FRom Gutenberg to the Internet Timeline.

An Annotated Chronology of the History of Information from about 30,000 B.C.E. to the present, by Jeremy M. Norman

TO FIND A SITUATION COMPARABLE TO THE PRESENT WE NEED TO REVISIT THE LAST GREAT INFORMATION REVOLUTION WHICH TOOK PLACE MORE THAN FIVE HUNDRED YEARS AGO.

This timeline is revised and expanded from the timeline available in the printed edition of From Gutenberg to the Internet, and widened greatly in scope. It is a work in progress, continuing the research which I began in the printed book. This is one of an untold number of timelines on the web. Even so, the approach that I am taking in building this growing timeline is, as far as I know, unique, at least for now. Thus some explanation may be in order. These introductory remarks, which I began writing in December 2005, first concern From Gutenberg to the Internet and then address issues involved with studying the history of information recorded in physical form in relationship to the history of information in digital form. They are a result of my continuing studies since the book was published, and they are evolving into another book. Your comments would be appreciated.

Should you wish to bypass these remarks and begin the timeline now please scroll to the bottom of this page.

If you review the table of contents of the From Gutenberg to the Internet you will see that ninety percent of the 900-page book comprises an extensive collection of readings, with brief commentaries, selected from classics in computing, networking, and telecommunications. These readings provide both theoretical and technological background for developments that led to electronic computing and eventually to the Internet. Prior anthologies on the history of computing concentrated on the development of computing alone. This is the first anthology to reflect the origins of the various technologies that converged in the Internet. I tried to include readings that would appeal to those with technical background in computing and readers whose backgrounds and interests are of a more general nature.

Separate from the anthology which comprises most of the book, the introduction contains a relatively brief, but reasoned and documented attempt to compare and contrast the introduction of printing by moveable type in the fifteenth century with the development of computing and the Internet in the twentieth century. I was motivated to make this comparison by the general awareness that the way computing and the Internet are revolutionizing the creation and distribution of information in our time is analogous in certain respects to the impact of Gutenberg's invention of printing by moveable type in the mid-fifteenth century. It is a measure of the massive change taking place today that we need to revisit the last information revolution which took place more than five hundred years ago to find a situation that may be comparable to our own.

Why did I focus on making this comparison which is not directly related to the 800 pages of readings which comprise most of the book? If I wanted to discuss the impact of the Internet I could have discussed its impact of the Internet on the record industry, including the problems of Napster, the popularity of iPods and iTunes and their impact on sale of compact discs. Or I could have discussed the impact of DVDs on movie theatres. Or I could have discussed the impact of cell phones on traditional telephones, or how my Treo 700 combines a digital camera, a telephone, and a remarkably wide range of functions of a personal computer in a miniature format. I chose to focus my historical approach to the impact of computing and the internet on books and printing because, like many people of my generation outside the profession of computing, my educational background was in books and libraries rather than in computing. As a rare book dealer, publisher, bibliographer and author, I came from the world of books and libraries. I had a special interest in the history of books and printing. With the introduction of personal computing about 1980 I became gradually more and more immersed in computing issues, in cyberculture, and in the applications of personal computing to book design and production. Faced with the revolutionary changes brought by computing and the Internet, which also revolutionized bookselling and publishing, I wanted to explore the history of present developments in the way that I found most compatible with my background, and in the way that they impacted my own life. Of course, once I began to explore the problems of comparing two complex series of technological and socio-economic developments separated by more than five hundred years, the limitations of the exercise became apparent. It would require an entire book to make this comparison in detail. But even though I recognized that aspects of the introduction could not be definitive, and might be rapidly outdated, I felt that writing this pioneering essay was worth the effort, especially since people with interests similar to mine should find it thought-provoking. Whatever the limitations of my introductory effort, I believed that the anthology had permanent value.

THE TWO CULTURES BEGAN TO MERGE IN A WIDELY-RECOGNIZED WAY FIRST WITH DESK-TOP PUBLISHING AND ABOUT TEN YEARS LATER THROUGH THE INTERNET

Another purpose for which I intended From Gutenberg to the Internet, is begin to address a wider set of historical problems which I could not articulate when I wrote the introduction-- the problems of comparing and contrasting the histories of the separate, but increasingly interrelated cultures that fall under the general headings of book history and computing/Internet history. To some readers with an interest in history just considering these two separate cultures in the same sentence might be considered a radical departure. Even though we all read books and use computers most people are not necessarily interested in the histories of both subjects. This reflects the fundamental and very long separation between the two cultures which began to merge in a widely-recognized way first with desk-top publishing, starting in the mid-1980s, and most noticeably about ten years later through the Internet.

