Category: Timeline Stories

Jack Dorsey was born on 19 November 1976, in St. Louis, Missouri, the son of Tim and Marcia (née Smith) Dorsey. Jack started his occasions with computers early, and at age 14, he created an open-source program for dispatch routing, used for many years. Jack went to high school at Bishop DuBourg High School and attended Missouri University of Science and Technology. While working on dispatching as a programmer, he later moved to Oakland, California.

In California in 2000, Dorsey started his company to dispatch couriers, taxis, and emergency services from the Web. His other projects and ideas at this time included networks of medical devices and a frictionless service market. In July 2000, building on dispatching and inspired partially by services like LiveJournal and AOL Instant Messenger, he had the idea for real-time status communication.

When he first saw implementations of instant messaging, he wondered if the software’s user status output could be shared among friends easily. He approached Biz Stone from Odeo (directory and search destination website for RSS-syndicated audio and video), who at the time happened to be interested in text messaging. Dorsey and Stone decided that SMS text suited the status message idea, and built a prototype of Twitter in about two weeks. The idea attracted many users at Odeo, as well as investment from Evan Williams, the founder of Pyra Labs and Blogger.

The working concept of Twitter is partially inspired by the cell phone text messaging service TXTMob.

The name Twitter was picked up later, as Dorsey recalled:
We wanted to capture that in the name — we wanted to capture that feeling: the physical sensation that you’re buzzing your friend’s pocket. It’s like buzzing all over the world. So we did a bunch of name-storming, and we came up with the word “twitch,” because the phone kind of vibrates when it moves. But “twitch” is not a good product name because it doesn’t bring up the right imagery. So we looked in the dictionary for words around it, and we came across the word “twitter,” and it was just perfect. The definition was “a short burst of inconsequential information,” and “chirps from birds.” And that’s exactly what the product was.

Work on the project started on 21 March 2006, when Dorsey published the first Twitter message at 9:50 PST: “just setting up my twttr”.

In July 2006 Twitter moved from an internal service for Odeo employees, into a full-scale version in July 2006. In October 2006, Biz Stone, Evan Williams, Dorsey, and other members of Odeo formed Obvious Corporation and acquired Odeo and all of its assets—including Odeo.com and Twitter.com—from the investors and other shareholders.

The tipping point for Twitter’s popularity was the 2007 South by Southwest festival. During the event, usage went from 20000 tweets per day up to 60000. The Twitter people cleverly placed two 60-inch plasma screens in the conference hallways, exclusively streaming Twitter messages. Hundreds of conference-goers kept tabs on each other via constant twitters. Panelists and speakers mentioned the service, and the bloggers in attendance touted it. Soon everyone was buzzing and posting about this new thing that was sort of instant messaging and sort of blogging and maybe even a bit of sending a stream of telegrams.

The 140-character limit on message length was initially set for compatibility with SMS messaging and has brought to the web the kind of shorthand notation and slang commonly used in SMS messages. This limit has also spurred the usage of URL shortening services such as bit.ly, goo.gl, and tr.im, and content hosting services, such as Twitpic and NotePub to accommodate multimedia content and text longer than 140 characters.

The Twitter Web interface uses the Ruby on Rails framework, deployed on a Ruby Enterprise Edition. The messages were handled initially by a Ruby persistent queue server called, but since 2009 this has been gradually replaced with software written in Scala. The service’s API allows other web services and applications to integrate with Twitter. To group posts together by topic or type, users make use of hashtags, words, or phrases prefixed with a #. Similarly, the letter d followed by a username allows users to send messages privately to their followers. Otherwise, the @ sign followed by a username publicly states the attached tweets are a reply to (or just mention) any specific users (who can find such recent tweets logged in their interface).

In late 2009, the new Twitter Lists feature was added, making it possible for users to follow (and mention/reply to) lists of authors instead of following individual authors.

On March 2010, Twitter has recorded a 1500 percent growth in the number of registered users, the number of its employees has grown 500 percent, and over 70000 registered applications have been created for the microblogging platform.

