forums, and the message board called PLATO Notes developed by David Woolley, in the PLATO IV system evolving at the University of Illinois at Urbana.

Efrem Lipkin, Mark Szpakowski, and Lee Felsenstein establish the first public computerized bulletin board system (BBS) called Community Memory in Berkeley, California.

Community Memory used hard-wired terminals in neighborhoods as distinct from the first public dial-up CBBS noticed on February 16, 1978 in this database.

"Community Memory ran off an XDS-940 timesharing computer located in Resource One in San Francisco. The first terminal was an ASR-33 Teletype at the top of the stairs leading to Leopold's Records in Berkeley. You could leave messages and attach keywords to them. Other people could then find messages by those keywords.

"The line from San Francisco to Berkeley ran at 110 baud - 10 characters per second. The teletype was noisy, so it was encased in a cardboard box, with a transparent plastic top so you could see what was being printed out, and holes for your hands so you could type. It made for some magic moments with the Allman Brothers' "Blue Sky" playing in the record store. Musicians loved it - they ended up generating a monthly printout of fusion rock bassists seeking raga lead guitars. And out of it also emerged the first net personality - Benway, as he called himself."

Atex works with the Minneapolis Star newspaper to develop the first electronic pagination system that allows the creation and output of full editorial pages, eliminating the need for manual paste-up of strips of film.

The Atex system featured "Atex Messaging" which is widely believed to be the forerunner of both email and instant messenger applications. Atex publishing systems were "based on highly modified Dec PDP-11 minicomputers, designed to produce news sections of newspapers. The systems included clustered CPUs, a distributed file system and dumb terminals that displayed memory-mapped video and featured keyboards with up to 140 keys: Distinctively, the cursor keys were on the left-hand side. A custom operating system tied everything together."

IBM announces Systems Network Architecture (SNA), a networking protocol for computing systems. SNA was a uniform set of rules and procedures for computer communications to free computer users from the technical complexities of communicating through local, national, and international computer networks.

The U.S. Department of Justice files an antitrust suit for the breakup of American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T), alleging anticompetitive behavior.

Raymond Kurzweil introduces the Kurzweil Reading Machine, the first practical application of OCR technology.

The Kurzweil Reading Machine combined omni-font OCR, a flat-bed scanner, and text-to-speech synthesis to create the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind. It was the first computer to transform random text into computer-spoken words, enabling blind and visually impaired people to read any printed materials. 

Wang Laboratories introduce the first CRT based word processor, the Wang WPS.

AT&T and Bell Labs construct a prototype analog cellular telephone system. The following year the first public trials will occur in Chicago with 2000 users.

The U.S. Department of Defence launches the first experimental Block-I GPS satellite. It will become part of the NAVSTAR GPS (Navigation Signal Timing and Ranging Global Positioning System)--the first GPS.

Texas Instruments announces a speech synthesis monolithic integrated circuit.

For the first time the human vocal tract was electronically duplicated on a single chip of silicon.

Starr Roxanne Hiltz, a sociologist, and Murray Turoff, a professor of computer science, show how "computer-mediated communication" could develop social networking in their book The Network Nation: Human Communication via Computer.

Funded by ARPA, The Aspen Movie Map, an early hypermedia project produced at the Architecture Machine Group (ARC MAC) at MIT under the direction of Andrew Lippman, allows the user to take a virtual tour through the city of Aspen, Colorado.

"ARPA funding during the late 1970s was subject to the military application requirements of the notorious Mansfield Amendment introduced by Mike Mansfield (which had severely limited funding for hypertext researchers like Douglas Engelbart).

"The Aspen Movie Map's military application was to solve the problem of quickly familiarizing soldiers with new territory. The Department of Defense had been deeply impressed by the success of Operation Entebbe in 1976, where the Israeli commandos had quickly built a crude replica of the airport and practiced in it before attacking the real thing. DOD hoped that the Movie Map would show the way to a future where computers could instantly create a three-dimensional simulation of a hostile environment at much lower cost and in less time (see virtual reality).