Prior to those dates elements of information in book form and digital information intersected at certain times and places. Probably the earliest points at which they intersected were in production of mathematical tables from the earliest written records, to printed tables, to the 1960s when these tables were made obsolete by inexpensive electronic hand-held calculators. In book and newspaper production they occurred in early efforts to automate the typesetting process, beginning with punched tape systems to drive the Monotype and Linotype casting machines, and evolved into special-purpose computers for photo-typesetting, the precursor of today's scalable digital fonts. Some of the other significant intersections were through projects in library automation, but these various information retrieval projects, many of which are noted on this timeline, were not widely known except to librarians and their patrons, and they had little to do with aspects of rare books or manuscripts that were of primary concern to me. I had never heard of most of the early library automation programs until I began researching them after publishing From Gutenberg to the Internet. However, like many details in the history of these technologies, some library information retrieval projects were influential upon the thinking of pioneers in other aspects of computing, such as J.C.R. Licklider. Licklider was the visionary behind development of the ARPANET, which eventually evolved into the Internet. As a psychologist, Licklider was especially interested in the relationship of people to computers. He was also interested in the relationship of physical information in libraries and digital information, and in making the growing body of stored information more accessible. In 1965 he published a book, now for the most part forgotten, entitled Libraries of the Future. In From Gutenberg to the Internet I republished several key papers by Licklider, some which concerned early research on the human-computer interface, and some of which led to the development of the ARPANET.

Even though some of us might have lived through these developments, and we might have some familiarity with aspects of their history, studying the histories of the two cultures in relationship to one another requires self-education, since I am unaware of any formal courses of study that currently approach these topics in this way. Yet because of my background as a rare book dealer, historical bibliographer, publisher, and co-author of Origins of Cyberspace, and because I was accustomed to doing independent research, I took the general relationship between the histories of the two cultures for granted when I wrote my introduction to From Gutenberg to the Internet.

WRITING A NEW BOOK

As I developed these and related themes, they evolved into a working manuscript on this website between December 2005 and February 2006. By continuing to post my thoughts in a public place on the web as they evolved, I was continually motivated to try to expand and improve both my analysis and my expression. But by February 14 when I printed the draft out for the first time, and recognized that it was more than 32 single-spaced pages, it was obvious that the manuscript had become inappropriately long, and far too involved to serve as an introduction to a timeline. Coincidentally I printed it out exactly exactly 60 years after the world's first electronic computer, the ENIAC, was made public on February 14, 1946. On February 20, 2006, I removed this evolving manuscript from the public portion of my website in order to develop it into a limited edition that I eventually intend to issue. The book will continue my researches on the historical relationship between manuscript, print and digital information by comparing first the impact of print on manuscript copying and later the impact of digital on print. Those who may have had the occasion to read one or the other early and widely changing drafts that I posted on this website may anticipate that in addition to the standard ground that a book on these topics might be expected to cover, the new book will include a few historical excursions down some infrequently trodden paths from the fifteenth through twentieth centuries.

ELEMENTS OF BOOK HISTORY MAY BE MORE RELEVANT THAN BEFORE THE INTERNET

It may be one of the digital revolution's more counter-intuitive consequences that in order to put the impact of the Internet on the traditional information of our time in perspective it may be helpful to revisit the development of printing in the mid-fifteenth century. Still another irony may be that in order to measure the impact of the innovation of printing upon the fifteenth century world of manuscript copying into which printing was introduced we must review medieval manuscript production and the history of the book prior to the introduction of printing. Thus, in a certain respect, elements of book history, and especially the production of books by manuscript copying, including the pecia system, and the early history of printing, may be more relevant today, as a way of putting the rapid changes of our time in perspective, than they were before the Internet revolution. As I reflect back on why I decided to write the introduction to From Gutenberg to the Internet in the manner that I did, I believe one reason was the recognition that the impact of Internet had rekindled my interest in early printing--an interest which had lain dormant for many years. In the process of researching the early history of printing I was awakened to the medieval manuscript tradition, a topic about which I had previously studied relatively little. As I began to understand the subtle interrelationships between the new invention of printing and the medieval manuscript tradition, and how the system of manuscript copying had worked within its limitations as an information distribution system for over a thousand years, I recognized that one consequence of the Internet may be to underline the common elements of different media as they evolved in the history of information. No matter how radical change may seem today my studies seemed to show that new media do not supercede old media in the standard sense with which we associate the concept of revolution. A revolution in media may be more accurately described as a transition with revolutionary consequences, though the transition with which we are currently involved may be moving faster and more abruptly than any previously. Manuscript copying persisted for at least 150 years after the invention of printing, and it is informative to review the manner in which it gradually diminished but remained in existence for limited purposes for such an extended period of time. Similarly the Internet is not superceding printing; it is instead providing electronic substitutes or alternatives for segments of information which used to be distributed entirely through printing. It is also incorporating aspects of earlier analog and electronic media such as radio, television, and film, and allowing the development of new information modalities. To place the current revolutionary developments in their full historical context one needs to understand the history and traditions of both physical and digital information. This timeline is my attempt to begin to provide a general framework for such studies.