In December 2012, Twitter announced it had surpassed 200 million monthly active users. In January 2013, Twitter acquired Crashlytics in order to build out its mobile developer products. In April 2013, Twitter launched a music app called Twitter Music for the iPhone. As of September 2013, the company’s data showed that 200 million users sent over 400 million tweets daily, with nearly 60% of tweets sent from mobile devices.

In April 2014, Twitter underwent a redesign that made the site resemble Facebook somewhat, with a profile picture and biography in a column left to the timeline, and a full-width header image with a parallax scrolling effect. That layout was used as the main for the desktop front end until July 2019, undergoing some minor changes over time.

In April 2015, the Twitter.com desktop homepage changed. Since May 2018, tweet replies deemed by an algorithm to be detractive from the conversation are initially hidden and only loaded by actuating a “Show more replies” element at the bottom.

Twitter experienced considerable growth during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. The platform also was increasingly used for misinformation related to the pandemic. Twitter started marking tweets that contained misleading information and adding links to fact-checks. In May 2020, Twitter moderators marked two tweets from U.S. President Donald Trump as “potentially misleading” and linked to a fact-check. Trump responded by signing an executive order to weaken Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which limits social media sites’ liability for content moderation decisions. Twitter later banned Trump, claiming that he violated “the glorification of violence policy”. The ban was criticized by conservatives and some European leaders, who saw it as an interference with freedom of speech.

Business magnate Elon Musk initiated an acquisition of Twitter in April 2022 and concluded it in October 2022 (cost US$44 billion). Musk published his first tweet on his personal Twitter account in June 2010, and had more than 80 million followers by April 2022.

At the beginning of 2005, a dinner party of fellow PayPal (the famous e-commerce Internet site for money transfers and payments) employees happened in San Francisco, California, in the apartment of Steve Chen. Chen was born in August 1978 in Taiwan, his family came to the United States when he was eight years old, where he studied computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. At this party, Chen and his friend, Chad Hurley (born in 1977 in Philadelphia, holder of a degree in fine arts from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, the first-ever graphic designer of PayPal in the period 1999-2002), spent much of the party shooting videos and digital photos of each other. They quickly uploaded the photos to the Web. But the videos? Not a chance.

Realizing that digital photographs were easier to share thanks to new Web sites like Flickr, they reasoned that a similar software package to share videos was possible, too, but… Stumbling across a need to publish a video on Internet, the friends decided to create a video-sharing website on which users can upload and share videos. And they had the means to address this need, because Chen was an exceptional code writer, and Hurley’s gift for design could give a new Web site a compelling look.

Hurley was living in Menlo Park, California, and had a garage on his property, where in February of 2005 he and Chen set to work on creating what became YouTube. On Valentine’s Day 2005, Hurley registered the trademark, logo and domain of YouTube. Two months later Chen and Hurley called for help from his ex-colleague from PayPal Jawed Karim (born in October 1979), also a very good programmer. The domain name www.youtube.com was activated the same month. The three founders agreed (Karim took a much lower share in the company) on a few caveats: The site had to be easy to use for a person with only a minimum of computer skills, and it would not require users to download any special software in order to upload or view videos. They also made it easy for site visitors to view clips without going through a registration process and created a quick search function to access the archives.

YouTube relocated his work from the garage to a modest office, situated above a pizzeria and Japanese restaurant in San Mateo, California, and offered the public a beta test of the site in May 2005, six months before the official launch in November 2005. In the same month, YouTube got a venture-capital kick-off—an $3.5 million investment by Sequoia Capital. The first YouTube video was uploaded on 23 April 2005, (it was entitled Me at the zoo, showing founder Jawed Karim at San Diego Zoo, still available on the site).

Before the launch of YouTube, there were few easy methods available for ordinary computer users who wanted to post videos online. With its simple interface, YouTube made it possible for anyone with an Internet connection to post a video that a worldwide audience could watch within a few minutes. The wide range of topics covered by YouTube has turned video sharing into one of the most important parts of Internet culture.