"While the Movie Map has been referred to as an early example of interactive video, it is perhaps more accurate to describe it as a pioneering example of interactive computing. Video, audio, still images, and metadata were retrieved from a database and assembled on the fly by the computer (an Interdata minicomputer running the MagicSix operating system) redirecting its actions based upon user input; video was the principle, but not sole affordance of the interaction" (Wikipedia article on Aspen Movie Map, accessed 04-16-2009).

Ward Christensen founds the Computerized Bulletin Board System (CBBS), the first dial-up bulletin board system (BBS) ever brought online, as a program to allow Christensen and other hobbyists to exchange information. This was distinct from Community Memory, a BBS established in Berkeley in 1973, that used hard-wired terminals placed around the town.

"In January 1978, Chicago was hit by the Great Blizzard of 1978, which dumped record amounts of snow throughout the midwest. Among those caught in it were Christensen and Randy Suess, who were members of CACHE, the Chicago Area Computer Hobbyists' Exchange. They had met at that computer club in the mid 1970s and become friends.

"Christensen had created a file transfer protocol for sending binary computer files through modem connections, which was called, simply, MODEM. Later improvements to the program motivated a name change into the now familiar XMODEM. The success of this project encouraged further experiments. Christensen and Suess became enamored of the idea of creating a computerized answering machine and message center, which would allow members to call in with their then-new modems and leave announcements for upcoming meetings.

"However, they needed some quiet time to set aside for such a project, and the blizzard gave them that time. Christensen worked on the software and Suess cobbled together an S-100 computer to put the program on. They had a working version within two weeks, but claimed soon afterwards that it had taken four so that it wouldn't seem like a "rushed" project. Time and tradition have settled that date to be February 16, 1978.

"Because the Internet was still small and not available to most computer users, users had to dial CBBS directly using a modem. Also because the CBBS hardware and software supported only a single modem for most of its existence, users had to take turns accessing the system, each hanging up when done to let someone else have access. Despite these limitations, the system was seen as very useful, and ran for many years and inspired the creation of many other bulletin board systems.

"Ward & Randy would often watch the users while they were online and comment or go into chat if the subject warranted. Sometime online users wondered if Ward & Randy actually existed.

"The program had many forward thinking ideas, now accepted as canon in the creation of message bases or "forums" (Wikipedia article on CBBS, accessed 04-27-2009).

Compuserve becomes the first online service to offer personal computer users email communication and online technical support. The following year it will offer real-time chat online with its CB simulator.

Duke University graduate Students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis establish USENET, one of the first computer network communications systems. 

USENET was conceived as a "poor man's ARPANET."

The first newsgroups seem to have been established virtually at the inception of USENET.

"The first newsgroups on Usenet, according to Truscott, were known as NET.xxxx and dept.xxxx. After Horton joined Usenet, he began feeding mailing lists from the ARPANET into Usenet. Mailing lists from the ARPANET fed into Usenet were identified as FA.xxxx newsgroups. Truscott notes that, "Only when ucbvax joined the net, did `fa' appear." Truscott explains that he didn't know about the ARPANET mailing lists until Horton joined Usenet.

" At first the Usenet community could only read these ARPANET mailing lists, but couldn't contribute to them. "It was a one-way gateway - ARPANET into Usenet only, done with recnews, as I recall," writes Horton. But at least it was possible for the Usenet community to follow the interesting discussions carried on via the ARPANET mailing lists during this early period of Usenet" (http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120/ch106.x10, accessed 01-16-2010).

Bell Labs develops digital cellular telephone technology, offering better sound quality, greater channel capacity and lower cost than analog.

Robert Edward "Ted" Turner III launches the Cable News Network (CNN). The husband and wife team of David Walker and Lois Hart anchor its first newscast.

Sony releases the first commercial electronic camera, the Sony Mavica (Magnetic Video Camera). Not a digital camera, it is actually a video camera that takes video freeze-frames.

Disney's movie Tron is one of the first films to incorporate computer graphics or computer animation, partly rendered on a Cray-1 Supercomputer, which also appears in the film.

IBM introduces the Scanmaster 1, a mainframe computer terminal designed to scan, transmit and store images of documents electronically.

The Federal Communications Commission authorizes American Telephone and Telegraph to build a commercial cellular telephone service in Chicago.

