From Cave Paintings to the Internet A Chronological and Thematic Database on the History of Information and Media Telephone Timeline

Johann Philipp Reis, a German schoolteacher and physicist, announces his invention of the telephone in a lecture before the Physical Society of Frankfurt. He publishes "Ueber Telephonie durch den galvanischen Strom" in Jahres-Bericht des physikalischen Vereins zu Frankfurt am Main fur des Rechungshahr 1860-1861 (1861). 

Reis' transmitter worked by alternatively making and breaking connection with a battery, while his receiver was designed to operate on the principle of magnetorestriction -- the property of ferromagnetic material such as iron to change shape on applicate of a magnetic field. Neither of these principles was adequate for constructing a successful speech-transmitting telephone, which requires continous contact and an undulating current; however,

"If the sound entering a Reis transmitter is not too strong, contact between the metal point and the metal strip will not be broken. Instead, the pressure of the former on the latter will fluctuate with the sound causing fluctuations in the electrical resistance and therefore in the current. Similarly the receiver will respond to continuously fluctuating as well as to intermittent currents (but not by magnetorestrction). The sensitivity, however, is extremely low. . . ." (Encyclopedia Brittanica, 15th edition.)

This may explain the partial but real success of Reis's telephone in transmitting intelligible speech.

Between 1858 and 1863 Reis constructed three different models of his telephone, the third and best-known of which was demonstrated to scientific societies throughout Europe and America. One of those who saw Reis's machine was Alexander Graham Bell, who was shown Reis's telephone at the Smithsonian Institution in March 1875, and who might have seen an earlier model demonstrated in Edinburgh as early as 1862.

Reis had no interest in profiting from his telephone, freely giving out information on it to anyone who asked, and selling models of it at a reasonable price. Reis died of tuberculosis in 1874 at the early age of 40.

Alexander Graham Bell invents the telephone, and applies for the patent. In his invention of the telephone Bell was preceded by Philip Reis, who perfected his device in 1861, and numerous other inventors played lesser or greater roles. However, Bell was the first to create a telephone that could reproduce intelligible speech at the receiving end, and was also the first to patent the telephone. Because of the numerous other inventors involved there was unusually extensive and historic litigation over the telephone patents, culminating in Bell's victory. Among the controversies was the question of the priority of Elisha Gray in the invention.

As the well-known story goes, on March 10, 1876 Bell spoke the first words through the instrument to his assistant, Thomas A. Watson, in the next room. Bell said, "Mr. Watson— come here— I want to see you." (See Reading 5.3

Bell presented his first report on the telephone to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences on May 10, 1876. His report, "Researches in telephony," was published in Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, new series 4 (whole series 12) (1877) 1-10.  Bell's telephone did not become commercially viable until 1878.

Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science & Medicine (1991) no. 164.

Construction of the first regular telephone line is completed. It runs from Boston to Somerville, Massachusetts.

The first telephone switchboard is set up in Boston.

Emile Berliner invents the microphone.

It was used as a telephone speech transmitter.

David Edward Hughes invents the loose-contact carbon microphone.

Hughes's microphone was vital to telephony and later to broadcasting and sound recording.

The first regular telephone exchange is set up in New Haven, Connecticut.

"The switchboard was built from "carriage bolts, handles from teapot lids and bustle wire" and could handle two simultaneous conversations" (Wikipedia article on telephone exchange, accessed 04-22-2009).

Eleven months after its foundation, The Connecticut District Telephone Company issues the world's first telephone book.

The telephone directory contains the names and addresses of 391 subscribers who paid $22 per year for service. There are no phone numbers, but there are advertisements and listings of businesses in the back of the book—the first, embryonic "yellow pages." The advertisers include physicians and carriage companies. Customers are limited to three minutes per call and no more than two calls an hour without permission from the central office.

"Besides rules, the embryonic phone book also featured pages of tips on placing calls — pick up the receiver and tell the operator whom you want — and how to talk on this gadget. Having a real conversation, for example, required rapidly transferring the telephone between mouth and ear.“When you are not speaking, you should be listening,” it says at one point. You should begin by saying, “Hulloa,” and when done talking, the book says, you should say, “That is all.” The other person should respond, “O.K.” Because anybody could be on the line at any time, customers should not pick up the telephone unless they want to make a call, and they should be careful about what others might hear. “Any person using profane or otherwise improper language should be reported at this office immediately.”