The site grew rapidly, and in July 2006 the company announced that more than 65000 new videos were being uploaded every day and that the site was receiving 100 million video views per day. Hurley and Chen’s idea proved to be one of the biggest Internet phenomena of 2006. YouTube soon became the dominant provider of online video in the United States, with a market share of around 43 percent and more than six billion videos viewed in January 2009. It was estimated that 20 hours of new videos are uploaded to the site every minute and that around three-quarters of the material comes from outside the United States. It is also estimated that in 2007 YouTube consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet in 2000. In March 2008, YouTube’s bandwidth costs were estimated at approximately US$1 million daily.

In October 2006, Google Inc. announced that it had acquired YouTube for US$1.65 billion in Google stock. Thus the three YouTube founders became overnight multi-millionaires.

Viewing YouTube videos on a personal computer required the Adobe Flash Player plug-in to be installed in the browser. The Adobe Flash Player plug-in was one of the most common pieces of software installed on personal computers and accounts for almost 75% of online video material. YouTube accepted videos uploaded in most container formats, including .AVI, .MKV, .MOV, .MP4, DivX, .FLV, and .OGG. These included video codecs such as MPEG-4, MPEG, and .WMV.

Videos uploaded to YouTube by standard account holders were limited to ten minutes in length and a file size of 2 GB. Initially, it was possible to upload longer videos, but a ten-minute limit was introduced in March 2006 after YouTube found that the majority of videos exceeding this length were unauthorized uploads of television shows and films. Partner accounts were permitted to upload videos longer than ten minutes, subject to acceptance by YouTube.

In June 2008, video annotations were introduced, allowing users were able to add text boxes and speech bubbles at any desired location and custom sizes in various colors, optionally with a link and short pausing, allowing for interactive videos. In February 2009, the feature was extended to allow for collaboration, meaning uploaders could invite others to edit their video’s annotations. In May 2017, annotations were locked from editing, and in January 2019, they were entirely shut down.

In April 2011, YouTube Live was launched, enabling content creators and corporate/public organizations to stream live content. Concerts, sports events, and even weddings begin to appear on the site. In July 2012 the Olympics are live-streamed for the very first time.

In December 2012 “Gangnam Style” becomes the first video to hit 1 billion views. In March 2013 YouTube reaches 1 billion unique monthly visitors.

Since its early days in 2005, YouTube has grown to become a behemoth of the Internet. It is now present in more than 75 countries and available in 61 languages, with hundreds of hours of video content uploaded every minute. Now, the site has more than one billion users and has become the de facto video-sharing platform on the Internet.

Like any business, YouTube needs to make money somehow, so how exactly does YouTube do it?

Before being purchased by Google in late 2006, YouTube had declared a monthly income of somewhere in the region of $15 million, not bad for a one-year-old site. Despite this, YouTube had a long way from actually being a profitable business. But profitability wasn’t the main reason that Google snapped them up. In fact, Google saw the potential for the platform as an online video service. They surmised that by combining YouTube’s platform with Google’s enormous internet traffic, it would only be a matter of time before the investment paid off. They soon added their Google ads service to video content on the platform in a bid to bring in some much-needed revenue from the site. And it certainly worked. By June 2008, Forbes magazine reported that YouTube was making somewhere in the region of $200 million annually, mainly owing to progress in advertising sales.

In 2018 the company added the “two-ads” feature, which shows two ads at once, to beef up potential revenue from the content. But this is not the only revenue source for the platform. YouTube also pulls in money through its subscriber-based model, now called YouTube Premium (previously YouTube Red), Music Premium service, and paid TV service. As of 2019, YouTube is believed to have generated around $15 billion for Alphabet, which is about 10% of all of its annual revenue for the year, while running costs are thought to be as much as $5 or $6 million a month.

Given YouTube’s size, dominance, and market penetration, it is unlikely to fade away any time soon. But only time will tell.

On 23 April 1881, William M. Howland (1843-1901), an inventor and carriage maker from Topsham, Sagadahoc County, Maine, USA, applied for a patent for an adding machine. The patent (see US patent Nr. 250541) was granted on 6 December of the same year. Besides the patent application, nothing is known about the adding device of Howland, so most probably it remained only on paper and has not been implemented in practice.

