Memory / Mnemonics / Data Storage Timeline Outline

Socrates on the Invention of Writing and the Relationship of Writing to Memory
(Circa 370 BCE)

Plato Compares Human Memory to Wax Tablets
(Circa 369 BCE)

The Earliest Treatise on Mnemonics
(Circa 90 BCE)

Note-Taking Versus "Place Memory" from Antiquity through the Renaissance and Later
(Circa 50 CE – 1700)

"Attic Nights" : Lack of Arrangement Makes its Own Kind of Arrangement
(Circa 180 CE)

The First Printed Herbal
(May 9, 1477)

The Best Medium for Long Term Information Storage
(1494)

Erasable Paper from 1609
(1609)

Depiction of Record Keeping by Pieter Breughel the Younger
(1620 – 1640)

Locke's Method of Indexing Commonplace Books
(1685 – 1706)

In One Gigantic Reading Room the Entire "Memory of the World"
(1785)

The Jacquard Loom Uses Punched Cards to Store Patterns
(1803)

Probably the Earliest to Use Punched Cards for Information Processing and Storage
(September 1832)

The Analytical Engine
(1834)

The First Scientific Instrument to Record Scientific Information in Real Time
(1847)

Flong as an "Immutable Form of Information Capture"
(Circa 1850)

"Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology"
(1885)

Vannevar Bush's "Rapid Selector"
(1938)

Zuse Completes the Z2
(1939)

Sealing of the Crypt of Civlization
(May 25, 1940)

Electronic Memory
(January 29, 1944)

The Williams Tube: The First Random-Access Memory
(June 1946 – March 1947)

A Single Erasable High-Speed Memory
(July 15, 1946)

The First Electronic Computer Company Receives its first Grant
(September 1946)

The ENIAC Becomes an Elementary Stored-Program Computer
(1947)

The Earliest Work Leading toward Machine Translation
(1947)

Invention of Holography
(1947)

Northrop Places the Contract for the BINAC
(October 1947)

Patenting the Mercury Acoustic Delay-Line Electronic Memory
(October 31, 1947)

Cybernetics: The First Widely Distributed Book on Electronic Computing
(1948)

The First Magnetic Drum Memory
(1948)

The First Operational Stored-Program Computer Runs its First Program
(June 21, 1948)

Applying New Technology to the Searching and Storage of Information
(1951)

The First Use of Magnetic Tape for Data Storage
(1951)

Magnetic Core Memory Replaces Electrostatic Memory on the Whirlwind
(1952)

IBM Installs its First Stored Program Electronic Computer, the 701, but They Don't Call it a Computer
(March 27, 1953)

Magnetic Core Storage Units
(1955)

"The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two. . . "
(April 15, 1955 – 1956)

The First Hard Drive: $10,000 per Megabyte
(1956)

"Libraries of the Future"
(1965)

Memory Caching
(April 1965)

Semi-Conductor Memory
(1966)

The Invention of DRAM
(1966)

A Sensor for Recording Images
(1969)

The Laserdisc
(1969 – December 15, 1978)

Problem with the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer Nearly Prevents the First Moon Walk
(July 21, 1969)

The First Commercially Available DRAM Chip
(1970)

System/370 Using Semiconductor Memory
(June 30, 1970)

The Floppy Disk is Introduced
(1971)

The CD is Developed
(1976 – 1983)

A Printed Book Entitled Toward Paperless Information Systems
(1978)

Invention of Flash Memory
(Circa 1980)

The First Scanner?
(November 1982)

Possibly the Earliest Electronic Publication on Art
(1983)

The First Commercially Available IBM PC Compatible ROM Bios
(1983 – May 1984)

The CD-ROM is Introduced
(1985)

The First Digital Image Database of Cultural Materials
(1987)

DVDs are Introduced.
(September 1996 – March 1997)

How Much Information is There?
(1997)

How Much Information?
(2000)

The ASCI White Supercomputer
(June 29, 2000)

High Density Rosetta Archival Preservation Technology
(2001)

"Vegetal and Mineral Memory: The Future of Books"
(November 1, 2003)

Cortical Rewiring and Information Storage
(October 14, 2004)

Data Curation as a Profession
(2006)

"The entire works of humankind, from the beginning of recorded history, in all languages" would amount to 50 petabytes of data.
(May 14, 2006)

The First One Terabyte Hard Disk Drive
(January 4, 2007)

Data-Storing Bacteria Could Last Thousands of Years
(February 27, 2007)

It Would Take 1800 Years to Convert the Paper Records . . . .
(March 10, 2007)

"Computers vs. Brains"
(April 1, 2009)

Costs of Managed Archiving versus Passive Archiving of Data
(June 4, 2009)

Biological Journals to Require Data-Archiving
(January 2010)

"The Data-Driven Life"
(April 20, 2010)

Scanning Books in Libraries Instead of Making Photocopies
(2011)

Worldwide Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information
(February 10, 2011)

The First Large Robotized Library
(May 16, 2011)

"Physical Archiving is Still an Important Function in the Digital Era."The Internet Archive Builds an Archive of Physical Books
(June 6, 2011)

IBM Announces Phase-Change Memory
(June 30, 2011)

How Search Engines Have Become a Primary Form of External or Transactive Memory
(July 14, 2011)

The Cost of Sequencing a Human Genome Drops to $10,500
(November 30, 2011)

The Smallest Magnetic Data Storage Unit Uses Just 12 Atoms per Bit
(January 13, 2012)

What Makes Spoken Lines in Movies Memorable
(April 30, 2012)

The First Book Stored in DNA and then Read
(August 16, 2012)

Memcomputing Outlined
(November 19, 2012)

The Historic Vatican Library to be Digitized in 2.8 Petabytes
(March 7, 2013)