This was the beginning of commercial cellular service in the United States.

The Motorola DynaTAC becomes the first mobile phone approved by the FCC in the United States.

"On Oct. 13, 1983, Bob Barnett, former president of Ameritech Mobile Communications placed the first commercial wireless call on a DynaTAC from inside a Chrysler convertible to the grandson of Alexander Graham Bell who was in Germany at the time. The call, made at Soldier Field in Chicago, is considered by many as a major turning point in communications. Later Richard Frenkel, the head of system development at Bell Laboratories, said about the DynaTAC: 'It was a triumph.' " (Wikipedia article on Motorola DynaTAC, accessed 04-11-2009).

"In 1984, Bell Labs developed modern commercial cellular technology (based, to a large extent, on the Gladden, Parelman Patent), which employed multiple, centrally controlled base stations (cell sites), each providing service to a small area (a cell). The cell sites would be set up such that cells partially overlapped. In a cellular system, a signal between a base station (cell site) and a terminal (phone) only need be strong enough to reach between the two, so the same channel can be used simultaneously for separate conversations in different cells" (Wikipedia article on Mobil phone, accessed 04-11-2009).

Moderated newsgroups are introduced on USENET.

American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T), is officially broken up, ending a long-established monopoly on telephone service.

AT&T's local operations were split into seven independent regional Bell operating companies, known as "Baby Bells." AT&T, reduced in value by about 70%, continued to run all its long distance services.

The Perseus Digital Library Project begins at Tufts University. Though the project is ostensibly about Greek and Roman literature and culture, it will evolve into an exploration of the ways that digital collections can enhance scholarship with new research tools that take libraries and scholarship beyond the physical book.

"Since planning began in 1985, the Perseus Digital Library Project has explored what happens when libraries move online. Two decades later, as new forms of publication emerge and millions of books become digital, this question is more pressing than ever. Perseus is a practical experiment in which we explore possibilities and challenges of digital collections in a networked world.

"Our flagship collection, under development since 1987, covers the history, literature and culture of the Greco-Roman world. We are applying what we have learned from Classics to other subjects within the humanities and beyond. We have studied many problems over the past two decades, but our current research centers on personalization: organizing what you see to meet your needs.

"We collect texts, images, datasets and other primary materials. We assemble and carefully structure encyclopedias, maps, grammars, dictionaries and other reference works. At present, 1.1 million manually created and 30 million automatically generated links connect the 100 million words and 75,000 images in the core Perseus collections. 850,000 reference articles provide background on 450,000 people, places, organizations, dictionary definitions, grammatical functions and other topics."

Franklin Computer Corporation introduces Spelling Ace, an electronic spelling corrector. This may be considered the first handheld electronic book or e-book (eBook).

John and Thomas Knoll develop ImagePro, the prototype of Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop 1.0 shipped in February 1990.

Sony releases the Sony ProMavica MVC-5000, one of the first digital cameras. The name MAVICA stands for magnetic video camera.

The first gateways between private e-mail carriers and the Internet are established. CompuServe is connected through Ohio State University, MCI through the Corporation for National Research Initiatives.

Digital high-definition TV software, based on video compression algorithms, is developed at Bell Labs.

Brian Raila of GTE Laboratories recognizes that a viewer or listener does not need to download the entirety of a program to view or listen to a portion of it, as long as the receiving device ("client computer") could, over time, receive and present data more rapidly than the user could digest the data. At the InterTainment '89 conference held in New York City Raila used the term "buffered media" to describe this concept. It became the basis for "webcasting."

The School of Information and Library Science and the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at The University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill  found an archive and information sharing environment designed to be "contributor-driven and content-managed." Originally one of the SunSITES, sponsored by Sun Microsystems, it was a pioneering collaboration of electronic librarianship, journalism and telecommunication.

"After living under the name MetaLab for a period of time, the environment is now known as ibiblio. It has grown to host one of the Internet's most active and respected software archives, coexisting with music archives, large text database projects, and special exhibits. The diverse management and content models of ibiblio complement and inform each other to give users the most useful and relevant information about a variety of topics. Examples include: single content manager archives ranging from folk music to travelogues, academic and librarian-managed archives, historical enthusiast-managed archives such as the Pearl Harbor archives, author-managed archives involving over 100 active authors with special interests such as the Linux Documentation Project.

