Timeline of the Different Devices from the Prehistoric Age to the Digital (Information) Age
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38,000 BCE
CAVE PAINTINGS | Prehistoric Age
Cave paintings are a type of parietal art (which category also includes petroglyphs, or engravings), found on the wall or ceilings of caves. The term usually implies prehistoric origin, and the oldest known are more than 100,000 years old (art of the Upper Paleolithic), found in both the Haryana region Manghar bani north western India, and in the caves in the district of Maros (Sulawesi, Indonesia). The oldest are often constructed from hand stencils and simple geometric shapes. -
2500 BCE
PAPYRUS | Prehistoric Age
The papyrus is a material prepared in ancient Egypt from the pithy stem of a water plant, used in sheets throughout the ancient Mediterranean world for writing or painting on and also for making rope, sandals, and boats. -
2400 BCE
CLAY TABLETS | Prehistoric Age
The ancient Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, and Hittites wrote on tablets made from water-cleaned clay. Clay tablets are usually associated with cuneiform writing, a script that takes its modern name from the wedge-shaped (from Latin cuneus, “wedge”) marks made by the stylus in clay. When the Aramaic language and alphabet arose in the 6th century BCE, the clay tablet book declined because clay was less suited than papyrus to the Aramaic characters. -
220 BCE
WOODBLOCK PRINTING | Prehistoric Age
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. As a method of printing on cloth, the earliest surviving examples from China date to before 220 AD. -
130 BCE
ACTA DIURNA | Prehistoric Age
Acta Diurna, also called Acta Populi, Acta Publica and simply Acta or Diurna, in ancient Rome was a sort of daily government gazette, containing an officially authorized narrative of noteworthy events at Rome. 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
DIBAO | Prehistoric Age
Dibao is a general term to describe the ancient Chinese gazette. Historically, there were different types of names used to describe Dibao in different dynasties among imperial Chinese history. While closest in form and function to gazettes in the Western world, they have also been called "palace reports" or "imperial bulletins". Different sources place Dibao's first publication as early as the Han Dynasty, which would make Dibao amongst the earliest newspapers in the world. -
500
CODEX | Prehistoric Age
Maya codices (singular: codex) are folding books stemming from the pre-Columbian Maya civilization, written in Maya hieroglyphic script on Mesoamerican paper, made from the inner bark of certain trees, the main being the wild fig tree or Amate (Ficus Glabrata). Such codices were the primary written records of Maya civilization, together with the many inscriptions on stone monuments and stelae that survived. -
NEWSPAPER (The Relation of Strasbourg) | Industrial Age
The newsletter usually accorded primacy as a definite newspaper is the Relation of Strasbourg, first printed in 1609 by Johann Carolus. A close rival is the Avisa Relation oder Zeitung (Zeitung is the German word for “newspaper”), founded in the same year by Heinrich Julius, duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel. -
OPTICAL TELEGRAPH | Industrial Age
An optical telegraph is a line of stations, typically towers, for the purpose of conveying textual information by means of visual signals. Credit for the first successful optical telegraph goes to the French engineer Claude Chappe and his brothers in 1792, who succeeded in covering France with a network of 556 stations stretching a total distance of 4,800 kilometres (3,000 mi). Le système Chappe was used for military and national communications until the 1850s. -
HELIOGRAPH | Industrial Age
The Niépce Heliograph was made in 1827, during this period of fervent experimentation. It is the earliest photograph produced with the aid of the camera obscura known to survive today. -
ELECTRICAL TELEGRAPH | Industrial Age
An electrical telegraph was a point-to-point text messaging system, used from the 1840s until the late 20th century when it was slowly replaced by other telecommunication systems. It was the first electrical telecommunications system and the most widely used of a number of early messaging systems called telegraphs, which were devised to communicate text messages more rapidly than by physical transportation. -
TELEPRINTER | Industrial Age
A teleprinter is an electromechanical device that can be used to send and receive typed messages through various communications channels, in both point-to-point and point-to-multipoint configurations. -
TYPEWRITER | Industrial Age
A typewriter is a mechanical or electromechanical machine for typing characters. Typically, a typewriter has an array of keys, and each one causes a different single character to be produced on paper by striking an inked ribbon selectively against the paper with a type element. The first practical typewriter was completed in September, 1867, although the patent was not issued until June, 1868. -
TELEPHONE | Industrial Age
A telephone is an instrument designed for the simultaneous transmission and reception of the human voice. While Italian innovator Antonio Meucci (pictured at left) is credited with inventing the first basic phone in 1849, and Frenchman Charles Bourseul devised a phone in 1854, Alexander Graham Bell won the first U.S. patent for the device in 1876. -
