digital text timeline
Timeline for The Future of Text Book. Please send additions and comments to frode@liquid.info
the analogue timeline is on a separate page for now
NOTE: I would greatly appreciate it if you keep the format the same for any additions:
Year – Item/Event, by person at company
BC
7500 Near Eastern counters “Tokens” to keep track of goods are the earliest antecedents of the Mesopotamian Cuneiform script. The stylus was used for this
3300 Reduction of three-dimensional Near Eastern tokens into two-dimensional signs on envelopes holding tokens
3200 First logographic Near Eastern accounting lists written on clay tablets by impressing tokens
3100 First logographic proto-cuneiform signs traced with a stylus on accounting tablets
3000 First proto-cuneiform phonetic signs to represent personal names on economic tablets
2700 First cuneiform texts that departed from accounting: funerary texts
2400 First cuneiform tablet dealing with trade
2300 First written sentence. These texts were inscribed on votive worshippers’ statues dedicated to a god and requesting immortality
2000 Classical period of the Sumerian Cuneiform Scrip
1700 Early, perhaps even first, alphabetic evidence in the Egyptian Pharaoh’s turquoise mines at Serabit el-Khadim in the south-west Sinai Peninsula
1500 Phoenician Alphabet of 22 consonants was among the early mature alphabets. It spread over the Mediterranean and led to the Greek, Hebrew, Roman, Arabic and modern alphabets
1300s Wax tablet with stylus
1200 Torah was copied onto a scroll by Moses according to the Hebrew tradition
900-400 The Greek Alphabet emerged around the ninth or eight century BC which had distinct letters for vowels, not only consonants. Many versions of the Greek alphabet existed but by the fourth century it had been standardised into twenty-four letters, ordered from alpha to omega
331 Alexandria founded by Alexander the Great
300s Reed pens for writing on papyrus
283 Library of Alexandria founded by Ptolemy I Soter
257-180 Punctuation is invented at the Library of Alexandria by Aristophanes of Byzantium
250 Parchment Scrolls
AD
200
220 Earliest surviving woodblock printed fragment (China)
500
500s Quill used until about the 19th century, when replaced by the pen
700
700s Word space pioneered by Celtic monks
900
900 Screen Printing in China during the Song Dynasty (960–1279 AD)
1300
1377 Jikji the oldest surviving book was printed, using moveable metal type
1400
1400s Movable Type Printing Press by Johannes Gutenberg
1470 Roman Type, inspired by the text on ancient Roman buildings by Nicolas Jenson
1479 Manicule in Breviarium totius juris canonici, compiled by Paolo Attavanti printed in Milan by the German firm of Leonhard Pachel and Ulrich Scinzenzeller,
1500
1500s Garamond Font. Claude Garamont, a French type designer, publisher and punch-cutter lived in Paris. Many old-style serif typefaces are collectively known as Garamond, named after him
1500(ca) Etching for Printing by Daniel Hopfer
1501 Italic Fonts by Aldus Manutius
1560 First blueprints for the modern, wood-encased carpentry pencil by Simonio and Lyndiana Bernacotti
1564 Graphite for pencils come into widespread use following the discovery of a large graphite deposit in Borrowdale, England
1565 Mechanical/Lead Holder Pencil by Conrad Gesner
1593 Index to content in a book, by Christopher Marlowe in Hero and Leander
1600
1642 Mezzotint Printmaking by Ludwig von Siegen
1665 Lead Pencils made from graphite mined in Seathwaite in Borrowdale parish, Cumbria, England
1667 Acoustic String Telephone by Robert Hooke
1677 Artificial Versifying by John Peter
1700
1770 Natural Rubber as eraser by Edward Nairne
1755 The Oxford English Dictionary by Oxford University Press
1772 Aquatint Printing by Peter Perez Burdett, named by Paul Sandby
1780 Didot and Bodoni by Firmin Didot and Giambattista Bodoni, the first ‘modern’ Modern Roman typefaces
1707-1778 Index Card organization by Carl Linnaeus
1795 Modern Pencil by Nicholas-Jacques Conté
1796 Lithography by Alois Senefelder
1800
1801 Blackboard by James Pillans
1801 Carbon Paper by Pellegrino Turri
1806 Patent for Carbon Paper by Ralph Wedgwood
1816 First Typeface Without Serifs by William Caslon IV
1816 First Working Telegraph by Francis Ronalds used static electricity and was rejected by the Admiralty as “wholly unnecessary”
1796 Colour Lithography by Alois Senefelder