"Through these different types of archive models, the resources available on ibiblio range from free applications and operating systems software to graphics and art, from fiction, poetry, literature, and music to religion, politics and cultural studies. ibiblio also offers streaming audio and video. ibiblio currently averages about 1.5 million information requests a day." (ibiblio, accessed 03-19-2009).

David Allen and Harold Williams found Teleport, the first commercially successful telepresence company. Its name was later changed to Teleport.

"The original intent was to develop a system that could allow families to interact across great distances without the hassle or costliness of flying. The first systems (which they called TeleSuites) looked more like something out of an upper class home rather than a conference room in an office suite. . . . " 

Alan Saperstein  of Visual Data Corporation, now Onstream Media, introduces streaming video with HotelView, a travel library of 2 minute videos featuring thousands of hotel properties worldwide. This is the beginning of video webcasting over the Internet.

The first Internet radio cyberstation broadcasts over the Internet at NetWorld + Interop in Las Vegas.

A Rolling Stones concert becomes the "first cyberspace multicast concert" over Internet radio. Mick Jagger opens the concert by saying, "I wanna say a special welcome to everyone that's, uh, climbed into the Internet tonight and, uh, has got into the Mbone. And I hope it doesn't all collapse." (quoted from the Wikipedia article on Internet radio).

WXYC (89.3 FM Chapel Hill, NC) becomes the first traditional radio station to initiate broadcasting on the Internet. WXYC uses an FM radio connected to a system at SunSite, later known as Ibiblio, running Cornell's CU-SeeMe software. WXYC had begun test broadcasts and bandwidth testing as early as August, 1994. WREK (91.1 FM, Atlanta, GA) starts streaming on the same day using their own custom software called CyberRadio1. However, unlike WXYC, this is WREK's beta launch and the stream will not be advertised until a later date.

On Thanksgiving morning ABC's World News Now  becomes the first television show to be broadcast over the Internet, using the CU-SeeMe videoconferencing software. This is the beginning of IP/TV.

This year more email is sent than paper mail.

The New York Times interactive web edition begins.

DVD specification 1.0 is finalized.

The first DVD players and discs were available in November 1996 in Japan, in March 1997 in the United States. The first movie commercially released on DVD was Twister.

At a Diplomatic Conference on Certain Copyright and Neighboring Rights Questions, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) adopts the WIPO Copyright Treaty.

Physicist and inventor Joseph Jacobson, of the MIT Media Lab,  founds E Ink Corporation to develop electrophoretic display technology, or electronic paper, (e-paper, epaper), which he invented.

The Joint Bi-l evel Image Experts Group (JBIG) and the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG1 (ITU-T SG8) Coding of Still Pictures issue the report entitled Call for Contributions for JPEG 2000 (JTC 1.29.14, 15444): Image Coding System. This will eventually lead to the establishment of the JPEG 2000 file standard for still images.

Wireless Application Protocol or WAP is established as a secure specification that allows users to access information via handheld wireless devices.

Voice over Internet equipment, using Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP), becomes available.

MP3 (MPEG Audio Layer 3) is introduced. It is an audio compression technology being a part of the MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 specifications. MP3 compresses CD quality sound by a factor of 8­12, while maintaining almost the same high-fidelity sound quality.

Webcast company AudioNet (Broadcast.com) begins the first continuous live webcasts with content from WFAA-TV in January, 1998 and KCTU-LP on January 10, 1998.

Jim Romensko founds mediagossip.com, providing daily news, commentary, and insider information about journalism and media.

Later in 1999 Romensko was hired by the non-profit Poynter Institute for Media Studies to write the blog Romensko on the Poynter website. The blog characterizes itself as "Your daily fix of media industry news, commentary, and memos."

Shawn Fanning releases the Napster file sharing service for MP3 files.