Alexander Graham Bell and his then-assistant Charles Summer Tainter transmit the first wireless telephone message 213 meters on a beam of light between the roof of the Franklin School and the window of Bell's Washington, D. C. laboratory using the photophone. 

"The photophone used crystalline selenium cells at the focal point of its parabolic receiver. This material's electrical resistance varies inversely with the illumination falling upon it, i.e., its resistance is higher when it is in the dark, and lower when it is exposed to light. The idea of the photophone was thus to modulate a light beam: the resulting varying illumination of the receiver would induce a corresponding varying resistance in the selenium cells, which were then used by a telephone to regenerate the sounds captured at the receiver. The modulation of the transmitted light beam was done by a mirror made to vibrate by a person's voice: the thin mirror would alternate between concave and convex forms, thus focusing or dispersing the light from the light source. The photophone functioned similarly to the telephone, except the photophone used light as a means of projecting information, while the telephone relied on a modulated electrical signal carried over a conductive wire circuit" (Wikipedia article on Photophone, accessed 03-27-2010).

Bell's and Tainter's invention, for which Bell received the master patent (U.S. Patent 235,199) in December 1880, was the forerunner of wireless telecommunications and the far-advanced forerunner of fiber-optic telecommunications.

According to Long & Groth, Bibliography of Early Optical (Audio) Communications (2005) Bell's first paper on the photophone, "Prof. A. G. Bell on Selenium and the Photophone," was first published in The Electrician No 5, 18 September 1880, 220-221 and 2 October 1880, 237. The complete paper also was published in Nature (London) Vol 22, 23 September 1880, 500 - 503. Thus the first complete publication appears to be the version published in Nature.

Bell's longer paper "On the Production and Reproduction of Sound by Light: the Photophone" was first published in American Assocation  for the Advancement of Science, Proceedings, Vol 29., October 1880, 115-136. This paper was widely reprinted in other journals. "In these papers, Bell accords the credit for the first demonstrations of the transmission of speech by light to a Mr A C Brown of London 'in September or October 1878' (Wikipedia article on Photophone, accessed 03-27-2010).

American Telephone and Telegraph Corporation (A T & T) is established to run the United States long-distance telephone network.

The AT&T long-distance telephone network extends from New York to Chicago.

About 240,000 telephones are in use in the United States.

The AT&T long-distance telegraph network begun in 1885 finally reaches from New York to San Francisco, allowing Alexander Graham Bell in New York and Thomas J. Watson in San Francisco to participate in the first transcontinental telephone call.

"Four locations participated in the first call. Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone and co-founder of AT&T, led a group of dignitaries in New York. His one-time assistant Thomas Watson, led a group in San Francisco. AT&T President Theodore Vail spoke from Jekyll Island, Ga. And U.S. President Woodrow Wilson spoke from the White House.  

At one point during the call, someone asked Professor Bell if he would repeat the first words he ever said over the telephone. He obliged, picking up the phone and repeating 'Mr. Watson, come here, I want you.' To which Watson, in San Francisco, replied, 'It would take me a week now.' "(http://www.corp.att.com/history/nethistory/transcontinental.html, accessed 01-24-2010).

Walter Gifford, president of AT&T, consolidates Western Electric Research Laboratories and part of the engineering department of the American Telephone & Telegraph company (AT&T)  to form Bell Telephone Laboratories.

The first transatlantic telephone cable, TAT-1, becomes operational.

Since 1927 very expensive radio-based transatlantic telephone service was available. Radio-based transatlantic telephone service carried pnly around 2000 calls per year.

C. Breen and D. A. Dahlbaum publish "Signaling Systems for the Control of Telephone Switching," Bell System Technical Journal, 39 (1960) 1381-1444.