PHONOGRAPH | Industrial Age
A phonograph, in its later forms also called a gramophone or since the 1940s called a record player, or more recently a turntable, is a device for the mechanical and analogue recording and reproduction of sound. In 1877, Thomas Edison invented the phonograph using a combination of the phonautograph, the telegraph and the telephone. His goal was to transcribe messages from the telegraph to a piece of paper tape. -
MOTION PICTURE PHOTOGRAPHY (Kinetographs) | Industrial Age
The first was a mechanism to enable sequence photographs to be taken within a single camera at regular, rapid intervals, and the second was a medium capable of storing images for more than the second or so of movement possible from drums, wheels, or disks. In 1890 Dickson unveiled the Kinetograph, a primitive motion picture camera. In 1892 he announced the invention of the Kinestoscope, a machine that could project the moving images onto a screen. -
PUNCH CARD | Industrial Age
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. Punched cards were widely used through much of the 20th century in what became known as the data processing industry, where specialized and increasingly complex unit record machines, organized into semiautomatic data processing systems, used punched cards for data input, output, and storage -
RADIO | Industrial Age
It is the first wireless mode of communication. Radios send messages by radio waves instead of wires. It works by changing sounds or signals into radio waves, which travel through air, space, and solid objects, and the radio receiver changes them back into the sounds, words, and music we hear. The first practical radio transmitters and receivers were developed around 1895–1896 by Italian Guglielmo Marconi, and radio began to be used commercially around 1900. -
PRINTING PRESS FOR MASS PRODUCTION | Industrial Age
The printing press is a device that allows for the mass production of uniform printed matter, mainly text in the form of books, pamphlets and newspapers. Johannes Gutenberg is usually cited as the inventor of the printing press. Indeed, the German goldsmith's 15th-century contribution to the technology was revolutionary — enabling the mass production of books and the rapid dissemination of knowledge throughout Europe. -
COMMERCIAL MOTION PICTURE | Industrial Age
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 | Industrial Age
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. Reliable synchronization was difficult to achieve with the early sound-on-disc systems, and amplification and recording quality were also inadequate. -
TELEVISION | Electronic Age
It is a system for transmitting visual images and sound that are reproduced on screens, chiefly used to broadcast programs for entertainment, information, and education. Electronic television was first successfully demonstrated in San Francisco on Sept. 7, 1927. The system was designed by Philo Taylor Farnsworth, a 21-year-old inventor who had lived in a house without electricity until he was 14. -
TRANSISTOR RADIO | Electronic Age
The transistor radio is a small portable radio receiver that uses transistor-based circuitry. Following their development in 1954, made possible by the invention of the transistor in 1947, they became the most popular electronic communication device in history, with billions manufactured during the 1960s and 1970s. -
LARGE ELECTRONIC COMPUTERS - EDSAC | Electronic Age
Short for Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator, EDSAC is an early British computer considered to be the first stored program electronic computer. It was created at the University of Cambridge in England, performed its first calculation on May 6, 1949, and was the computer that ran the first graphical computer game, nicknamed "Baby." In the picture to the right, is an example of the EDSAC computer. -
MAINFRAME COMPUTERS | Electronic Age
Mainframe computers are computers used primarily by large organizations for critical applications; bulk data processing, such as census, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise resource planning; and transaction processing -
MAINFRAME COMPUTER - IBM 704 | Electronic Age
The IBM 704, introduced by IBM in 1954, is the first mass-produced computer with floating-point arithmetic hardware. The IBM 704 Manual of operation states "The type 704 Electronic Data-Processing Machine is a large-scale, high-speed electronic calculator controlled by an internally stored program of the single address type." -
PERSONAL COMPUTER | Electronic Age
A multi-purpose microcomputer whose size, capabilities, and price make it feasible for individual use. -
PORTABLE COMPUTER | Electronic Age
A portable computer was a computer designed to be easily 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). -
LCD TELEVISION | Electronic Age
In 1982, Seiko Epson released the first LCD television, the Epson TV Watch, a small wrist-worn active-matrix LCD television. -
LCD PROJECTOR | Electronic Age