"It was the first of the massively popular peer-to-peer file sharing systems, although it was not fully peer-to-peer since it used central servers to maintain lists of connected systems and the files they provided, while actual transactions were conducted directly between machines. Although there were already media which facilitated the sharing of files across the Internet, such as IRC, Hotline, and USENET, Napster specialized exclusively in music in the form of MP3 files and presented a friendly user-interface. The result was a system whose popularity generated an enormous selection of music to download."

XM Radio, having launched its two broadcast satellites "Rock" and "Roll" in the spring, initiates the first U.S. digital satellite radio service in Dallas/Ft. Worth and San Diego. Within two months service will extend across the U.S. "The initial lineup includes 71 music channels and 29 other channels consisting of sports, talk, children's programming, entertainment and news." (quoted from Wikipedia article on XM Satellite Radio.) The original launch date of September 12 is pushed back after the 9/11 attacks.

Apple launches the iPod line of portable media players.

Diana Hook and the author/editor of this database, Jeremy Norman, issue as a limited edition an annotated, descriptive bibliography entitled Origins of Cyberspace: A Library on the History of Computing, Networking, and Telecommunications. It was the first annotated descriptive bibliography on these subjects.

David Margolese launches Sirius Satellite Radio on a pay for service subscription basis.

Under the  pen name  "Yoshi," a Tokyo man publishes the first cell phone novel,  Deep Love— the story of a teenage prostitute in Tokyo.

Deep Love

"became so popular that it was published as an actual book, with 2.6 million copies sold in Japan, then spun off into a television series, a manga, and a movie. The cell phone novel became a hit mainly through word of mouth and gradually started to gain traction in China and South Korea among young adults. In Japan, several sites offer large prizes to authors (up to $100,000 US) and purchase the publishing rights to the novel."

"Cell phone or mobile phone novels called keitai shousetsu in Japanese, are the first literary genre to emerge from the cellular age via text messaging. Phone novels started out primarily read and authored by young Japanese women, on the subject of romantic fiction such as relationships, lovers, rape, love triangles, and pregnancy. However, mobile phone novels are trickling their way to a worldwide popularity on all subjects. Japanese ethos of the Internet regarding mobile phone novels are dominated by false names and forged identities. Therefore, identities of the Japanese authors of mobile phone novels are rarely disclosed. 'Net transvestites' are of the most extreme play actors of the sort. Differing from regular novels, mobile phone novels may be structured according to the author's preference. If a couple is fighting in the story, the author may choose to have the lines closely spaced and crowded. On the contrary, if the author writes a calm or soothing poem the line spacing may be further apart than normal. Overall, the line spacing of phone novels contains enough blank space for an easy read. Phone novels are meant to be read in 1,000 to 2,000-word (in China) or 70-word (in Japan) chapters via text message on mobile phones. They are downloaded in short installments and run on handsets as Java-based applications on a mobile phone. Cell phone novels often appear in three different formats: WMLD, JAVA and TXT. Maho i-Land is the largest cell phone novel site that carries more than a million titles, mainly novice writers, all which are available for free. Maho iLand provides templates for blogs and homepages. It is visited 3.5 billion times each month. In 2007 98 cell phone novels were published into books. "Love Sky" is a popular phone novel with approximately 12 million views on-line, written by "Mika", that was not only published but turned into a movie. www.textnovel.com is another popular mobile phone novel site, however, in English."

"Five out of the ten best selling novels in Japan in 2007 were originally cell phone novels" (Wikipedia article on Cell phone novel, accessed 08-23-2009).

Apple opens the software based, online iTunes Store.

Mary Flanagan, Michael Mateas, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, Andrew Stern, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin found the group blog Grand Text Auto. It is
"about computer mediated and computer generated works of many forms: interactive fiction, net.art, electronic poetry, interactive drama, hypertext fiction, computer games of all sorts, shared virtual environments, and more."

Three former employees of Paypal -- Steven Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim -- found the video sharing website, YouTube.

Google announces the planned opening of the Google Video Store, "the first open video marketplace enabling consumers to buy and rent a wide range of video content from a major television network, a professional sports league, cable programmers, independent producers and film makers."

