Internet: BCE-1600s

Highlights

• "Technology is a gift of God... After the gift of life it is perhaps the greatest of God's gifts. It is the mother of civilizations, of arts and of sciences." ~Freeman Dyson
• BCE: Abacus; Astrolabe; Antikythera mechanism; 'social media' (papyrus)
• "We are the brothers and sisters of our machines... Minds and tools have been sharpened against each other ever since a scavenger's stone fractured cleanly and the first cutting edge was held in a hunter's hand." ~George Dyson, "Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence"
• 0CE-1600s: paper; printing press; slide rule

BCE

• ~2500 BCE: Abacus Mesopotamia; later in multiple civilizations: Persia, Greece, China, ...
• Why does this digital abacus exist? 2/14/2018
• ~220 BCE: Astrolabe
• How Astrolabes Work
• ~200 BCE: Antikythera mechanism ancient analog computer designed to calculate astronomical positions
• How the Antikythera Mechanism Worked
• A 2,000-year-old computer called the Antikythera Mechanism helped the ancient Greeks understand their universe 5/17/2017
• The World’s Oldest Computer May Have Been Used to Predict the Future like a textbook of astronomy; 6/10/2016
• The Antikythera Mechanism 11/23/2015
• 51 BCE: Cicero's Web: How Social Media Was Born in Ancient Rome how the dynamics of papyrus scrolls explain Facebook; 10/25/2013

0-1600s

• ~140 CE: paper; China. display device and strorage medium
• 1440: Printing press w/ metal movable type: Gutenberg in Europe; other types of type and materials earlier in other countries
• 1622: Slide rule, William Oughtred mechanical analog computer
• Oughtred Society: history
• Slide Rules were the Original Personal Computers 11/5/2015

References

• Wikipedia: Timeline of computing hardware: Prehistory-AntiquityMedieval-1640
• The 50 Greatest Breakthroughs Since the Wheel The Atlantic; 10/23/2013
• Computer History Museum looks at 2000-year history of the computer 1/15/2011
• The Extremely Accurate History of the Internet: The Onion's new satirical documentary lands on Yahoo Humanity's Terrible Past: 50,000 Years Without WiFi; 11/14/2012