Media

Timeline of the Evolution of Media

  • 35,000 BCE

    Cave Paintings

    Cave Paintings
    Cave or rock paintings are paintings painted on caves or rock walls and ceilings, usually dating to prehistoric times. Rock paintings have been made since the Upper Paleolithic, 40,000 years ago. These cave paintings were used as a means of communication for prehistoric people.
  • 2500 BCE

    Papyrus in Egypt

    Papyrus in Egypt
    Papyrus is a material similar to thick paper used in ancient times as writing surface. It was made from pith of papyrus plant. It was used to designate documents written on its sheets, rolled up to scrolls. These include household and administrative documents, letters, contracts, legal texts, illustrated narratives, and religious texts. Papyri regulated the information and communication of the Egyptians with one another during the Prehistoric Age.
  • 2400 BCE

    Clay Tablets in Mesopotamia

    Clay Tablets in Mesopotamia
    Clay tablets were used as a writing medium especially for cuneiform. Its texts took forms of myths, fables, essays, hymns, proverbs, epic poetry, laws, plants, and animals. They allowed individuals to record who and what was significant. This means of communicating was used for over 3000 years in 15 different languages. They were used widely for communication in the ancient times.
  • 130 BCE

    Acta Diurna in Rome

    Acta Diurna in Rome
    Acta Diurna were daily Roman official notices, a sort of daily gazette. They were carved on stone or metal and presented in message boards in public places like the Forum of Rome. They were also called simly Acta.
  • 206

    Dibao in China

    Dibao in China
    Dibao was a type of publication issued by central and local governments in imperial China. They have been called "palace reports" or "imperial bulletins." Various sources place their first publication as early as Han Dynasty or as late as Tang Dynasty. They contained official announcements and news, and were intended to be seen only by bureaucrats. Dibao were used as media for regulation and circulation of government’s official reports and announcements to masses.
  • 220

    Printing Press Using Wood Blocks

    Printing Press Using Wood Blocks
    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.
  • 400

    Codex in the Mayan Region

    Codex in the Mayan Region
    Maya codices are folding books written by the pre-Colombian Maya civilization in Maya hieroglyphic script on Mesoamerican bark paper. The folding books are the products of professional scribes working under the patronage deities such as the Tonsured Maize God and the Howler Monkey God.
  • 1455

    First Printed Bible

    First Printed Bible
    Johann Gutenberg holds the distinction of being the inventor of the movable-type printing press. Gutenberg produced what is considered to be the first book ever printed: a Latin language Bible, printed in Mainz, Germany.
  • Doctrina Cristiana

    Doctrina Cristiana
    The Doctrina Christiana was an early book on the Roman Catholic Catechism, written by Fray Juan de Plasencia, and is believed to be one of the earliest printed books in the Philippines. He derived its name from the Latin term Doctrina Christiana meaning the “teachings of the church” .
  • Newspaper: The London Gazette

    Newspaper: The London Gazette
    A newspaper is a periodical publication containing written information about current events and is often typed in black ink with a white or gray background. During the 1600s, numerous amounts of newspapers were published - including the The London Gazette.
  • Typewriter

    Typewriter
    Typewriter is a mechanical or electromechanical machine for writing characters similar to those produced by printer's movable type. It operates by keys that strike ribbon to transmit ink or carbon impressions onto paper. It allowed people to bring printing press into their own homes. They replaced simple pen and paper in many offices, homes and schools. Typewriters initiated the idea of “computer-printer” process in which many types of writings or texts can be made.
  • Telegraph

    Telegraph
    Developed in the 1830s and 1840s by Samuel Morse and other inventors, the telegraph revolutionized long-distance communication. It worked by transmitting electrical signals over a wire laid between stations.
  • Telephone

    Telephone
    Telephone is a telecommunications device that permits users to conduct conversation when they are far apart to be heard directly. It converts human voice into electronic signals transmitted via cables and other communication channels to another telephone which produces the sound to receiving user. It was invented by Alexander Graham Bell. Telephones made communication more accessible and two-way, wherein people are in state of exchanging messages to each other.
  • Motion Picture Photography/Projection

    Motion Picture Photography/Projection
    Motion picture photography, dating from the 1890s, is one of the oldest of modern imaging, technologies that remains current today. The illusion of motion pictures is based on the optical phenomena known as persistence of vision and the phi phenomenon.
  • Punch Cards

    Punch Cards
    Punch cards or also known as Hollerith cards and IBM cards are paper cards containing several punched or perforated holes that were punched by hand or machine to represent data. These cards allowed companies to store and access information by entering the card into the computer. Punch cards directly control automated machinery through the digital information stored in them.
  • Printing Press for Mass Production

    Printing Press for Mass Production
    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 Pictures

