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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. -
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. -
Direct keyboard input to computers
At MIT, researchers begin experimenting with direct keyboard input to computers, a precursor to today´s normal mode of operation. Typically, computer users of the time fed their programs into a computer using punched cards or paper tape. -
Star Trek debuts with multiple computation devices
One of the most popular television series of all-time, Star Trek tells of the journeys of the starship Enterprise and its 5-year mission of exploration. Star Trek speculated on technologies such as voice-recognition, handheld computing and communications, human computer interaction, and machine-supported medical diagnosis. -
Star Wars (Death Star Briefing)
Set in a Galaxy far, far away, Star Wars combined old-fashioned science fiction storytelling with cutting-edge special effects provided by Industrial Light & Magic. One effect, the Death Star briefing, featured a wire-frame version of the space station, one of the first uses of wire-frame animation in a major motion picture. -
Compaq Computer Corporation introduces the Compaq Portable
Advertised as the first 100% IBM PC-compatible computer, the Compaq Portable can run the same software as the IBM PC. With the success of the clone, Compaq recorded first-year sales of $111 million, the most ever by an American business in a single year. -
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act becomes law
The advent of the Internet led to an increase in copying and sharing of digital content including music, video, and software, often in direct violation of copyright law. To combat this, the US Congress passes the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (or DMCA), which stiffened the punishment for violating copyright on the Internet. It also made illegal the creation of programs to circumvent copy protection. -
USB Flash drive
USB Flash drives are introduced. Sometimes referred to as jump drives or memory sticks, these drives consisted of flash memory encased in a small form factor container with a USB interface. They could be used for data storage and in the backing up and transferring of files between various devices. -
HTML 5 is Announced
HTML 5 is announced as the successor to HTML 4, which had become the standard for web markup languages in 1997. Markup languages describe how web pages will look and function. Work on HTML 5 had begun in 2004 under the auspices of the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group. It was simplified compared to its predecessors and was intended to be human-readable.
