1913: Henry Ford and the Assembly Line Realizing that he'd need to lower costs Henry Ford (Ford Motor Company) was inspired to create a more efficient way to produce his cars. Looking at other industries he and his team found four principles, which furthered their goal: interchangeable parts, continuous flow, division of labor, and reducing wasted effort. The use of interchangeable parts meant making the individual pieces of the car the same every time. Therefore the machines had to be improved, but once they were adjusted, they could be operated by a low-skilled laborer. To reduce the time workers spent moving around Ford refined the flow of work in the manner that as one task was finished another began, with minimum time spent in set-up. Furthermore he divided the labor by breaking the assembly of the legendary Model T in 84 distinct steps. Frederick Taylor, the creator of "scientific management" was consulted to do time and motion studies to determine the exact speed at which the work should proceed and the exact motions workers should use to accomplish their tasks. Putting all those findings together in 1913 Ford installed the first moving assembly line that was ever used for large-scale manufacturing. His cars could then be produced at a record-breaking rate, which meant that he could lower the price, but still make a good profit by selling more cars. For the first time work processes were largely automated by machinery.

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Linking and Framing: Cases Mormon Church v. Sandra and Jerald Tanner In a ruling of December 1999, a federal judge in Utah temporarily barred two critics of the Mormon Church from posting on their website the Internet addresses of other sites featuring pirated copies of a Mormon text. The Judge said that it was likely that Sandra and Jerald Tanner had engaged in contributory copyright infringement when they posted the addresses of three Web sites that they knew, or should have known, contained the copies. Kaplan, Carl S.: Copyright Decision Threatens Freedom to Link. In: New York Times. December 10, 1999. Universal Studios v. Movie-List The website Movie-List, which features links to online, externally hosted movie trailers has been asked to completely refrain from linking to any of Universal Studio's servers containing the trailers as this would infringe copyright. Cisneros, Oscar S.: Universal: Don't Link to Us. In: Wired. July 27, 1999. More cases concerned with the issue of linking, framing and the infringement of intellectual property are published in: Ross, Alexandra: Copyright Law and the Internet: Selected Statutes and Cases.

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1950s: The Beginnings of Artificial Intelligence (AI) Research With the development of the electronic computer in 1941 and the stored program computer in 1949 the conditions for research in artificial intelligence (AI) were given. Still, the observation of a link between human intelligence and machines was not widely observed until the late 1950s. A discovery that influenced much of the early development of AI was made by Norbert Wiener. He was one of the first to theorize that all intelligent behavior was the result of feedback mechanisms. Mechanisms that could possibly be simulated by machines. A further step towards the development of modern AI was the creation of The Logic Theorist. Designed by Newell and Simon in 1955 it may be considered the first AI program. The person who finally coined the term artificial intelligence and is regarded as the father of AI is John McCarthy. In 1956 he organized a conference "The Dartmouth summer research project on artificial intelligence" to draw the talent and expertise of others interested in machine intelligence for a month of brainstorming. In the following years AI research centers began forming at the Carnegie Mellon University as well as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and new challenges were faced: 1) the creation of systems that could efficiently solve problems by limiting the search and 2) the construction of systems that could learn by themselves. One of the results of the intensified research in AI was a novel program called The General Problem Solver, developed by Newell and Simon in 1957 (the same people who had created The Logic Theorist). It was an extension of Wiener's feedback principle and capable of solving a greater extent of common sense problems. While more programs were developed a major breakthrough in AI history was the creation of the LISP (LISt Processing) language by John McCarthy in 1958. It was soon adopted by many AI researchers and is still in use today.

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Expert system Expert systems are advanced computer programs that mimic the knowledge and reasoning capabilities of an expert in a particular discipline. Their creators strive to clone the expertise of one or several human specialists to develop a tool that can be used by the layman to solve difficult or ambiguous problems. Expert systems differ from conventional computer programs as they combine facts with rules that state relations between the facts to achieve a crude form of reasoning analogous to artificial intelligence. The three main elements of expert systems are: (1) an interface which allows interaction between the system and the user, (2) a database (also called the knowledge base) which consists of axioms and rules, and (3) the inference engine, a computer program that executes the inference-making process. The disadvantage of rule-based expert systems is that they cannot handle unanticipated events, as every condition that may be encountered must be described by a rule. They also remain limited to narrow problem domains such as troubleshooting malfunctioning equipment or medical image interpretation, but still have the advantage of being much lower in costs compared with paying an expert or a team of specialists.

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