"Telephone signaling is basically a matter of transferring information between machines, and between humans and machines. The techniques developed to accomplish this have evolved over the years in step with advances in the total telephone art. The history of this evolution is traced, starting from the early simple manual switchboard days to the present Direct Distance Dialing era. The effect of the increasing sophistication in automatic switching and transmission systems and their influence on signaling principles are discussed. Emphasis is given to the signaling systems used between central offices of the nationwide telephone network and the influence on such systems of the characteristics of switching systems and their information requirements, the transmission media and the compatibility problem. A review is made of the forms and characteristics of some of the interoffice signaling systems presently in use. In addition, the problem of signaling between Bell System and overseas telephone systems is reviewed with reference to delivering information requirements, signaling techniques and new transmission media. Finally, some speculation is made on the future trends of telephone signaling systems" (abstract of the paper).

According to http://www.historyofphonephreaking.org/docs.php, the Breen and Dahlbaum paper is

"often cited as the article that gave away the keys to the kingdom," leading to the development of the underground "phreaker" culture.  Other papers that included the in-band trunk signaling tones which provided the technical information needed to build Blue Boxes are cited at http://www.lospadres.info/thorg/bstj.html, accessed 09-17-2009).

My thanks to Jeffrey Odel for this reference.

British science fiction writer, inventor and futurist Arthur C. Clarke publishes a short story entitled "Dial F for Frankenstein.

". . . it foretold an ever-more-interconnected telephone network that spontaneously acts like a newborn baby and leads to global chaos as it takes over financial, transportation and military systems" (John Markoff, "The Coming Superbrain," New York Times, May 24, 2009).

"The father of the internet, Sir Tim Berners-Lee credits Clarke's short story, Dial F for Frankenstein, as an inspiration" (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/arthur-c-clarke-science-fiction-turns-to-fact-799519.html, accessed 05-24-2009).

The first geosynchronous communications satellite, Syncom 2, is launched by NASA on a Delta rocket B booster from Cape Canaveral. "Its orbit was inclined rather than geostationary. . . The satellite successfully kept stationary at the altitude calculated by Herman Potočnik Noordung in the 1920s.

"During Syncom 2's first year, NASA conducted voice, teletype, and facsimile tests, as well as 110 public demonstrations to acquaint people with Syncom's capabilities and invite their feedback. In August 1963, President John F. Kennedy in Washington, D.C., telephoned Nigerian Prime Minister Abubakar Balewa aboard USNS Kingsport docked in Lagos Harbor; the first live two-way call between heads of state by satellite. The Kingsport acted as a control station and uplink stationa' (Wikipedia article on Syncom, accessed 05-24-2009).

Touch-tone telephone dialing is introduced, enabling calls to be switched digitally.

The first use of the term "hacker" in the context of computing appears in the MIT student newspaper, The Tech:

"Many telephone services have been curtailed because of so-called hackers, according to Prof. Carlton Tucker, administrator of the Institute phone system. . . .The hackers have accomplished such things as tying up all the tie-lines between Harvard and MIT, or making long-distance calls by charging them to a local radar installation. One method involved connecting the PDP-1 computer to the phone system to search the lines until a dial tone, indicating an outside line, was found. . . . Because of the 'hacking,' the majority of the MIT phones are 'trapped.' "

Italian-American electrical engineer and businessman Andrew Viterbi develops the Viterbi algorithm,  "as an error-correction scheme for noisy digital communication links, finding universal application in decoding the convolutional codes used in both CDMA and GSM digital cellular, dial-up modems, satellite, deep-space communications, and 802.11 wireless LANs. It is now also commonly used in speech recognition, keyword spotting, computational linguistics, and bioinformatics. For example, in speech-to-text (speech recognition), the acoustic signal is treated as the observed sequence of events, and a string of text is considered to be the "hidden cause" of the acoustic signal. The Viterbi algorithm finds the most likely string of text given the acoustic signal" (Wikipedia article on Viterbi algorithm, accessed 12-29-2009).

German electrical engineers Helmut Gröttrup and Jürgen Dethloff invent the smart card (chip card, or integrated circuit card [ICC]) and apply for the patent. The patent for the smart card was finally granted to both inventors in 1982. The first wide use of the cards was for payment in French pay phones—France Telecom Télécarte—starting in 1983-84.

