1990 to 2000 Timeline

Alan Emtage, Bill Heelan, and Peter J. Deutsch, students at McGill University, Montreal, Canada, wrote ARCHIE, a program designed to index FTP archives.  ARCHIE was the first “search engine,” as distinct from a “web search engine.”

The Library of Congress began making its collections available in digital form through the American Memory project. Initially the files for American Memory were distributed to 44 schools and libraries on CD-ROMS.

Mitchell Kapor, John Gilmore, and John Perry Barlow founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, San Francisco, California, to defend individual rights in the digital world. The three had met on The Well.

Motivation for creation of the organization was the

“massive search and seizure on Steve Jackson Games by the United States Secret Service early in 1990.” The first successful achievement of the new foundation was to lay “the groundwork for the successful representation of Steven Jackson Games (SJG) in a Federal court case to prosecute the United States Secret Service for unlawfully raiding their offices and seizing computers.”

The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) was founded in Washington, D.C.  By the end of its first year its membership consisted of 18 institutions.

In 1990 the ARPANET discontinued operations and merged into the Internet

After a one-off event in 1984, annual TED conferences begain in 1990 in Montery, California.  In 2012 the events were held in Long Beach and Palm Springs in the U.S. and in Europe and Asia, offering live streaming video of the talks on the Internet. The TED organization is based in New York City and Vancouver.

TED speakers are given a maximum of 18 minutes to present their material in the most exciting and engaging way that they can, often through storytelling.

"Since June 2006 the talks have been offered for free viewing online, under Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs Creative Commons license, through TED.com. As of November 2011, over 1,050 talks are available free online. By January 2009 they had been viewed 50 million times. In June 2011, the viewing figure stood at more than 500 million, and on Tuesday November 13, 2012, TED Talks had been watched one billion times worldwide, reflecting a still growing global audience."

"TED was conceived by architect and graphic designer Richard Saul Wurman, who observed a convergence of the fields of technology, entertainment and design. The first conference, organized by Wurman and Harry Marks in 1984, featured demos of the Sony compact disc, and one of the first demonstrations of the Apple Macintosh computer.Presentations were given by famous mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot and influential members of the digerati community, like Nicholas Negroponte en Steward Brand. The event was financially unsuccessful, however, and it took 6 years before the second conference was organized. From 1990 onward, a growing community of "TEDsters" has been gathering annually at the invitation-only event in Monterey, California, until 2009, when it was relocated to Long Beach, California due to a substantial increase of attendees" (Wikipedia article on Ted (conference), accessed 12-26-2012).

In July 1990 lawyer Martine Rothblatt founded Satellite CD Radio, Inc., and petitioned the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to create a Satellite Digital Audio Radio Service in an underutilized portion of the 2300 MHz frequency band.

"Her vision was to adapt GPS patch antennas to a national, digital, radio service, for which she claimed in her Petition for Rulemaking that there was a large, unmet public need. Rothblatt first demonstrated the service via terrestrial emulators of a satellite to FCC officials in 1992 outside the offices of WPFW in Washington, DC. In that year her daughter was diagnosed with life-threatening pulmonary arterial hypertension, and she resigned as Chairman & CEO to focus on finding a cure for the medical condition. She selected David Margolese to succeed her, and he subsequently venture capitalized US$20 million over the next five years lobbying the Federal Communications Commission to allow satellite radio to be deployed" (Wikipedia article on Sirius Satellite Radio, accessed 03-23-2012).

On February 14, 2002 David Margolese launched Sirius Satellite Radio on a pay for service subscription basis in four states, extending the service nationwide in July of that year.

American sculptor James Sanborn created the cryptographic sculpture, Kryptos, on the grounds of the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia.

"The name Kryptos comes from the Greek word for 'hidden', and the theme of the sculpture is 'intelligence gathering.' The most prominent feature is a large vertical S-shaped copper screen resembling a scroll, or piece of paper emerging from a computer printer, covered with characters comprising encrypted text. The characters consist of the 26 letters of the standard Roman alphabet and question marks cut out of the copper. This 'inscription' contains four separate enigmatic messages, each apparently encrypted with a different cipher."

"The ciphertext on one half of the main sculpture contains 869 characters in total, however Sanborn released information in April 2006 stating that an intended letter on the main half of Kryptos was missing. This would bring the total number of characters to 870 on the main portion. The other half of the sculpture comprises a Vigenère encryption tableau, comprising 869 characters, if spaces are counted. Sanborn worked with a retiring CIA employee named Ed Scheidt, Chairman of the CIA Cryptographic Center, to come up with the cryptographic systems used on the sculpture. Sanborn has since revealed that the sculpture contains a riddle within a riddle which will be solvable only after the four encrypted passages have been decrypted. He said that he gave the complete solution at the time of the sculpture's dedication to CIA director William H. Webster. However, in an interview for wired.com in January 2005, Sanborn said that he had not given Webster the entire solution. He did, however, confirm that where in part 2 it says "Who knows the exact location? Only WW," that "WW" was intended to refer to William Webster. He also confirmed that should he die before it becomes deciphered that there will be someone able to confirm the solution" (Wikipedia article on Kryptos, accessed 05-09-2009).

Steven Levy, "Mission Impossible: The Code that Even the CIA Can't Crack," Wired 17.05 (May 2009).

Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland,  issued World Wide Web: Proposal for a Hypertext Project.

At CERN Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first web page on a NeXT workstation.

During the Christmas holiday Tim Berners-Lee wrote the software tools necessary for a working World Wide Web:

1, The first web browser called WorldWideWeb.

2. A WYSIWYG HTML editor

3. The first Web server, CERN httpd. It was operational on Christmas Day 1990.

The National Science Foundation (NSF), Arlington, Virginia, lifted restrictions on the commercial use of the NSFNET Backbone Network, clearing the way for electronic commerce.

Adobe, San Jose, California, introduced the Portable Document Format (PDF) to aid in the transfer of documents across platforms. PDF is a file format used to represent a document in a manner independent of the application software, hardware, and operating system used to create it.

Apple introduced TrueType in competition with Adobe's PostScript. The first TrueType fonts available were Times Roman, Helvetica and Courier.

J. Craig Venter and colleagues at the National Institute of Health described a fast new approach to gene discovery using Expressed Sequence Tags (ESTs).

Although controversial when first introduced, ESTs were soon widely employed both in public and private sector research. They proved economical and versatile, used not only for rapid identification of new genes, but also for analyzing gene expression, gene families, and possible disease-causing mutations.

The first webcam, called the CoffeeCam, pointed at the Trojan room coffee pot in the computer science department of Cambridge University.

"The camera was installed on a local network in 1991 using a video capture card on an Acorn Archimedes computer. Employing the X Window System protocol, Quentin Stafford-Fraser wrote the client software and Paul Jardetzky wrote the server. When web browsers gained the ability to display images in March 1993, it was clear this would be an easier way to make the picture available. The camera was connected to the Internet in November 1993 by Daniel Gordon and Martyn Johnson. It therefore became visible to any Internet user and grew into a popular landmark of the early web." (quoted from the Trojan Room Coffee Machine article in Wikipedia, accessed 11-23-2008).

The camera was finally switched off on August 22, 2001. The final image captured by the camera could be viewed at its homepage in November 2008.

American computer engineers Brewster Kahle and Harry Morris, both of Thinking Machines, Cambridge, Massachusetts, in collaboration with Apple Computer, Dow Jones, and KPMG Peat Marwick, developed the Wide Area Information Server or WAIS system. WAIS was a client-server text searching system that used the ANSI Standard Z39.50 Information Retrieval Service Definition and Protocol Specifications for Library Applications to search index databases on remote computers.

"Public WAIS was often used as a full text search engine for individual Internet Gopher servers, supplementing the popular Veronica system which only searched the menu titles of Gopher sites. WAIS and Gopher share the World Wide Web's client–server architecture and a certain amount of its functionality. The WAIS protocol is influenced largely by the z39.50 protocol designed for networking library catalogs. It allows a text-based search, and retrieval following a search. Gopher provides a free text search mechanism, but principally uses menus. A menu is a list of titles, from which the user may pick one. While gopher space is a web containing many loops, the menu system gives the user the impression of a tree.

"The W3 data model is similar to the gopher model, except that menus are generalized to hypertext documents. In both cases, simple file servers generate the menus or hypertext directly from the file structure of a server. The W3 hypertext model gives the program more power to communicate the options available to the reader, as it can include headings and various forms of list structure" (Wikipedia article on Wide Area Information Server, accessed 01-06-2012).

The Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 (TCPA) was passed by the United States Congress and signed into law by President George H. W. Bush as Public Law 102-243, amending the Communications Act of 1934.

"The TCPA is the primary law in the US governing the conduct of telephone solicitations, ie. telemarketing. The TCPA restricts the use of automatic dialing systems, artificial or prerecorded voice messages, SMS text messages received by cell phones, and the use of fax machines to send unsolicited advertisements. It also specifies several technical requirements for fax machines, autodialers, and voice messaging systems -- principally with provisions requiring identification and contact information of the entity using the device to be contained in the message" (Wikipedia article on Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991, accessed 10-31-2009).

In 1991 typographer Sumner Stone, the first director of typography at Adobe Systems, published On Stone. The Art and Use of Typography on the Personal Computer in San Francisco, California. This book, set in Stone's "Stone" family of type faces developed for Adobe and announced in March 1988, was probably the first book on typographic design for the personal computer set in a digital typeface that originated in a page description language; in this case, PostScript.

Tim Berners-Lee released the first web browser, WorldWideWeb, to a number of people at CERN. This release introduced the web to the high energy physics community, and began the spread of the World Wide Web.

Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR) held the First Conference on Computers, Freedom & Privacy in Burlingame, California.

The world's first GSM (Global System for Mobil communications) phone call was made in Finland on the Radiolinja network. 

Linus Torvalds, a 21-year-old student at the University of Helsinki in Finland, wrote the Linux kernel.  This was the origin of a software development project that brought the open-source movement into the mainstream. Torvalds started with a task switcher in Intel 80386 assembly language and a terminal driver. Then, on August 26, 1991, he posted the following to comp.os.minix, a newsgroup on Usenet:

"Hello everybody out there using minix-

"I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since April, and is starting to get ready. I'd like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other things).

"I've currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to work. This implies that I'll get something practical within a few months, and I'd like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions are welcome, but I won't promise I'll implement them :-)

Linus (torva...@kruuna.helsinki.fi)

"PS. Yes - it's free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs. It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that's all I have :-(."

After that, many people contributed code to the project. By September 1991, Linux version 0.01 was released. It had 10,239 lines of code.

On July 1, 1991 second generation 2G cellular telecom networks were commercially launched on the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) standard in Finland on Radiolinja's network.

"Three primary benefits of 2G networks over their predecessors were that phone conversations were digitally encrypted, 2G systems were significantly more efficient on the spectrum allowing for far greater mobile phone penetration levels; and 2G introduced data services for mobile, starting with SMS text messages.

"After 2G was launched, the previous mobile telephone systems were retrospectively dubbed 1G. While radio signals on 1G networks are analog, and on 2G networks are digital, both systems use digital signaling to connect the radio towers (which listen to the handsets) to the rest of the telephone system" (Wikipedia article on GSM, accessed 04-11-2009).

WorldWideWeb - Executive Summary by Tim Berners-Lee of CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, posted on the alt.hypertext newsgroup, gave a short summary of the World Wide Web project, explained where to download a web server and line mode browser, and made it available all over the world at no cost.

"The WWW project merges the techniques of information retrieval and hypertext to make an easy but powerful global information system."