1822 Menchanical Pencil with a Mechanism to Propell Repleaceable Lead by Sampson Mordan and John Isaac Hawkins
1828 Pencil Sharpener by Bernard Lassimonne
1836 Chorded Keyboard by Wheatstone and Cooke
1837 Morse Code by Samuel F. B. Morse, Joseph Henry, and Alfred Vail
1839 Vlucanized Rubber for Eraser by Charles Goodyear
1839 Electrical Telegraph Commercialised by Sir William Fothergill Cooke
1843 Rotary Drum Printing by Richard March Hoe
1846 Print Output envisioned by Charles Babbage from his Difference Engine 2
1854 Boolean algebra the mathematical basis of digital computing, developed by George Boole in The Laws of Thought
1860 Hectograph, gelatin duplicator or jellygraph by
1864 Analog ‘SPAM’. Unsolicited group telegram advertisement
1858 Eraser on Pencil by Hymen Lipman
1868 Kineograph / Flip-Book by John Barnes Linnett
1870s QWERTY layout by Christopher Latham Sholes
1874 Stencil Duplicating by Eugenio de Zuccato
1876 Telephone Patent by Alexander Graham Bell
1876 Telephone Switch, which allowed for the formation of telephone exchanges and eventually networks by Tivadar Puská
1876 Autographic Printing by Thomas Edison
1881 Harvard Citation Style (author date) by Edward Laurens Mark at Harvard University
1884 Linotype by Ottmar Mergenthaler
1888 Ballpoint Pen by John J. Loud
1895 Universal Bibliography, or Répertoire Bibliographique Universel proposed by Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine
1874 Typewriters (see previous section)
1891 Automatic Cyclostyle by David Gestetner
1900
1903 First message to travel around the globe by Commercial Pacific Cable Company, from US President Theodore Roosevelt, wishing “a happy Independence Day to the US, its territories and properties...” It took nine minutes for the message to travel worldwide
1904 Patent for a “type wheel printing telegraph machine” filed by Charles Krum which would go on to be come Teletype in 1929
1901 Trans-Atlantic Radio Signal by Marconi Company
1907 Commercial Transatlantic Radio Telegraph Cable opened by Marconi Company
1906/7 Photographic Copying Machines by George C. Beidler at the Rectigraph Company
1910
1913 Plantin typeface by Frank Hinman Pierpont and draughtsman Fritz Stelzer. the British Monotype Corporation, based on a Gros Cicero face cut in the 16th century by Robert Granjon
1914 Optophone (OCR precursor) by Emanuel Goldberg, a machine which read characters and converted them into standard telegraph code
1914 Handheld Scanner (OCR precursor) by Edmund Fournier d’Albe a machine which read characters and converted them into tones
1910 Felt-tip marking pen by Lee Newman
1920
1920s First Full-Time Type Designer Frederic Goudy
1925 Corkboard by George Brooks
1927 Futura typeface family by Paul Renner
1924 Art Color Pencils by Faber-Castell and Caran d’Ache
1929 Hellschreiber by Rudolf Hell, precursor to dot matrix printing
1930
1930 The Readies concept by Bob Brown
1931 Knowledge Machine by Emanuel Goldberg
1931 Biro by brothers László Bíró and György Bíró
1932 Times New Roman typeface by Victor Lardent under the direction of Stanley Morison, on a commission of the Times newspaper, based on the Plantin typeface
1934 Logik der Forschung by Karl R. Popper advanced the theory that the demarcation of the limit of scientific knowledge, is its ‘falsifiability’ and not its ‘verifiability’
1935 Monde book By Paul Otlet
1936 World Brain by H. G. Wells
1936 Dvorak Keyboard Layout by August Dvorak
1940
1942 Xerography Patent by Chester Carlson. The technique was originally called electrophotography
1944 Marking pen which held ink in liquid form in its handle and used a felt tip by Walter J. De Groft which becomes “Sharpie” in 1964
1945 Memex proposed by Vannevar Bush in ‘As We May Think’
1946 ‘A Logic Named Joe’ by Murray Leinster
1946 Electric Printing Telegraph by Alexander Bain, precursor to the fax
1948 A Mathematical Theory of Communication by Claude Shannon, including he word ‘bit,’ short for binary digit, and credited to John Tukey
1948 The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society by Norbert Wiener. The word cybernetics was first used in the context of the study of self-governance of people by Plato and in 1834 by André-Marie Ampère to mean the sciences of government in his classification system of human knowledge. Here Norbert Wiener introduced the term for the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine.
