Tech Anniversaries
Seems today marks 10 years since the term ‘blog’ was coined by Jorn Barger.
In 2007 I’ve noticed a whole bunch of ICT anniversaries being reported, including:
- 10 years since the first blog was established - well, possibly, depending on how the term is defined, but when Dave Winer launched Scripting News on 1st April 1997 he launched what some see as the first modern blog.
- 25 years since the emoticon was invented - when Professor Scott Fahlman of Carnegie Mellon University typed : - ) on a bulletin board on September 19th 1982.
- 15 years since the first text message was sent when Neil Papworth, an engineer working for Airwide, texted ‘Merry Christmas’ over the Vodafone Network on 5th December 1992.
- 5 years since the Creative Commons was launched on 14th December 2002.
Some sites have also noted that 2007 marked 25 years since the Commodore 64 was launched in January 1982. Personally I couldn’t care less about that one; much more important to me was the 25th Birthday of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, launched a few months later in April 1982, as my first computer was a Spectrum (a 1982 Christmas present IIRC!).
It is also fifteen years since the first mass produced GSM phone - Nokia’s 1011 - was released, on 10th November of 1992, and it was this device that made texting a possibility. While I was reading for my PhD I shared an office with a visiting scholar from Finland (Jan-Erik johanson) who had one of Nokia’s early GSM phones. As most UK handsets were still analogue he couldn’t send SMS to anyone he met in the UK and was completely bemused that we had not heard of texting over here…