"The project started with the philosophy that much academic information should be freely available to anyone. It aims to allow information sharing within internationally dispersed teams, and the dissemination of information by support groups."

Mark P. McCahill and team at the University of Minnesota developed the Gopher protocol, "a simple way to navigate distributed information resources on the Internet," but without hyperlinks.  This was a significant disadvantage to the World Wide Web.

They announced the Internet Gopher on USENET. Its central goals were:

"* A file-like hierarchical arrangement that would be familiar to users

"* A simple syntax

"* A system that can be created quickly and inexpensively

"* Extending the file system metaphor to include things like searches

" The source of the name "Gopher" is claimed to be threefold:

"1. Users instruct it to 'go for' information

"2. It does so through a web of menu items analogous to gopher holes

"3. The sports teams of the University of Minnesota are the Golden Gophers (Wikipedia article on Gopher (protocol), accessed 06-04-2009).

The first volume of the Unicode standard 1.0 was published by the Unicode Consortium, Mountain View, California.

"Unicode is a computing industry standard allowing computers to consistently represent and manipulate text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. Developed in tandem with the Universal Character Set standard and published in book form as The Unicode Standard, the latest version [5.2, 2009] of Unicode consists of a repertoire of more than 107,000 characters covering 90 scripts [including Egyptian hieroglyphs] a set of code charts for visual reference, an encoding methodology and set of standard character encodings, an enumeration of character properties such as upper and lower case, a set of reference data computer files, and a number of related items, such as character properties, rules for normalization, decomposition, collation, rendering, and bidirectional display order (for the correct display of text containing both right-to-left scripts, such as Arabic or Hebrew, and left-to-right scripts) " (Wikipedia article on Unicode, accessed 01-29-2010).

One of the first U.S. cases related to Cyberspace law was decided: Cubby v. CompuServe, 776 F. Supp. 135 (1991). It "suggested that online companies would not be liable for the acts of their customers. CompuServe exerted no control whatsoever over the presumably false and defamatory statements which were the subject of the suit; their forum sysops were independent entrepreneurs. Prior to this decision, the liability risk was largely undecided."

Through the efforts of  physicist and software developer Paul Kunz and Terry Hung, the first web server in North America went live at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC).

The first image posted to the web was a photograph of a CERN singing group called Les Horribles Cernettes.

In 1992 there were 50 Web Servers on the Internet.

The Internet Society (ISOC) was chartered in 1992.  Its headquarters are in Reston, Virginia. In 2012 the society had 80 national chapters and 50,000 individual members.

J. Craig Venter left the National Institutes of Health and founded The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR), Rockville, Maryland.

The School of Information and Library Science and the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at The University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill  founded an archive and information sharing environment designed to be "contributor-driven and content-managed." Originally one of the SunSITES, sponsored by Sun Microsystems, it was a pioneering collaboration of electronic librarianship, journalism and telecommunication.

"After living under the name MetaLab for a period of time, the environment is now known as ibiblio. It has grown to host one of the Internet's most active and respected software archives, coexisting with music archives, large text database projects, and special exhibits. The diverse management and content models of ibiblio complement and inform each other to give users the most useful and relevant information about a variety of topics. Examples include: single content manager archives ranging from folk music to travelogues, academic and librarian-managed archives, historical enthusiast-managed archives such as the Pearl Harbor archives, author-managed archives involving over 100 active authors with special interests such as the Linux Documentation Project.

"Through these different types of archive models, the resources available on ibiblio range from free applications and operating systems software to graphics and art, from fiction, poetry, literature, and music to religion, politics and cultural studies. ibiblio also offers streaming audio and video. ibiblio currently averages about 1.5 million information requests a day." (ibiblio, accessed 03-19-2009).

UNESCO, Paris, France, launched the Memory of the World Programme, an international initiative to guard against collective amnesia, by aiming at preservation and dissemination of valuable archive holdings and library collections worldwide.

In 1992 Sony Corporation introduced the Data Discman, an electronic book device marketed in the United States to college students and international travelers. The Data Discman had little success outside of Japan.

The Data Discman's purpose was quick access to electronic reference information on a pre-recorded disc. Searches for information on disc were entered using a QWERTY-style keyboard, and utilized the "Yes" and "No" keys. A typical Data Discman model had a low resolution small grayscale LCD, a CD drive unit, and a low-power computer. Early versions of the device were incapable of playing audio CDs. Software was prerecorded, and featured encyclopedias, foreign language dictionaries, novels, etc.  All Data Discmans had audio and video output capabilities.

American writer Neal Stephenson published the science fiction novel, Snow Crash. In it he coined the term Metaverse to describe "how a virtual reality-based Internet might evolve in the future."

On December 3, 1992, using a personal computer, Neil Papworth of Sema Group in Newbury, Berkshire, England sent the first commercial SMS  text message to Richard Jarvis of Vodafone who received it on his on his Orbitel 901 mobile phone. The text of the message was "Merry Christmas." Jarvis did not reply because there was no way to send a text from a phone at the time. That had to wait for Nokia's first mobile phone in 1993.

IBM developed scalable parallel systems, joining multiple computer processors and breaking down complex, data-intensive jobs to speed their completion.

In 1993 traffic on the Internet expanded at a 341,634 percent growth rate.

OCLC, Dublin, Ohio, published Electronic Dewey, the first library classification system published in electronic form.

At the Towards Federation 2001 (TF2001) meeting a group from the Australian library and archives sectors was organized to develop appropriate guidelines for the preservation of information in electronic form. This evolved into the National Library of Australia's Preserving Access to Digital Information Initiative (PADI).

Fred Mintzer and colleagues at IBM photographed and developed a database of about 20,000 digital images for the Vatican Library. This was the first library of digital images on the Internet.

Richard Weatherford established Interloc, "the first successful online bookseller service." Arguing that "our mission is to help booksellers find books for their own customers," Weatherford opened the database to booksellers only. In 1997 Interloc evolved into Alibris.

Villanova Law Review Symposium: The Congress, The Courts, and Computer-Based Communications Networks: Answering Questions About Access and Content Control was "perhaps the first law review symposium dedicated to cyberspace."

At this time it was estimated that in China, a country with about 1,000,000,000 people, only about 2000 people used the Internet.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded  at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science [MIT/LCS] in collaboration with CERN.

David Allen and Harold Williams founded Teleport, the first commercially successful telepresence company. Its name was later changed to TeleSuite.

"The original intent was to develop a system that could allow families to interact across great distances without the hassle or costliness of flying. The first systems (which they called TeleSuites) looked more like something out of an upper class home rather than a conference room in an office suite. . . . " 

The British Library and Kevin S. Kiernan at the University of Kentucky embarked on the Electronic Beowulf project, an effort to photograph and publish high resolution electronic copies of the manuscript. The Electronic Beowulf was a pioneering effort in the digital preservation, restoration, and dissemination of manuscript material.

"The equipment we are using to capture the images is the Roche/Kontron ProgRes 3012 digital camera, which can scan any text, from a letter or a word to an entire page, at 2000 x 3000 pixels in 24-bit color. The resulting images at this maximum resolution are enormous, about 21-25 MB, and tax the capabilities of the biggest machines. Three or four images - three or four letters or words if that is what we are scanning - will fill up an 88 MB hard disk, and we have found that no single image of this size can be processed in real time without at least 64 MB of RAM. In our first experiments in June with the camera and its dedicated hardware, we transmitted a half-dozen images by phone line from the Conservation Studio of the British Library to the Wenner Gren Imaging Laboratory at the University of Kentucky, where identical hardware was set up to receive the data. Most of these images are now available on the Internet through anonymous ftp or Mosaic."

Steven Spielberg directed the science fiction techno-thriller film Jurassic Park, based on the novel by Michael Crichton, and adapted by Crichton for the screen. It was produced by Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment, Universal City, California. With gross sales of $914,000,000 when released, Jurassic Park was also among the highest-grossing and most profitable films ever made.

The plot of Jurassic Park centered around the possibility of re-creating dinosaurs by

"cloning genetic material found in mosquitoes that fed on dinosaur blood, preserved in Dominican amber. The DNA from these samples was spliced with DNA from frogs to fill in sequence gaps. Only female dinosaurs are created in order to prevent uncontrolled breeding within the park" (Wikipedia article on Jurassic Park [film], accessed 05-25-2009)

This was the first film to integrate computer generated images and animatronic dinosaurs seemlessly into live action scenes.

"In 1993, Dr. Glen Barry invented blogging, defined as web based commentary, linking to other articles. The "Forest Protection Blog" (originally entitled "Gaia's Forest Conservation Archives") at http://forests.org/blog/ was also the first political blog, as Dr. Barry campaigned there for forest protection and documented these efforts as his Ph.D. project. The first blog initially used the gopher protocol, and has been on the web continuously since Jan. 1995, making it the web's first and longest continuously running blog. Prior to this, Dr. Barry provided forest conservation materials via email and bulletin board since 1989. The work has since evolved into the world's largest environmental portals at http://www.ecoearth.info/" (Wikipedia article on History of blogging timeline, accessed 04-21-2009).

Psychologist, neuroscientist and cognitive scientist James A. Anderson of Brown University, Providence, RI, published "The BSB Model: A simple non-linear autoassociative network," M. Hassoun (Ed), Associative Neural Memories: Theory and Implementation (1993).  Anderson's neural networks were applied to models of human concept formation, decision making, speech perception, and models of vision.

Anderson, J. A., Spoehr, K. T. and Bennett, D.J.  "A study in numerical perversity: Teaching arithmetic to a neural network,"  D.S. Levine and M. Aparicio (Eds.) Neural Networks for Knowledge Representation and Inference, (1994).

"In 1993 total Internet traffic was around 100 terabytes for the year" (http://www.disco-tech.org/2007/10/an_exabyte_here_an_exabyte_the.html, accessed 06-04-2009).

In 1993 there were 250 web servers on the Internet.

Peter F. Brown and colleagues at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, published "The Mathematics of Statistical Machine Translation: Parameter Estimation," Computational Linguistics, 19 (2) 263-311:

"We describe a series of five statistical models of the translation process and give algorithms for estimating the parameters of these models given a set of pairs of sentences that are translations of one another. We define a concept of word-by-word alignment between such pairs of sentences. For any given pair of such sentences each of our models assigns a probability to each of the possible word-by-word alignments. We give an algorithm for seeking the most probable of these alignments. Although the algorithm is suboptimal, the alignment thus obtained accounts well for the word-by-word relationships in the pair of sentences. We have a great deal of data in French and English from the proceedings of the Canadian Parliament. Accordingly, we have restricted our work to these two languages; but we,feel that because our algorithms have minimal linguistic content they would work well on other pairs of languages. We also feel, again because of the minimal linguistic content of our algorithms, that it is reasonable to argue that word-by-word alignments are inherent in any sufficiently large bilingual corpus."

"The first ideas of statistical machine translation were introduced by Warren Weaver in 1949, including the ideas of applying Claude Shannon's information theory. Statistical machine translation was re-introduced in 1991 by researchers at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center and has contributed to the significant resurgence in interest in machine translation in recent years. Nowadays it is by far the most widely-studied machine translation method" (Wikipedia article on Statistical machine translation, accessed 05-14-2010).

Mathematician, computer scientist and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge called the creation of the first ultraintelligent machine the Singularity in Omni magazine. Vinge's follow-up paper entitled "What is the Singularity?" presented at the VISION-21 Symposium sponsored by NASA Lewis Research Center( now NASA John H. Glenn Research Center at Lewis Field) and the Ohio Aerospace Institute, March 30-31, 1993, and  slightly changed in the Winter 1993 issue of Whole Earth Review, contained the oft-quoted statement,

"Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly thereafter, the human era will be ended."