1949 El libro mecánico by Ángela Ruiz Robles
1949 The Lumitype-Photon Phototypesetting by the Photon Corporation based on the Lumitype of Rene Higonnet and Louis Moyroud
1940
1949 Fr Roberto Busa starts work on computerizing his Index Thomisticus (St Thomas Aquinas), in the process founding Humanities computing
1950
1950 Whirlwind computer at MIT including a display oscilloscope
1951 Doug Engelbart’s Epiphany “problems are getting more complex and urgent and have to be dealt with collectively- we have to deal with them collectively”
1951 Qu’est-ce que la documentation? by Suzanne Briet
1951 UNIVAC (UNIVersal Automatic Computer) by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly at EMCC/ Remington Rand
1952 Manchester Mark I computer Love Letter Generator by Christopher Strachey (using a random number algorithm by Alan Turing
1952 Antitrust Investigations And Trial Against IBM. It will drag on for thirty years, finally being dismissed in 1982. IBM will cautiously monitor its microcomputer business practices, fearful of a repeat of government scrutiny
1952-4 Dot Matrix Teletypewriter developed by Fritz Karl Preikschat at
1953 UNIVAC 1103 designed by Seymour Cray at the Engineering Research Associates and built by the Remington Rand corporation
1953 Magic Marker by Sidney Rosenthal
1953 The Lumitype-Photon Phototypesetting first used to set a complete published book
1953 The Lumitype-Photon Phototypesetting first used for newspaper
1954 Charactron by J. T. McNaney at Convair was a shaped electron beam cathode ray tube functioning both a display device and a read-only memory storing multiple characters and fonts on the UNIVAC 1103
1954 IBM 740 CRT used computers to draw vector graphics images, point by point, on 35 mm film
1956 Keyboard and Light Pen for computer text input at MIT on the Whirlwind computer
1956 305 RAMAC by IBM used a moving-head hard disk drive
1956 ‘Artificial Intelligence’ term coined by John McCarthy at MIT
1957 COMIT string processing language by Victor Yngve and collaborators at MIT
1957 Univers typeface family by Adrian Frutiger
1957 Dye-sublimation Printing by Noël de Plasse at Sublistatis SA
1957 Helvetica typeface family by Max Miedinger
1958 The Uses Of Argument and invention of the argumentation diagram by Stephen Toulmin
1958 Integrated circuit by Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments
1960
1960 Colossal Typewriter by John McCarthy and Roland Silver at Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN)
1960 Ted Nelson’s Epiphany about interactive screens becoming universal, on-line publishing by individuals
1960s ‘Word Processing’ term invented by IBM
1960 Suggestion for Emoticon by Vladimir Nabokov
1961 Selectric Typewriter by IBM with a ball print head instead of jamming bars, which could be easily replaced for different fonts and left the paper in place and moved the type ball instead
1961 Synthesised Speech by John Larry Kelly, Jr and Louis Gerstman of Bell Labs
1961 Expensive Typewriter by Steve Piner and L. Peter Deutsch
1962 TECO ( Text Editor & Corrector), both a character-oriented text editor and a programming language, by Dan Murphy
1962 Highlighter Pen by Frank Honn
1962 Modern fiber-tipped Pen by Yukio Horie at the Tokyo Stationery Company
1962 Enciclopedia Mecánica by Ángela Ruiz Robles
1962 RUNOFF by Jerome H. Saltzer. Bob Morris and Doug McIlroy (text editor with pagination)
1962 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn
1962 Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework by Doug Engelbart
1963 Sketchpad (a.k.a. Robot Draftsman) by Ivan Sutherland
1963 Augmentation Research Center by Doug Engelbart at SRI
1963 TJ-2 (Type Justifying Program) by Peter Samson (first page layout program)
1963 ASCII (developed from telegraph code)
1963 ‘Hypertext’ coined by Ted Nelson
1963 Computer Mouse and Chorded Keyset by Doug Engelbart
1964 ELIZA natural language-like processing computer program by Joseph Weizenbaum at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
1964 LDX (Long Distance Xerography) by Xerox Corporation, considered to be the first commercial fax machine
1964 Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan
1964 ASCII 7-bit standard
1965 TV-Edit, one of the first CRT-based display editors that was widely used by Brian Tolliver for the DEC PDP-1 computer
1965 Semi-Conductor Based Thermal Printer by Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments
1965 ‘Hypertext’ by Ted Nelson first in print, as well as first design (zipper lists).
1965 MAIL Command for MIT’s CTSS ,proposed by Pat Crisman, Glenda Schroeder, & Louis Pouzin, then implemented by Tom Van Vleck and Noel Morris
1967 HES (The Hypertext Editing System) co-designed at Brown University by Ted Nelson, Andy van Dam and Steve Carmody, as well as other student implementors, based in part on a spec Ted had written previously for Harcourt Brace.