To preserve the history and traditions of what I call physical information-- book and manuscript history and rare book librarianship-- in an increasingly digital world we are fortunate to have a selection of training programs including the University of Virginia Rare Book School, and the newer Rare Books and Special Collections training program at the Palmer School at Long Island University, and the Rare Book School at UCLA which will begin classes in the Summer of 2006. At the University of Saskatchewan there is an innovative program and website on The History and Future of the Book. Additional programs are offered in England, France, Australia, and New Zealand. These rare book programs, which incorporate digital technology as teaching and communications tools, co-exist with standard library training programs which increasingly focus on information science and technology. Supporting scholarship on the history of books, printing, and libraries, Book History Online, the worldwide database for scholarship on the history of the book, was established in 1997 at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in Copenhagen. This database uses digital technology as a means of organizing and communicating information on many aspects of the history of physical information. A more specialized online resource is the Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania. This contains the descriptions of 60,000 medieval manuscripts. Other notable digital resources concerning medieval manuscripts and libraries include the Pecia website and blog, .

For the history and traditions of book collecting, and the ongoing process of forming and maintaining libraries of rare books and manuscripts, there are numerous clubs and societies, of which The Grolier Club of New York is the most distinguished in the United States. A manuscript collector and dealer's group is The Manuscript Society. Because of long and illustrious historical tradition of physical information there are hundreds, and perhaps thousands of institutional libraries around the world that hold rare books and manuscripts, and there are also hundreds of museums and some institutional libraries which hold recorded information prior to the codex, such as stone incriptions, cunieform tablets, and papyrus scrolls.

Organizations and institutions concerning the history of computing and the Internet are far more limited in number. Some of the most significant are the Charles Babbage Institute , the Computer History Museum, the Science Museum, London, and the IEEE Computer Society. Since 1976 the IEEE has published IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. For the history of media--film, radio, and television-- there is the International Association for Media and History. For the history of information management and information science there are various useful websites such as that of Professor Michael Buckland.

CONTINUITY WITH THE PAST IN AN AGE OF DISCONTINUITY

Until hundreds of millions of personal computers were connected to the Internet, mostly during the past ten years and within the recollection of most of us, physical forms of information--manuscripts, printed documents, physical libraries, and archives--were the primary means of creating, accessing, organizing, distributing, searching and storing many kinds of information. Considering the long history of physical information, it is nothing short of amazing to analyze the radical changes that have taken place in only a decade. As more and more information is created, distributed, and made searchable on the Internet, it may be helpful to see how books, libraries, archives and other "information technologies," including computing, evolved.

Though the explosion of new media is occurring so rapidly that it may appear discontinuous with the past this timelne demonstrates otherwise. The use of tally marks for counting predates writing. Computation is as ancient as written records. Over the centuries content evolved along with media for recording, distributing, organizing, searching, and storing information. The world's first electronic computer, the ENIAC, became operational in 1945, and it took forty to fifty years before the impact of electronic computing began to be felt throughout society on a daily basis with the invention and development of personal computers and their eventual connection to the Internet. Though computing now speeds the production and communication of information in all forms including printing, search engines on the Internet play a role analogous to that played by bibliographical lists and catalogues of physical libraries and archives as they evolved over the centuries. However, just as there are many differences between physical and digital information, there are differences between Internet search engines and search systems for physical libraries. One difference is the virtually unlimited amount of information in diffierent media, not-necessarily restricted by physical location, that Internet search engines allow us to search within seconds, and with previously impossible specificity, at little or no cost. In contrast, library catalogues, whether of single institutions or cooperative online library catalogues incorporating the holdings of thousands of physical libraries like OCLC or RLIN, typically focus on information in physical form, such as manuscript or print, in specific physical locations, though clearly this focus is rapidly widening. Another difference is that Internet search engines, as entrepeneurial concerns, approach information with less purely altruistic motives than bibliographies and library catalogues, often incorporating advertising with the search results. As library catalogues widen the scope of their focus to incorporate new media will they retain their non-commercial approach?