"Vinge refines his estimate of the time scales involved, adding, 'I'll be surprised if this event occurs before 2005 or after 2030.

"Vinge continues by predicting that superhuman intelligences, however created, will be able to enhance their own minds faster than the humans that created them. 'When greater-than-human intelligence drives progress," Vinge writes, "that progress will be much more rapid.' This feedback loop of self-improving intelligence, he predicts, will cause large amounts of technological progress within a short period of time" (Wikipedia article on Technological singularity, accessed 05-24-2009).

The science fiction television series Babylon 5 became the first television series to use computer generated images (CGI) as the primary method for its visual effects (rather than using hand-built models). It also marked the first TV use of virtual sets.

Wired 1.01, the first issue of a magazine of cyberculture, was published in San Francisco under the editorship of Kevin Kelly.

Marc Andreesen of the Software Development Group,  National Center for Supercomputing Applications,  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign announced on Usenet the creation of the NCSA Mosaic browser 0.10, and the introduction of the image tag.

In April 1993 AT&T introduced the AT&T EO Personal Communicator, the first tablet computer with wireless connectivity via a cellular phone. The device, which provided wireless voice, email, and fax communications, was developed by GO/Eo, a subsidiary of GO Corporation, both of which were acquired by AT&T in 1993. As advanced as it was, the AT&T Personal Communicator was probably far ahead of the market. EO Inc., 52% owned by AT&T, failed to meet its revenue targets and shut down on July, 1994.

"Two models, the Communicator 440 and 880 were produced and measured about the size of a small clipboard. Both were powered by the AT&T Hobbit chip, created by AT&T specifically for running code from the C programming language. They also contained a host of I/O ports - modem, parallel, serial, VGA out and SCSI. The device came with a wireless cellular network modem, a built-in microphone with speaker and a free subscription to AT&T EasyLink Mail for both fax and e-mail messages.

"Perhaps the most interesting part was the operating system, PenPoint OS, created by GO Corporation. Widely praised for its simplicity and ease of use, the OS never gained widespread use. Also equally compelling was the tightly integrated applications suite, Perspective, licensed to EO by Pensoft" (Wikipedia article on EO Personal Communicator, accessed 02-03-2010).

Ken Maki, The AT&T EO Travel Guide. (1993).

The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), "the UK’s expert on information and digital technologies for education and research," was established "at the University of Bristol under terms of letters of guidance from the Secretaries of State to the newly-established Higher Education Funding Councils for England, Scotland, and Wales, inviting them to establish a Joint Committee to deal with networking and specialist information services."

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign introduced Mosaic, the first graphics-based Web browser, designed and programmed for Unix's X Window System by Marc Andreesen and Eric Bina.

On April 30, 1993 CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, published documents which released the World Wide Web software into the public domain.

Tim O’Reilly, Sebastapol, California, launched the Global Network Navigator. This was the first web portal and the first true commercial website. According to a statement by Tim O'Reilly, it also contained the first online advertising. The Global Network Navigator was sold to America Online in 1995.

Matthew Gray at MIT developed the web crawler, World Wide Web Wanderer, to measure the size of the web.

Later in the year the World Wide Web Wanderer was used to generate an index called the "Wandex", providing what was probably the first web search engine.

Alan Saperstein of Visual Data Corporation, later Onstream Media, introduced streaming video with HotelView, a travel library of 2 minute videos featuring thousands of hotel properties worldwide. This was the beginning of video webcasting over the Internet.

Benny Landa of Indigo, Rehovot, Israel, introduced the Indigo E-Print 1000 digital offset press, incorporating ElectroInk technology, also called ink-based electrophotography. The E-Print 1000 was the first digital offset press.

"Everywhere on the global Internet, which is now roamed by an estimated 15 million computer users, the growth rates are staggering.

"At the National Center for Supercomputer Applications in Champaign, Ill., a new service that answers requests to an electronic library called the World Wide Web, has seen the number of daily queries explode from almost 100,000 requests in June to almost 400,000 in October. Officials at the center say the only solution may be to take a $15 million supercomputer away from its normal scientific number-crunching duties and employ it full time as an electronic librarian.

"This year, information retrieved using a popular searching program called Gopher increased more than 400 percent, to almost 200 billion bytes a month -- about seven million newspaper pages" (John Markoff, http://www.nytimes.com/1993/11/03/business/business-technology-jams-already-on-data-highway.html?sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all, accessed 06-04-2009).

Martijn Koster developed ALIWEB, (Archie Like Indexing for the Web). Along with the World Wide Web Wanderer, this is a candidate for the first web search engine. It was demonstrated at the First International World-Wide Web Conference in May 1994.

"Aliweb allowed users to submit their webpages and add the page description with which they wanted them to be indexed. This empowered webmasters, who could define the terms that would lead users to their pages and also avoided setting bots (as the Wanderer) which used up bandwidth. Aliweb was not very successful as not many people submitted their sites."

Edward A. Fox of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) issued Sourcebook on Digital Libraries. Version 1.0. The earliest reference in the bibliography is the April 1991 issue of Byte magazine. Most other references are to works published in 1992.

At Xerox PARC Vicky Reich and Mark Weiser described proposed electronic features of the "national information infrastructure" in a paper entitled Libraries are More than Information: Situational Aspects of Electronic Libraries. All references cited in this paper are to printed publications.

In 1994 the number of websites reached 10,000. There were 2500 web servers on the Internet.

The National Science Foundation Digital Libraries Initiative made its first six awards. One of these was The Stanford Integrated Digital Library Project:

"This project . . . is to develop the enabling technologies for a single, integrated and universal' library, proving uniform access to the large number of emerging networked information sources and collections. These include both on-line versions of pre-existing works and new works and media of all kinds that will be available on the globally interlinked computer networks of the future. The Integrated Digital Library is broadly defined to include everything from personal information collections, to the collections that one finds today in conventional libraries, to the large data collections shared by scientists. The technology developed in this project will provide the "glue" that will make this worldwide collection usable as a unified entity, in a scalable and economically viable fashion."

In 1994 an early web search engine, the World Wide Web Worm, developed in September 1993 by Oliver McBryan at the University of Colorado at Boulder, had an index of 110,000 pages and web-accessible documents. It received an average of 1500 queries per day.

The NSFNET backbone was upgraded to 155 Mbps as traffic passed 10 trillion bytes per month.

HTTP (Web) packets surpassed FTP traffic as the largest-volume Internet protocol.

NSFNET reverted back to a research network, and the main U. S. backbone traffic went through interconnected network providers.

In 1994 the first demonstration of wireless Internet access occured at Bell Labs.

David Banisar, Marc Rotenberg, and David Sobel founded The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) in Washington, D.C. to focus public attention on emerging civil liberties issues and to protect privacy, the First Amendment, and constitutional values in the information age. EPIC was a joint project of the Fund for Constitutional Government and Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility.

On the Internet Kevin Hughes published a pioneering cultural and historical work entitled From Webspace to Cyberspace.

Gary Kremen and Peng T. Ong started the online dating site Match.com.

"The initial business scope developed by this team included a possible subscription model, now common among personals services, and inclusion of diverse communities with high first trial and market leaders status, including women, technology professionals and the GLBT community. Fran Maier joined in late 1994 to lead the Match.com business unit where she significantly bolstered the strategy to make Match.com friendly and accessible to women (the men would then follow)" (Wikipedia article on Match.com).

While working on the Netscape web browser, Louis J. "Lou" Montulli II buillt the Fishcam, one of the earliest live image websites. 

Netscape hosted the Fishcam until long after they were no longer Netscape. After a short hiatus, in 2009 it found a new host.  When this note was written in May 2009 the Fishcam was operational and remained  one of the longest nearly continuously running live websites.

Jim Sterne launched the first "Marketing on the Internet" seminar series. This eight-city tour was intended to promote the possibilities of using the Internet for advertising, marketing, sales, and customer service.

At the Second Man-Machine World Championship, Chinook, a computer checkers program developed around 1989 at the University of Alberta by a team led by Jonathan Schaeffer, won due to human frailty.

This was the first time that a computer program defeated a human champion in a game competition.  "In 1996 the Guinness Book of World Records recognized Chinook as the first program to win a human world championship" (http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~chinook/project/, accessed 01-24-2010).

The Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper in Japan achieved a daily audited circulation greater than 10 million printed copies. 

In Death By Government (1994), revised 2005) political scientist Rudolph J. Rummel of the University of Hawaii estimated that "deaths at the hands of one's own government in the period 1900-87 amounted to 212 million persons, while deaths from warfare numbered 34 million. In other words, victims of their own government (what he calls democide) were in fact over six times greater than those killed in the century's wars. The largest number of fatalities was 78 million killed by the Chinese Communists, then 62 million by the Soviet Communists, 21 million by the Nazis, 10 million by the Chinese nationalists, and 6 million by the Japanese militarists. Even this listing is incomplete; as Rummel puts it, 'post-1987 democides by Iraq, Iran, Burundi, Serbia and Bosnian Serbs, Bosnia, Croatia, Sudan, Somalia, the Khmer Rouge guerrillas, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and others have not been included' (http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2012/01/anarchy-the-new-threat, accessed 01-31-2012).

Justin Hall, a student at Swarthmore College, started his web-based diary, Justin's Links from the Underground, Links.net, offering one of the earliest guided tours of the web. This is considered one of the earliest blogs.

Apple introduced the first consumer-priced digital camera that worked with a personal computer-- the QuickTake 100.

John Perry Barlow, lyricist for The Grateful Dead, published in Wired magazine an article entitled The Economy of Ideas. A framework for patents and copyrights in the Digital Ages. (Everything you know about intellectual property is wrong.)

This, or a very similar text, was also issued under the title of: Selling Wine Without Bottles: The Economy of Mind on the Global Net.

"A one-day, constrained-size workshop addendum to the annual CAIA conference" was held in San Antonio, Texas, on the emerging topic of digital libraries. It issued the report: Digital Library: Gross Structure and Requirements.

Commissioned to develop an Internet event for "Towards the Aesthetics of the Future," an arts weekend at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London, Ivan Pope wrote a proposal outlining the concept of a café with Internet access from the tables. Pope's Cybercafe, the first Internet cafe, operated during the weekend event.

Jerry Yang and David Filo, Electrical Engineering graduate students at Stanford,  changed the name of "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" to "Yahoo!", for which the official expansion was "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle".

Filo and Yang selected the name because they liked the word's general definition, which comes from Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift: "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth." Its URL was akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo. They created the Yahoo! domain on January 18, 1995.

Marc Andreesen, one of the programmers of Mosaic, and James H. Clark of Silicon Graphics founded Mosaic Communications Corporation in Mountain View, California. Mosaic Communications was the first company to exploit the potential of the Mosaic web browser, and the first company to exploit the economic potential of the World Wide Web.

Commercial spamming started when a pair of immigation lawyers from Phoenix, Arizona, Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel, used bulk Usenet postings to advertise immigration law services. This was called the "Green Card spam", after the subject line of the postings: "Green Card Lottery-Final One?"

