a timeline of content (WIP)
for desktop viewing
Earliest known algorithms were documented on Cuneiform tablets in Babylon (modern Iraq)
Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi completed On the Calculation with Hindu Numerals
Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi writes The Rules of Restoration and Reductionwhich leads to the name "al-jabr" (etymological source for algebra) [unsure timing]
Robert of Chester translates The Rules of Restoration and Reduction into Latin. Al-jabr becomes algeber and al-Khwarizmi becomes Algoritmi.
Johann Wolfgang Ritter von Kempelen built the Mechanical Turk
Benjamin Franklin battles the Mechanical Turk (loss)
Philip Thicknesse argues the Mechanical Turk is controlled by "invisible confederates... The Automaton Chess-Player is a man within a man; for whatever his outward form be composed of, he bears a living soul within."
Napoleon Bonaparte battles the Mechanical Turk (loss)
Charles Babbage concepts an "application of machinery to the computation of astronomical and mathematical tables"
Ada Lovelace writes that the Analytical Engine (Babbage) "might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operation notion and mechanism of the engine."
The secret of the Mechanical Turk is fully revealed while in posession of John Kearsley Mitchell
John Muirhead (Baedeker) observes, "A guidebook is not made, it grows."
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer write "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception"
Alan Turing writes a report for the National Physical Library proposing an "Automatic Computing Engine"
MIT researcher J. C. R. Licklider conceives the idea of a 'Galactic Network' which is eventually funded by DARPA
Marshall McLuhan writes "the medium is the message" in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
Stafford Beer writes Management Sciences and states "We enshrine in steel, glass and semiconductors those very limitations of hand, eye, and brain that the computer was invented precisely to transcend."
ARPANET is launched at four universities (Stanford, University of Utah, UCLA, UCSB)
29 Oct - first message sent over the internet: "Lo"
April - 15 nodes connected to the ARPANET
Santiago, Chile - Project Cybersyn is built
June - the internet is international as NORSAR (Norway) is connected to the ARPANET
July - University College London connected to ARPANET
Vint Cerf coins 'internet'
IBM programmer Ward Christensen creates the 'Computerized Bulletin Board System (CBBS/BBS)' which is the first home for the concept of an online community.
CompuServe (MicroNET at the time) launches - one of the first customer-facing dial-up online information services (text only)
Jean-Francois Lyotard publishes "The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge"
CSNET Launches
CSNET has 180 universities connected globally
The WELL launches (online community)
NSFNET (National Science Foundation Network) launches
FidoNET launches and allows the general public to connect to the internet
2 Nov - Morris Worm pushed as the first major internet virus
CompuServe offers ordinary internet users to email other people outside CompuServe
first web browser launches (WorldWideWeb, renamed Nexus)
Prodigy (CompuServe competitor) launches; bringing interaction through graphical interfaces
John P. Noon trademarks the term "content"
As used narrowly in the computer world, content means "the information on a Web site"; more broadly, it means "software rather than hardware" or "data or other material to be provided by on-line services." The phrase on-line service provider (O.S.P.) — used to describe such firms as America Online, Fujitsu Niftyserve or Compuserve — led to the term content provider (which is not shorthanded as C.P., because some of us remember the Communist Party). "A service provider — Earthlink, Prodigy, AT&T — gives you access, like a pipeline to a destination," says Paul Lewis, an on-line advertising pioneer. "A content provider is the outfit that offers the stuff you want at the destination."
23% of American households have a computer
Xerox PARC - Goldberg, Nichols, Oki, Terry write a paper stating that they sought to solve the problem of "the increasing use of electronic mail, which is resluting in users being inundated by a huge stream of Incoming documents".
23 Jan - Mosaic (web browser) launches; bringing the internet to the masses
Dec - 600 sites online postmodern culture
Howard Rheingold (co-founder WELL) publishes "The Virtual Community"
first webcam stream launched - Cambridge University coffee stream
Mosaic creates cookies
Mosaic is rebranded and launched as Netscape Navigator - University of Illinois
web's first chat room "Bianca's Smut Shack" is created
Microsoft begins developing a web browser competitor off of code from Mosaic (bought)
12 Apr - attorney's Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel send the first 'spam' message to a large amount of internet users advertising visa applications
Sept - Ringo (first music recommendation algorithm) has 2100 users + 500 emails/day
27 Oct - first banner ad posted on hotwired.com by AT&T
GeoCities launches
NSFNET is decomissioned, the internet is in the hands of the open market
14% of Americans use the internet (~37m people)
Aug - Microsoft launches Internet Explorer as a part of Windows 95
Brian Eno creates "generative music"
MIT Media Lab - Upendra Shardanand and Pattie Maes describe "social information filtering... a technique for making personalized recommendations from any type of database to a user based on similarities between the interest profile of that user and those of other users."
John Perry Barlow publishes "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace"
Internet Fast Forward launched - first ad-blocker created
Sergey Brin and Larry Page begin work on PageRank
Dec - Jorn Barger coins 'weblog'
Google launches
"The Summer of This Content" in the New York Times (first reference to the content industry)
personal blog 'the Drudge Report' speculates on Bill Clinton's sexual deviance in the Oval Office, indicating the influence of personal blogs on culture
Blogger launches
elance launches (remote hiring)
Live-Journal launches
Pew Research Center study finds half of US adults are online, but 3% have broadband, 97% on dial-up
Google launches AdWords
Jan - Yahoo acquires GeoCities for $3.57b
46% of American households use the internet
Quebecois high schooler Michael 'mafiaboy' Calce launches the first major DDoS attack, taking Yahoo offline for 1 hour
Microsoft declared guilty of anti-competitive practices for the packaging of internet explorer
Google Images is launched in response to user demand for JLo's green dress
Yochai Benkler writes "Coase's Penguin, Or, Linux and The Nature of the Firm" in the Yale Law Review
ODesk launches (remote hiring)
MySpace launches
del.icio.us launches (social bookmarking site)
Google launches AdSense
Flickr launches (image hosting)
FaceBook launches
YouTube launches
Writely launches
Amazon names it's service for accomplishing digital tasks using an invisible marketplace of outsourced human labor as "the Mechanical Turk"
Twitter launches
Google acquires Writely to make Google Docs (2009)
McKenzie Wark publishes "A Hacker Manifesto"
Henry Jenkins publishes his book "Convergence Culture"
Tumblr launches (microblogging)
Sept - Google launches Chrome
Gayatri Spivak writes, "Globalization takes place only in capital and data. Everything else is damage control."
Michael Bhaskar writes "The Content Machine: Towards a Theory of Publishing from the Printing Press to the Internet"
elance and ODesk merge forming elance-ODesk to become Upwork (2015)
Christian Fuchs publishes "Class and Exploitation on the Internet"
Heartbleed revealed an OpenSSL vulnerability which leads to BigTech funding volunteer-led internet organizations
Lil Nas X releases "Old Town Road" on TikTok
Liz Pelly coins "streambait" as "muted, mid-tempo, melancholy pop"
Jia Tolentino coins "Instagram Face" as the "disctinctly white but ambiguously ethnic" mix of features made popular on the platform.
Instagram launches Reels
Microsoft Excel becomes "Turing-complete"
Twitter launches "For You" feed