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Period: 1300 to 1500
The Renaissance Period
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1450
Printing press
A printing press is a device for applying pressure to an inked surface resting upon a print medium, thereby transferring the ink. It marked a dramatic improvement on earlier printing methods in which the cloth, paper or other medium was brushed or rubbed repeatedly to achieve the transfer of ink, and accelerated the process. -
T.V.
The Nipkow disk. This schematic shows the circular paths traced by the holes that may also be square for greater precision. The area of the disk outlined in black shows the region scanned.
Facsimile transmission systems for still photographs pioneered methods of mechanical scanning of images in the early 19th century. Alexander Bain introduced the facsimile machine between 1843 and 1846. Frederick Bakewell demonstrated a working laboratory version in 1851. -
Period: to
Machine Age
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Boardcasting
On 24 December 1906, the first radio broadcast for entertainment and music was transmitted from Brant Rock, Massachusetts to the general public. This pioneering broadcast was achieved after years of development work by Reginald Aubrey Fessenden (1866-1932) who built a complete system of wireless transmission and reception using amplitude modulation of continuous electromagnetic waves. This technology was a revolutionary departure from transmission of dots and dashes widespread at the time -
Period: to
World War II
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ENIAC
The ENIAC was invented by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly at the University of Pennsylvania and began construction in 1943 and was not completed until 1946. It occupied about 1,800 square feet and used about 18,000 vacuum tubes, weighing almost 50 tons. -
Robot
The first commercial, digital and programmable robot was built by George Devol in 1954 and was named the Unimate. It was sold to General Motors in 1961 where it was used to lift pieces of hot metal from die casting machines at the Inland Fisher Guide Plant in the West Trenton section of Ewing Township, New Jersey. -
ANITA MK-8
In 1956, the Bell Punch Co. of Great Britain set out to diversify from manufacturing ticket punches by producing a commercial electronic desktop calculator codenamed the ANITA. According to the Vintage Calculators Web Museum, the vacuum tube–based calculator was released in 1961 under the name ANITA MK-8. The machine featured approximately 170 cold cathode vacuum tubes, a Dekatron decade counter tube and Numicator display/indicator tubes. -
Sputnik I (First Satellite)
The Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik I. The world's first artificial satellite was about the size of a beach ball. Took about 98 minutes to orbit the Earth on its elliptical path. -
Mouse
The first computer mouse was publicly unveiled in 1968 by its inventor, Douglas C. Engelbart. He invented the computer mouse in 1964. Two decades before it would ship with the first Apple Macintosh. -
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E-mail
Electronic mail is a method of exchanging messages between people using electronic devices. Invented by Ray Tomlinson, email first entered limited use in the 1970s and by the mid-1980s had taken the form now recognized as email. Today's email systems are based on a store-and-forward model. Email servers accept, forward, deliver, and store messages. -
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology company with headquarters in Redmond, Washington. The Microsoft Office suite, and the Internet Explorer and Edge web browsers. One of the world's most valuable companies. The word "Microsoft" is a portmanteau of "microcomputer" and "software". Microsoft is ranked No. 30 in the 2018 Fortune 500 rankings of the largest United States corporations by total revenue. -
First Virus
Elk Cloner, written in 1982 by then-15-year-old Rich Skrenta of Pittsburgh, was a boot-sector virus designed to infect Apply II computers and was the first to be detected in the wild. Brain, created in Pakistan in 1986, was the first PC virus to be found in the wild. -
Internet Explorer
The first Internet Explorer was derived from Spyglass Mosaic. The original Mosaic came from NCSA, but since NCSA was a public entity it relied on Spyglass as its commercial licensing partner. Spyglass in turn delivered two versions of the Mosaic browser to Microsoft, one wholly based on the NCSA source code, and another engineered from scratch but conceptually modeled on the NCSA browser. Internet Explorer was initially built using the Spyglass, not the NCSA source code. -
The Birth of Social Media
The first social media site that everyone can agree actually was social media was a website called Six Degrees. It was named after the six degrees of separation. Theory and lasted from 1997 to 2001. Six Degrees allowed users to create a profile and then friend other users. Six Degrees even allowed those who didn’t register as users to confirm friendships and connected quite a few people this way. -
Google
Google is an American multinational technology company that specializes in Internet-related services and products, which include online advertising technologies, search engine, cloud computing, software, and hardware. Google was founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford University in California. -
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Google Chrome
Google chrome is a free internet web-browser developed by Google. It was first released as a beta version on September 2, 2008 and was later released to the public on December 11, 2008. Currently, Google Chrome is the most popular and most widely used web browser in the world. -