"Canter and Siegel sent their advertisement, with the subject 'Green Card Lottery - Final One?', to at least 5,500 Usenet discussion groups, a huge number at the time. Rather than cross-posting a single copy of the message to multiple groups, so a reader would only see it once (considered a common courtesy when posting the same message to more than one group), they posted it as separate postings in each newsgroup, so a reader would see it in each group they read. Their internet service provider, Internet Direct, received so many complaints that its mail servers crashed repeatedly for the next two days; it promptly terminated their service. Despite the ire directed at the two lawyers, they posted another advertisement to 1,000 newsgroups in June 1994. This time, Arnt Gulbrandsen put together the first software "cancelbot" to trawl Usenet and kill their messages within minutes. The couple claimed in a December 1994 interview to have gained 1,000 new clients and 'made $100,000 off an ad that cost them only pennies' " (Wikipedia article on Lawrence Cantor and Martha Siegel, accessed 03-17-2012).

The first "full text" crawler-based web search engine, Web Crawler, created by Brian Pinkerton at the University of Washington, became operational.

"Unlike its predecessors, it let users search for any word in any web page, which became the standard for all major search engines since. It was also the first one to be widely known by the public."

The Directors of 15 major academic libraries in the United States, and the President of the Commission on Preservation and Access, and the Council on Library and Information Resources founded The Digital Library Federation for:

"The implementation of a distributed, open digital library conforming to the overall theme and accessible across the global Internet. This library shall consist of collections--expanding over time in number and scope -- to be created from the conversion to digital form of documents contained in our and other libraries and archives, and from the incorporation of holdings already in electronic form."

The first Internet radio cyberstation broadcast over the Internet at NetWorld + Interop in Las Vegas.

The First International Conference on the World Wide Web took place at CERN in Geneva.

Louis J. "Lou" Montulli II at Netscape Communications Corporation invented the HTTP cookie.

"Together with John Giannandrea, Montulli wrote the initial Netscape cookie specification the same year. Version 0.9beta of Mosaic Netscape, released on October 13, 1994, supported cookies. The first actual use of cookies (out of the labs) was made for checking whether visitors to the Netscape Web site had already visited the site. Montulli applied for a patent for the cookie technology in 1995, and US patent 5774670 was granted in 1998. Support for cookies was integrated in Internet Explorer in version 2, released in October 1995.

"The introduction of cookies was not widely known to the public, at the time. In particular, cookies were accepted by default, and users were not notified of the presence of cookies. Some people were aware of the existence of cookies as early as the first quarter of 1995, but the general public learned about them after the Financial Times published an article about them on February 12, 1996. In the same year, cookies received lot of media attention, especially because of potential privacy implications. Cookies were discussed in two U.S. Federal Trade Commission hearings in 1996 and 1997" (Wikipedia article on HTTP cookie, accessed 05-09-2009).

San Francisco entrepreneur Ariel Poler founded Internet Profiles Corporation ( I/PRO), the first commercial web analytics vendor, producer of the first log analyzer.

"The company emerged as the early market leader in the developing field of web usage measurement, partly because of its partnership with the venerable Neilsen Media Research . . . and Neilsen Media Services in . . . 1995." (Peters, Computerized Monitoring and Online Privacy [1999] 343).

The first annual conference on the Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries met at College Station, Texas.

In July 1994 Jeff Bezos of Seattle, Washington, incorporated Amazon.com. The company originally promoted itself as "Earth's biggest book store." 

Amazon.com was very nearly called "Cadabra," as in "abracadabra." Bezos rapidly re-conceptualized the name when his lawyer misheard the word as "cadaver." Bezos instead named the business after the river for two reasons: to suggest scale, as the earth's biggest book store, and because website listings were often alphabetical at that time.

In July 1995 Amazon sold its first book, Douglas Hofstadter's Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought.

The first public rendition of whitehouse.gov, "Welcome to the White House," went online.

The Library of Congress announced The National Digital Library Program.

Marc Andreesen of Mosaic Communications Corporation released Mosaic Netscape 0.9, beta on USENET: 

"Mosaic Communications Corporation is a making a public version of Mosaic Netscape 0.9 Beta available for anonymous FTP. Mosaic Netscape is a built-from-scratch Internet navigator featuring performance optimized for 14.4 modems, native JPEG support, and more.

"You can FTP Mosaic Netscape 0.9 Beta from the following locations:

"ftp.mcom.com in /netscape

"gatekeeper.dec.com in /pub/net/infosys/Mosaic-Comm

"lark.cc.ukans.edu in /Netscape

"ftp.meer.net in /Netscape doc.ic.ac.uk in /packages/Netscape

"archie.au in /pub/misc/netscape

"ftp.cica.indiana.edu in /pub/pc/win3/winsock/nscape09.zip (PC only) mac.archive.umich.edu in /mac (Mac only)

"Please make sure to read the README and LICENSE files.  

An up-to-date listing of mirror sites can be obtained at any time by sending email to rele...@mcom.com.  

"Subject to the timing and results of this beta cycle, Mosaic Communications will release Mosaic Netscape 1.0, also available free for personal use via the Internet. It will be subject to license terms; please review them when and if you obtain Mosaic Netscape 1.0.  

"A commercial version of Mosaic Netscape 1.0, including technical support from Mosaic Communications, will be available upon completion of the beta cycle. Contact us at i...@mcom.com for more information.

"Have fun!

"Marc and the gang

i...@mcom.com, http://mosaic.mcom.com/"

One month later, in November 1994 the company renamed itself Netscape Communications Corporation.

The Unites States Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit, based in New Orleans, Louisiana, decided Steve Jackson Games v. U.S. Secret Service,36 F.3d 457 (5th Cir. 1994).

"The narrow issue before us is whether the seizure of a computer, used to operate an electronic bulletin board system, and containing private electronic mail which had been sent to (stored on) the bulletin board, but not read (retrieved) by the intended recipients, constitutes an unlawful intercept under the Federal Wiretap Act, 18 U.S.C. s 2510, et seq., as amended by Title I of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, Pub.L. No. 99-508, Title I, 100 Stat. 1848 (1986). We hold that it is not, and therefore AFFIRM."

A Rolling Stones concert with 50, 000 fans at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas, Texas, became the "first cyberspace multicast concert" over Internet radio. Mick Jagger opened the concert by saying, "I wanna say a special welcome to everyone that's, uh, climbed into the Internet tonight and, uh, has got into the Mbone. And I hope it doesn't all collapse" (quoted from the Wikipedia article on Internet radio, accessed 03-18-2012).

WXYC (89.3 FM Chapel Hill, NC) became the first traditional radio station to initiate broadcasting on the Internet. WXYC used an FM radio connected to a system at SunSite, later known as Ibiblio, running Cornell's CU-SeeMe software. WXYC had begun test broadcasts and bandwidth testing as early as August, 1994.

WREK (91.1 FM, Atlanta, GA) started streaming on the same day using their own custom software called CyberRadio1. However, unlike WXYC, this was WREK's beta launch and the stream was not advertised until a later date.

A broadcast by Seattle based space rock group Sky Cries Mary was the first live Internet only broadcast of a live band on November 10th, 1994.  The broadcast was done by Paul Allen's Seattle based digital media start-up Starwave.

The Commission on Preservation and Access and the Research Libraries Group (RLG), Mountain View, California, created the Task Force on Digital Archiving. The purpose of the Task Force was to investigate the means of ensuring “continued access indefinitely into the future of records stored in digital electronic form.” On May 1, 1996 the group issued its report: Preserving Digital Information.

Sony launched its first PlayStation game console in Japan.

Randy Conrads founded Classmates.com. This may be the first for-profit social networking website.

WebtraffIQ.com developed the first commercial web page tagging system.

During 1995 up to 700 new web servers were registered each day, and there were approximately 73,500 servers.

During this year WWW was generally equated with the Internet.

JSTOR (short for Journal Storage), an online system for archiving academic journals, was founded in 1995.  In 2012 it provided online searchable texts of more than 1000 academic journals to member educational institutions. 

"JSTOR was originally conceived as a solution to one of the problems faced by libraries, especially research and university libraries, due to the increasing number of academic journals in existence. The founder, William G. Bowen, was the president of Princeton University from 1972 to 1988. Most libraries found it prohibitively expensive in terms of cost and space to maintain a comprehensive collection of journals. By digitizing many journal titles, JSTOR allowed libraries to outsource the storage of these journals with the confidence that they would remain available for the long term. Online access and full-text search ability improved access dramatically. JSTOR originally encompassed ten economics and history journals and was initiated in 1995 at seven different library sites. As of November 2010, there were 6,425 participating libraries. JSTOR access was improved based on feedback from these sites and it became a fully searchable index accessible from any ordinary Web browser. Special software was put in place to make pictures and graphs clear and readable.

"With the success of this limited project, Bowen and Kevin Guthrie, then-president of JSTOR, were interested in expanding the number of participating journals. They met with representatives of the Royal Society of London, and an agreement was made to digitize the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society back to its beginning in 1665. The work of adding these volumes to JSTOR was completed by December 2000. As of November 2, 2010, the database contained 1,289 journal titles in 20 collections representing 53 disciplines, and 303,294 individual journal issues, totaling over 38 million pages of text (Wikipedia article on JSTOR, accessed 01-12-2012).

The U.S. Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics, which began publication of statistics in print in 1886, began publishing statistics on its website.

Feeling isolated after having recently moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, and having observed people helping one another online at The Well and Usenet, Craig Naymark founded craigslist, as a bulletin board for social events.  It evolved into a "central network of online communities, featuring free online classified advertisements – with jobs, internships, housing, personals, erotic services, for sale/barter/wanted, services, community, gigs, resume, and pets categories – and forums on various topics." Craigslist eventually made a profit by charging under-market fees for job ads in ten cities and for brokered apartment listings in New York City. By providing most classified advertising for free it undermined the traditional income stream of printed newspapers.

Ward Cunningham, Portland, Oregon, established the first wiki, the WikiWikiWeb on the c2.com domain for Cunningham & Cunningham, Inc.

Wiki "was named by Cunningham, who remembered a Honolulu International Airport counter employee telling him to take the 'Wiki Wiki' shuttle bus that runs between the airport's terminals. According to Cunningham, 'I chose wiki-wiki as an alliterative substitute for 'quick' and thereby avoided naming this stuff quick-web.' Cunningham was in part inspired by Apple's HyperCard. Apple had designed a system allowing users to create virtual 'card stacks' supporting links among the various cards. Cunningham developed Vannevar Bush's ideas by allowing users to 'comment on and change one another's text' (Wikipedia article on Wiki, accessed 12-29-2009).

♦ You can watch a video of an interview of Ward Cunningham with John Gage at the Computer History Museum in 2006 at this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bx6nNqSASGo

Robert McCool, author of the original NCSA HTTPd web server, and a group of collaborative software developers initially known as the Apache Group, made the first official public release (0.6.2) of the Apache HTTP Server software in April 1995. McCool wrote the first version of NCSA HTTPd as an undergraduate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, while working on the original NCSA Mosaic team.

"Since April 1996 Apache has been the most popular HTTP server software in use. As of September 2009 Apache served over 54.48% of all websites and over 66% of the million busiest."

"There have been two explanations of the project's name. According to the Apache Foundation, the name was chosen out of respect for the Native American tribe of Apache (Indé), well-known for their endurance and their skills in warfare. However, the original FAQ on the Apache Server project's website, from 1996 to 2001, claimed that The result after combining [the NCSA httpd patches] was a patchy server. The first explanation was supported at an Apache Conference and in an interview in 2000 by Brian Behlendorf, who said that the name connoted 'Take no prisoners. Be kind of aggressive and kick some ass'. Behlendorf then contradicted this in a 2007 interview, stating that 'The Apache server isn't named in honor of Geronimo's tribe' but that so many revisions were sent in that 'the group called it 'a patchy Web server' '. Both explanations are probably appropriate" (Wikipedia article on Apache HTTP server, accessed 02-02-2010).