The adding machine of Howland was a simple lever-operated device, consisting of a series of numbered disks arranged on a shaft and having interlocking pawls. It has nothing new in the area, but let’s examine the operation of this adding machine, using the drawing from the patent application (see the nearby image).

For use, the wheels are set with a zero on each at the slot between the top of the apron and bar I, and the handles of the levers at the top of the apron-slots. The handle of the unit wheel is brought down to the number on its slot corresponding with the unit of the first number of those to be added. By this, the pawl on this handle turns the wheel as many teeth as units. Then the handle of the tens-wheel is worked the same way, and so on for the first number. For the next number, the handles are returned and the operation continued, and so on for all the numbers which are to be calculated. After all are calculated, the number which is under the slot is the sum of the numbers.

It will be seen that when the number of any two or more digits in order of the same denomination goes over nine it causes the next wheel to be turned one tooth by reason of the engagement of one of the hooks on the first wheel.

Instead of using the drag-pawl g’ on the levers D the push-pawl z may be used.

Biography of William Howland

William M. Howland was born in November 1843 in Topsham, Sagadahoc County, Maine. He was the son of Abraham Howland (1794-1880) and Lydia Waite (Kidder) Howland (1802-1890), who married in 1822. Besides William, Abraham and Lydia had: Sarah Ann (1823–1908), Arabella R. (1825–1845), and James E. (1844–1892). Abraham had a younger brother, Stockbridge Howland (1801-1883, see the nearby image), who became a known local civil engineer and Adventist preacher.

Besides the above-mentioned adding machine William Howland patented the bench dog in USA and Canada with his brother James E. He patented also an apple peeler in 1864, a machine for reducing wood to pulp (1881), and together with his cousin George L. Howland (born 1833)—a hoisting apparatus (derrick) (invented in 1867, patented in 1871). In 1872, Howland Brothers (William and James) established a shop for the manufacture of “Howland’s Patent Car Derrick,” which proved to be a popular item for the railroads.

William Howland married his cousin Mary Kendall and they had a daughter—Eunice Howland Merryman (1877-1898).

William Howland died on 22 Apr 1901 in Topsham.

On 29 March 1876 John Hall Mears (1827-1887), a 49 years old prolific inventor, who used to work as an agricultural machinery agent and commercial traveler, from Oshkosh, the county seat of Winnebago County, Wisconsin, USA, applied for a patent for a small and simple adding machine (arithmometer). The patent (see US patent Nr. 183409) was granted on 17 October 1876, and Mears assigned one-half of his right to Alonzo C. Austin (1833-1912), a businessman from Oshkosh.

The adding machine of Mears was a simple adding device, quite similar to the earlier calculators of his compatriots Jabez Burns and John Ballou from 1858, Joseph Harris (1861), and Milton Jeffers (1863). The adding machine of John Mears obviously never went into production, so the only information we have for it is the patent application. Let’s examine the operation of the device, using the patent drawing (see the image below).

The operation of this instrument is as follows:

The disks C are first turned back until the spring-pins f come against the projecting cams or shoulders i of the springs D. Each disk is then turned, the operator commencing either from the right or the left, at his own option, until one of the pins f comes opposite to that cipher on the index placed on the springs D which corresponds to the cipher in the amount to be added up.

Thus, for instance, if the operator desires to add the sums of 742 and 317, the wheel farthest to the right is turned until the pin f comes opposite the cipher 2 on the index. Next, the second wheel from the right is turned until the pin comes opposite figure 4 of its index. Then the third wheel is turned until the pin f comes opposite the cipher 7, thus indicating the first amount, 742. The second amount, 317, is indicated in the same manner by first turning the third wheel from the right until the pin comes opposite the figure 3. Next, the second wheel from the right is turned until the pin comes opposite the figure 1 on the index, and, lastly, the wheel nearest the end is turned until the pin comes opposite Fig. 7. By looking through the slot a in the front part of the box, the amount of these two sums added (in this case 1059) will appear.