Steve "Woz" Wozniak and Steve Jobs read an article about phreaking by Ron Rosenbaum entitled "Secrets of the Little Blue Box" in the October 1971 issue of Esquire magazine, and become active in the phreaker culture, with its legendary character "Captain Crunch." 

Wozniak's "blue box" used for phreaking in 1972 is preserved in the Computer History Museum.

Though on a much smaller scale, the phreaker underground telephone system culture was an analogous precursor of the hacker culture that later evolved around computers and the Internet.

The U.S. Department of Justice files an antitrust suit for the breakup of American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T), alleging anticompetitive behavior.

AT&T and Bell Labs construct a prototype analog cellular telephone system. The following year the first public trials will occur in Chicago with 2000 users.

The first single-chip digital signal processor (DSP) is developed at Bell Labs, making small portable digital telephones possible.

"The concepts of frequency reuse and handoff as well as a number of other concepts that formed the basis of modern cell phone technology are first described in U.S. Patent 4,152,647 , issued May 1, 1979 to Charles A. Gladden and Martin H. Parelman, both of Las Vegas, Nevada and assigned by them to the United States Government.

"This is the first embodiment of all the concepts that formed the basis of the next major step in mobile telephony, the Analog cellular telephone. Concepts covered in this patent (cited in at least 34 other patents) also were later extended to several satellite communication systems. Later updating of the cellular system to a digital system credits this patent" (Wikipedia article on Mobil phone, accessed 04-11-2009).

Bell Labs develops digital cellular telephone technology, offering better sound quality, greater channel capacity and lower cost than analog.

Robert Edward "Ted" Turner III launches the Cable News Network (CNN). The husband and wife team of David Walker and Lois Hart anchor its first newscast.

The Federal Communications Commission authorizes American Telephone and Telegraph to build a commercial cellular telephone service in Chicago.

This was the beginning of commercial cellular service in the United States.

The Motorola DynaTAC becomes the first mobile phone approved by the FCC in the United States.

"On Oct. 13, 1983, Bob Barnett, former president of Ameritech Mobile Communications placed the first commercial wireless call on a DynaTAC from inside a Chrysler convertible to the grandson of Alexander Graham Bell who was in Germany at the time. The call, made at Soldier Field in Chicago, is considered by many as a major turning point in communications. Later Richard Frenkel, the head of system development at Bell Laboratories, said about the DynaTAC: 'It was a triumph.' " (Wikipedia article on Motorola DynaTAC, accessed 04-11-2009).

"In 1984, Bell Labs developed modern commercial cellular technology (based, to a large extent, on the Gladden, Parelman Patent), which employed multiple, centrally controlled base stations (cell sites), each providing service to a small area (a cell). The cell sites would be set up such that cells partially overlapped. In a cellular system, a signal between a base station (cell site) and a terminal (phone) only need be strong enough to reach between the two, so the same channel can be used simultaneously for separate conversations in different cells" (Wikipedia article on Mobil phone, accessed 04-11-2009).

Under the pen name of Emmanuel Goldstein, Eric Gordon Corley begins publication of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly, 

"a quarterly American publication that specializes in publishing technical information on a variety of subjects including telephone switching systems, Internet protocols and services, as well as general news concerning the computer "underground" and left wing, and sometimes (but not recently), anarchist issues.

"The magazine's name comes from the phreaker discovery in the 1960s that the transmission of a 2600 hertz tone (which could be produced perfectly with a plastic toy whistle given away free with Cap'n Crunch cereal—discovered by friends of John Draper) over a long-distance trunk connection gained access to "operator mode" and allowed the user to explore aspects of the telephone system that were not otherwise accessible. The magazine was given its name by David Ruderman, who co-founded the magazine with his college friend and roommate, Eric Corley. It was first published in 1984, coinciding with the book of the same name and the break-up of AT&T. Ruderman ended his direct involvement with the magazine three years later.

"The magazine is published and edited by its co-founder Emmanuel Goldstein (a pen name of Eric Corley and allusion to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four) . . . .

