Toward Digital Media

The Age of WritingEvery book is handwritten, with an

individual voice. c3000BCE: papyrus scrolls, clay tablets refer to earlier ones? c1700BCE: phonetic alphabets in mideast c335BCE: Aristotle surveys human knowledge c300BCE: Alexandria Library project innovates xrefs and annotations c100: first books in 'codex' form; uppercase letterforms established c700: lowercase letterforms established c900: "1001 Arabian Nights" frames stories within stories within stories 1140: Gratian's "Decretum" collates 3800 divergent Catholic texts c1300: Kabbalists and Ramon Llull explore text combinatoric

The Age of PrintingThe illusion of an objective

voice. 1455: Gutenberg's Bible using moveable type c1500: title pages, prefaces grow out of publishers' colophons

1725: Vico's "New Science" calls for universal thesaurus of concepts 1746-55: Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of English 1759: Sterne's "Tristram Shandy" makes form the center of a novel 1768: Encyclopedia Britannica surveys all knowledge

The Age of ElectricityExploring an infinitely impressionable

medium. 1837: Morse Code digitizes alphabet 1839: Panizzi's cataloguing code for British Museum 1839: Invention of Photography, process for multiple prints from paper negative 1852: Roget's Thesaurus digitizes word-meanings 1873: Dewey Decimal System digitizes topic-meanings 1888: Kodaks First Camera for the masses by George Eastman 1890: Hollerith's punched-card computer 1895: Cathode-ray tube (CRT) 1939: Joyce's "Finnegans Wake" uses puns to implement diverging plotlines 1940: First electronic computers in US, UK, and Germany 1941: Borges's story "Garden of the Forking Paths" (tribute to Joyce's FW?)

The Era of Big IronAllowing coarse projections of human

reason 1945: Vannevar Bush proposes Memex; ENIAC completed 1948: Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley create first transistor 1954: Skinner's behaviorism inspires 'programmed learning' approach 1957: ARPA formed in response to Sputnik 1960: "Spacewar" first videogame on PDP-1 at MIT 1960: Donald Bitzer initiates PLATO computer-based education project 1962: Nabokov's "Pale Fire" disguises novel as footnotes to a long poem 1963: Doug Engelbart's "A Conceptual Framework" 1963: Quillian lays AI groundwork for semantic nets 1963: ASCII 7-bit standard digitizes alphabet; first 'teletext' 1964: McLuhan's "Understanding Media" postulates global village 1965: Ted Nelson coins the term "hypertext"; Englebart invents the mouse 1966: Cortazar's "Hopscotch" published-- multi-path novel 1968: Englebart's "Augment/NLS" hypertext sys; Brown's HES (Nelson & van Dam) 1968: Alan Kay's "DynaBook" cardboard prototype First Laptop Idea; SCRIPT

Diagram, The Memex

The Network EraA radically new dimension in human

communication. 1969: ARPANET; Ritchie & Thompson's UNIX operating system 1969: FRESS developed at Brown U 1969: Ernst, Newell & Simon's General Problem Solver 1971: Intel 4004 microprocessor 1972: Tomlinson invents email 1972: ZOG development begins at Carnegie Mellon (distributed hypertext) 1973: PLATO Notes early groupware; Waterloo Script? 1974: Ted Nelson's "Computer Lib/Dream Machines" 1974: TCP proposed by Cerf and Kahn 1974: Minsky reifies the 'frame' as data structure for AI 1975: Atari released “PONG” 1976: Don Woods adds fantasy to Wm Crowther's '72 cave adventure -> 1st IF 1976: TROFF?; Michael Shrayer writes Electric Pencil for Altair

The Micro EraPersonal computing brings a burst of innovation. 1977: Apple ][ personal computer 1977: UUCP networked-copy program distributed with Unix 1978: First BBS created by Ward Christensen and Randy Suess 1978: MIT's "Aspen Movie Map" hypermedia videodisc 1979: Truscott & Bellovin's Usenet news; Bartle & Trubshaw first MUD ?1979: choose-your-own-adventure books 1979: WordStar word processing software 1980: Infocom ports Zork to the Apple 1981: Xerox debuts the Star, with mouse and windows 1981/2/3: Development-- KMS (Knowledge Sys.)/ Guide (U Kent)/ TIES (U Md) 1981: Nelson's "Literary Machines"- Xanadu, centralized hypertext archive 1981: French Telecom pioneers nationwide Minitel network 1982: Netnews distributes 500 msgs/day to 100 sites in <100 newsgroups 1983: TCP/IP replaces NCP, defines "Internet" 1983: Randall Trigg's PhD on hypertext "TEXTNET" at U of Maryland

The WYSIWYG EraConflicting standards for aesthetic

computation. 1984: Apple Macintosh bundled w/WYSIWYG word processor MacWrite 1984: Gibson coins 'cyberspace' in "Neuromancer" 1984: Knuth's "Literate Programming", TeX 1984: Guide implemented commercially by Office Workstations 1984/5/6: Devel-- NoteCards (Xerox)/ Intermedia (BrownU)/ Writing Env. (UNC) 1984: Doug Lenat begins Cyc project at MCC (common sense -> logic) 1984: DNS Domain Name Server, Internet hosts break 1000 1985: Adobe Postscript; CD-ROMs; Windows 1.0 [Windows Help?] 1985: The WELL offers Silicon Valley a community BBS 1985: Janet Walker creates Symbolics "Document Examiner" 1986: Goldfarb's SGML standard adopted 1986: NSFnet backbone opens Internet access to all; NNTP speeds netnews

The Hypertext EraPersonal hypertext generates

excitement. 1987: Apple bundles HyperCard with every Macintosh 1987: Hypertext '87 Workshop held in North Carolina 1987: Conklin's "Hypertext: An Introduction and Survey" 1987: Internet hosts break 10,000; 1000 news msgs/day in 300 groups 1989: Tim Berners-Lee proposes WorldWide Web 1989: 100,000 Internet hosts; ?4,000 news msgs/day in ?500 newsgroups 1989: Autodesk funds Xanadu project development (dropped 1992) 1989: IBM's LinkWay & IRIS Intermedia 3.0 released commercially 1989: Schneiderman & Kearsley's "Hypertext Hands-On"; Joyce's "Afternoon" 1990: ECHT (European Conference on Hypertext) 1990: HTML; Deutsch, Emtage, & Heelan's Archie; Lotus Notes? 1991: Sony's Data Discman; Franklin's Electronic Bible 1991: Lindner & McCahill's Gopher; Kahle's WAIS

The WWWeb EraGlobal hypertext.

1992: CERN ?releases WWWeb [http?] 1992: 1,000,000 Internet hosts; 10,000 news msgs/day in ?1000 newsgroups 1992: Ed Krol's "Whole Internet Guide" is a bestseller 1992: alt.hypertext newsgroup created 1993: Int'l Wrkshp on Hypermedia & Hypertext Standards, Amsterdam (April) 1993: NCSA Mosaic 1.0 for X Windows (June) 1993: WWW dvlprs conf, Cambridge MA (August); Hypertext Conf, Seattle (Nov) 1993: "A Hard Day's Night" CD-ROM from Voyager; US White House on WWWeb 1993: "Myst" by Robyn and Rand Miller, "Doom" by ID released 1994: WWWeb byte-traffic passes Gopher byte-traffic on NSFnet (March) 1994: Confs: Geneva, Intl WWW; Vancvr, Ed Multimed; Edinbrgh, Hypermed Tech 1994: Clark & Andreessen form Mosaic (-> Netscape), release 1st beta