In its Design Now Room, 20th Century Gallery, The Victoria and Albert Museum in London held the exhibition The Book and Beyond. Electronic publishing and the art of the book. To accompany the exhibition in 1995 the museum published a pamphlet. In 2001 they incorporated material in the pamphlet into a website.

The exhibition was divided into five sections:

Introduction

Artists' books and books as art

Artists' books and books as art

Electronic publications

"Various forms of "electronic publishing" - including videodiscs, "floppy books", CD-ROMs, and the Internet - have become increasingly evident in the 1980s and 1990s. Some electronic publications are based upon information which was previously available in a linear form, and they represent a natural progression from computer typesetting or video. Others have been conceived specifically to exploit the potential offered by the new media. The method of presentation is crucial to the success (or otherwise) of these publications, and designers and publishers are still learning to use the new technology."

Artists, computers and publishing

University Librarian and Director of Information Resources Michael A. Keller and Stanford University Libraries founded HighWire Press. Its initial publication was the online production of the weekly Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC), "the most highly cited (and second largest) peer-reviewed journal."

A portion of its mission statement (June 1995) included the following:

"Network-Based Scholarly Publishing:

A Prospectus

The Problems:

The problems of scholarly publishing - particularly for science, technology and medical information (STM) - are well documented:

It takes too long for authors to get work into the literature because of the author, reviewer, publisher, library, reader handoffs.

It is difficult and time consuming for readers to sort through all that is published.

It is increasingly expensive for libraries to acquire STM materials, which are advancing in price to research libraries at four to six times the c.p.i.

It is becoming impractical for publishers to deliver a timely and complete product that meets the needs of research scientists. As single events, these problems are each frustrating to scholars and those who serve them. In combination, these impediments are a significant barrier, and challenge the productivity and quality of science.

The Projects:

The Network Publishing project, dubbed "The HighWire Press," provides models of solutions for these problems by taking advantage of the special circumstances of scholarly communication - as distinct from entertainment or trade publishing - in the context of a University community: the writers and readers of scholarly materials are in the same profession, writing for each other, they are located in similar environments; and they do not seek profit from their publishing activities, which are a means to an end for them. Because of network-based communication technologies, the apparatus of a large publishing operation is becoming unnecessary for communication of scholarly results; this is true for the same reason that desktop publishing technologies a decade ago allowed a shift from large design and composition shops to desktop authorship backed up by small, responsive print shops. Essentially, our projects attempt to "re-engineer" traditional scholarly publishing to focus on formal, structured communication among the community of scholars."

The Corporation for National Research Initiiatives, sponsored by DARPA, began publication, only on the web, of D-lib Magazine, the Magazine of the Digital Library Forum.

Netscape Communications, Mountain View, California, had a very successful IPO.

The stock, initially intended to be offered at $14 per share, was offered at double that for the IPO, and reached $75 on the first day of trading.

This was later considered the beginning of the "dot-com bubble."

French-born Iranian-American computer programmer Pierre M. Omidyar founded eBay in San Jose, California, as a sole proprietorship. Initially he conducted auctions under the name AuctionWeb, and advertised items for auction on USENET.

On Thanksgiving morning ABC's World News Now became the first television show to be broadcast over the Internet, using the CU-SeeMe videoconferencing software. This was the beginning of Internet Protocol Television IPTV.

Web search engine Altavista was launched from Palo Alto, California. It received 300,000 hits on its first day.

According to UNESCO 968,735 new different printed book titles were produced in the world in 2996.

The used and antiquarian bookselling website Abebooks.com was launched in Victoria, BC, Canada.

The National Library of Sweden (Kungl. Biblioteket) initiated the Kulturarw3 Project - The Royal Swedish Web Archiw3e.

In 1996 computer engineer, Internet entrepreneur, activist, and digital librarian Brewster Kahle founded the Internet Archive in San Francisco.  After the modern Bibliotheca Alexandrina opened in 2002 the Internet Archive established a mirror site at that historic location.

IBM announced the DB2 Universal Database, the first fully scalable, Web-ready database management system. It was called “universal” because it could sort and query alphanumeric data as well as text documents, images, audio, video and other complex objects.

In 1996 IBM databases managed about 70 percent of the world’s business information.

1996 was the first year in which more email was sent than paper mail in the United States.

In 1996 there were 14,352,000 Internet hosts and 100,000 websites.

IBM introduced continuous speech recognition technology for Mandarin Chinese. In developing the product, researchers identified and classified thousand of vocal tones and homonyms, created an algorithm that deconstructed syllables into parts, and developed a new language model to transform spoken words into the right combination drawn from 6,700 Chinese characters.

IBM also announced software that gave people a hands-free way to dictate text and navigate the desktop with the power of natural speech.

In 1996 LexisNexis online services, Miamisburg, Ohio, exceeded one billion documents.

In response to the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, John Perry Barlow wrote A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.

In 1996 Russian microminiature artist, Anatoly Konenko of Omsk, southwestern Siberia, issued what was then the world's smallest book printed on paper — an edition of Chekhov's very short story, Chameleon. It measures just .9 by .9 millimeters, not much larger than a grain of salt, and has 30 pages and three color illustrations. The print cannot be read by the naked eye. The edition was limited to 50 copies in English, and 50 copies in Russian.

"The first access to the mobile web was commercially offered in Finland in 1996 on the Nokia Communicator 9000 phone on the Sonera and Radiolinja networks. This was access to the real internet" (Wikipedia article on Mobile web, accessed 04-25-2009).

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, students of computer science at Stanford, began collaboration at on a search engine called BackRub, named for its unique ability to analyze the "back links" pointing to a given website.

"Larry, who had always enjoyed tinkering with machinery and had gained some notoriety for building a working printer out of Lego™, took on the task of creating a new kind of server environment that used low-end PCs instead of big expensive machines. Afflicted by the perennial shortage of cash common to graduate students everywhere, the pair took to haunting the department's loading docks in hopes of tracking down newly arrived computers that they could borrow for their network."

"Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed BackRub, the predecessor to the Google search engine, while working on an early library digitization project at Stanford that was funded in part by the National Science Foundation’s Digital Libraries Initiative. And PageRank, Google’s core search algorithm, which orders sites in search results based on the number of other sites that link to them, is simply a computer scientist’s version of citation analysis, long used to rate the influence of articles in scholarly print journals" Roush, "The Infinite Library Does Google's plan to digitize millions of print books spell the death of libraries; or their rebirth?" (Technology Review.com, May 2005, http://www.technologyreview.com/web/14408/, accessed 03-19-2009).

Pschologist John Suler of Rider University, Lawrenceville, New Jersey, published The Psychology of Cyberspace as an online hypertext book.

This book has been cited as a founding work in the developing fields of cyberspychology and cybertherapy, in which avatars assist with treatment.

The first recorded use of the term "phishing" (baits used to "catch financial information and passwords) occured on the "alt.online-service. America-online" Usenet newsgroup after AOL introduced measures to prevent using fake, algorithmically generated credit card numbers to open accounts. To obtain legitimate credit card information AOL crackers resorted to phishing.

The New York Times interactive web edition began.

The first ACM International Conference on Digital Libraries occurred in Bethesda, Maryland.

Seachenginewatch.com went online as "A Webmaster's Guide to Search Engines."

In April 1996, during her junior year at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Internet personality and lifecaster Jennifer Ringley began the popular website, JenniCam. She was the first real full time online webcam girl.

"Previously, live webcams transmitted static shots from cameras aimed through windows or at coffee pots. Ringley's innovation was simply to allow others to view her daily activities.

"In June 2008, CNET hailed JenniCam as one of the greatest defunct websites in history.

"Regarded by some as a conceptual artist, Ringley viewed her site as a straight-forward document of her life. She did not wish to filter the events that were shown on her camera, so sometimes she was shown nude or engaging in sexual behavior, including sexual intercourse and masturbation. This was a new use of Internet technology in 1996 and viewers were stimulated both for its sociological implications and for sexual arousal. Surveillance became conceptual art, as noted by Mark Tribe in 'New Media Art':

In Web sites like JenniCAM, in which a young woman installed Web cameras in her home to expose her everyday actions to online viewers. . . surveillance became a source of voyeuristic and exhibitionistic excitement. . . Institutional surveillance and the invasion of privacy have been widely explored by New Media artists.'

"Ringley's genuine desires to maintain the purity of the cam-eye view of her life eventually created the need to establish that she was within her rights as an adult to broadcast such information, in the legal sense, and that it was not harmful to other adults. Unlike later for-profit webcam services, Ringley did not spend her day displaying her private parts, and she spent much more time discussing her romantic life than she did her sex life. Ringley maintained her webcam site for seven years" (Wikipedia article on Jennifer Ringley, accessed 05-08-2009).

The Raleigh, North Carolina television station WRAL-HD began broadcasting from the existing tower of WRAL-TV south-east of Raleigh, winning a race to be first television station to broadcast high-definition televison (HDTV) in the United States.

DVD specification 1.0 (Digital Video Disc) was finalized. The capacity of the original single-sided, single layer DVD-1 was 1.46 gigabytes. 

The first DVD players and discs were available in November 1996 in Japan, and in March 1997 in the United States.

The first movie commercially released on DVD was Twister.

The Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition & Technology published the unclassified REPORT OF THE DEFENSE SCIENCE BOARD TASK FORCE ON INFORMATION WARFARE - DEFENSE (IW-D.

This 212-page report was a "call to arms" for cyber warfare or information warfare in the United States

At a Diplomatic Conference on Certain Copyright and Neighboring Rights Questions, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), Geneva, Switzerland, adopted the WIPO Copyright Treaty.

126,000,000 metric tons of paper were consumed in the world in 1997.

In 1997 the Internet2 consortium was established, with offices in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Washington, D.C.

The IEEE Computer Society established the Technical Committee on Digital Libraries. "It is to promote research in the theory and practice of all aspects of Collective Memory, i.e. the fields of Digital Libraries, Digital Museums and Digital Archives of all kinds."

At a news conference in San Francisco the California Digital Library was founded "by University of California President Emeritus Richard Atkinson to build the University's digital library, assist campus libraries with sharing their resources and holdings more effectively, and provide leadership in applying technology to the development of library collections and services."

SixDegrees.com, an early social networking website, was founded.

Michael Lesk attempted to calculate "How Much Information is There in the World?" He included information on how much information a human brain may be able to retain.

The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) of the University of Virginia, the UCLA Cultural Virtual Reality Laboratory (CVRLab), the UCLA Experimential Technologies Center (ETC), the Reverse Engineering (INDACO) Lab at the Politecnico di Milano, the Ausonius Institute of the CNRS at the University of Bordeaux-3, and the University of Caen, lower Normandy, began collaboration on a project to create a digital model of ancient Rome as it appeared in late antiquity. The notional date of the model is June 21, 320 A.D.

"The primary purpose of this phase of the project was to spatialize and present information and theories about how the city looked at this moment in time, which was more or less the height of its development as the capital of the Roman Empire. A secondary, but important, goal was to create the cyberinfrastructure whereby the model could be updated, corrected, and augmented. Spatialization and presentation involve two related forms of communication: (1) the knowledge we have about the city has been used to reconstruct digitally how its topography, urban infrastructure (streets, bridges, aqueducts, walls, etc.), and individual buildings and monuments might have looked; and (2) whenever possible, the sources of archaeological information or speculative reasoning behind the digital reconstructions, as well as valuable online resources for understanding the sites of ancient Rome, have been made available to users. The model is thus a representation of the state of our knowledge (and, implicitly, of our ignorance) about the urban topography of ancient Rome at various periods of time. Beyond this primary use, the model can function in other ways. It can be used to teach students or the general public about how the city looked; it can be used to gather data not otherwise available, such as the alignment of built features in the city with respect to each other or to natural features and phenomena; and, it can be used to run urban or architectural experiments not otherwise possible, such as how well the city or the buildings within it functioned in terms of heating and ventilation, illumination, circulation of people, etc. Finally, a digital model can be easily updated to reflect corrections to the model or new archaeological discoveries."