"The magazine offers free advertising for subscribers. Many subscribers who have been imprisoned will take out personal ads seeking new friends and penpals" (Wikipedia article on 2600: The Hacker Quarterly, accessed 01-17-2010(.

American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T), is officially broken up, ending a long-established monopoly on telephone service.

AT&T's local operations were split into seven independent regional Bell operating companies, known as "Baby Bells." AT&T, reduced in value by about 70%, continued to run all its long distance services.

Norwegian engineers Torliev Maseng and Odd Trandem develop the technology that became accepted as the Global System for Mobil communications (GSM).

Maseng's work "included the use of channel estimation and the combination of equalization, error correcting codes and modulation in which the Viterbi algorithm was used by all components" (Wikipedia article on Torleiv Maseng, accessed 12-29-2009).

" 'The most important reason we prevailed was that our system was the best in handling the interference created when radio signals are reflected by buildings and topography,' Mr. Maseng says.  

“ 'As the number of reflected signals increases, there is a greater chance that the radio transmitter or receiver gets confused and mixes up the signals. Norway has an abundance of those kinds of natural topographic challenges.'  

"A central concept in understanding how the system works is bandwidth. Bandwidth can be compared with the speed at which people talk. In this analogy, the faster you talk, the higher the bandwidth. But high bandwidth can be a problem in places with lots of reflected signals. The same problem explains why most hymns are sung slowly in church. If they are sung quickly, the acoustics of the church turn the hymn into an unintelligible mess.  

"This phenomenon also confounds radio signals. But Mr. Maseng and Mr. Trandem came up with a clever solution. The problem is that if the data speed is too high, the receiving equipment cannot deal with signals that ‘hang in the air’ at the same time, and the signal becomes chaotic. But if the bandwidth is too low, there is a greater chance that the signal will disappear because the receiving equipment cannot distinguish between different echoes.  

"Maseng and Trandem altered their bandwidth during testing; they could do this because they devised a way to see their results in real time. By doing this they were able to find the optimal bandwidth between the two extremes. Their competitors could not. The two researchers were clever, but they also had a powerful tool to help them: A Cray supercomputer, purchased by NTNU’s predecessor, NTH, in 1986. “The computing power of the Cray was a great help in finding the optimal bandwidth,” Odd Trandem says" (http://www.ntnu.no/gemini/2005-01e/gsm.htm, accessed 12-29-2009).

The Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 (TCPA) is passed by the United States Congress and signed into law by President George H. W. Bush as Public Law 102-243, amending the Communications Act of 1934.

"The TCPA is the primary law in the US governing the conduct of telephone solicitations, ie. telemarketing. The TCPA restricts the use of automatic dialing systems, artificial or prerecorded voice messages, SMS text messages received by cell phones, and the use of fax machines to send unsolicited advertisements. It also specifies several technical requirements for fax machines, autodialers, and voice messaging systems -- principally with provisions requiring identification and contact information of the entity using the device to be contained in the message" (Wikipedia article on Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991, accessed 10-31-2009).

The world's first GSM (Global System for Mobil communications) phone call is made in Finland on the  Radiolinja network. 

Second generation 2G cellular telecom networks are commercially launched on the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) standard in Finland on Radiolinja's network.

"Three primary benefits of 2G networks over their predecessors were that phone conversations were digitally encrypted, 2G systems were significantly more efficient on the spectrum allowing for far greater mobile phone penetration levels; and 2G introduced data services for mobile, starting with SMS text messages.

"After 2G was launched, the previous mobile telephone systems were retrospectively dubbed 1G. While radio signals on 1G networks are analog, and on 2G networks are digital, both systems use digital signaling to connect the radio towers (which listen to the handsets) to the rest of the telephone system" (Wikipedia article on GSM, accessed 04-11-2009).

Using a personal computer, Neil Papworth of Sema Group  sends the first commercial SMS  text message to Richard Jarvis of Vodafone, using an Orbitel 901 handset. The text of the message is "Merry Christmas."

AT&T introduces the AT&T EO Personal Communicator, the first tablet computer with wireless connectivity via a cellular phone.

