This Week in Tech History: The Internet is 46 years old and Internet Advertising is 21

October 27, 2010

World Day for Audiovisual Heritage is celebrated or the first time, to “raise general awareness of the need for urgent measures to be taken and to acknowledge the importance of audiovisual documents as an integral part of national identity.” UNESCO estimates that “we have no more than 10 to 15 years to transfer audiovisual records to digital to prevent their loss.” Examples here and here.

To celebrate the International Day for Audiovisual Heritage, the Centre for Image Research and Diffusion (CRDI) of the Girona City Council, has made four audiovisuals with the CRDI footage, which show the evolution of four emblematic places in the city: the Cathedral, the Rambla, the Devesa and the Independence square.

October 27, 1994

HotWired, the first commercial Web magazine, gives birth to the first Web banner ad and the Internet advertising industry. Legend has it that the first banner ad was from AT&T, prophetically asking “Have you ever clicked your mouse right here? You will.” Worldwide Internet advertising revenues were $135.42 billion in 2014 and are expected to grow to $239.87 billion in 2019, surpassing TV as the largest single advertising category.

October 28, 1927

The first biweekly Movietone newsreel premiers at the Roxy Theater in New York City. Newsreels were a source of news, current affairs, and entertainment for millions of moviegoers until television supplanted them in the 1950s. In 2013, Television was still cited as one of two major sources of news by 69% of Americans, followed by a rapidly-rising Internet, cited by 50%. Today, the share of Americans for whom Twitter and Facebook serve as a source of news is continuing to rise, reaching 63% in 2015.

Fox Movietone News, Vol. XVIII, No. 11,1935

October 20, 1969

Leonard Kleinrock and Charley Kline send the first message ever sent over the ARPANET, the predecessor of the Internet, from their network node at UCLA to Bill Duvall at SRI. They attempted to transmit the word “login,” as in logging into the SRI computer from their computer at UCLA. They succeeded in transmitting the “l” and the “o” and then the system crashed! Hence, says Kleinrock, the first message on the Internet was “lo”, as in “lo and behold!” They were able to do the full login about an hour later.

November 1, 1870

The U.S. Weather Bureau makes its first meteorological observations using 24 locations that provided reports via telegraph. For the first time, weather observations from distant points could be “rapidly” collected, plotted, and analyzed at one location. It’s a great example of how the value of information increases when it’s shared or what Metcalfe’s Law should have been about. Instead, Metcalfe’s Law tries to capture the increase in the value of the network as more users join it. What flows over the network is more important and interesting than the network itself. Of course, what Metcalfe was selling in the early 1980s when he used the formula (later labeled “Metcalfe’s Law” by George Gilder), was a network card and the pioneering idea of local-area-networks. At that time, the major perceived benefit of networking PCs was not sharing information, but sharing a printer…

News from the past and future of information http://infostory.wordpress.com/