"Starting on June 11, 2007, when the model of ancient Rome was first shown publicly at a ceremony in Rome, a number of video fly-throughs and static images of the model were posted for free public viewing online. In August, 2008, the alpha version of Rome Reborn 2.0 was demonstrated at SIGGRAPH held at the Los Angeles Convention Center. In November, 2008, the latest version of Rome Reborn 1.0 was published to the Internet as in Google Earth." (quotations from the Rome Reborn website of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia, accessed 01-21-2009)

Nettracker.com produced the first web log analyzer with "drill-down and ad-hoc analysis."

Incorporating scans begun in 1992, the Bibliothèque nationale de France launched the digital library Gallica, " la bibliothèque virtuelle de l'honnête homme."

On August 1, 2009 Gallica contained:

"Documents moissonnés

bibliothèques partenaires : 5,834

partenaires commerciaux : 12,133

Total : 17,967

Documents de la BnF

Imprimés

114,397 monographies, dont 59,651 consultables en mode texte

3,471 titres de périodiques, représentant 526,223 fascicules dont 213,122 en mode texte

Documents iconographiques : 38,493 lots, représentant approximativement 111,643 images"

Cartes et plans : 5,008 documents

Documents sonores : 1,056 documents

Documents manuscrits : 4,164 documents

Musique notées : 2,127 documents (http://gallica.bnf.fr/content?lang=en#stats).

Physicist and inventor Joseph Jacobson of the MIT Media Lab founded E Ink Corporation to develop electrophoretic display technology, or electronic paper, (e-paper, epaper), which he invented.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) implemented Carnivore, a customizable packet sniffer, or packet analyzer, that could monitor all of a user's network traffic.

"The Carnivore system was a Microsoft Windows-based workstation with packet-sniffing software and a removable disk drive. This computer must be physically installed at an Internet service provider (ISP) or other location where it can "sniff" traffic on a LAN segment to look for email messages in transit. The technology itself was not highly advanced — it used a standard packet sniffer and straightforward filtering. The critical components of the operation were the filtering criteria. To accurately match the appropriate subject, an elaborate content model was developed" (Wikipedia article on Carnivore, accessed 01-14-2012).

"On July 11, 2000, the existence of an FBI Internet monitoring system called "Carnivore" was widely reported. Although the public details were sketchy, reports indicated that the Carnivore system is installed at the facilities of an Internet Service Provider (ISP) and can monitor all traffic moving through that ISP. The FBI claims that Carnivore "filters" data traffic and delivers to investigators only those "packets" that they are lawfully authorized to obtain. Because the details remain secret, the public is left to trust the FBI's characterization of the system and -- more significantly -- the FBI's compliance with legal requirements.

"One day after the initial disclosures, EPIC filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking the public release of all FBI records concerning Carnivore, including the source code, other technical details, and legal analyses addressing the potential privacy implications of the technology. On July 18, 2000, after Carnivore had become a major issue of public concern, EPIC asked the Justice Department to expedite the processing of its request. When DOJ failed to respond within the statutory deadline, EPIC filed suit in U.S. District Court seeking the immediate release of all information concerning Carnivore.

"At an emergency hearing held on August 2, 2000, U.S. District Judge James Robertson ordered the FBI to report back to the court by August 16 and to identify the amount of material at issue and the Bureau's schedule for releasing it. The FBI subsequently reported that 3000 pages of responsive material were located, but it refused to commit to a date for the completion of processing.  

"In late January 2001, the FBI completed its processing of EPIC's FOIA request. The Bureau revised its earlier estimate and reported that there were 1756 pages of responsive material; 1502 were released in part and 254 were withheld in their entirety (see link below for sample scanned documents).  

"On August 1, 2001, the FBI moved for summary judgment, asserting that it fully met its obligations under FOIA. On August 9, 2001, EPIC filed a motion to stay further proceedings pending discovery, on the grounds that the FBI has failed to conduct an adequate search for responsive documents.  

"On March 25, 2002, the court issued an order directing the FBI to initiate a new search for responsive documents. The new search was to be conducted in the offices of General Counsel and Congressional & Public Affairs, and be completed no later than May 24, 2002. The documents listed above were located and released as a result of that court-ordered search" (http://epic.org/privacy/carnivore/, accessed 01-14-2012).

The first Museums and the Web Conference took place in Los Angeles. 

The Joint Bi-level Image Experts Group (JBIG) and the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG1 (ITU-T SG8) Coding of Still Pictures issued the report entitled Call for Contributions for JPEG 2000 (JTC 1.29.14, 15444): Image Coding System. This eventually led to the establishment of the JPEG 2000 file standard for still images.

IN 1997 there were one million websites on the Internet.

RLG DigiNews, RLG's online newsletter for digital libraries and preservation, produced for the Research Libraries Group by the staff of the Department of Preservation and Conservation, Cornell University Library, began publication on the web.

Gary Kasparov, sometimes regarded as the greatest chess player of all time, resigned 19 moves into Game 6 against Deep Blue, an IBM RS/6000 SP supercomputer capable of calculating 200 million chess positions per second. This was the first time that a human world chess champion lost to a computer under tournament conditions.

The event was broadcast live from IBM's website via a Java viewer, and became the world's record "Net event" at the time.

"The AI crowd, too, was pleased with the result and the attention, but dismayed by the fact that Deep Blue was hardly what their predecessors had imagined decades earlier when they dreamed of creating a machine to defeat the world chess champion. Instead of a computer that thought and played chess like a human, with human creativity and intuition, they got one that played like a machine, systematically evaluating 200 million possible moves on the chess board per second and winning with brute number-crunching force. As Igor Aleksander, a British AI and neural networks pioneer, explained in his 2000 book, How to Build a Mind:  

" 'By the mid-1990s the number of people with some experience of using computers was many orders of magnitude greater than in the 1960s. In the Kasparov defeat they recognized that here was a great triumph for programmers, but not one that may compete with the human intelligence that helps us to lead our lives.'

"It was an impressive achievement, of course, and a human achievement by the members of the IBM team, but Deep Blue was only intelligent the way your programmable alarm clock is intelligent. Not that losing to a $10 million alarm clock made me feel any better" (Gary Kasparov, "The Chess Master and the Computer," The New York Review of Books, 57, February 11, 2010).

In June 1997 Wireless Application Protocol or WAP was established as a secure specification that allowed users to access information via handheld wireless devices.

In Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union all 9 Justices of the United States Supreme Court voted to strike down anti-obscenity provisions of the Communications Decency Act (the "CDA"), finding they violated the freedom of speech provisions of the First Amendment. Two Justices concurred in part and dissented in part to the decision. This was the first major Supreme Court ruling regarding the regulation of materials distributed via the Internet.

The Court rules that "223(a)(1)(B), §223(a)(2), §223(d) of the CDA are unconstitutional and unenforceable, except for cases of obscenity or child pornography, because they abridge the freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment and are substantially overbroad. The Internet is entitled to the full protection given to media like the print press; the special factors justifying government regulation of broadcast media do not apply.

"The CDA was an attempt to protect minors from explicit material on the Internet by criminalizing the 'knowing' transmission of "obscene or indecent" messages to any recipient under 18; and also the knowing sending to a person under 18 of anything 'that, in context, depicts or describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards, sexual or excretory activities or organs' " (Wikipedia article on Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union).

A human error at Network Solutions, Herndon, Virginia, caused the Domain Name System (DNS) table for .com and .net domains to become corrupted, making millions of systems unreachable. In the four hours it took to repair the error the problem spread throughout the Internet.

Digital Scriptorium, an image database of medieval and renaissance manuscripts, hosted by Columbia University Libraries, that unites scattered resources from many institutions into an international tool for teaching and scholarly research, first appeared on the web.

In November 1997 web search engine Altavista claimed to handle 20,000,000 queries per day.

Virtual Medical Worlds, "a monthly Virtual Magazine on Telemedicine and High Performance Computing and Networking for readers interested in computer applications in medical environments," initiated publication on the Internet.

W3C released the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) specification, allowing web pages to be tagged with descriptive labels.

Voice over Internet equipment, using Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP), became available.

IN 1998 the average person received 733 pieces of mail on paper per year, half of which was junk mail.

MP3 (MPEG Audio Layer 3) was introduced. It was an audio compression technology and a part of the MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 specifications. MP3 compresses CD quality sound by a factor of 8­12, while maintaining almost the same high-fidelity sound quality.

Richard-Gabriel Rummonds's Printing on the Iron Handpress was published. This elegantly produced definitive book on the operation of historic handpress printing technology, illustrated by photographs and line drawings, was printed by high-speed photo-offset rather than manual letterpress printing. It included an annotated bibliography of prior printing manuals published in English. The introduction by Harry Duncan concluded:

". . . anyone who does stay the course and follow to the end the directives given here can count on acquiring a consummate, tried, and true method for handling an instrument that has never been surpassed, that still calls for a printer's full participation, physical as well as mental, in order to achieve the best work of which he is capable."

"In the summer of 1988 soon after printing Seven Aspects of Solitude, a sixteen page keepsake and the last publication to bear the imprint of the Plain Wrapper Press, Rummonds sold his printing equipment and moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in screenwriting" (legacy.www.nypl.org/research/chss/spe/rbk/faids/rummonds.pdf, accessed 03-18-2012)

The National Library of Australia, Canberra, initiated its Digital Services Project with the goal of establishing a web archive. This evolved into PANDORA, Australia's Web Archive.

The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) began the Electronic Records Archives Program (ERA) for the eventual preservation of digital archives.

In 1998 Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searles and David Weinberger published the Cluetrain Manifesto containing 95 theses, presumably, and possibly grandiosely, in the tradition of Martin Luther.

The manifesto was first published online, followed in December 1999 by a printed book issued by Perseus Books in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“A powerful global conversation has begun.” “Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter--and getting smarter faster than most companies.” “Markets are conversations.”

In 1998 Bell Labs reported the first long-distance transmission of one terabit (trillion bits) of data per second over a single strand of optical fiber.

The last printed edition of Friedrich Konrad Beilstein's Handbuch der organischen Chemie, was published in 1998. The first edition of this work, published in 2 volumes in Hamburg, Germany, in 1881, covered 1,500 compounds in 2,200 pages. By 1998 the research, incorporating information from 1779 to the present, grew to more than 7,000,000 compounds, and the annual subscription price to the printed edition reached about $40,000 per year.

After termination of the printed edition, publication of Beilstein continued online under a number of different names, including Crossfire Beilstein. Since 2009, the content has been maintained and distributed by Elsevier Information Systems in Frankfurt under the product name "Reaxys"

Norman, From Gutenberg to the Internet (2005) 11.

You've Got Mail, an American romantic comedy film set in New York City starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, was released by Warner Brothers. The film dramatizes a romantic relationship that develops over email, featuring AOL's "You've got mail" slogan in product placement. Paralleling this film about computers and society is the film's subplot of the forced closure of a small independent bookshop by competition from a big-box chain bookstore — thus not only a film about computers and romance but also a commentary about the changing face of the book trade.

Cognitive scientist / entrepreneur Jeffrey Stibel, physicist, psychologist, neural scientist James A. Anderson, and others from the Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences at Brown University created a word sense disambiguator using George A. Miller's WordNet lexical database.

