Early scripts

The oldest-known forms of writing were primarily logographic in nature, based on pictographic and ideographic elements. Most writing systems can be broadly divided into three categories: logographic, syllabic and alphabetic (or segmental); however, all three may be found in any given writing system in varying proportions, often making it difficult to categorize a system uniquely.

The invention of the first writing systems is roughly contemporary with the beginning of the Bronze Age in the late Neolithic of the late 5th millennium BCE. The first writing system is generally believed to have been invented in prehistoric Sumer and developed by the late 4th millennium BCE into cuneiform. Egyptian hieroglyphs, and the undeciphered Proto-Elamite writing system and Indus Valley script, also date to this era, though a few scholars have questioned the Indus Valley script's status as a writing system.

The original Sumerian writing system was derived from a system of clay tokens used to represent commodities. By the end of the 4th millennium BCE, this had evolved into a method of keeping accounts, using a round shaped stylus impressed into soft clay at different angles for recording numbers. This was gradually augmented with pictographic writing using a sharp stylus to indicate what was being counted. Round-stylus and sharp-stylus writing was gradually replaced about 2700–2000 BC by writing using a wedge-shaped stylus (hence the term cuneiform), at first only for logograms, but developed to include phonetic elements by 2800 BCE. About 2600 BCE cuneiform began to represent syllables of spoken Sumerian language.

Finally, cuneiform writing became general-purpose writing system for logograms, syllables, and numbers. By the 26th century; BCE, this script had been adapted to another Mesopotamian language, Akkadian, and from that to others such as Hurrian, and Hittite. Scripts similar in appearance to this writing system include those for Ugaritic and Old Persian.

The Chinese script may have originated independently of the Middle Eastern scripts, around the 16th century BCE (early Shang dynasty), out of a late neolithic Chinese system of proto-writing dating back to c. 6000 BCE. The pre-Columbian writing systems of the Americas, including Olmec and Mayan, are also generally believed to have had independent origins.

Alphabet

A Specimen of typeset fonts and languages, by William Caslon, letter founder; from the 1728 Cyclopaedia.

The first pure alphabets (properly, "abjads", mapping single symbols to single phonemes, but not necessarily each phoneme to a symbol) emerged around 2000 BCE in Ancient Egypt, but by then alphabetic principles had already been incorporated into Egyptian hieroglyphs for a millennium (see Middle Bronze Age alphabets).

By 2700 BCE, Egyptian writing had a set of some 22 hieroglyphs to represent syllables that begin with a single consonant of their language, plus a vowel (or no vowel) to be supplied by the native speaker. These glyphs were used as pronunciation guides for logograms, to write grammatical inflections, and, later, to transcribe loan words and foreign names.

However, although seemingly alphabetic in nature, the original Egyptian uniliterals were not a system and were never used by themselves to encode Egyptian speech. In the Middle Bronze Age an apparently "alphabetic" system is thought by some to have been developed in central Egypt around 1700 BCE for or by Semitic workers, but we cannot read these early writings and their exact nature remains open to interpretation.

Over the next five centuries this Semitic "alphabet" (really a syllabary like Phoenician writing) seems to have spread north. All subsequent alphabets around the world with the sole exception of Korean Hangul have either descended from it, or been inspired by one of its descendants.

Scholars agree that there is a relationship between the West-Semitic alphabet and the creation of the Greek alphabet. There is debate between scholars regarding the earliest uses of the Greek alphabet because of the changes that were made to create the Greek alphabet.^[7]

The Greek alphabet had the following characteristics:

1. The Greek lettering we know of today traces back to the eighth century BCE
2. Early Greek scripts used the twenty-two West-Semitic letters and included five supplementary letters.
3. Early Greek was not uniform in structure, and had many local variations.
4. The Greek lettering was written using a lapidary style of writing.
5. Greek was written in a boustrophedon style.

Scholars believe that at one point in time, early Greek scripts were very close to the West-Semitic alphabet. Over time, the changes that were made to the Greek alphabet were introduced as a result of the need for the Greeks to find a better way to express their spoken language in a more accurate way.^[7]

Storytelling

Verbal communication is one of the earliest forms of human communication, the oral tradition of storytelling has dated back to various times in history. The development of communication in its oral form can be based on certain historical periods. The complexity of oral communication has always been reflective based on the circumstance of the time period. Verbal communication was never bound to one specific area, instead, it had and continues to be a globally shared tradition of communication.^[8] People communicated through song, poems, and chants, as some examples. People would gather in groups and pass down stories, myths, and history. Oral poets from Indo-European regions were known as "weavers of words" for their mastery over the spoken word and ability to tell stories.^[9] Nomadic people also had oral traditions that they used to tell stories of the history of their people to pass them on to the next generation.

Nomadic tribes have been the torch bearers of oral storytelling. Nomads of Arabia are one example of the many nomadic tribes that have continued through history to use oral storytelling as a tool to tell their histories and the story of their people. Due to the nature of nomadic life, these individuals were often left without architecture and possessions to call their own, and often left little to no traces of themselves.^[10] The richness of the nomadic life and culture is preserved by early Muslim scholars who collect the poems and stories that are handed down from generation to generation. Poems created by these Arabic nomads are passed down by specialists known as sha'ir. These individuals spread the stories and histories of these nomadic tribes, and often in times of war, would strengthen morale within members of given tribes through these stories.

In its natural form, oral communication was, and has continued to be, one of the best ways for humans to spread their message, history, and traditions to the world.