Biography of John Mears

John Hall Mears was born in 1827 in Ontario, Canada. He settled in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, USA, in the middle 1850s. There he worked as a dealer in farm implements and invented and patented (besides the above-mentioned calculating device), quite a few agricultural machines and devices like: car coupling (US pat. No. 25844), harvester rake (US34584 and US35653), mop wringer (US74400), horse-hay rakes (US141370), stove pipe shelf heaters (US151237), etc.

John Mears married Mary Elizabeth Farnsworth on 26 May 1864, in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. Mary was a very interesting person. She was born in Groton, Massachusetts, on 27 August 1827, the daughter of Mathias (1797-1876) and Martha (Burges) Farnsworth (1797-1884). The family moved to Illinois when she was only six years old, and a couple of years later they moved to Fond du Lac, WI. She began writing in 1860 under the names “Nellie Wildwood” and “Ianthe,” and became a poet, essayist, and playwright, as she was frequently called the first Wisconsin poetess. John Hall Mears and Elizabeth Farnsworth were the parents of three talented daughters, all of whom pursued artistic careers: Louise (1866-1925), a book illustrator, Mary (1870-1943), a fiction writer, and Helen Farnsworth (1872–1916), a sculptor (John Mears taught her anatomy and made sculpting tools for her). Mary Elizabeth Mears died in Lake Mills, WI, on 15 November 1907.

John Mears died suddenly of heart affection on 23 September 1887 (aged 60) in Oshkosh. He was a member of the Royal Arcanum, a fraternal benefit society, and was foresighted to carry life insurance of 3000$, a nice sum for the time.

The American engineer Adam Hoch (1856-1926) was a prolific inventor of calculating machines and devices (e.g. adding attachments for type-writing machines) from the end of the 19^th and beginning of the 20^th century. He was a holder of several dozens of patents in this area from the USA, Canada, Germany, France, and Great Britain.

Some of the patents of Hoch (first application he filed in April 1898) have been assigned to and implemented by other businessmen and companies, but one of them,  the so-called Wendling-Hoch Machine, was put in production by his own company, Wendling-Hoch Adding Machine Company, which he incorporated in San Francisco, California, together with the prominent Californian businessman George Xavier Wendling, who obviously financed the venture.

Wendling-Hoch Machine was an adding and listing machine, introduced at the beginning of the 20^th century. It seems it was manufactured in very small numbers by Wendling-Hoch Adding Machine Co. and by California Adding Machine Co. (San Francisco) because there is no survived to our time example.

Let’s examine one of the earliest patents for Wendling-Hoch Machine (see US patent Nr. 712795 from 4 November 1902).

The improvements involved in the contstruction of the machine relate more particularly to novel construction and combination of numeral printing-segments and selecting and setting mechanism controlled by a single set of ten finger-keys, by means of which the printing-segments brought into operation to print a row of figures to any required order are set to position to print and are afterward brought in contact with the paper to print the entire row at a single operation, together with a separate set or series of adding-wheels having also the function of printing-wheels to print the sum-total, and operating mechanism also controlled from the same finger-keys and actuated from the setting mechanism of the printing-segments to add one row of figures to another as they are printed; also, novel paper-controlling and type-inking devices for operating to ink the type-faces and bring the paper in working contact with the segments or the adding wheels at the proper times to print the rows of figures and afterward the total.

Biography of Adam Hoch

Adam Firma Hoch was born on 11 March 1856 in Millerstown, a small town in Butler County, Pennsylvania. Adam was a descendant of a well-known local business family. His grandfather, Jacob Hoch (1793-1871), a farmer, hops dealer, beer host, and beer brewer from Gönningen, Württemberg, Germany, emigrated to the New World in the late 1830s, where he established a planing mill and a farm. Jacob was followed in the late 1840s by his sons Jacob Martin (1818-1859), Georg Johann Martin (1820-1888), and Gottlieb (Gottlob) (1827-1878). Jacob Hoch died on 31 August 1871 in Millerstown.