Free file-sharing of digital music on the web exceeds the sale of digital music downloads by many fold: "Total music sales - including online - are off some 20 percent from five years ago. Songs traded freely over unlicensed Internet sites swamp the number of legal sales by thousands to one."

Apple iTunes Store surpasses one billion iTunes downloads.

The Chairman of Cisco systems, John Chambers, compares telepresence to teleporting in Star Trek, and says it will be potentially a billion dollar market.

Sony announces the Sony Reader PRS-500 — another attempt to provide an acceptable e-book (ebook; electronic book) reader. 

A feature of the PRS-500 is that it only uses power when a page is turned. Thus theoretically 7500 pages may be read on the device with one battery charge.

Google completes the purchase of YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google stock.

Yahoo and Reuters introduce programs to place photographs and videos of news events submitted by the public, including cell phone photos and videos, throughout Reuters.com and Yahoo's new service entitled YouWitnessNews. Reuters says that it will also start to distribute some of the submissions next year to the thousands of print, online and broadcast media outlets that subscribe to its news service. Reuters also says that it hopes to develop a service devoted entirely to user-submitted photographs and video.

Time Magazine names "You" as the Person of the Year:

"The "Great Man" theory of history is usually attributed to the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who wrote that 'the history of the world is but the biography of great men.' He believed that it is the few, the powerful and the famous who shape our collective destiny as a species. That theory took a serious beating this year.

"To be sure, there are individuals we could blame for the many painful and disturbing things that happened in 2006. The conflict in Iraq only got bloodier and more entrenched. A vicious skirmish erupted between Israel and Lebanon. A war dragged on in Sudan. A tin-pot dictator in North Korea got the Bomb, and the President of Iran wants to go nuclear too. Meanwhile nobody fixed global warming, and Sony didn't make enough PlayStation3s.

"But look at 2006 through a different lens and you'll see another story, one that isn't about conflict or great men. It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes."

The Library of Congress launches a series of news feeds using RSS (Really Simple Syndication) technology.

Apple introduces the iPhone, an internet-connected multimedia smartphone with a virtual keypad and a virtual keyboard.

Amazon.com introduces the Kindle.This unconventially-named e-book reader differs from other e-book readers because it incorporates a wireless service for purchasing and delivering electronic texts without a computer. The 6 inch electronic-paper screen is limited to grayscale at 167ppi resolution. 90,000 titles are available for download to the 10 oz. device at its introduction. The device can store about 200 books.

Apple's iTunes Store has reportedly sold five billion songs.

Sirius Satellite Radio and XM Radio merge to form Sirius XM Radio.

American educator Cathy N. Davidson and South African educator David Theo Goldberg, with support of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation grant making initiative on Digital Media and Learning, publish The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age.

The United States converts from analog to digital television broadcasting.

"The switch from analog to digital broadcast television is referred to as the digital TV (DTV) transition. In 1996, the U.S. Congress authorized the distribution of an additional broadcast channel to each broadcast TV station so that they could start a digital broadcast channel while simultaneously continuing their analog broadcast channel. Later, Congress set June 12, 2009 as the final date that full power television stations can broadcast analog signals. As of June 13, 2009, full power television stations will only broadcast digital, over-the-air signals. Your local broadcasters may make the transition before then, and some already have.

"The digital transition is underway. Prepare now! On Feb. 17, some full-power broadcast television stations in the United States may stop broadcasting on analog airwaves and begin broadcasting only in digital. The remaining stations may stop broadcasting analog sometime between April 16 and June 12. June 12 is the final deadline for terminating analog broadcasts under legislation passed by Congress.

"Why are we switching to DTV?

"An important benefit of the switch to all-digital broadcasting is that it will free up parts of the valuable broadcast spectrum for public safety communications (such as police, fire departments, and rescue squads). Also, some of the spectrum will be auctioned to companies that will be able to provide consumers with more advanced wireless services (such as wireless broadband).

