1588
Agostino Ramelli designed a "reading wheel", which allowed browsing through a large number of documents without moving from one spot to another.
The device presented a large number of books - a small library - laid open on lecterns on a kind of ferry-wheel. It allowed skipping chapters and browsing through pages by turning the wheel to bring lectern after lectern before the eyes. Ramelli's reading wheel thus linked ideas and texts and reminds of today's browsing software used to navigate the
1597
The first newspaper is printed in Europe.
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Although Internet advertising only really started in 1994, revenues showed a steady and fast growth. In 1997 US$ 906.5 million were spent on on-line advertising. Compared with advertising revenue for the television industry in equivalent dollars for its third year, the Internet was slightly ahead, at US$ 907 million compared to television's US$ 834 million. 1998 on-line advertising grew by 112 percent to US$ 1.92 billion in revenues, and is on track to hit US$ 4 billion in 1999, which would put Internet advertising at about 2 percent of the U.S. ad market.
Table: Spending on On-Line Advertising by Category
(first quarter 1999)
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Table: Types of On-Line Advertising
(first quarter 1999)
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Source: Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB).
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FREEnet is an academic and research network, interconnecting computer networks of research institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences, universities, colleges, and other research and academic institutions. It was established in 1991 by the N.D. Zelinsky Institute of Organic Chemistry at the Center of Computer Assistance to Chemical Research. It provides its more than 350 members of the academic and educational community with all types of basic Internet services and various information services.
Strategies and Policies
FREEnets general intention is to become a backbone infrastructure providing:
Open networking services for efficient access to the network and information resources located both in Russia and all over the Internet.
Reliable network connectivity for research, academic and educational communities in Russia and abroad.
Worldwide access to science and information resources of the Russian Academy of Sciences, universities and colleges in Russia.
Assistance to the progress of Russian based fundamental research.
Assistance to the development and application of modern information technologies in education.
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Universally accepted system of writing used by and for blind persons and consisting of a code of 63 characters, each made up of one to six raised dots arranged in a six-position matrix or cell. These Braille characters are embossed in lines on paper and read by passing the fingers lightly over the manuscript. Louis Braille, who was blinded at the age of three, invented the system in 1824 while a student at the Institution Nationale des Jeunes Aveugles (National Institute for Blind Children), Paris.
The first of the great medieval universities was established at Bologna. At the beginning, universities predominantly offered a kind of do-it-yourself publishing service.
Books still had to be copied by hand and were so rare that a copy of a widely desired book qualified for being invited to a university. Holding a lecture equaled to reading a book aloud, like a priest read from the Bible during services. Attending a lecture equaled to copy a lecture word by word, so you had your own copy of a book, thus enabling you to hold a lecture, too.
For further details see History of the Idea of a University,
Aeneas Tacitus, a Greek military scientist and cryptographer, invented an optical communication system that combines water and beacon telegraphy. Torches indicated the beginnings and the ends of message transmissions while water jars were used to transmit the messages. These jars had a plugged standard-size hole drilled on the bottom side and were filled with water. As those who sent and those who received the message unplugged the jars simultaneously, the water drained out. Because the transmitted messages corresponded to water levels, the sender indicated by torch signal that the appropriate water level has been reached. It is a disadvantage that the possible messages are restricted to a given code, but as this system was mainly used for military purposes, this was offset by the advantage that it was almost impossible for outsiders to understand these messages unless they possessed the codebook.
With communication separated from transportation, the distant became near.
Tacitus' telegraph system was very fast and not excelled until
For further information see Joanne Chang & Anna Soellner, Decoding Device,
The Roman smoke signals network consisted of towers within visible range of each other and had a total length of about 4500 kilometers. It was used for military signaling.
For a similar telegraph network in ancient Greece see