Stibel and others applied this technology in Simpli, "an early search engine that offered disambiguation to search terms. A user could enter in a search term that was ambiguous (e.g., Java) and the search engine would return a list of alternatives (coffee, programming language, island in the South Seas)."

"The technology was rooted in brain science and built by academics to model the way in which the mind stored and utilized language."

"Simpli was sold in 2000 to NetZero. Another company that leveraged the Simpli WordNet technology was purchased by Google and they continue to use the technology for search and advertising under the brand Google AdSense.

"In 2001, there was a buyout of the company and it was merged with another company called Search123. Most of the original members joined the new company. The company was later sold in 2004 to ValueClick, which continues to use the technology and search engine to this day" (Wikipedia article on Simpli, accessed 05-10-2009).

American filmaker Terry Sanders, the American Film Foundation, the Council on Library and Information Resources,  and the American Council of Learned Societies issued Into the Future: On the Preservation of Knowledge in the Electronic Age.

This film, narratived by Robert McNeil, was a sequel to Slow Fires (1987). It "explores the hidden crisis of the digital information age. Will digitally stored information and knowledge survive into the future? Will humans twenty, fifty, one hundred years from now have access to the electronically recorded history of our time?" (from the American Film Foundation blurb; it was available in 33 and 58 minute versions on July 28, 2009). The film included interviews with Peter Norton and Tim Berners-Lee.

According to Bowker, as cited by Robert Darnton in Publisher's Weekly, 700,000 new book titles were published worldwide during 1998.

Marc Levoy and team began The Digital Michelangelo Project at Stanford University using laser scanners to digitize the statues of Michelangelo, and 1,163 fragments of the Forma Urbis Romae, a giant marble map of ancient Rome.

The quality of the scans was so high that the Italian government would not permit the release of the full data set on the Internet; however, the Stanford researchers built a system called ScanView that allowed viewing of details of specific parts of the statue, including parts that would be inaccessible to a normal museum visitor. You can download Scanview at this link: http://graphics.stanford.edu/software/scanview/ (accessed 12-23-2009).

The laser scan data for Michelangelo's David was utilized in its cleaning and restoration that began in September 2002. This eventually resulted in a 2004 book entitled Exploring David: Diagnostic Tests and State of Conservation.

"In preparation for this restoration, the Galleria dell'Accademia undertook an ambitious 10-year program of scientific study of the statue and its condition. Led by Professor Mauro Matteini of CNR-ICVBC, a team of Italian scientists studied every inch of the statue using color photography, radiography (i.e. X-rays), ultraviolet fluorescence and thermographic imaging, and several other modalities. In addition, by scraping off microsamples and performing in-situ analyses, the mineralogy and chemistry of the statue and its contaminants were characterized. Finally, finite element structural analyses were performed to determine the origin of hairline cracks that are visible on his ankles and the tree stump, to decide if intervention was necessary. (They decided it wasn't; these cracks arose in 1871, when the statue briefly tilted forward 3 degrees due to settling of the ground in the Piazza Signoria. This tilt was one of the reasons they moved the statue to the Galleria dell'Accademia.)  

"The results of this diagnostic campaign are summarized in the book Exploring David . . . . The book, written in English, also contains a history of the statue and its past restorations, a visual analysis of the chisel marks of Michelangelo as evident from the statue surface, and an essay by museum director Franca Falletti on the difficulties of restoring famous artworks. . . .  

"Aside from its sweeping scientific vision, what is remarkable about this book is that many of the studies employed a three-dimensional computer model of the statue - the model created by us during the Digital Michelangelo Project. Although we worked hard to create this model, and we envisioned 3D models eventually being used to support art conservation, we did not expect such uses to become practical so soon. After all, our model of the David is huge; outside our laboratory and a few others in the computer graphics field, little software exists that can manipulate such large models. However, with help from Roberto Scopigno and his team at CNR-Pisa, museum director Franca Falletti prodded, encouraged, and cajoled the scientists working under her direction to use our model wherever possible. We contributed a chapter to this book, on the scanning of the statue, but we take no credit for its use in the rest of the book. In fact, to us at Stanford University, the timing of our scanning project relative to the statue's restoration and the creation of this book seems merely fortuitious. However, Falletti insists that she had this use of our model in mind all along! In any case, this is a landmark book - the most extensive use that has ever been made of a 3D computer model in an art conservation project" (http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/mich/book/book.html, accessed 12-23-2009).

On July 21, 2009 the team announced that they had a "full-resolution (1/4mm) 3D model of Michelangelo's 5-meter statue of David", containing "about 1 billion polygons."

Webcast company AudioNet (Broadcast.com) began the first continuous live webcasts with content from WFAA-TV serving Dallas-Ft. Worth in January, 1998 and KCTU-LP serving Wichita, Kansas, on January 10, 1998.

Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Rajeev Motwani, and Terry Winograd of the Stanford Database Group published on paper The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web.

"The worldwide web creates many new challenges for information retrieval. It is very large and heterogeneous. Current estimates are that there are over 150 million web pages with a doubling life of less than one year."

According to his paper, Mapping the World of Science, Eugene Garfield's Science Citation Index built on the principles of citation analysis, covered nearly 20,000,000 printed source articles and 300 million cited printed references over a 50-year period.

J. Craig Venter founded Celera Genomics, with Applera Corporation (Applied Biosystems) in Rockville, Maryland, to sequence and assemble the human genome.

Microsoft, Redmond, Washington, launched MSN Search, a search engine, index and web crawler.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google in Mountain View, California.

They described the technology in a paper entitled  "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine", Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, 30, 107-117.

The first Google index included 26,000,000 web pages.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) was founded on September 30, 1998 to oversee a number of Internet-related tasks previously performed directly on behalf of the U.S. government by other organizations, notably the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA).

ICANN is responsible for managing the assignment of domain names and IP addresses. ICANN's tasks include responsibility for IP address space allocation, protocol identifier assignment, top-level domain name system management, and root server system management functions. . .  ICANN's primary principles of operation have been described as helping preserve the operational stability of the Internet; to promote competition; to achieve broad representation of global Internet community; and to develop policies appropriate to its mission through bottom-up, consensus-based processes" (Wikipedia article in ICANN, accessed 05-16-2010).

The U.S. Congress passed the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.

Supercomputer ASCI Blue-Pacific SST, jointly developed by the U.S. Energy Department’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and IBM, could perform 3.9 trillion calculations per second (15,000 times faster than the average desktop computer) and had over 2.6 trillion bytes of memory (80,000 times more than the average PC).

IBM commented that it would take a person using a calculator 63,000 years to perform as many calculations as this computer could perform in a single second.

The MyFamily.com website was launched in Provo, Utah, with additional free sites beginning in March, 1999. The site generated 1 million registered users within its first 140 days. The company raised more than $90 million in venture capital from investors, and changed its name on November 17, 1999 from Ancestry.com, Inc., to MyFamily.com, Inc. Its three Internet genealogy sites were then called Ancestry.com, MyFamily.com, and FamilyHistory.com.

Reference: http://www.paulallen.net/my-companies, accessed 12-18-2008.

In anticipation of the exhaustion of available IP addresses under IPv4, The Network Working Group of The Internet Society drafted the IPv6 standard.

Database consultant Hank Estrin created and made operational Where's George?, a website that tracked the natural geographic circulation of American paper money.

"A hit is when a bill registered with Where's George? is re-entered into the database. Where's George? does not have specific goals other than tracking currency movements, but many users like to collect interesting patterns of hits, called bingos. The most common bingo involves getting at least one hit in all 50 states (called "50 State Bingo"). Another Bingo, FRB Bingo, is when a user gets hits on bills from all 12 Federal Reserve Banks.

"Most bills do not receive any responses, or hits, but many bills receive two or more hits. The average hit rate is slightly over 11.1%. Double- and triple-hitters are common, and bills with 4 or 5 hits are not unheard of. Almost daily a bill receives its 6th hit. The site record is held by a $1 bill with 15 entries.

"To increase the chance of having a bill reported, users (called "Georgers") may write or stamp text on the bills encouraging bill finders to visit www.wheresgeorge.com and track the bill's travels. Bills that are entered into the database, but not marked, are known as stealths" (Wikipedia article on Where's George, accessed 05-04-2009).

In 1999 64,711 new books were published on paper in the United States. 

The British Government issued a white paper, Modernising Government, setting among its goals that by 2004 all newly created public records would be electronically stored and retrieved. 

In 1999 it required about 756,000,000 trees to produce the world’s annual paper supply.

“The UNESCO Statistical Handbook for 1999 estimates that paper production provides 1,510 sheets of paper per inhabitant of the world on average, although in fact the inhabitants of North America consume 11,916 sheets of paper each (24 reams), and inhabitants of the European Union consume 7,280 sheets of paper annually (15 reams), according to the ENST report. At least half of this paper is used in printers and copiers to produce office documents.”

Thus computers have not reduced paper usage; if anything, because nearly everyone who owns a personal computer also owns a printer, and more and more people acquire computers every year, the amount of printing being done continues to increase.

The U. S. Supreme Court ruled that Internet domain names are property.

The Early English Books Online project, a joint effort between the University of Michigan, Oxford University and ProQuest Information and Learning, began to provide searchable texts of all 125,000 English books printed from 1475 to 1700. This was a development of a project that began in 1938 to microfilm all English books in the timeframe.

The LOCKSS digital library preservation program ("Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe") began intensive testing at Stanford University. It was developed in order to allow libraries to retain copies of digital publications they purchased.

Heritage Microfilm, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, launched NewspaperARCHIVE.com, making available newspaper pages from 1759 to the present. When I accessed the site in December 2008 it stated that you could :

The short range wireless networking standard, Bluetooth, was announced.

The Matrix, a science fiction-martial arts-action film,

"describes a future in which reality perceived by humans is actually the Matrix: a simulated reality created by sentient machines in order to pacify and subdue the human population while their bodies' heat and electrical activity are used as an energy source. Upon learning this, computer programmer "Neo" is drawn into a rebellion against the machines. The film contains many references to the cyberpunk and hacker subcultures; philosophical and religious ideas; and homages to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Hong Kong action cinema, Spaghetti Westerns, and Japanese animation" (Wikipedia article on The Matrix, accessed 12-23-2008).

NTT DoCoMo introduced the mobile web to Japan with the first full internet service on mobile phones, and the first mobile-specific web browser. 

The Better Business Bureau warned about Nigerian spams. These letter scams had previously operated for perhaps 100 years by snail mail.

"For Immediate Release

"June 10, 1999 - The wording is very familiar to Better Business Bureaus nationwide …only the method of contact, and country of origin have changed:

"* 'We respectfully invite your kind attention to the transfer of U.S. $25 million into your personal/company offshore account.'

"* 'you will receive 20% of the total sum, 10% for miscellaneous expenses and the remaining 70% is for me and my colleagues.'

"* 'It is our sincere conviction that you will handle this transaction with absolute confidentiality, maturity and utmost sense of purpose.'

"* 'such transaction to commence within 10 business days.'

"These statements are typical of the lures contained in what's commonly referred to as 'Nigerian Letter Scams.' The BBB warns that these scams have recently gone high-tech and are emanating from several countries throughout Africa, as well as New Zealand, Brazil and Great Britain. Members of the BBB nationwide report that such pitches now arrive unannounced and uninvited in their fax and email boxes.

"The letters are usually signed by someone who 'represents' the relevant country's Ministry of Commerce or Finance or the Department of Petroleum Resources. The writer claims that huge funds are left over from a deliberately inflated construction contract or purchase order and he's seeking to ship the funds offshore.