"Consumers also benefit because digital broadcasting allows stations to offer improved picture and sound quality, and digital is much more efficient than analog. For example, rather than being limited to providing one analog program, a broadcaster is able to offer a super sharp “high definition” (HD) digital program or multiple “standard definition” (SD) digital programs simultaneously through a process called “multicasting.” Multicasting allows broadcast stations to offer several channels of digital programming at the same time, using the same amount of spectrum required for one analog program. So, for example, while a station broadcasting in analog on channel 7 is only able to offer viewers one program, a station broadcasting in digital on channel 7 can offer viewers one digital program on channel 7-1, a second digital program on channel 7-2, a third digital program on channel 7-3, and so on. This means more programming choices for viewers. Further, DTV can provide interactive video and data services that are not possible with analog technology" (http://dtv.gov/whatisdtv.html, accessed 06-12-2009).

"At one time, authoritarian regimes could draw a shroud around the events in their countries by simply snipping the long-distance phone lines and restricting a few foreigners. But this is the new arena of censorship in the 21st century, a world where cellphone cameras, Twitter accounts and all the trappings of the World Wide Web have changed the ancient calculus of how much power governments actually have to sequester their nations from the eyes of the world and make it difficult for their own people to gather, dissent and rebel.

"Iran’s sometimes faltering attempts to come to grips with this new reality are providing a laboratory for what can and cannot be done in this new media age — and providing lessons to other governments, watching with calculated interest from afar, about what they may be able to get away with should their own citizens take to the streets.

"One early lesson is that it is easier for Iranian authorities to limit images and information within their own country than it is to stop them from spreading rapidly to the outside world. While Iran has severely restricted Internet access, a loose worldwide network of sympathizers has risen up to help keep activists and spontaneous filmmakers connected.

"The pervasiveness of the Web makes censorship 'a much more complicated job,' said John Palfrey, a co-director of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

"The Berkman Center estimates that about three dozen governments — as widely disparate as China, Cuba and Uzbekistan — extensively control their citizens’ access to the Internet. Of those, Iran is one of the most aggressive. Mr. Palfrey said the trend during this decade has been toward more, not less, censorship. 'It’s almost impossible for the censor to win in an Internet world, but they’re putting up a good fight,' he said.

"Since the advent of the digital age, governments and rebels have dueled over attempts to censor communications. Text messaging was used to rally supporters in a popular political uprising in Ukraine in 2004 and to threaten activists in Belarus in 2006. When Myanmar sought to silence demonstrators in 2007, it switched off the country’s Internet network for six weeks. Earlier this month, China blocked sites like YouTube to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown.

"In Iran, the censorship has been more sophisticated, amounting to an extraordinary cyberduel. It feels at times as if communications within the country are being strained through a sieve, as the government slows down Web access and uses the latest spying technology to pinpoint opponents. But at least in limited ways, users are still able to send Twitter messages, or tweets, and transmit video to one another and to a world of online spectators.

"Because of the determination of those users, hundreds of amateur videos from Tehran and other cities have been uploaded to YouTube in recent days, providing television networks with hours of raw — but unverified — video from the protests. 

"The Internet has 'certainly broken 30 years of state control over what is seen and is unseen, what is visible versus invisible,'  said Navtej Dhillon, an analyst with the Brookings Institution" (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/world/middleeast/23censor.html?hp).

"In George Orwell’s '1984,' government censors erase all traces of news articles embarrassing to Big Brother by sending them down an incineration chute called the 'memory hole.'

"On Friday, it was '1984' and another Orwell book, 'Animal Farm,' that were dropped down the memory hole — by Amazon.com.

"In a move that angered customers and generated waves of online pique, Amazon remotely deleted some digital editions of the books from the Kindle devices of readers who had bought them.

"An Amazon spokesman, Drew Herdener, said in an e-mail message that the books were added to the Kindle store by a company that did not have rights to them, using a self-service function. 'When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers’ devices, and refunded customers,' he said.

'Amazon effectively acknowledged that the deletions were a bad idea. 'We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances,' Mr. Herdener said" (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html, accessed 07-25-2009).

"Books in the real world are covered by a notion of copyright called the 'first sale' doctrine, which allows a purchaser to do pretty much whatever he or she wants with the book–including reselling it or lending it to a friend.

