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4000 - 1000 B.C. |
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4th millennium B.C.
In Sumer  writing is invented.
Writing and calculating came into being at about the same time. The first pictographs carved into clay tablets were used for administrative purposes. As an instrument for the administrative bodies of early empires, which began to rely on the collection, storage, processing and transmission of data, the skill of writing was restricted to only very few. Being more or less separated tasks, writing and calculating converge in today's computers.
Letters are invented so that we might be able to converse even with the absent, says Saint Augustine. The invention of writing made it possible to transmit and store information. No longer the ear predominates; face-to-face communication becomes more and more obsolete for administration and bureaucracy. Standardization and centralization become the constituents of high culture and vast empires as Sumer and China.
3200 B.C.
In Sumer the seal is invented.
About 3000 B.C.
In Egypt papyrus scrolls and hieroglyphs are used.
About 1350 B.C.
In Assyria the cuneiform script is invented.
1200 B.C.
According to Aeschylus, the conquest of the town of Troy was transmitted via torch signals.
About 1100 B.C.
Egyptians use homing pigeons to deliver military information.
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World Wide Web (WWW)
Probably the most significant Internet service, the World Wide Web is not the essence of the Internet, but a subset of it. It is constituted by documents that are linked together in a way you can switch from one document to another by simply clicking on the link connecting these documents. This is made possible by the Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML), the authoring language used in creating World Wide Web-based documents. These so-called hypertexts can combine text documents, graphics, videos, sounds, and Java applets, so making multimedia content possible.
Especially on the World Wide Web, documents are often retrieved by entering keywords into so-called search engines, sets of programs that fetch documents from as many servers as possible and index the stored information. (For regularly updated lists of the 100 most popular words that people are entering into search engines, click  here). No search engine can retrieve all information on the whole World Wide Web; every search engine covers just a small part of it.
Among other things that is the reason why the World Wide Web is not simply a very huge database, as is sometimes said, because it lacks consistency. There is virtually almost infinite storage capacity on the Internet, that is true, a capacity, which might become an almost everlasting too, a prospect, which is sometimes consoling, but threatening too.
According to the Internet domain survey of the Internet Software Consortium the number of Internet host computers is growing rapidly. In October 1969 the first two computers were connected; this number grows to 376.000 in January 1991 and 72,398.092 in January 2000.
World Wide Web History Project, http://www.webhistory.org/home.html
 http://www.searchwords.com/
http://www.islandnet.com/deathnet/
http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/199...
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