The LCD projector was invented by New York inventor Gene Dolgoff. The idea was to use an element referred to as a “light valve” to regulate the amount of light that passes through it. This would allow the use of a very powerful external light source.He then settled on liquid crystals to modulate the light in 1971. It took him until 1984 to get an addressable liquid crystal display (LCD), which is when he built the world’s first LCD projector. -
VIRTUAL REALITY | Information Age
A computer-generated environment with scenes and objects that appear to be real, making the user feel they are immersed in their surroundings. This environment is perceived through a device known as a Virtual Reality headset or helmet. Consumer virtual reality headsets were first released by video game companies in the early-mid 1990s. -
LAPTOPS | Information Age
IBM announced the IBM 5155 Portable Personal Computer. In 1986, Radio Shack released the new, improved and smaller TRS Model 200. In 1988, Compaq Computer introduced its first laptop PC with VGA graphics, the Compaq SLT/286. It was a laptop size computer that weighed under 5-pounds. It is a battery- or AC-powered personal computer generally smaller than a briefcase that can easily be transported and conveniently used in temporary spaces. -
WEB BROWER | Information Age
The first web browser - or browser-editor rather - was called WorldWideWeb as, after all, when it was written in 1990 it was the only way to see the web. Much later it was renamed Nexus in order to save confusion between the program and the abstract information space (which is now spelled World Wide Web with spaces). -
SEARCH ENGINE | Information Age
The first Internet search engine is released in 1990. Early online journalists used an Internet search tool called Archie, which was released on September 10, 1990. -
WEARABLE COMPUTERS | Information Age
Wearable computers are designed for accessibility and convenience, as well as improvements to workplaces by making information quickly and readily available to the wearer. The Hewlett Packard HP-01 is considered the first wearable device to have a mass market impact. It was branded as a calculator wristwatch but showcased other technologies such as time of day, alarm, timer, stopwatch, date and calendar. The watch sold for over $3000 in today's dollars. -
SMARTPHONE | Information Age
Smartphone is a handheld personal computer. It possesses extensive computing capabilities, including high-speed access to the Internet using both Wi-Fi and mobile broadband; most, if not all smartphones also are built with support for Bluetooth and satellite navigation. Modern smartphones have a touchscreen color display with a graphical user interface that covers the front surface and enables the user to use a virtual keyboard to type and press onscreen icons. -
YAHOO! | Information Age
Yahoo! was started at Stanford University. It was founded in January 1994 by Jerry Yang and David Filo, who were Electrical Engineering graduate students when they created a website named "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web".The yahoo.com domain was created on January 18, 1995. -
BLOGS | Information Age
The first blog was Links.net, created in 1994 by Justin Hall as a place to publish his writing. The site consisted entirely of brief posts, each one sharing a link and some of his thoughts on the content within. This compilation of links included links to websites he liked, as well as his own work. With the term “blog” not invented yet, these sites were referred to as “Online Diaries” or even “Personal Pages”. In 1997, the term “weblog” was coined by Jorn Barger. -
GOOGLE | Information Age
Initially known as BackRub, Google began as a research project of Larry Page, who enrolled in Stanford's computer science graduate program in 1995. There, he met fellow CS student Sergey Brin. The two stayed in touch as Page began looking into the behavior of linking on the World Wide Web. -
BLOGGER | Information Age
Blogger is a blog-publishing service that allows multi-user blogs with time-stamped entries. It was developed by Pyra Labs, which was bought by Google in 2003. The blogs are hosted by Google and generally accessed from a subdomain of blogspot.com. Blogs can also be served from a custom domain owned by the user (like www.example.com) by using DNS facilities to direct a domain to Google's servers. A user can have up to 100 blogs per account. -
WORDPRESS | Information Age
WordPress was born out of a desire for an elegant, well-architectured personal publishing system built on PHP and MySQL and licensed under the GPL. It is the official successor of b2/cafelog. WordPress is modern software, but its roots and development go back to 2001. It is a mature and stable product. We hope that by focusing on user experience and web standards we can create a tool different from anything else out there. -
FRIENDSTER | Information Age
Friendster was a U.S. social networking site based in Mountain View, CA, founded in 2003 by Jonathan Abrams.It was originally a social networking service website. The service allowed users to contact other members, share online content and media with those contacts, and also for dating and discovering new events, bands and hobbies. Users could share videos, photos, messages and comments with other members via profiles and networks.It is considered one of the original social networks. -
SKYPE | Information Age