"But digital books–especially if they’re sold as part of access to a networked system such as Amazon’s Kindle Store and Google’s online books collection–don’t necessarily fall under those same rules. 'We have not matured our understanding of copyright to work in a digital environment in way that provides a set of protections and meets people’s expectations for how we use digital content,' said Brantley" (http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/07/17/an-orwellian-moment-for-amazons-kindle/, accessed 07-25-2009).

Among the numerous things I collect are DVDs and high-definition Blu-ray Discs. Toward the end of 2009 I noticed that certain classic films were being re-issued as Blu-ray discs packaged in the back of short hardcover books concerning the films. These were not books that happened to include a disc as supplementary material. In those cases the electronic data is often secondary to the physical book. What I bought was the Blu-ray disc, packaged inside a full color book of 30 to 50 pages that was issued in the same size as the normal plastic Blu-ray clamshell boxes. The book is clearly secondary to the data—an excellent informative way of packaging and storing the data.

Two Blu-ray discs that I purchased in December 2009 packaged in hardcover books were Robert Redford's film, A River Runs Through It, based on the elegantly written novella by Norman Maclean, and the 50th Anniversary edition of Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest. The back of each book contains a thick plastic insert attached to the inside of the rear cover to protect the disc. Both books contain full-color content that is well-presented and informative.

Why do I include these details in this database? To me, selling Blu-ray discs inside a book represents a notable physical example of the convergence of the book and electronic media. To a book collector this format is also superior and of greater interest than the standard Blu-ray plastic clamshell box. 

"The Association of American Publishers (AAP) has today released its annual estimate of total book sales in the United States. The report, which uses data from the Bureau of the Census as well as sales data from eighty-six publishers inclusive of all major book publishing media market holders, estimates that U.S. publishers had net sales of $23.9 billion in 2009, down from $24.3 billion in 2008, representing a 1.8% decrease. In the last seven years the industry had a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 1.1%."

"Audio book sales for 2009 totaled $192 million, down 12.9% on the prior year, CAGR (compound annual growth rate) for this category is still healthy at 4.3%. E-books overtook audiobooks in 2009 with sales reaching $313 million in 2009, up 176.6%" (http://www.publishers.org/main/PressCenter/Archicves/2010_April/BookSalesEstimatedat23.9Billionin2009.htm)

"The periodical shelves at Stanford University’s Engineering Library are nearly bare. Library chief Helen Josephine says that in the past five years, most engineering periodicals have been moved online, making their print versions pretty obsolete -- and books aren't doing much better.  

"In 2005, when the university realized it was running out space for its growing collection of 80,000 engineering books, administrators decided to build a new library. But instead of creating more space for books, they chose to create less.  

"The new library is set to open in August with 10,000 engineering books on the shelves -- a decrease of more than 85 percent from the old library. Stanford library director Michael Keller says the librarians determined which books to keep on the shelf by looking at how frequently a book was checked out. They found that the vast majority of the collection hadn't been taken off the shelf in five years.  

"Keller expects that, eventually, there won't be any books on the shelves at all.  'As the world turns more and more, the items that appeared in physical form in previous decades and centuries are appearing in digital form,' he says.  

"Given the nature of engineering, that actually comes in handy. Engineering uses some basic formulas but is generally a rapidly changing field -- particularly in specialties such as software and bioengineering. Traditional textbooks have rarely been able to keep up.  

"Jim Plummer, dean of Stanford's School of Engineering, says that's why his faculty is increasingly using e-books.  

" 'It allows our faculty to change examples,' he says, 'to put in new homework problems ... and lectures and things like that in almost a real-time way.'

For the moment, the Engineering Library is the only Stanford library that's cutting back on books. But Keller says he can see what's coming down the road by simply looking at the current crop of Stanford students.  

" 'They write their papers online, and they read articles online, and many, many, many of them read chapters and books online,' he says. 'I can see in this population of students behaviors that clearly indicate where this is all going.'

"And while it's still rare among American libraries to get rid of such a large amount of books, it's clear that many are starting to lay the groundwork for a different future. According to a survey by the Association of Research Libraries, American libraries are spending more of their money on electronic resources and less on books" (http://news.opb.org/article/8204-stanford_ushers_in_the_age_of_bookless_libraries/, accessed 07-10-2010).