" 'Now that the Nigerian letter scam has gone high-tech and is being perpetrated via fax machines and e-mails, it's more critical than ever that we educate business owners and managers to this scam,' said James L. Bast, president of the Council of Better Business Bureaus, Inc., the umbrella organization for the nation's BBBs. 'If you receive an offer from a stranger who promises a large payoff in return for assisting in transferring millions of dollars out of Nigeria or any other country, ignore it.' Some letters request copies of business letterhead; others request the name and address of the company and details about its business activities. 'Any response to this fraudulent offer will bring the con artist one step closer to being able to plunder your bank account,' Bast said" (http://www.bbb.org/alerts/article.asp?ID=41. accessed 05-08-2009).

"I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A 'Semantic Web', which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The 'intelligent agents' people have touted for ages will finally materialize" (Berners-Lee, Tim; Fischetti, Mark, Weaving the Web. The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by Its Inventor (1999) Chapter 12).

In 1999 British technology pioneer Kevin Ashton, co-founder of the Auto-ID Labs at MIT, invented the term "The Internet of Things" to describe a system where the Internet is connected to the physical world via ubiquitous sensors, including RFID (Radio-frequency identification).

"Ashton's original definition was: 'Today computers—and, therefore, the Internet—are almost wholly dependent on human beings for information. Nearly all of the roughly 50 petabytes (a petabyte is 1,024 terabytes) of data available on the Internet were first captured and created by human beings—by typing, pressing a record button, taking a digital picture or scanning a bar code. Conventional diagrams of the Internet ... leave out the most numerous and important routers of all - people. The problem is, people have limited time, attention and accuracy—all of which means they are not very good at capturing data about things in the real world. And that's a big deal. We're physical, and so is our environment ... You can't eat bits, burn them to stay warm or put them in your gas tank. Ideas and information are important, but things matter much more. Yet today's information technology is so dependent on data originated by people that our computers know more about ideas than things. If we had computers that knew everything there was to know about things—using data they gathered without any help from us—we would be able to track and count everything, and greatly reduce waste, loss and cost. We would know when things needed replacing, repairing or recalling, and whether they were fresh or past their best. The Internet of Things has the potential to change the world, just as the Internet did. Maybe even more so.' "(Wikipedia article on Internet of Things, accessed 01-07-2013).

In 1999 German industrial designer Birgit Lohmann co-founded Designboom in Milan Italy with Massimo Mini. Designboom was the first independent web publication dedicated to architecture and design.

"Based in Milan with her family, Birgit Lohmann runs the website of her own creation, Designboom. At Designboom, people from around the world can compete in design competitions, view design jobs and share their design work.  

"Having created one of the go-to websites for design knowledge, Birgit Lohmann is certainly on the cutting edge. We had the chance to speak with her about the role trend spotting plays in her work with Designboom.

"1. How did you get involved with Designboom and what motivates you to continue?  

"I practiced as an industrial designer and product development manager for 15 years, I worked for a number of Italian architects and master designers which include Achille Castiglioni, Vico Magistretti, Bruno Munari, Enzo Mari and Renzo Piano. At that time we did not use computers, we drew by hand and made lots of models and prototypes. I was able to work on the first chair using polypropylene and developed the tools for producing it. I enjoyed the work so much, that I did not plan to work on my own, but then there was a time when the ‘eternal assistant’ aspired for more autonomy.  

"Two of the things I like best - spending time in nature and figuring out how things work. I got to combine these things through Internet publishing. Massimo Mini and I founded Designboom in 1999. We left Milan with our two children (at that time 9 and 5 years old) and lived in Bali for a while. In between tropical plants in our garden we created an open air office with 4 desks, where the kids did drawings and homework (which was sent to us by email from their Italian school teachers) and we created and updated Designboom.  

"1999 - we are the ‘grandparents’ of online publishing in the field of art, architecture and design. When we started there were only two other relevant sites, the American Core77.com and the Belgian DesignAddict.com. Core77 was created by students inside the university and this targeted their audience - students and young professionals. Designaddict was initially a XX century design collector’s database. Designboom, because of our work experience, always reached design professionals. The ‘real world’ is a place where things change all the time, and it is essential to be updated continuously.  

"Based in Milan, our small international team is still made up of designers, not journalists. We talk about real experience, cultural intents and influences, restraints and contradictions. We stimulate a global discussion and the rapport that we’ve established with our readers and the greater design community keeps us motivated. It’s a lot of work, not exactly a typical 9-to-5 job, but we spend our days sharing ideas with people of all ages and backgrounds from more than 200 countries. Seriously - what could be better?!" (http://www.trendhunter.com/trends/birgit-lohmann-interview. accessed 01-15-2013).

American computer programmer and entrepreneur Shawn Fanning released the Napster file sharing service for MP3 files from his headquarters in Hull, Massachusetts. After Napster's early explosive success Fanning moved the company to San Mateo, California. "The original company ran into legal difficulties over copyright infringement, ceased operations and was eventually acquired by Roxio. In its second incarnation Napster became an online music store until it merged with Rhapsody on 1 December 2011" (Wikipedia article on Napster, accessed 03-18-2012).

"It [Napster] was the first of the massively popular peer-to-peer file sharing systems, although it was not fully peer-to-peer since it used central servers to maintain lists of connected systems and the files they provided, while actual transactions were conducted directly between machines. Although there were already media which facilitated the sharing of files across the Internet, such as IRC, Hotline, and USENET, Napster specialized exclusively in music in the form of MP3 files and presented a friendly user-interface. The result was a system whose popularity generated an enormous selection of music to download."

In August 1999 Magid M. Abraham and Gian M. Fulgoni founded comScore with the objective of creating the first service to measure trends in e-commerce.

"At the time, no market research company measured online buying behavior. The two leading online measurement companies, Media Metrix and Nielsen NetRatings, were focused solely on tracking Internet users’ site visitation behavior, providing their clients with basic metrics on the size and demographic characteristics of site audiences.

"The panels these two companies used numbered in the tens of thousands. This was far too small a sample size to accurately measure e-commerce since, on average, only 5 percent of a site’s visitors converted into buyers in any month. A panel of at least a million people would be needed. That was a daunting challenge because no research company had ever built a panel of 100,000 people, let alone a million. However, since their experience at IRI had shown that marketers spend four times as many research dollars measuring consumers’ buying behavior as they spend measuring media ratings, Magid and Gian were confident that an attractive market existed for online browsing and buying information. They decided to take on the challenge by raising and willingly investing tens of millions of dollars to discover ways in which to successfully recruit millions of opt-in panelists and develop the technology needed to capture, warehouse and analyze massive quantities of online data" (http://www.comscore.com/About_comScore/comScore_History, accessed 05-12-2009).

An unlikely alliance of disgruntled Labor backbenchers and Tories in the British Parliament defeated a move to end the centuries-old tradition of printing copies of Acts of Parliament on vellum, by 121 votes to 53. Remarkably this also shows that the centuries-old debate continued on whether paper or vellum are the more permanent material for the storage of information.

"Under the scheme, already approved by the Lords, instead of two copies printed on vellum, only one would be produced on archive paper which has a life expectancy of 500 years.

“Labour's Nick Palmer, a Commons administration committee member, urged MPs to approve the change - which would have saved £30,000 a year and the skin of several goats.

“But opposition to it was led by Labour's Brian White (Milton Keynes NE) who said it would almost certainly put 12 people at William Cowley, a parchment and vellum printing company in his constituency, out of work and mean the death of the industry in Britain.

"He claimed the committee had not consulted the firm about the change until it was too late, and urged MPs to find a "different way forward that doesn't destroy an industry".

“Acts of Parliament dating back to 1497 recorded on vellum are currently held in the House of Lords Public Record Office.

“Under the proposed change duplicate copies of Acts of Parliament would also no longer be placed in the Public Record Office at Kew, replacing a resolution decreed in 1849 that two copies of every Act should be printed on vellum.

“Opening the short debate, Dr Palmer (Broxtowe) said the committee considered the change "appropriate and justifiable".

“Continuing to deposit duplicate record copies of both public and private Acts at the Public Record Offices appeared to "serve no useful purpose".

“Dr Palmer dismissed concerns about the durability of archive paper compared with vellum as "groundless".

“He said vellum and archive paper were both flammable so security could not depend alone on the document.

“Dr Palmer said he found it "attractive" that Parliament would not be using animal products where it was not necessary, although it was not one of the arguments advanced by the committee report.

“'We didn't have sentiment or animal welfare consideration affecting our judgment here, we reached it for practical, you might even say prosaic, reasons,' he said.

“Dr Palmer said British Library conservation department laboratory tests had proved that archival paper could have a life expectancy exceeding 500 years.

“But Tory Gerald Howarth (Aldershot) said: "I don't believe that this kind of tradition should lightly be tossed aside."

“Mr Howarth said the death warrant of Charles I was recorded on vellum and added: 'Who is to say whether archival paper will last 300 to 400 years? We shouldn't take the chance.' "

quoted from BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/502342.stm accessed 12-04-2008.

The Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (also known as Truth in Domain Names Act), was enacted into U.S. law as is part of A bill to amend the provisions of title 17, United States Code, and the Communications Act of 1934, relating to copyright licensing and carriage of broadcast signals by satellite (S. 1948). The act mades people who registered domain names that are either trademarks or individual's names with the sole intent of selling the rights of the domain name to the trademark holder or individual for a profit liable to civil action.

"In order for a trademark owner to bring a claim under the ACPA, the owner must establish

• the trademark owner’s mark is distinctive or famous;
• the domain name owner acted in bad faith to profit from the mark; and
• the domain name and the trademark are either identical or confusingly similar (or dilutive for famous trademarks)" 

(Wikipedia article on Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, accessed 11-24-2008).

The Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act was enacted in part because the domain whitehouse.com went online in 1997 as an "adult entertainment" site, leading to this letter from a Whitehouse consel:

"The following is a December letter from a White House counsel to the operator of the "whitehouse.com" adult site regarding the use of the domain and the names and images of the White House, President Clinton, and Hillary Clinton on the site:

"The White House

"Washington

"December 8, 1997

"Mr. Dan Parisi

"Secaucus, New Jersey

"Dear Mr. Parisi:

"It will come as no surprise to you that the White House Counsel's Office is aware of your Internet Web site, "www.whitehouse.com," and that we object to your use of the names and images of the White House, the President, and the First Lady on that Web site to sell memberships in an adult video club. We also recognize that you undoubtedly will use this letter as an object of humor and as an invitation to advance the claim that you are merely exercising your rights under the First Amendment.

"We too believe in the First Amendment--and in humor, although we see nothing humorous in your use of the White House domain name to draw children and other unwitting Internet users to your Web site. However distasteful your business may be, we do not challenge your right to pursue it or to exercise your First Amendment rights, but we do challenge your right to use the White House, the President, and the First Lady as a marketing device. For adult internet users, that device is, at the least, part of a deceptive scheme. For younger Internet users, it has more disturbing consequences. As your own online disclaimer implicitly acknowledges, the foreseeable result of your use of the White House domain name is that children will access your Web site inadvertently. Your customers will understand that such a result is unconscionable, and so, we submit, should you.

Sincerely,

Charles F.C. Ruff

Counsel to the President" (http://news.cnet.com/2009-1023-207800.html, accessed 06-15-2009).

IBM announced the start of a five-year effort to build a massively parallel computer, Blue Gene, which was 500 times more powerful than the world’s fastest computers at the time of the announcement.

Initially Blue Gene was applied to the study of bio-molecular phenomena such as protein folding.