    Commercial Motion Pictures
    In 1913, the Edison Film Company advertised his "latest and greatest invention" - the Kinetophone (or projector), a new version of an earlier device to show his "Talking Pictures" and provide "Perfect Synchronicity."
  • Motion Picture with Sound

    Motion Picture with Sound
    The earliest feature-length movie with recorded sound included only music and effects. The first feature film originally presented as a talkie was The Jazz Singer, released in October 1927. A major hit, it was made with Vitaphone, which was at the time the leading brand of sound-on-disc technology.
  • Television

    Television
    Television is a machine with a screen. It receives broadcast signals and turn them into pictures and sound. It is a telecommunication medium used for transmitting moving images in monochrome (black and white), or in color, and in two or three dimensions and sound. Television is a mass medium for entertainment, education, news, politics, gossip and advertising.
  • Large Electronic Computers: EDVAC

    Large Electronic Computers: EDVAC
    EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer) was one of the earliest electronic computers. Unlike its predecessor the ENIAC, it was binary rather than decimal, and was designed to be a stored-program computer.
  • Large Electronic Computers: EDSAC

    Large Electronic Computers: EDSAC
    The Electronic delay storage automatic calculator (EDSAC) was an early British computer. Inspired by John von Neumann's seminal First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC, the machine was constructed by Maurice Wilkes and his team at the University of Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory in England.
  • Large Electronic Computers: UNIVAC I

    Large Electronic Computers: UNIVAC I
    The UNIVAC I (UNIVersal Automatic Computer I) was the first general purpose electronic digital computer design for business application produced in the United States. It was designed principally by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, the inventors of the ENIAC.
  • Transistor Radio

    Transistor Radio
    Transistor radios are small portable radio receivers that uses transistor-based circuitry. They became the most popular electronic communication device in history, with billions manufactured during the 1960s and 1970s.Their pocket size sparked a change in popular music listening habits, allowing people to listen to music anywhere they went. Transistor radios first introduced music listening habit in an accessible and portable manner.
  • Mainframe Computers: IBM 704

    Mainframe Computers: IBM 704
    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.
  • Overhead Projector

    Overhead Projector
    Overhead projector is a presentation device that projects the enlarged image of writing or drawing on clear or transparent film placed on it onto a wall or screen by means of an overhead mirror. It is a variant of slide projector that is used to display images to an audience. Overhead projectors were used as an aid in presentations and discussions especially in education and businesses by teachers and businesspersons.
  • Personal Computers: Hewlett-Packard 9100A

    Personal Computers: Hewlett-Packard 9100A
    The Hewlett-Packard 9100A (hp 9100A) is an early programmable calculator (or computer), first appearing in 1968. HP called it a desktop calculator because, as Bill Hewlett said, "If we had called it a computer, it would have been rejected by our customers' computer gurus because it didn't look like an IBM. We therefore decided to call it a calculator, and all such nonsense disappeared."
  • Personal Computers: Apple 1

    Personal Computers: Apple 1
    Apple Computer 1, also known later as the Apple I, or Apple-1, is a desktop computer released by the Apple Computer Company (now Apple Inc.) in 1976. It was designed and hand-built by Steve Wozniak. The Apple I was Apple's first product, and to finance its creation, Jobs sold his only motorized means of transportation, a VW Microbus, for a few hundred dollars, and Steve Wozniak sold his HP-65 calculator for $500; however, Wozniak said that Jobs planned to use his bicycle if necessary.
  • Portable Computers: Laptop

    Portable Computers: Laptop
    Compaq released their first laptop computer in 1988, the Compaq SLT/286. It was the first battery-powered laptop to feature VGA graphics and an internal hard drive. Apple released their first laptop, the Macintosh Portable, in September 1989.
  • LCD Projector

    LCD Projector
    The LCD projector was invented by New York inventor Gene Dolgoff. It took him until 1984 to get an addressable liquid crystal display (LCD), which is when he built the world's first LCD projector. After building it, he saw many problems that had to be corrected including major light losses and very noticeable pixels.
  • Web Browsers: Mosaic

    Web Browsers: Mosaic
    While often described as the first graphical web browser, Mosaic was preceded by WorldWideWeb, the lesser-known Erwise and ViolaWWW. Mosaic was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign beginning in late 1992.
  • Portable Computers: Tablet

    Portable Computers: Tablet
    Microsoft's first Tablet computer arrived in 2000. Here's Microsoft's first attempt at a tablet, a prototype that Bill Gates introduced in 2000. Some people credit Microsoft for coining the term "Tablet PC" with its early tablet devices. He predicted tablets would become a big thing within 5 years.
  • Web Browsers: Internet Explorer

    Web Browsers: Internet Explorer
    Internet Explorer was a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft and included in the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, starting in 1995. It was first released as part of the add-on package Plus! for Windows 95 that year.
  • Search Engine: Yahoo!

