Timeline of communication technology

Prior to 20th

30,000 BC In ice-age Europe, people mark ivory, bone, and stone with patterns to keep track of
time, using a lunar calendar.[1]

14,000 BC In what is now Mezhirich, Ukraine, the first known artifact with a map on it is made
using bone.[1]

Prior to 3500BC Communication was carried out through paintings of indigenous tribes.
3500s BC The Sumerians develop cuneiform writing and
the Egyptians develop hieroglyphic writing.
16th century BC The Phoenicians develop an alphabet.
AD 2637 Roman Emperor Tiberius rules the empire from island of Capri by signaling
messages with metal mirrors to reflect the sun.
105 Tsai Lun invents paper.
7th century Hindu-Malayan empires write legal documents on copper plate scrolls, and write
other documents on more perishable media.

751 Paper is introduced to the Muslim world after the Battle of Talas.

1250 The quill is used for writing.[1]

1305 The Chinese develop wooden block movable type printing.

1450 Johannes Gutenberg finishes a printing press with metal movable type.

1520 Ships on Ferdinand Magellan's voyage signal to each other by firing cannon and raising
flags.

1792 Claude Chappe establishes the first long-distance semaphore telegraph line.

1831 Joseph Henry proposes and builds an electric telegraph.

1835 Samuel Morse develops the Morse code.

1843 Samuel Morse builds the first long distance electric telegraph line.

1844 Charles Fenerty produces paper from a wood pulp, eliminating rag paper which was in
limited supply.

1849 Associated Press organizes Nova Scotia pony express to carry latest European news for
New York newspapers.

1876 Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas A. Watson exhibit an electric telephone in Boston.

1877 Thomas Edison patents the phonograph.

1889 Almon Strowger patents the direct dial telephone.

20th century

1901 Guglielmo Marconi transmits radio signals from Cornwall to Newfoundland.

1920 Radio station KDKA based in Pittsburgh began the first broadcast.

1925 John Logie Baird transmits the first television signal.

1942 Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil invent frequency hopping spread
spectrum communication technique.

1947 Douglas H. Ring and W. Rae Young of Bell Labs propose a cell-based approach which led
to "cellular phones."

1947 Full-scale commercial television is first broadcast.

1949 Claude Elwood Shannon, the "father of information theory", mathematically proves
the NyquistShannon sampling theorem.

1958 Chester Carlson presents the first photocopier suitable for office use.
1963 First geosynchronous communications satellite is launched, 17 years after Arthur C.
Clarke's article.

1965 - First email sent (at MIT).[2]

1966 Charles Kao realizes that silica-based optical waveguides offer a practical way to transmit
light via total internal reflection.

1969 The first hosts of ARPANET, Internet's ancestor, are connected.[3]

1971

Erna Schneider Hoover invent a computerized switching system for telephone traffic.

8-inch floppy disk removable storage medium for computers is introduced. [4]

1975 - "First list servers are introduced."[4]

1976 The personal computer (PC) market is born.

1977 Donald Knuth begins work on TeX.

1981

Hayes Smart modem introduced.[5]

Nordic Mobile Telephone, the worlds first automatic mobile phone is put into operation

1983 - Microsoft Word software is launched.[6]

1989

Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau build the prototype system which became the World
Wide Web at CERN.

WordPerfect 5.1 word processing software released.[5]

1991

Anders Olsson transmits solitary waves through an optical fiber with a data rate of 32
billion bits per second.

GSM is put into operation

1992

Neil Papworth sends the first SMS (or text message).

Internet2 organization is created.

IBM ThinkPad 700C laptop computer created. It was lightweight compared to its
predecessors.[5]

1993 - Mosaic graphical web browser is launched.[7]

1994 Internet radio broadcasting is born.

1996 - Motorola StarTAC mobile phone introduced. It was significantly smaller than previous
cellphones.[5]

1999 45% of Australians have a mobile phone.

1998 - Lotus Notes software is launched.[7]

1999

Sirius satellite radio is introduced.

Napster peer-to-peer file sharing is launched.[5]

21st century

2001 First digital cinema transmission by satellite in Europe of a feature film by Bernard
Pauchon and Philippe Binant.

2003 MySpace is launched.

2004 What would become the largest social networking site in the world, Facebook is launched.

2005 YouTube, the video sharing site, is launched.

2006 Twitter, microblogging

June 7, 2010, in conjunction with the iPhone 4, FaceTime is launched as an iPhone constituent.