History

We will know first what is communication.”The imparting or exchanging of information by speaking, writing, or using some other medium”.

The history of telecommunication – the transmission of signals over a distance for the purpose of communication – began thousands of years ago with the use of smoke signals and drums in Africa, America and parts of Asia. In the 1790s the first fixed semaphore systems emerged in Europe however it was not until the 1830s that electrical telecommunication systems started to appear.

Pre-electric

• AD 26–37 – Roman Emperor Tiberius rules the empire from the island of Capri by signaling messages with metal mirrors to reflect the sun.
• 1520 – Ships on Ferdinand Magellan‘s voyage signal to each other by firing cannon and raising flags.

Telegraph

• 1792 – Claude Chappe establishes the first long-distance semaphore telegraph line.
• 1831 – Joseph Henry proposes and builds an electric telegraph.
• 1836 – Samuel Morse develops the Morse code.
• 1843 – Samuel Morse builds the first long distance electric telegraph line.

Landline telephone

• 1876 – Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas A. Watson exhibit an electric telephone in Boston.
• 1889 – Almon Strowger patents the direct dial telephone.

Phonograph

• 1877 – Thomas Edison patents the phonograph.

Radio and television

• 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 – Full-scale commercial television is first broadcast.
• 1963 – First geosynchronous communications satellite is launched, 17.5 years after Arthur C. Clarke‘s article.
• 1999 – Sirius satellite radio is introduced.

Fax

• 1843 – Patent issued for the “Electric Printing Telegraph”, a very early forerunner of the fax machine
• 1926 – Commercial availability of the radiofax
• 1964 – First modern fax machine commercially available (Long Distance Xerography)

Mobile telephone

• 1947 – Douglas H. Ring and W. Rae Young of Bell Labs propose a cell-based approach which led to “cellular phones.”
• 1981 – Nordic Mobile Telephone, the world’s first automatic mobile phone is put into operation
• 1991 – GSM is put into operation
• 1992 – Neil Papworth sends the first SMS (or text message).
• 1999 – 45% of Australians have a mobile phone.

Computers and Internet

• 1949 – Claude Elwood Shannon, the “father of information theory“, mathematically proves the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem.
• 1965 – First email sent (at MIT).^[7]
• 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.^[8]
• 1971 – Erna Schneider Hoover invent a computerized switching system for telephone traffic.
• 1971 – 8-inch floppy disk removable storage medium for computers is introduced.^[9]
• 1975 – “First list servers are introduced.”^[9]
• 1976 – The personal computer (PC) market is born.
• 1977 – Donald Knuth begins work on TeX.
• 1981 – Hayes Smartmodem introduced.^[10]
• 1983 – Microsoft Word software is launched.^[11]
• 1985 – AOL is launched.
• 1989 – Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau build the prototype system which became the World Wide Web at CERN.
• 1989 – WordPerfect 5.1 word processing software released.^[10]
• 1991 – Anders Olsson transmits solitary waves through an optical fiber with a data rate of 32 billion bits per second.
• 1992 – Internet2 organization is created.
• 1992 – IBM ThinkPad 700C laptop computer created. It was lightweight compared to its predecessors.^[10]
• 1993 – Mosaic graphical web browser is launched.^[12]
• 1994 – Internet radio broadcasting is born.
• 1996 – Motorola StarTAC mobile phone introduced. It was significantly smaller than previous cellphones.^[10]
• 1997 – SixDegrees.com is launched, the first of a number of early social networking services
• 1998 – Lotus Notes software is launched.^[12]
• 1999 – Napster peer-to-peer file sharing is launched.^[10]
• 2001 – Cyworld adds social networking features and becomes the first of a number of mass-market social networking service
• 2003 – Skype video calling software is launched.
• 2004 – Facebook is launched, becoming the largest social networking site in 2009.
• 2005 – YouTube, the video sharing site, is launched.
• 2006 – Twitter is launched.
• 2007 – iPhone is launched.
• 2009 – Whatsapp is launched.
• 2010 – Instagram is launched.
• 2011 – Snapchat is launched.
• 2015 – Discord is launched.