Timeline of writing technology

• 30,000 BC – In ice-age Europe, people mark ivory, bone, and stone with patterns to keep track of time, using a lunar calendar.^[11]
• 14,000 BCE – In what is now Mezhirich, Ukraine, the first known artifact with a map on it is made using bone.^[11]
• Prior to 3500 BC – Communication was carried out through paintings of indigenous tribes.
• 3500s BCE – The Sumerians develop cuneiform writing and the Egyptians develop hieroglyphic writing.
• 16th century BCE – The Phoenicians develop an alphabet.
• 105 – Tsai Lun invents paper.
• 7th century – Hindu-Malayan empires write legal documents on copper plate scrolls, and write other documents on more perishable media.
• 751 – Paper is introduced to the Muslim world after the Battle of Talas.
• 1250 – The quill is used for writing.^[11]

Pre-electric

• 26–37 CE – Roman Emperor Tiberius rules the empire from the island of Capri by signaling messages with metal mirrors to reflect the sun.
• 1520 – Ships on Ferdinand Magellan's voyage signal to each other by firing cannon and raising flags.

Telegraph

• 1792 – Claude Chappe establishes the first long-distance semaphore telegraph line.
• 1831 – Joseph Henry proposes and builds an electric telegraph.
• 1836 – Samuel Morse develops the Morse code.
• 1843 – Samuel Morse builds the first long-distance electric telegraph line.

Landline telephone

• 1876 – Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas A. Watson exhibit an electric telephone in Boston.
• 1889 – Almon Strowger patents the direct dial

Phonograph

• 1877 – Thomas Edison patents the phonograph.

Radio and television

• 1920 – Radio station KDKA based in Pittsburgh began the first broadcast.
• 1925 – John Logie Baird transmits the first television signal.
• 1942 – Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil invent frequency hopping spread spectrum communication technique.
• 1947 – Full-scale commercial television is first broadcast.
• 1963 – First geosynchronous communications satellite is launched, 17.5 years after Arthur C. Clarke's article.
• 1999 – Sirius satellite radio is introduced.

Fax

• 1843 – Patent issued for the "Electric Printing Telegraph", a very early forerunner of the fax machine
• 1926 – Commercial availability of the radioax
• 1964 – First modern fax machine commercially available (Long Distance Xerography)

Mobile telephone

• 1947 – Douglas H. Ring and W. Rae Young of Bell Labs propose a cell-based approach which led to "cellular phones."
• 1965 – Chandros Rypinski, Jr. patents the first multiple channel radio telephone system^[12] which was licensed to Bell Labs^[13] (patent no. US3173996A).
• 1981 – Comvik introduces the world's first automatic mobile phone service followed a week later by Nordic Mobile Telephone
• 1991 – GSM is put into operation
• 1992 – Neil Papworth sends the first SMS (or text message), on the Vodafone network.^{[14][15][16][17]}
• 1999 – 45% of Australians have a mobile phone.
• 2014 – The number of mobile connections surpasses the global population.^[18]

Computers and Internet

• 1946 - The University of Pennsylvania introduces ENIAC, the first programmable, electronic, general-purpose digital computer
• 1949 – Claude Shannon, the "father of information theory", mathematically proves the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem.
• 1957 – Gordon Gould invents the laser and the optical amplifier.^[19]
• 1965 – First email sent (at MIT).^[20]
  

  Exhibition space at Rupriikki Media Museum in Tampere, Finland
• 1966 – Charles Kao realizes that silica-based optical waveguides offer a practical way to transmit light via total internal reflection.
• 1969 – The first hosts of ARPANET, Internet's ancestor, are connected.^[21]

ARPANET access points in the 1970s

• 1971 – Erna Schneider Hoover invents a computerized switching system for telephone traffic.
• 1971 – 8-inch floppy disk removable storage medium for computers is introduced.^[22]
• 1973 – Optelecom, Inc. delivers the first operational optical communications system under an ARPA contract to the US Army Missile Command, and the first commercial fiber optic system to Chevron.^[23]
• 1975 – "First list servers are introduced."^[22]
• 1976 – The personal computer (PC) market is born.
• 1977 – Donald Knuth begins work on TeX.
• 1981 – Hayes Smartmodem introduced.^[24]
• 1983 – Microsoft Word software is launched.^[25]
• 1985 – AOL is launched.
• 1989 – Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau build the prototype system which became the World Wide Web at CERN.
• 1989 – WordPerfect 5.1 word processing software released.^[24]
• 1989 – Lotus Notes software is launched.^[26]
• 1991 – Anders Olsson transmits solitary waves through an optical fiber with a data rate of 32 billion bits per second.
• 1992 – Internet2 organization is created.
• 1992 – IBM ThinkPad 700C laptop computer created. It was lightweight compared to its predecessors.^[24]
• 

  Screenshot of NCSA Mosaic browser
  1993 – Mosaic graphical web browser is launched.^[26]
• 1994 – Internet radio broadcasting is born.
• 1996 – The first Dense Wave Division Multiplexing (WDM) system was installed by Ciena Corp.^[27] WDM subsequently became the common basis of all telecommunications networks^[28] and a foundation of the Internet.
• 1996 – Motorola StarTAC mobile phone introduced. It was significantly smaller than previous cellphones.^[24]
• 1997 – SixDegrees.com is launched, the first of several early social networking services
• 1999 – Napster peer-to-peer file sharing is launched.^[24]
• 2001 – Cyworld adds social networking features and becomes the first of several mass-market social networking service
• 2003 – Skype video calling software is launched.
• 2004 – Facebook is launched, becoming the largest social networking site in 2009.
• 2005 – YouTube, the video-sharing site, is launched.
• 2005 – Reddit is launched.
• 2006 – Twitter is launched.
• 2007 – iPhone is launched.
• 2009 – WhatsApp is launched.
• 2010 – Instagram is launched.
• 2011 – Snapchat is launched.
• 2015 – Discord is launched.