The device was developed by GO/EO, a subsidiary of GO Corporation, both of which were acquired by AT&T in 1993.

"Two models, the Communicator 440 and 880 were produced and measured about the size of a small clipboard. Both were powered by the AT&T Hobbit chip, created by AT&T specifically for running code from the C programming language. They also contained a host of I/O ports - modem, parallel, serial, VGA out and SCSI. The device came with a wireless cellular network modem, a built-in microphone with speaker and a free subscription to AT&T EasyLink Mail for both fax and e-mail messages.

"Perhaps the most interesting part was the operating system, PenPoint OS, created by GO Corporation. Widely praised for its simplicity and ease of use, the OS never gained widespread use. Also equally compelling was the tightly integrated applications suite, Perspective, licensed to EO by Pensoft" (Wikipedia article on EO Personal Communicator, accessed 02-03-2010).

Tim O’Reilly launches the Global Network Navigator. This the first web portal and the first true commercial website. According to a statement by Tim O'Reilly, it contains the first online advertising. The Global Network Navigator will be sold to America Online in 1995.

"The first access to the mobile web was commercially offered in Finland in 1996 on the Nokia Communicator 9000 phone on the Sonera and Radiolinja networks. This was access to the real internet" (Wikipedia article on Mobile web, accessed 04-25-2009).

Wireless Application Protocol or WAP is established as a secure specification that allows users to access information via handheld wireless devices.

NTT DoCoMo introduces the mobile web to Japan with the first full internet service on mobile phones, and the first mobile-specific web browser. 

NTT DoCoMo in Japan launches the first 3G (Third Generation) cellular network.

"3G networks enable network operators to offer users a wider range of more advanced services while achieving greater network capacity through improved spectral efficiency. Services include wide-area wireless voice telephony, video calls, and broadband wireless data, all in a mobile environment. Additional features also include HSPA data transmission capabilities able to deliver speeds up to 14.4 Mbit/s on the downlink and 5.8 Mbit/s on the uplink" (Wikipedia article on 3G, accessed 04-11-2009).

Under the  pen name  "Yoshi," a Tokyo man publishes the first cell phone novel,  Deep Love— the story of a teenage prostitute in Tokyo.

Deep Love

"became so popular that it was published as an actual book, with 2.6 million copies sold in Japan, then spun off into a television series, a manga, and a movie. The cell phone novel became a hit mainly through word of mouth and gradually started to gain traction in China and South Korea among young adults. In Japan, several sites offer large prizes to authors (up to $100,000 US) and purchase the publishing rights to the novel."

"Cell phone or mobile phone novels called keitai shousetsu in Japanese, are the first literary genre to emerge from the cellular age via text messaging. Phone novels started out primarily read and authored by young Japanese women, on the subject of romantic fiction such as relationships, lovers, rape, love triangles, and pregnancy. However, mobile phone novels are trickling their way to a worldwide popularity on all subjects. Japanese ethos of the Internet regarding mobile phone novels are dominated by false names and forged identities. Therefore, identities of the Japanese authors of mobile phone novels are rarely disclosed. 'Net transvestites' are of the most extreme play actors of the sort. Differing from regular novels, mobile phone novels may be structured according to the author's preference. If a couple is fighting in the story, the author may choose to have the lines closely spaced and crowded. On the contrary, if the author writes a calm or soothing poem the line spacing may be further apart than normal. Overall, the line spacing of phone novels contains enough blank space for an easy read. Phone novels are meant to be read in 1,000 to 2,000-word (in China) or 70-word (in Japan) chapters via text message on mobile phones. They are downloaded in short installments and run on handsets as Java-based applications on a mobile phone. Cell phone novels often appear in three different formats: WMLD, JAVA and TXT. Maho i-Land is the largest cell phone novel site that carries more than a million titles, mainly novice writers, all which are available for free. Maho iLand provides templates for blogs and homepages. It is visited 3.5 billion times each month. In 2007 98 cell phone novels were published into books. "Love Sky" is a popular phone novel with approximately 12 million views on-line, written by "Mika", that was not only published but turned into a movie. www.textnovel.com is another popular mobile phone novel site, however, in English."