1968 Doug Engelbart’s Seminal Demo of the NLS system at FJCC, including windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, the computer mouse & chorded keyset, word processing, dynamic file linking and revision control
1968 Dynabook Concept by Alan Kay
1968 Digi Grotesk, digital font by Rudolph Hell
1968 OCR-A monotype font for Optical Character Recognition by 23 American type foundries
1968 OCR-B monospace font by Adrian Frutiger for Monotype
1968 Serial Impact Dot Matrix Printer by OKI
1968 SHRDLU natural language understanding computer program by Terry Winograd at MIT
1969 FRESS, inspired in part by HES and Engelbart’s NLS by Andy van Dam and his students at Brown University
1969 GML, leading to SGML by Charles Goldfarb, Edward Mosher and Raymond Lorie at IBM
1969 Ed line editor for the Unix, developed in by Ken Thompson
1969 Structured Writing and Information Mapping by Robert E. Horn
1969 ARPANET based on concepts developed in parallel with work by Paul Baran, Donald Davies, Leonard Kleinrock and Lawrence Roberts
1970
1970 IBIS (issue-based information system) conceptualised by Horst Rittel
1970 gIBIS and QuestMap by Jeff Conklin
1970s Gyricon Electronic Paper by Nick Sheridon at Xerox’s PARC
1970 Journal by David A. Evans
1970 Bomber by Len Deighton, first published novel written with the aid of a commercial word processor, IBM’s MT/ST (IBM 72 IV)
1970 XEROX PARC founded by Jacob E. Goldman of XEROX
1970 Daisy Wheel Printing by Andrew Gabor at Diablo Data Systems allowing for proportional fonts
1971 New York Times article refers to “the brave new world of Word Processing”
1971 Laser Printer by Gary Starkweather at XEROX PARC
1971 File Transfer Protocol (FTP) by Abhay Bhushan
1971 Project Gutenberg by Michael S. Hart
1971 Email with @ by Ray Tomlinson
1972 First Emoticons on the PLATO IV computer system
1972 TLG (Thesaurus Linguae Graecae) founded by Prof Marianne McDonald at the University of California, Irvine, to create a comprehensive digital collection of all surviving Greek texts from antiquity to the present era
1972 C programming language by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson
1972 XEROX STAR memo written by Butler Lampson, inspired by NLS
1973 Xerox Alto by XEROX PARC
1973 Community Memory Bulletin Board precursor
1974 Omni-Font Optical Character Recognition System (OCR) Scanners by Ray Kurzweil at Kurzweil Computer Products
1974 Bravo by Butler Lampson, Charles Simonyi at Xerox PARC the precursor to Word
1974 Computer Lib/Dream Machines by Ted Nelson
1974 ‘Writing with light, writing on glass’ were the closing words of Wilfred A. Beeching’s ‘Century of the Typewriter’
1974 TCP by Robert E. Kahn and Vinton G. Cerf
1975 ZOG built at CMU
1975 MUSA Speech Synthesis systems
1975 Altair 8800 by Ed Roberts and Forrest M. Mims III
1975 Gypsy by Larry Tesler, Timothy Mott, Butler Lampson, Charles Simonyi, with advice from Dan Swinehart and other colleagues
1975 Colossal Cave Adventure text adventure game by Will Crowther
1976 Frutiger series of typefaces by Adrian Frutiger.
1976 Apple Computer (later Apple Inc.) founded Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne
1976 The Metanovel: Writing Stories by Computer by James Meehan
1976 Emacs (Editor MACroS) by David A. Moon, Guy L. Steele Jr. and Richard M. Stallman, based on TECO
1976 vi by Bill Joy (now Vim)