    Search Engine: Yahoo!
    Yahoo! Search is a web search engine owned by Yahoo, headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. As of October 2018, it is the second largest search engine worldwide across all platforms with 2.32% market share.
  • Search Engine: Google

    Search Engine: Google
    Google Custom Search is a platform provided by Google that allows web developers to feature specialized information in web searches, refine and categorize queries and create customized search engines, based on Google Search.
  • Blog: LiveJournal

    Blog: LiveJournal
    LiveJournal is a Russian social networking service where users can keep a blog, journal or diary. American programmer Brad Fitzpatrick started LiveJournal on April 15, 1999, as a way of keeping his high school friends updated on his activities. In January 2005, American blogging software company Six Apart purchased Danga Interactive, the company that operated LiveJournal, from Fitzpatrick.
  • Blog: Blogspot

    Blog: Blogspot
    A blog is an informational website published on the Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries. Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order so that the most recent post appears first at the top of the web page. 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.
  • Social Networks: Friendster

    Social Networks: Friendster
    Friendster was a US social networking site based in Mountain View, CA, founded in 2003 by Jonathan Abrams. The company was sold in 2015 and became a social gaming site based in Malaysia. It was originally a social networking website. Before Friendster was redesigned, the service allowed users to contact other members, maintain those contacts, and share online content and media with those contacts. Users share videos, photos, messages and comments with other members via profiles and networks.
  • Video Chat: Skype

    Video Chat: Skype
    Skype is a telecommunications application that specializes in providing video chat and voice calls between computers, tablets, mobile devices, the Xbox One console, and smartwatches via the Internet. Skype also provides instant messaging services. Users may transmit text, video, audio and images.
  • Blog: Wordpress

    Blog: Wordpress
    WordPress is a free and open-source content management system based on PHP & MySQL. Features include a plugin architecture and a template system. It is most associated with blogging but supports other types of web content including more traditional mailing lists and forums, media galleries, and online stores.
  • Social Networks: Multiply

    Social Networks: Multiply
    Multiply was a social networking service with an emphasis on allowing users to share media – such as photos, videos and blog entries – with their "real-world" network. The website was launched in March 2004 and was privately held with backing by VantagePoint Venture Partners, Point Judith Capital, Transcosmos, and private investors. Multiply had over 11 million registered users.
  • Social Networks: Facebook

    Social Networks: Facebook
    Facebook, Inc. is an American online social media and social networking service company based in Menlo Park, California. It was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, along with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes.
  • Video: YouTube

    Video: YouTube
    YouTube is an American video-sharing website headquartered in San Bruno, California. Three former PayPal employees—Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim—created the service in February 2005. Google bought the site in November 2006 for US$1.65 billion; YouTube now operates as one of Google's subsidiaries.
  • Microblogs: Twitter

    Microblogs: Twitter
    Twitter is an American online news and social networking service on which users post and interact with messages known as "tweets". Tweets were originally restricted to 140 characters, but on November 7, 2017, this limit was doubled to 280 for all languages except Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
  • Microblogs: Tumblr

    Microblogs: Tumblr
    Tumblr is a microblogging and social networking website founded by David Karp in 2007 and owned by Verizon Media. The 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.
  • Portable Computers: Netbook

    Portable Computers: Netbook
    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).
  • Smartphone

    Smartphone
    NTT DoCoMo launched the first 3G network in Japan on October 1, 2001, making videoconferencing and large email attachments possible. But the true smartphone revolution didn't start until Macworld 2007, when Steve Jobs revealed the first iPhone.
  • Video Chat: Google Hangouts

    Video Chat: Google Hangouts
    Google Hangouts is a communication platform developed by Google which includes messaging, video chat, and VOIP features. It replaces three messaging products that Google had implemented concurrently within its services, including Google Talk, Google+ Messenger, and Hangouts, a video chat system present within Google+.
  • Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality

    Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality
    Virtual reality (VR) is an experience taking place within simulated and immersive environments that can be similar to or completely different from the real world. Applications of virtual reality can include entertainment (i.e. gaming) and educational purposes (i.e. medical or military training). Other, distinct types of VR style technology include augmented reality and mixed reality.
  • Wearable Teachnologies

    Wearable Teachnologies
    Wearable technologies are smart electronic devices with micro-controllers that can be incorporated into clothing or worn on the body as implants or accessories. Wearable technology has a variety of applications which grows as the field itself expands. It appears prominently in consumer electronics with the popularization of the smartwatch and activity tracker. Apart from commercial uses, wearable technology is being incorporated into navigation systems, advanced textiles, and healthcare.
  • Cloud and Big Data

    Cloud and Big Data
    While it seems that these two concepts are similar, they are entirely different. Big data refers to voluminous, large sets of data whereas cloud computing refers to the platform for accessing large sets of data. In other words, big data is information while cloud computing is the means of getting information.