"Five out of the ten best selling novels in Japan in 2007 were originally cell phone novels" (Wikipedia article on Cell phone novel, accessed 08-23-2009).

Niklas Zennström, Janus Friis, and the Estonians Ahti Heinla, Priit Kasesalu launch the peer-to-peer voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) telephony service, Skype. The name of the company evolved from "Sky peer-to-peer" or "Skyper." However some of the domain names associated with "Skyper" were already taken, so the final "r" was dropped leaving "Skype," for which domain names were available. Skype was sold to eBay in September 2005.

The author/editor of this database, Jeremy Norman, issues From Gutenberg to the Internet: A Sourcebook on the History of Information Technology.

This printed book was the first anthology to reflect the origins of the various technologies that converged to form the Internet.

Google announces the planned opening of the Google Video Store, "the first open video marketplace enabling consumers to buy and rent a wide range of video content from a major television network, a professional sports league, cable programmers, independent producers and film makers."

The start-up company Obvious launches the social networking and micro-blogging service Twitter: What are you doing?. Twitter "allows its users to send and read other users' updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length." This is under the 160 character limit of the SMS communication protocol for mobile phones.

Apple introduces the iPhone, an internet-connected multimedia smartphone with a virtual keypad and a virtual keyboard.

Changeling, an American historical drama film set in Los Angeles in 1928, and based on a true story, produced and directed by Clint Eastwood, written by J. Michael Straczynski, starring Angela Jolie and John Malkovich, has many features to recommend it. Rather than describing the plot in detail and spoiling the story for you, I will mention that the film is tangentially relevant to the topics covered in this database since the central figure played by Jolie works as a supervisor in a telephone exchange, then a manual operation. In the film the operation of the exchange appears to be accurately depicted.

"Later exchanges consisted of one to several hundred plug boards staffed by telephone operators. Each operator sat in front of a vertical panel containing banks of ¼-inch tip-ring-sleeve (5-conductor) jacks, each of which was the local termination of a subscriber's telephone line. In front of the jack panel lay a horizontal panel containing two rows of patch cords, each pair connected to a cord circuit. When a calling party lifted the receiver, a signal lamp near the jack would light. The operator would plug one of the cords (the "answering cord") into the subscriber's jack and switch her headset into the circuit to ask, "number please?" Depending upon the answer, the operator might plug the other cord of the pair (the "ringing cord") into the called party's local jack and start the ringing cycle, or plug into a trunk circuit to start what might be a long distance call handled by subsequent operators in another bank of boards or in another building miles away. In 1918, the average time to complete the connection for a long-distance call was 15 minutes. In the ringdown method, the originating operator called another intermediate operator who would call the called subscriber, or passed it on to another intermediate operator. This chain of intermediate operators could complete the call only if intermediate trunk lines were available between all the centers at the same time. In 1943 when military calls had priority, a cross-country US call might take as long as 2 hours to request and schedule in cities that used manual switchboards for toll calls" (Wikipedia article on Telephone exchange, accessed 04-26-2009).

T-Mobile announces the first cell phone powered by the Android operating system, developed by Google in association with the Open Handset Alliance.

According to the New York Times online 2.5 trillion text messages, generally limited to 160 characters per message, were sent worldwide in 2008, up 32% from 2007.

Artist Jorge Columbo's cover art drawn entirely on an iPhone using the Brushes app  is the first iPhone art published as the cover of a major magazine.

"It has been widely reported that my drawings are now made on an iPhone... Considering all the sketches and watercolors and photographs I have done in the USA for the past twenty years, my output in the Brushes app since I bought a G3 last February is still rather small. It has attracted more attention than anything else I have done: it seems people can't resist a nice tech story. But it's a happy affair. As much as I enjoy and admire other media, drawing on a screen that's always bright even on a dark street, with no paint to carry, no brushes to wash, and countless levels of "undo", seems to agree with me. I always work on location, drawing everything from scratch, with no use of photography whatsoever. (The app churns out Quicktime movies that detail each brushtroke, as seen in The New Yorker's website; it mercifully ignores all the trial-and-errors and failed attempts, making my progression look uncannily flawless. That's so not true.) I could carry a pad or even an easel around. But drawing on a phone is so discreet, so casual" (http://www.drawger.com/jorgecolombo/?section=articles&article_id=9154, accessed 01-07-2010).