Adam’s father—Gottlieb (Gottlob) Hoch, was born on 15 August 1827 in Gönningen, Tübingen, Württemberg, Germany. In 1850 he emigrated to the USA, where he joined his brother Georg Johann Martin, who in 1849 established a brewery in Millerstown, with another local businessman, Martin Reiber. In 1853, Martin Hoch left the brewery, in order to focus on other businesses (store and hotel), and Gottlob became the sole proprietor. For twenty-six years until his death he carried on this industry, erecting a new brewery. In the early 1850s, Gottlob married a local girl, Catharine (6 Dec 1831-18 May 1903) and they had five children: Anna Elizabeth (b. 1854), our hero Adam (1856-1926), Gottlob F. (1858-1859), Wilhelmina Philomena (b. 1861), and Heinrich Jacob (b. 1872). Gottlob Hoch died on 2 November 1878 in Millerstwon at age 51.

As a teenager, Adam was an apprentice in the brewery of his father. We know nothing about his life until the end of the 1890s when he appeared in the world of mechanical computers and proved himself as an excellent engineer.

In 1878 Adam Hoch married Della White (4 May 1860-10 Feb 1932) from Connellsville, Fayette County, Pennsylvania. They had a daughter—Hazel Hilda (1887-1970), who married the engineer William Reagan Gorham and spent most of his life in Japan.

Adam Hoch died on 2 November 1926 (aged 70) in Los Angeles, California. Following his death, his remains were cremated and interred at Forest Lawn, Glendale.

Office administration became a lot more convenient in 1886 when the German inventor Friedrich Soennecken (see the nearby portrait) invented the ring-binder, and the hole-punch. Only several years later Soennecken patented a simple calculating device, which went into production under different names (Consul (the educated monkey), Jumbo (der multiplizierende elefant), der kleine Rechenkünstler, Eureka, Recnomatic, etc.) for many years and had quite a few clones.

Friedrich Soennecken (1848-1919) was a well-known German entrepreneur and inventor, the founder of F. Soennecken Verlag, a German office supplier. The company, incorporated in 1875, existed for almost a century, and although it went into bankruptcy in 1973, its trademark Soennecken, registered in 1905, is still in business.

The calculating device of Soennecken was patented in Germany (patent №51445 for Rechenvorrichtung zum Vervielfachen und Teilen, dated: 13.06.1889) and in Great Britain (patent Nr. 188910495 for Calculating apparatus, dated: 28.06.1889).

The calculating device of Soennecken (see the nearby image of the Eureka calculator (the little accountant), which was produced in Germany from 1889 until 1906) has a base plate, made of wood or another suitable material and painted with different background images. It has a linkage mechanism where the operator placed two small double-armed levers, rotatable around a pin, to point to the numbers to be multiplied, after which the large arrow points to the result.

The multiplication by means of the above-mentioned device (see the patent drawing) takes place in such a way that firstly one of the levers H (e.g. H’, the right lever) is moved to point the first factor. The tip of the pointer Z takes any position on the decade circle of the network of numbers N. If you now take the other lever and set it to the second factor, then during this movement the tip of the pointer Z is set around the point needed and thus set to the number indicating the result.

When solving division problems, the process is reversed. First, one grasps the pointer Z and sets it to the dividend. The position of the two levers is arbitrary. Then one moves one lever so that it comes to rest on the divisor, during which rotation the second lever naturally adjusts itself to the quotient.

Eureka and its clones were sold in many countries, for example in 1904 and 1905 it was sold in France for 3.00 FFr by the publisher of the French magazine Les Inventions Illustrées.

Biography of Friedrich Soennecken

Friedrich Soennecken was born in Iserlohn-Dröschede, Sauerland, on 20 September 1848, as the sixth of twelve children of the blacksmith Johann Peter Caspar Soennecken (1810-1871), and his wife Louise Wehner (1820-1879). Friedrich attended elementary school in Iserlohn, but later the meager financial resources did not allow for theology studies as he originally intended. In 1864, after only two years spent in a rectorate school, Soennecken began a commercial apprenticeship at the Iserlohn company Aurand & Sudhaus (spurs, stirrups, carriage fittings).

