Research

Below is a visual history of "search" and search engines; hopefully it's both a trip down memory lane and a useful resource for anyone looking to learn a bit more about the history of Internet search engines. If you like the graphic or find it useful you're welcome to embed the image on your own site, link to it, or give it a Digg/Stumble/Etc.

Overview Nothing epitomizes modern life better than the computer. For better or worse, computers have infiltrated every aspect of our society. Today computers do much more than simply compute: supermarket scanners calculate our grocery bill while keeping store inventory; computerized telphone switching centers play traffic cop to millions of calls and keep lines of communication untangled; and automatic teller machines (ATM) let us conduct banking transactions from virtually anywhere in the world. But where did all this technology come from and where is it heading? To fully understand and appreciate the impact computers have on our lives and promises they hold for the future, it is important to understand their evolution.

As We May Think (1945): The concept of hypertext and a memory extension really came to life in July of 1945, when after enjoying the scientific camaraderie that was a side effect of WWII, Vannevar Bush's As We May Think was published in The Atlantic Monthly. He urged scientists to work together to help build a body of knowledge for all mankind. Here are a few selected sentences and paragraphs that drive his point home.

Alan M. Turing was an English mathematician, cryptoanalyst and computer scientist who played a crucial role in World War II to break the German Enigma codes. He is considered by many to be the father of modern computer science.

A Dusty Legacy In 1994 the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney received a telephone call from the electronics company Amalgamated Wireless Australia (AWA), requesting that someone from the Museum be sent to inspect a collection of old totalisator equipment at one of the Company’s premises. AWA was Australia’s oldest and most high profile electronics manufacturer, and had come into possession of the Tote equipment through its acquisition of a company called Automatic Totalisators Limited (ATL), in the 1980s. This equipment, once used to mechanically calculate the betting odds at Australian racecourses, had long been redundant, and AWA was unsure what to do with it: should it just become landfill, or was it worth preserving?

The following chronology is provided by Webb & Associates for information purposes only. This telecommunications history timeline is derived from several sources including "Events in Telephone History" published by the AT&T Public Relations Department, and "A Capsule History of the Bell System" - A Bell System Publication. Additional sources used in the creation of this timeline as well as a complete list of related books which may be of interest to you are included within our bibliography.

StarLAN was the first implementation of 1 megabit per second (1Mb/s) Ethernet over twisted pair wiring. It was standardized by the standards association of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) as 802.3e in 1986, as the 1BASE5 version of Ethernet.

Sendmail provides message processing appliances, applications, and services that enable enterprises to modernize their messaging infrastructures resulting in optimal email systems and lowered operating costs. Since 1982, thousands of customers around the globe have relied on Sendmail open source and commercial products for intelligent email backbones that solve the complex problems of policy-based message handling and routing between email systems such as Microsoft Exchange or IBM Lotus Notes and the Internet.

Ethernet is a family of computer networking technologies for local area networks (LANs) commercially introduced in 1980. Standardized in IEEE 802.3, Ethernet has largely replaced competing wired LAN technologies.

700 BC Homing pigeons carry messages in ancient Greece. 1536 May 4th In a letter Florentine merchant Francesco Lapi uses the @ sign for the first time in recorded history. 1610 Galileo Galilei discovers the moon's terrain and Jupiter's four largest moons. His view of the heavens as a place started a scientific revolution, and would forever change how we view the universe around us. 1819 Danish physicist Hans Christian Orsted discovers that a wire carrying an electric current creates a field that deflects a magnetic needle, a discovery that would eventually lead to the creation of the telegraph.