USING THE INTERNET TO STUDY THE HISTORY OF INFORMATION PRIOR TO THE INTERNET

The impact of the Internet may have stimulated many of us to review the nature of information and its history. The Internet also offers previously unavailable opportunities to study the history of information and the media from which the Internet evolved. This timeline is an attempt to take advantage of just some of those opportunities. Of course I could not compile this timeline without the Internet and search engines, which have made a universe of information available to us virtually instantaneously wherever we happen to be connected, and have taken the scope of information beyond the written or printed page, beyond physical libraries, and beyond geographical boundaries. Though this timeline evolved out of a timeline published in a printed book, this expanded timeline could not and would not exist without the Internet. The web is an ideal place to publish a work like this since it can be revised and expanded at will. Through links to websites the timeline points to a wide variety of illustrations, articles, and documents on the web.

Besides Internet search engines I am using numerous printed books to compile this timeline. Ironically I learned of many of these books from Internet research, and in keeping with the radical changes that have taken place in bookselling during the past decade, I obtained most of them for my personal library from book search sites on the web. We might describe the way that the Internet has transformed bookselling as still an additional way that physical and digital information are being integrated on the Internet. No matter what way we want to think about that, I will eventually link some timeline items to an extensive annotated bibliography of printed titles.

In addition to providing opportunities to publish online text works like this, the Internet integrates broadcast communications like radio and television, and interactive communications like email or certain websites. Because of these features, the Internet also allows the creation of new social and information modalities including blogs, social networks and cooperative publications such as wikis. The timeline attempts to chronicle the introduction of these new modalities.

THE HISTORICAL RECORD AS A REFLECTION OF INFORMATION SURVIVAL AND LOSS

Today the technical records of information technology fill a vast number of physical and digital libraries. However, we have relatively few records of the technical side of information technology until the sixteenth century, especially since considerable information was inevitably lost. For example, we know relatively little about how Gutenberg invented printing by moveable type in the first half of the 15th century. What we do know is chiefly inferred from legal documents, and from the examples of Gutenberg's printing that we have. The first printers' manuals were not published until the seventeenth century. For information about the early history of printing especially we must refer to the books themselves, to printer's archives, and of course to government records, and other archival records that concern printing, as well as to the histories of printing that used these resources. For the period before printing we probably have less information on the production of manuscript books and manuscript copying, though scholars have pieced much together from government records, from individual manuscripts and their comparison, from the few surviving model books, and from the study of unfinished illuminated manuscripts. As this timeline expands and improves I intend to include as many references as possible to the technical and social aspects of information technology before printing, and in the history of printing.

Using references to discoveries, social developments, and documents, this timeline attempts to arrange in approximate chronological sequence landmarks in the history of methods used to record, distribute, exchange, organize, store, and search information. Topics include Writing, Manuscript Copying, Papermaking, Printing, Publishing, Bibliography, Libraries, Archives, Survival of Information, Book and Manuscript Collecting, Conservation, Education, Computing Theory, Computing, Software, Networking, Telegraph, Photography, Cinematography, Telephone, Radio, Television, Cryptography, Computer Games, Law, Privacy, and related fields. One of ways that the timeline attempts to reflect the "survival of information" is to discuss the earliest extant texts of documents, and in certain instances the history of their survival in physical form. The timeline also tracks projects for the long term preservation and conservation of digital objects. These projects, which are generally little known except to specialists, began in 1993-94.

AN INDIVIDUAL APPROACH

It should be obvious that this timeline can reflect only the briefest outline of selected events on the myriad of topics to which it refers. Precise dates are not always known, or developments did not take place on specific dates. Frequently more people than those named in this timeline were involved. In addition some developments overlap rather than necessarily follow in linear fashion, or they may be the result of different processes working in parallel or in opposition. Balancing the chronological format are the many links to websites that provide further details. Nevertheless the timeline format has inherent limitations. While it may range over a very wide scope of information it records events chronologically without necessarily drawing conclusions as to their relative importance. Even though I have been highly selective in the inclusion of all material on this timeline, I have tried not to draw conclusions. It will be up to historians to use this timeline as a tool for their research. This timeline--a work in progress-- must always be considered an incomplete outline, and the approach of this individual author/editor to the topics concerned. Considering the range of topics covered in the timeline, and the impossibility of truly comprehensive coverage, this individual approach may remain its strength. The links connected to each item on the timeline provide more information, including illustrations, and some provide references for further research on these topics. When quotations are not credited in parentheses within the text of individual notes they are taken from the web document to which the entry is linked.

This timeline currently extends to about eighty web pages which you can search with the Google search engine below. The search engine indexes to the web page on which the information appears rather than to the specific timeline reference that may be relevant on that page. After you click on the link provided by the search engine you may find the specific reference by using the "edit, find" program on your web browser.

The gray buttons below the search box enable you to jump to the beginnings of twenty-four date ranges. From these stopping points you will need to click on the "next" or "previous" buttons to reach intermediate dates.

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