A loan from a brother enabled Friedrich to become self-employed in 1875. On 27 May 1875, he founded the trading company F. Soennecken Verlag in Remscheid. A good year later, the young entrepreneur moved from Remscheid to Bonn, where the company started by selling special circular (synchronous) nibs. Manufactured according to his specifications in Birmingham and marked with his name, they were delivered in sacks to Bonn, where packing and distribution took place in three rented houses. Portable copying presses were added in 1877. In 1883 the company already employed 30 workers and packers, plus ten correspondents and one traveler. The broadening of the product range made a completely fresh start necessary. In the neighboring community of Poppelsdorf (incorporated into Bonn in 1904), Soennecken found a plot of land that could be expanded. In 1884, an unadorned three-story factory was built there, in which the famous letter folders and hole punches were also manufactured since 1886.

In the course of the industrial boom from 1895 to 1913, the workforce grew to over 1000 people. Visiting the world exhibition in Chicago (1893) gave the company founder valuable impulses for the production of office furniture. Their manufacture using modern American methods meant the final transition to industrial production. Between 1895 and 1911, an impressive, closed complex of five-story large buildings was built in Poppelsdorf. In 1913 Friedrich Soennecken was one of the richest men in the region with a fortune of five to six million gold marks. Management of the company later passed to his son Alfred Soennecken.

Soennecken is best known for the reintroduction of the Rundschrift (round script) style of calligraphy and the broad pen nib associated with it. He had a talent for calligraphy and has published several books on the theme in his own publishing company. He was the first German manufacturer of fountain pens in 1871.

Soennecken also introduced the two-hole punch and the ring binder. In 1876 he and his company relocated to Poppelsdorf, near Bonn, to be closer to the University which later awarded him the honorary title Dr. med. h. c. He was politically active as a deputy in the Poppelsdorf mayor’s office from 1883 to 1904 and as a Bonn city councilor from 1904. He had been deputy chairman since 1905 and chairman of the Bonn Chamber of Commerce since 1914.

Friedrich Soennecken was a prolific inventor. His first invention for ink container with a stable stand he made as an apprentice in the middle 1860s. Besides the above-mentioned patents for calculating devices, he was a holder of dozens of patents for devices like: binder, perforating device, copying-machine, bracket, letter-file, paper-cutting device, etc.

Soennecken married in Remscheid in 1877 to Helene (1852–1878), the daughter of the local pastor Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Wülfing, but she died only a year later, together with their newborn son. Friedrich married a second time in Remscheid in 1880 to Bertha (1855–1914), the daughter of the local blacksmith August Busch. They had two children: Alfred (1881-1954), who inherited the family business, and Karoline (1883-1972), who in 1911 married Wilhelm Hammerschmidt (1883-1924), the only son of the commercial councilor Rudolf Hammerschmidt

Friedrich Soennecken died in Bonn on 2 July 1919. He found his final resting place in the mausoleum of the Soennecken family in the Poppelsdorf cemetery, which has been preserved to this day. He was posthumously awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Bonn.

In the late evening of 28 October 2003, a sophomore at Harvard named Mark Zuckerberg, disappointed by a girl who had dumped him, was sitting in his room in the dormitory and was trying to think of something to do to get her off his mind. Dormitory facebook was open on his desktop and Mark found that some of these people have pretty horrendous facebook pictures. He got an idea to put some of these faces next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive 🙂 “Let the hacking begin”, wrote Zuckerberg about midnight and started.

Mark Elliot Zuckerberg was born on 14 May 1984, in White Plains, New York, to Karen (née Kempner), a psychiatrist, and Edward Zuckerberg, a dentist. He was raised in Dobbs Ferry, New York, and started programming when he was in middle school. Early on, Mark enjoyed developing computer programs, especially communication tools and games, and a music player named Synapse that used artificial intelligence to learn the user’s listening habits. Microsoft and AOL tried to purchase Synapse and recruit Zuckerberg, but he decided to attend Harvard University instead.