1976 PROMIS (Problem-Oriented Medical Information System) by Jan Schultz and Lawrence Weed the University of Vermont
1977 Apple II by Steve Wozniak at Apple
1977 DataLand developed at MIT
1977 Inkjet Printing by Ichiro Endo at Canon
1977 Name/Finger protocol (provided status on a particular computer system or person at network sites) by Harrenstien
1978 Aspen Movie Map, the first hypermedia videodisk by Andy Lippman of the MIT Architecture Machine Group
1978 Public dial-up BBS by Ward Christensen and Randy Suess.
1978 TeX by Donald Knuth
1978 Vancouver Citation Style (author number), as a part of the Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals (URMs)
1978 QuarkXPress by Quark
1978 Earliest Documented Spam (although the term had not yet been coined) by Gary Thuerk
1978 LISA by Apple design starts, with a requirement for proportional fonts
1978 Speak & Spell by Texas Instruments
1978 Highlighters with fluorescent colors by Dennison Company
1978 Wordstar by Rob Barnaby
1979 WordPerfect by Bruce Bastian and Alan Ashton at Brigham Young University
1979 Hayes Modem
1979 EasyWriter for Apple II by John Draper
1979 TV-EDIT was used by Douglas Hofstadter to write ‘Gödel, Escher, Bach’
1979 Macintosh Project Started by Jef Raskin and included Brian Howard, Marc LeBrun, Burrell Smith, Joanna Hoffman, and Bud Tribble
1979 Steve Jobs visits XEROX PARC, as part of an investment agreement, organzied by Jef Raskin. This was to see what other companies were doing in the same space, it was not the revelation or theft it has come to be known as, since the Mac was already being designed to be a GUI system and the PARC work was not secret from the Apple employees
1980
1980 ‘SPAM’. The term was used to describe users on BBSs and MUDs who repeat it a huge number of times to scroll other users’ text off the screen. It later came to be used on Usenet to mean excessive multiple postings
1980 ZX80 by Sinclair
1980 PC by IBM
1980 Floppy Disks become prevalent for personal computers
1980 Vydec1800 Series Word Processor by Exxon
1980 ENQUIRE proposed by Tim Berners-Lee
1980 USENET by Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis
1981 Raskin leaves the Macintosh project and Steve Jobs takes over
1981 BITNET, EARN and NetNorth network university IBM mainframes, allowing text (mail,files, chat) to be shared by non-Arpanet institutions
1981 TPS (Technical Publishing Software) by David Boucher at Interleaf, allowed authors to write text and create graphics WYSIWYG
1981 First major use of Information Murals in Organizations by David Sibbet
1982 Adobe founded by John Warnock and Charles Geschke
1982 First ASCII emoticons :-) and :-( by Scott Fahlman at Carnegie Mellon University
1982 CD-ROM by Denon
1983 Viewtron by AT&T and Knight Ridder
1983 MILNET physically separated from ARPANET
1983 ThinkTank outliner for Apple II
1983 ARPANET switches to TCP/IP
1983 Lisa by Apple
1983 Word by Microsoft
1983 KMS (Knowledge Management System), a descendant of ZOG by Don McCracken and Rob Akscyn at Knowledge Systems (a spinoff from the Computer Science Department of Carnegie Mellon University.
1983 Hyperties by Ben Shneiderman at the University of Maryland
1983 1984 Macintosh Television Commercial by Apple
1984 Macintosh launched. In addition to the original contributors, the team also included Bill Atkinson Chris Espinosa, Joanna Hoffman, George Crow, Bruce Horn, Jerry Manock, Susan Kare, Andy Hertzfeld, and Daniel Kottke
1984 Desktop Publishing introduced by Macintosh hardware and Aldus and Adobe software
1984 MacWrite by Apple, included with Macintosh
1984 The Print Shop (desktop publishing software with libraries of clip-art and templates for household dot-matrix printers) by Brøderbund
1984 FidoNet bulletin board system software by Tom Jennings.
1984 LaserWriter by Apple
1984 Guide by Peter Brown at the University of Kent for Unix (1984), Macintosh (1986), and Windows (1987)
1984 ‘Cyberspace’ term coined by William Gibson in Neuromancer
1984 Organizer by David Potter at Psion
1984 PostScript by John Warnock, Charles Geschke, Doug Brotz, Ed Taft and Bill Paxton at Adobe, influenced by Interpress, developed at XEROX PARC
1984 MacroMind founded by Marc Canter, Jay Fenton and Mark Stephen Pierce
1984 PC Jr by IBM
1984 Notecards by Randall Trigg, Frank Halasz and Thomas Moran at XEROX PARC
1984 Highlighted Selectable Link by Ben Shneiderman and Dan Ostroff at University of Maryland
1984 TIES System by Ben Shneiderman at University of Maryland
1984 LaserJet by HP
1984 Text Messaging / SMS (short message service) developed by Franco-German GSM cooperation by Friedhelm Hillebrand and Bernard Ghillebaert.