Skype was founded in 2003 by Niklas Zennström, from Sweden, and Janus Friis, from Denmark. The Skype software was created by Estonians Ahti Heinla, Priit Kasesalu, and Jaan Tallinn. The first public beta version was released on 29 August 2003. -
FACEBOOK | Information Age
Facebook, American online social network service that is part of the company Meta Platforms. Facebook was founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes, all of whom were students at Harvard University. Facebook became the largest social network in the world. -
NINTENDO DS | Information Age
The Nintendo DS is a handheld game console produced by Nintendo, released globally across 2004 and 2005. The DS, an initialism for "Developers' System" or "Dual Screen", introduced distinctive new features to handheld games: two LCD screens working in tandem (the bottom one being a touchscreen), a built-in microphone and support for wireless connectivity. -
PlayStation Portable (PSP) | Information Age
The PlayStation Portable (PSP) is a handheld game console developed and marketed by Sony Computer Entertainment. It was first released in Japan on December 12, 2004, in North America on March 24, 2005, and in PAL regions on September 1, 2005, and is the first handheld installment in the PlayStation line of consoles. As a seventh-generation console, the PSP competed with the Nintendo DS. -
YOUTUBE | Information Age
In February 2005 three former PayPal employees, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, launched the YouTube website for publishing and sharing video files. The first video called "Me at the zoo" was uploaded to YouTube on 23 April, 2005 by one of the co-founders, Jawed Karim. It was a short video from the San Diego zoo. In November 2006, YouTube was purchased by Google for $ 1.65 billion. -
VIDEO CHAT | Information Age
The Video Chat Revolution Online video chat was booming by the mid 2000s, thanks to cheap color cameras, free software, ubiquitous PCs, and widespread broadband. By 2003, all the major instant messaging clients supported video calling. An array of webcams appeared from vendors like Logitech, Microsoft, and Apple. Skype began offering video in 2005. Video calling had crept in under the noses of a formerly skittish-to-be-seen populace in a surprising way. -
TWITTER | Information Age
Twitter began as an idea that Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey (@Jack) had in 2006. Dorsey had originally imagined Twitter as an SMS-based communications platform. Groups of friends could keep tabs on what each other were doing based on their status updates. Like texting, but not.In its early days, Twitter was referred to as twttr. At the time, a popular trend, sometimes to gain a domain-name advantage, was to drop vowels in the name of their companies and services. -
TUMBLR | Information Age
Tumblr is a microblogging and social networking website founded by David Karp in 2007, and owned by Oath Inc.he service allows users to post multimedia and other content to a short-form blog. Users can follow other users' blogs. Bloggers can also make their blogs private. For bloggers many of the website's features are accessed from a "dashboard" interface. -
NETBOOKS | Information Age
A netbook is a generic name given to a category of small, lightweight, legacy-free, and inexpensive laptop computers that were introduced in 2007. Netbooks compete in the same market segment as mobiles and Chromebooks (a variation on the portable network computer). -
SMART TV | Information Age
Smart TV, with its apps, widgets and features is undeniably cool. Picking up your TV remote and switching from ESPN to Netflix, to Angry Birds, and then to Facebook is definitely convenient. Smart TV dominates the market, so the only decision you’re really left with is which interface you prefer. The first Smart TV would arguably be the HP MediaSmart which was released around 2007. More popular was Samsung's Pavv Bordeaux TV 750 which hit the stores in 2008. -
iPHONE | Information Age
The iPhone is the first smartphone designed and marketed by Apple Inc. After years of rumors and speculation, it was officially announced on January 9, 2007, and was released in the United States on June 29, 2007. -
INSTAGRAM | Information Age
Instagram is an American photo and video sharing social networking service founded by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. On this day in 2010, Instagram founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger unleashed the photo-sharing platform that, though they didn't know it at the time, would soon become a selfie-filled, multi-billion-dollar beast used by 500 million people. -
FACEBOOK MESSENGER | Information Age
Facebook Messenger is a messaging app and platform. Originally developed as Facebook Chat in 2008, the company revamped its messaging service in 2010, and subsequently released standalone iOS and Android apps in August 2011. Over the years, Facebook has released new apps on a variety of DIFFERENT OS, launched a dedicated website interface, and separated the messaging functionality from the main Facebook app. -
APPLE WATCH | Information Age
The original Apple Watch launched in April 2015, and it was simply referred to as the first-generation Apple Watch. Apple then launched the second-generation Apple Watch in September 2016, and this generation included the Series 1 and Series 2 models.