♦ On January 07, 2010 you could watch a series of Quicktime movies of Jorge Columbo creating iPhone paintings on the New Yorker website at this link: http://www.newyorker.com/video?videoID=40951183001.

More than 100,000 apps are now available for download from Apple's App Store, making it the largest such retailer in the world.

"The App Store launched in July 2008 with just 500 applications. The store is now available in 77 countries, which has contributed to what Apple said Wednesday is well over 2 billion downloads" (http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10390454-37.html)

Apple announces that more than three billion apps have been downloaded from its App Store by iPhone and iPod touch users worldwide.  

" 'Three billion applications downloaded in less than 18 months—this is like nothing we’ve ever seen before,' said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. 'The revolutionary App Store offers iPhone and iPod touch users an experience unlike anything else available on other mobile devices, and we see no signs of the competition catching up anytime soon ' " (http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/01/05appstore.html, accessed 01-05-2010).

After the disastrous earthquake in Haiti you could send aid money by text message on your cell phone, and $10 was put on your cell phone bill. In the case of the Red Cross you could "send a $10 Donation by Texting ‘Haiti’ to 90999", or you could donate by phone or by credit card on the Red Cross website, or through social networking sites.

The first LG Mobile Worldcup SMS texting championship takes place in New York.

“ 'When others watch me texting, they think I’m not that fast and they can do better,' said Mr. Bae, 17, a high school dropout who dyes his hair a light chestnut color and is studying to be an opera singer.'So far, I’ve never lost a match.'

"In the New York competition he typed six characters a second. 'If I can think faster I can type faster,' he said.

"The inaugural Mobile World Cup, hosted by the South Korean cellphone maker LG Electronics, brought together two-person teams from 13 countries who had clinched their national titles by beating a total of six million contestants. Marching behind their national flags, they gathered in New York on Jan. 14 for what was billed as an international clash of dexterous digits" (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/28/world/asia/28seoul.html, accessed 01-28-2010).

According to The New York Times, people are now using their cell phones more for text messaging and data-processing than for speech. This should not come as a surprise to anyone with teen-age children.

". . . although almost 90 percent of households in the United States now have a cellphone, the growth in voice minutes used by consumers has stagnated, according to government and industry data.  

"This is true even though more households each year are disconnecting their landlines in favor of cellphones.  

"Instead of talking on their cellphones, people are making use of all the extras that iPhones, BlackBerrys and other smartphones were also designed to do — browse the Web, listen to music, watch television, play games and send e-mail and text messages.  

"The number of text messages sent per user increased by nearly 50 percent nationwide last year, according to the CTIA, the wireless industry association. And for the first time in the United States, the amount of data in text, e-mail messages, streaming video, music and other services on mobile devices in 2009 surpassed the amount of voice data in cellphone calls, industry executives and analysts say. 'Originally, talking was the only cellphone application,' said Dan Hesse, chief executive of Sprint Nextel. 'But now it’s less than half of the traffic on mobile networks.'  

"Of course, talking on the cellphone isn’t disappearing entirely. 'Anytime something is sensitive or is something I don’t want to be forwarded, I pick up the phone rather than put it into a tweet or a text,' said Kristen Kulinowski, a 41-year-old chemistry teacher in Houston. And calling is cheaper than ever because of fierce competition among rival wireless networks.  

"But figures from the CTIA show that over the last two years, the average number of voice minutes per user in the United States has fallen (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/14/technology/personaltech/14talk.html?hp, accessed 05-14-2010).

"The volume of data on the world’s mobile networks is doubling each year, according to Cisco Systems, the U.S. maker of routers and networking equipment. By 2014, it estimates, the monthly data flow will increase about sixteenfold, to 3.6 billion gigabytes from 220.1 million" (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/02/technology/02iht-NETPIPE02.html?src=un&feedurl=http://json8.nytimes.com/pages/business/global/index.jsonp, accessed 08-01-2010)