1984 Filevision by Telos
1984 LaTeX by Leslie Lamport
1984 Zoomracks for Atari by Paul Heckel
1985 Symbolics Document Examiner by Janet Walker
1985 Pagemaker by Aldus, bought by Adobe in 1994
1985 StarWriter by Marco Börries at Star Division
1985 Intermedia by Norman Meyrowitz at Brown University
1985 Windows spearheaded by Bill Gates at Microsoft
1985 Write by Microsoft, included with Windows
1985 Amiga by Commodore
1985 Emacs General Public License by Richard Stallman, the first copyleft license
1985 TRICKLE by Turgut Kalfaoglu at Ege University, İzmir; BITNET-to-Internet gateway allows sharing of text and programs between two disparate networks
1986 Guide by OWL
1986 Harvard Graphics desktop business application by Software Publishing Corporation
1986 FrameMaker by Frame Technology, bought by Adobe 1995
1986 Hyperties commercial version by Cognetics Corporation
1986 Solid Ink Printing by Tektronix
1986 SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language)
1986 Uncle Roger by Judy Malloy released on Art Com Electronic Network on The Well
1987 PowerPoint created by Robert Gaskins and Dennis Austin at Forethought Inc., bought by Microsoft same year and released as a Microsoft product 1989
1987 Amanda Goodenough’s children’s point and click stories in Hypercard published by Voyager
1987 MacroMind Director by MacroMind
1987 Storyspace by Jay David Bolter & Michael Joyce, maintained and distributed by Mark Bernstein of Eastgate Systems
1987 Unicode by Joe Becker from Xerox with Lee Collins and Mark Davis from Apple
1987 Franklin Spelling Ace by Franklin Electronic Publishers
1987 Knowledge Navigator visionary concept video published by Apple
1987 TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) “Poughkeepsie Principles”: text encoding guidelines for Humanities texts
1987 HyperCard by Bill Atkinson at Apple
1987 Hypertext’87 is first major conference on hypertext
1988 Microcosm by Wendy Hall, Andrew Fountain, Hugh Davis and Ian Heath
1988 NeXT Cube by NeXT
1988 IRC by Jarkko Oikarinen
1988 # (hashtag) and & (ampersand) used in IRC to label groups and topics (RFC 1459)
1988 Wolfram Mathematica by Stephen Wolfram
1988 Hypertext edition of Communications of the ACM using Hyperties by Ben Shneiderman
1988 Hypertext Hands-On! by Ben Shneiderman and Greg Kearsley, first commercial electronic book
1988 Reflections on NoteCards: seven issues for the next generation of hypermedia systems by Frank,G. Halasz (ac.paper)
1988 Serial Line Internet Protocol (SLIP) by J. Romkey
1988 Breadcrumb Trail navigation metaphor in Hypergate by Mark Bernstein
1989 GRiDPad 1900, the first commercial tablet by GRiD Systems Corporation
1989 Robert Winter’s CD Companion to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, published by Voyager, he first viable commercial CD-ROM
1989 SuperCard by Bill Appleton at Silicon Beach Software
1989 Bidirectional Email-to-Fax Gateway hosted by UCC
1989 Mapping Hypertext: Analysis, Linkage, and Display of Knowledge for the Next Generation of On-Line Text and Graphics by Robert E. Horn
1990
1990s T9 invented by Martin King and Cliff Kushler, co-founders of Tegic
1990s Compendium by Al Selvin and Maarten Sierhuis
1990 Archie, a tool for indexing FTP archives, considered to be the first Internet search engine, by Alan Emtage and Bill Heelan at McGill University/Concordia University in Montreal.
1990 Python programming language by Guido van Rossum
1990 Designing Hypermedia for Learning by David H. Jonassen and Heinz Mandl (editors) publish (Springer-Verlag, NATO Advanced Science Institutes Series, F: Computer and Systems Sciences, Vol. 67) in which updated conference proceedings are annotated by the authors with typed hypertext links in the margins connecting passages between the articles. The publisher’s webpage about the book is at https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783642759475
1991 Gopher protocol by the University of Minnesota (initial version of the protocol appeared in 1991, codified in 1993 as a RFC 1436)
