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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. |
| 1920194019501960 |
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1997 |
126,000,000 metric tons of paper are consumed in the world. |
|
IEEE releases the 802.11 WiFi standard. |
|
The Internet2 consortium is established. |
| The IEEE Computer Society establishes the Technical Committee on Digital Libraries. "It is to promote research in the theory and practice of all aspects of Collective Memory, i.e. the fields of Digital Libraries, Digital Museums and Digital Archives of all kinds." | |
| The California Digital Library is founded "by University of California President Emeritus Richard Atkinson to build the University's digital library, assist campus libraries with sharing their resources and holdings more effectively, and provide leadership in applying technology to the development of library collections and services." | |
| SixDegrees.com, an early social networking website, is founded. | |
| March 17 | The Joint Bi-l evel Image Experts Group (JBIG) and the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG1 (ITU-T SG8) Coding of Still Pictures issue the report entitled Call for Contributions for JPEG 2000 (JTC 1.29.14, 15444): Image Coding System. This will eventually lead to the establishment of the JPEG 2000 file standard for still images. |
| April | There are one million websites on the Internet. |
| April 15 | RLG DigiNews, RLG's online newsletter for digital libraries and preservation, begins publication on the web. |
May 11 |
Gary Kasparov resigns 19 moves into Game 6 against Deep Blue, an IBM supercomputer. Deep Blue is an IBM RS/6000 SP supercomputer capable of calculating 200 million chess positions per second. This is the first time that a current world chess champion loses to a computer under tournament conditions. |
June |
Wireless Application Protocol or WAP is established as a secure specification that allows users to access information via handheld wireless devices. |
| November | Digital Scriptorium, providing digital versions of medieval manuscripts and miniatures from a consortium of academic libraries, first appears on the web. |
1998 |
W3C releases the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) specification, allowing web pages to be tagged with descriptive labels. |
|
Voice over Internet equipment (VOIP) becomes available. |
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The average person receives 733 pieces of mail on paper per year, half of which is junk mail. |
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MP3 (MPEG Audio Layer 3) is introduced. It is an audio compression technology being a part of the MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 specifications. MP3 compresses CD quality sound by a factor of 812, while maintaining almost the same high-fidelity sound quality. |
| Richard-Gabriel Rummonds' Printing on the Iron Handpress is published. This elegantly produced definitive work on the operation of historic handpress printing technology, illustrated by photographs and line drawings, is printed by high-speed photo-offset rather than manual letterpress printing. It includes an annotated bibliography of prior printing manuals published in English. The introduction by Harry Duncan concludes: ". . .anyone who does stay the course and follow to the end the directives given here can count on acquiring a consummate, tried, and true method for handling an instrument that has never been surpassed, that still calls for a printer's full participation, physical as well as mental, in order to achieve the best work of which he is capable." | |
| The National Library of Australia initiates its Digital Services Project with the goal of establishing a web archive. This will evolve into PANDORA. | |
| The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) begins the Electronic Records Archives Program (ERA) for the eventual preservation of digital archives. | |
| January 29 | Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Rajeev Motwani, and Terry Winograd of the Stanford Database Group publish on paper The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web. "The worldwide web creates many new challenges for information retrieval. It is very large and heterogeneous. Current estimates are that there are over 150 million web pages with a doubling life of less than one year." |
| March | Robert E. Kahn and Vinton G. Cerf publish on paper An Open Architecture for a Digital Library System and a Plan for its Development, describing "an open architecture for an important new kind of national information infrastructure." |
April |
The Internet Society (ISOC) meets to discuss the growing spam problem. |
|
Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searles and David Weinberger publish the Cluetrain Manifesto containing 95 theses: “A powerful global conversation has begun.” “Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter--and getting smarter faster than most companies.” “Markets are conversations.” The manifesto is first published online, followed by a book. |
May |
J. Craig Venter founds Celera Genomics with Applera Corporation (Applied Biosystems) to sequence and assemble the human genome. |
September 7 |
Larry Page and Sergey Brin found Google. |
| October | ASCI Blue-Pacific SST, jointly developed by the U.S. Energy Department’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and IBM. It can perform 3.9 trillion calculations per second (15,000 times faster than the average desktop computer) and has over 2.6 trillion bytes of memory (80,000 times more than the average PC). It would take a person using a calculator 63,000 years to perform as many calculations as this computer can perform in a single second. |
| October 12 | The U.S. Congress passes the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. |
| 1999 | 64,711 new books are published on paper in the United States this year. |
| The British Government issues a white paper, Modernising Government, setting the goal that by 2004 all newly created public records will be electronically stored and retrieved. | |
|
It requires about 756,000,000 trees to produce the world’s annual paper supply. “The UNESCO Statistical Handbook for 1999 estimates that paper production provides 1,510 sheets of paper per inhabitant of the world on average, although in fact the inhabitants of North America consume 11,916 sheets of paper each (24 reams), and inhabitants of the European Union consume 7,280 sheets of paper annually (15 reams), according to the ENST report. At least half of this paper is used in printers and copiers to produce office documents.” |
|
The U. S. Supreme Court rules that domain names are property. |
| The Early English Books Online project, a joint effort between the University of Michigan, Oxford University and ProQuest Information and Learning, begins to provide searchable texts of all 125,000 English books printed from 1475 to 1700. This is a development of a project that began in 1938 to microfilm all English books in the timeframe. | |
| The LOCKSS digital library preservation program ("Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe") begins intensive testing at Stanford University. | |
June |
Shawn Fanning releases the Napster file sharing service for MP3 files. "It was the first of the massively popular peer-to-peer file sharing systems, although it was not fully peer-to-peer since it used central servers to maintain lists of connected systems and the files they provided, while actual transactions were conducted directly between machines. Although there were already media which facilitated the sharing of files across the Internet, such as IRC, Hotline, and USENET, Napster specialized exclusively in music in the form of MP3 files and presented a friendly user-interface. The result was a system whose popularity generated an enormous selection of music to download." |
December |
IBM announces the start of a five-year effort to build a massively parallel computer, Blue Gene, which will be 500 times more powerful than the world’s fastest computers at the time of the announcement. Initially Blue Gene will be applied to the study of bio-molecular phenomena such as protein folding. |
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| 1920194019501960 |
(This page was last revised on
May 11, 2008
. Please report errors
and broken links to jnorman@jnorman.com.) |
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