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Telex messaging network comes on line
Comença com una forma de distribuir missatges militars però aviat es converteix en una xarxa mundial de text tan oficials com comercials -
“World Brains”
Belgian Paul Otlet has a modest goal: collect, organize, and share all the world’s knowledge. Otlet had co-created a massive “search engine” starting in the early 1900s. His Mundaneum now combines enhanced card catalogs with sixteen million entries, photos, documents, microfilm, and more. He is working on integrating telegraphy and multiple media, from sound recordings to television. In the 1930s British writer H.G. Wells and American scientist Vannevar Bush are advancing similar goals. -
“Memex” concept
With sidebyside screens,the imaginary Memex desk is meant to let a user compare and create links between microfilm documents, somewhat like today’s clickable Web links and bookmarks.The idea is that people will continually build on each other's associative trails through the world's knowledge, helping tackle the growing problem of information overload.The Memex is the brainchild of top US scientist Vannevar Bush, an analog computing pioneer who had helped oversee development of the atomic bomb. -
Birth of the Modem
Computers “talk” over ordinary voice phone lines through modems. Developed in 1949 for transmitting radar signals by Jack Harrington’s group at the Air Force Cambridge Research Center (AFCRC) near Boston, the modem modulates digital data into sounds, and demodulates received sounds into digital data. (MODulation + DEModulation = MODEM). Modems will be adapted to computers in 1953 for the upcoming SAGE system, and commercialized by Bell Telephone in 1958. -
Digital Phone Lines
Phone companies develop digital transmission for internal uses – specifically to put more calls on each of the main lines connecting their own switching centers. By 1958, this produces the T1 standard still used in North America. By the 1980s, phone companies will be leasing digital lines to commercial customers. -
Timesharing – the first online communities
By the early 1960s many people can share a single computer, using terminals (often repurposed teleprinters) to log in over phone lines. These timesharing computers are like central hubs with spokes radiating to individual users. Although the computers generally can't connect to each other, these are the first common multi-user systems, with dozens of people online at the same time. As a result, timesharing pioneers many features of later networks, from file sharing to e-mail and chat. -
Carterfone
Used by Texas oilmen, the Carterfone acoustically connects mobile radios to the telephone network. Telephone companies sue in 1966. The FCC supports Carter, freeing U.S. telephone lines for many uses—including later answering machines, faxes and modems. Users in some countries will wait until the 1990s for similar freedoms. Modems create a kind of de facto net neutrality; telephone companies have no control over what is sent over their lines with a modem. -
Multiplexers: Cramming More Users onto the Same Line
Since telegraph days, people have been refining techniques for squeezing more connections onto a single wire. Early multiplexers for computers let up to 15 terminals share the same line, by assigning each of them a particular frequency (Frequency Division Multiplexing). In 1968, a new generation of time-division multiplexers gives each user a small slice of time in turn, radically expanding the number of computer terminals that can share the same line – from 15 to 45. -
Hooking up – networks come online
Switched on in late October 1969, the ARPAnet is the first large-scale, general-purpose computer network to connect different kinds of computers together. But others come online within weeks or months. 1969-70 marks the start of Britain’s NPL network, the wireless and more specialized ALOHANET in Hawaii (also ARPA funded), and the HLN (High Level Network) for the SITA consortium of commercial airlines. Work begins on France’s CYCLADES network not long after. -
Banking Automation Reaches the Customer
The ERMA system had revolutionized behind-the-scenes check processing in the 1950s, spawning the funny letters still at the bottom of checks today. During the 1960s researchers in various countries have been working on bringing automation – and online transactions – to customers in the form of an Automated Teller Machine (ATM). Barclay’s Bank in the UK has likely been the first to put one in operation, in 1967. By decade’s end many systems are up or being planned in Europe and North America. -
Birth of modern mobile networks
In 1973, ARPA funds the outfitting of a packet radio research van at SRI to develop standards for a Packet Radio Network (PRNET). As the unmarked van drives through the San Francisco Bay Area, stuffed full of hackers and sometimes uniformed generals, it is pioneering wireless, packet-switched digital networks, including the kind your mobile phone uses today. A related set of experiments test out Voice Over IP (like the later Skype). -
IBM announces SNA (Systems Network Architecture)
IBM has been building hierarchical, special-purpose networks since the SAGE system in the late 1950s and SABRE not long after. In 1974 it announces Systems Network Architecture (SNA), a set of protocols designed for less centralized networks. SNA will evolve into an internet-like network of networks, albeit one reserved for those that were SNA compliant. DEC and Xerox will also begin commercializing their own proprietary networks, DECNET and XNS. -
Automating the office – LAN operating systems
Protocols like Ethernet or Token Ring have established low-level links between computers and peripherals in the office. But that's only part of the solution – workers still need to do higher-level tasks such as sending e-mail, exchanging files, and sharing printers.
This need yields a hodge-podge of third party “network operating systems,” including Novell Netware, and built-in solutions like Apple’s AppleTalk. In the 1990s, Internet protocols will replace them all. -
GSM standard formally agreed
Digital mobile networks had been pioneered by ARPA from the early 1970s for military use, but early cell phone networks for consumers are analog. They use traditional telephone circuit-switching, where there is a connection (circuit) between caller and recipient for the duration of the call. The connection seamlessly switches from cell to cell as the phone moves. In 1987, the European Community formally agrees on the GSM (Spécial Mobile Group, or GSM in French) standard for digital mobile teleph -
The "WorldWideWeb" is born
At the world’s biggest physics laboratory, CERN in Switzerland, English programmer and physicist Tim Berners-Lee submits two proposals for what will become the Web, starting in March of 1989. Neither is approved. He proceeds anyway, with only unofficial support from his boss and his coworker Robert Cailliau. By Christmas of 1990 he has prototyped “WorldWideWeb” (as he writes it) in just three months on an advanced NeXT computer. It features a server, HTML, URLs, and the first browser.