1991 Seven Issues: Revisited Hypertext ‘91 Closing Plenary by Frank G. Halasz at Xerox Corporation (ac.paper)
1991 World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee becomes the first global hypertext system
1991 DocBook DTD by HaL Computer Systems and O’Reilly & Associates
1991 Camelot Project started as in at Adobe, later to become PDF
1991 PowerBook Laptops by Apple
1991 Aquanet by Catherine C. Marshall Frank G. Halasz Russell A. Rogers William C. Janssen Jr.
1991 Visual Basic by Microsoft
1991 Instant Update by ON Technology
1991 HTML by Tim Berners-Lee, influenced by SGMLguid, an in-house markup language at CERN
1991 CURIA (now CELT: Corpus of Electronic Texts) first corpus in Early Irish to be published on the World-Wide Web
1991 Expanded Books Project by The Voyager Company
1991 TeachText by Apple, included with System 7
1991 Liquid Information Philosophy by Frode Hegland with Sarah Walton
1992 First Text Message (SMS) is sent by Neil Papworth reading: “Merry Christmas” to Richard Jarvis at Vodafone
1992 Veronica a search engine system for the Gopher protocol by Steven Foster and Fred Barrie at the University of Nevada, Reno
1992 Lynx internet web browser by Lou Montulli, Michael Grobe, and Charles Rezac at the University of Kansas
1992 Frontier by Dave Winer at UserLand Software released on Mac
1992 Palm Computing founded by Jeff Hawkins,
1992 Hypertext fiction cover story by the New York Times Book Review
1992 Before Writing by Denise Schmandt-Besserat
1992 PDF by Adobe
1992 BBEdit by Rich Siegel at Bare Bones Software
1993 Mosaic Web Browser by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina at NCSA massively popularises the web
1993 Microsoft Word celebrates its 10th aniversary with 10 million Word users
1993 Encarta multimedia encyclopedia by Microsoft
1993 Hypermedia Encyclopedias sell more copies than print encyclopedias
1993 Newton PDA by Apple
1993 Open Agent Architecture (OAA) delegated agent framework by Adam Cheyer et al. at SRI International
1993 Georgia typeface designed by Matthew Carter and hinted by Tom Rickner for Microsoft
1994 PDF made freely available
1994 OpenType by Microsoft and Adobe
1994 Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) enabled internet communications between two routers directly by W. Simpson
1994 Netscape Navigator by Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen at Netscape Communications Corp
1994 Scripting News by Dave Winer
1994 Yahoo! founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo
1994 Amazon founded by Jeff Bezos
1994 World Wide Web Consortium founded
1994 PageMill by Seneca Inc., bought by Adobe one year later, discontinued 2000
1995 WordPad by Microsoft, included in Windows 95
1995 Netscape goes public and gains market value of almost $3B on first day of stock market trading
1995 The World Wide Web Handbook by Peter Flynn, first comprehensive book on HTML
1995 Ruby by Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto
1995 Windows 95 by Microsoft
1995-1999 Emoji developed by Japanese mobile operators
1995 JavaScript by Brendan Eich
1995 AltaVista founded by Paul Flaherty, Louis Monier, Michael Burrows and Jeffrey Black
1996 CSS by Håkon Wium Lie and Bert Bos at the World Wide Web Consortium
1996 Palm OS PDAs including the Graffiti handwriting system
1996 Vaio by Sony
1996 OpenType by Adobe and Microsoft
1996 Anoto founded by Christer Fåhræus to provide digital pen capability to paper
1996 Hotmail by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith, bought by Microsoft in 1997
1996 The Internet Archive by Brewster Kahle
1996 GoLive by GoNet Communication, Inc., bought by Adobe 1999
1996 TextEdit by Apple
1996 Live word count by Keith Martin, demonstrated in the Wordless word processor, first mainstream appearance Microsoft Word 98
1997 Yandex by Arkady Volozh and Ilya Segalovich
1997 Dreamweaver by Macromedia, bought by Adobe 2005
1997 Flash by Macromedia
1997 Jabberwacky released online by Rollo Carpenter, with development starting
1997 E-Paper by Barrett Comiskey, Joseph Jacobson and JD Albert at E Ink Corporation
1997 Newton cancelled by Apple
1997 iMac by Apple
1997 Unistroke by David Goldberg at Xerox PARC
1997 9000i Communicator by Nokia, the first mobile phone with a full keyboard
1997 OpenType by Microsoft
1998 iMac by Apple
1998 Can Computers Think? History and Status of the Debate. Seven posters. Industrial strength argumentation map by Robert E. Horn
1998 Visual Language: Global Communication for the 21st Century Robert by E. Horn, comprehensive grammar, syntax, semantics of visual-verbal language Visual Language: Global Communication for the 21st Century
1998 Fluid Links demo video at the ACM CHI conference byPolle T. Zellweger, Bay-Wei Chang, and Jock D. Mackinlay (possibly 1999)
1998 ‘SPAM’ in The New Oxford Dictionary of English
1998 Google founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin
1998 XML
1998 Netscape goes open source with the name Mozilla
1998 XML-RPC text-based networking protocol between apps running across operating systems
1998 Frontier by Dave Winer at UserLand Software released on Windows
1998 MathML by W3C
1998 @font-face by W3C
1998 AOL buys Netscape for $4B
1999 Open eBook
1999 RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9) the first version of RSS, by Dan Libby and Ramanathan V. Guha at Netscape
1999 RSS 0.91 by Dave Winer at UserLand
1999 my.netscape.com, my.userland.com
1999 Edit This Page by Dave Winer
1999 Code is Law by Larry Lessig
1999 Mac OS X by Apple
1999 ActiveText: A Method for Creating Dynamic and Interactive Texts by Jason E. Lewis and Alex Weyers at Interval Research Corporation (ac. paper)
1999 Spatial Hypertext: An Alternative to Navigational and Semantic Links paper by Frank M. Shipman and Catherine C. Marshall
2000
2000 OCR software is made available online for free
2000 1 billion indexable pages on the Web, estimated by NEC-RI and Inktomi
2000 ClearType by Microsoft
2000 CoolType by Adobe
2000 Riding the Bullet by Stephen King, the first mass-market e-book for encrypted download
2000 EverNote founded by Stepan Pachikov
2001 G4 Titanium PowerBook by Apple
2001 Creative Commons by Lawrence Lessig, Hal Abelson, and Eric Eldred
2001 Wikipedia by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger at Nupedia
2001 JSON by Douglas Crockford
2001 Douglas Adams’ speech about Virtual Graffiti held at the 3GSM World Congress
2002 Bibliotheca Alexandrina founded, the modern Library of Alexandria, with Ismail Serageldin as the founding director
2003 Android Inc. founded by Andy Rubin, Rich Miner, Nick Sears, and Chris White
2003 Keitai Shousetsu, first cell phone novel (Deep Love, Yoshi)
2003 The Legal Deposit Libraries Act widens the definition of what publishers should send to the libraries to include digital publications, pending further regulation
2003 WordPress Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little
2003 Ulysses by Max Seelemann and Marcus Fehn
2004 Facebook founded by Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes
2004 First hypertext format full length articles accepted at ACM’s Hypertext Conference
2004 First hypertext format article at ACM’s Document Engineering conference by James Blustein and Mona Noor
2004 Institute for the Future of the Book founded by Bob Stein
2004 Tag Cloud at Flickr, Technorati, WordPress Plugins and more
2005 Pages by Apple
2005 Markdown by John Gruber collaboration with Aaron Swartz
2006 Time Person of the Year is ‘You’
2005 Writely by programmers Sam Schillace, Steve Newman and Claudia Carpenter at Upstartle
2006 Upstartle bought by Google
2006 Google Docs by Google
2006 Twitter founded by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone and Evan Williams at Twitter
2006 One Laptop Per Child by Nicholas Negroponte
2006 HyperScope Project
2006 Hyperwords Project
2006 Office Open XML by Microsoft
2006 Debategraph by Peter Baldwin and David Price
2006 Gamer Theory by McKenzie Wark’s, the first networked book, produced by the Institute for the Future of the Book
2006 Dialogue Mapping: Creating Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems by Jeff Conklin
2007 Hashtag by Chris Messina (name by Stowe Boyd)
2007 iPhone by Apple Inc.
2007 Kindle by Amazon
2007 Scrivener by Keith Blount at Literature & Latte
2007 EPUB by IDPF
2008 MacBook Air by Apple
2008 Last Stable Build of Netscape Navigator
2009 Like Button by Facebook
2009 Webfonts by Typekit
2009 OmmWriter by Herraiz Soto & Co
2009 iPhone Copy & Paste by Apple
2010
2010 Thumbs Up Emoji
2010 Retina Display by Apple
2010 iA Writer by Oliver Reichenstein
2010 iPad by Apple
2010 Siri bought and released by Apple, developed by Dag Kittlaus, Tom Gruber, and Adam Cheyer
2010 Emoji ratified as part of Unicode 6.0
2011 iMessage by Apple
2011 ByWord by Metaclassy
2011 Annual Future of Text Symposium by Frode Hegland launched
2011 Liquid by Frode Hegland at The Liquid Information Company
2011 Siri assistant released as part of the iPhone 4S by Apple
2011 Swype invented by Cliff Kushler allying users to drag their fingers on a virtual keyboard to connect the dots between letters in a word
2011 ClaiMaker by Li, G.; Uren, V; Motta, E.; Buckingham Shum, S. and Domingue, J.
2012 Knowledge Graph by Google
2012 Muse by Adobe
2012 The Web-Extended Mind by Paul Smart. (ac. paper)
2012 Google Now Assistant launched by Google
2012 LiquidText by Craig Tashman
2012 Outlook by Microsoft replaces Hotmail
2013 Non-Print Legal Deposit Regulations further define the digital elements of the Legal Deposit Libraries Act and lead to large-scale on-going transfer of e-journals and e-books to the legal deposit libraries for posterity
2013 First Full-Scale Harvest of the UK Domain by the UK Web Archive ,using the Non-Print Legal Deposit Regulations
2013 Ulysses III (major rewrite) by Max Seelemann and Marcus Fehn
2014 Xanadu by Ted Nelson
2014 Alexa assistant released by Amazon
2014 Cortana assistant released by Microsoft
2014 AppleScript by Apple
2014 Author early release by Frode Hegland at The Liquid Information Company
2014 Augmented Writing by Textio
2015 Notion by Ivan Zhao at Notion Labs
2015 Watch by Apple
2016 Reactions for iMessage by Apple
2014 Author reboot by Frode Hegland at The Liquid Information Company with coding by Jacob Hazelgrove
2016 Universal Clipboard by Apple
2016 Viv Labs, developed by Dag Kittlaus, Adam Cheyer and Chris Brigham, acquired by Samsung
2017 Web Annotations Standardised by the W3C Web Annotation Working Group
2018 Bixby Marketplace, an open assistant ecosystem based on Viv Labs Technology, launched by Samsung
2019 Reader by Frode Hegland at The Liquid Information Company
2020
2020 Muse by Adobe discontinued
2020 Flash by Adobe discontinued
2020 HyLighter LLC plans to release a thought processor
2021 Four Internets by Dame Wendy Hall and Kieron O’Hara