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Thus in October 2003 Zuckerberg decided to create a student directory with photos and basic personal information, called Facemash, which used photos compiled from the online facebooks of nine dormitory Houses, placing two next to each other at a time and asking users to choose the hotter person. To accomplish this, Mark hacked into the protected areas of Harvard’s computer network and copied the houses’ private dormitory ID images.

Harvard at that time did not have a student directory with photos and essential information and the Facemash site generated 450 visitors and 22000 photo-views in its first several hours online. That the initial site mirrored people’s physical community—with their real identities, represented the key aspects of what later became Facebook.

The site was quickly forwarded to several campus group list-servers but was shut down a few days later by the Harvard administration. Zuckerberg got into trouble, being charged by the administration with breach of security, violating copyrights, and violating individual privacy, and faced expulsion, but ultimately the charges were dropped.

The following semester, in January 2004, Mark began writing code for a new website. In February 2004, he launched Thefacebook site, initially located at URL thefacebook.com. When Zuckerberg finished the site, he told a couple of friends, and one of them put it on an online mailing list. Immediately several dozen people joined, and then they were telling people at the other houses. It was like an avalanche, within twenty-four hours, Thefacebook had somewhere between twelve hundred and fifteen hundred registrants.

Initially, membership was restricted to students of Harvard College, and within the first month, more than half the undergraduate population at Harvard was registered on the site. Mark soon attracted assistants, in order to promote the website—Eduardo Saverin (business aspects), Dustin Moskovitz (programmer), Andrew McCollum (graphic artist), and Chris Hughes. In March 2004, Facebook expanded to three other Universities—Stanford, Columbia, and Yale. This expansion continued when it opened to all Ivy League and Boston area schools, and gradually most universities in Canada and the United States.

The company Facebook was incorporated in the summer of 2004 and the entrepreneur Sean Parker, who had been informally advising Zuckerberg, became the company’s president. At the same time, the company received its first investment of US$500000 from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and moved its base of operations to Palo Alto, California. The company dropped The from its name after purchasing the domain name facebook.com in 2005 for $200000.

Facebook launched a high school version in September 2005, at that time, high school networks required an invitation to join. Facebook later expanded membership eligibility to employees of several companies, including Microsoft and Apple. And finally, on 26 September 2006, Facebook was opened to everyone ages 13 and older with a valid e-mail address.

Users of Facebook can create profiles with photos, lists of personal interests, contact information, and other personal information. Users can upload any of their own photos whether they were taken digitally or in a photo booth hire. While some users choose candid photos as their profile pictures, posed photo booth-style photos often make the best ones. Communicating with friends and other users can be done through private or public messages or a chat feature. Users can also create and join interest and fan groups, some of which are maintained by organizations as a means of advertising. To combat privacy concerns, Facebook enables users to choose their own privacy settings and choose who can see what parts of their profile.

Facebook is free to users and generates revenue from advertising, such as banner ads. By default, the viewing of detailed profile data is restricted to users from the same network and reasonable community limitations.

Microsoft is Facebook’s exclusive partner for serving banner advertising, and as such Facebook only serves advertisements that exist in Microsoft’s advertisement inventory. According to ComScore, an internet marketing research company, Facebook collected as much data from its visitors as Google and Microsoft, but considerably less than Yahoo!

Facebook has a number of features, with which users may interact. They include the Wall, a space on every user’s profile page that allows friends to post messages for the user to see and to post attachments, depending on privacy settings, anyone who can see a user’s profile can also view that user’s Wall; Pokes, which allows users to send a virtual poke to each other (a notification then tells a user that they have been poked); Photos, where users can upload albums and photos; Status, which allows users to inform their friends of their whereabouts and actions; etc.

The front-end servers of Facebook are running a PHP LAMP stack with the addition of Memcache. The back-end services are written in various languages including C++, Java, Python, and Erlang. Other components of the Facebook infrastructure (which have been released as open-source projects) include Scribe, Thrift, and Cassandra, as well as existing open-source components such as ODS.

In 2007 Facebook became the leading social networking site based on monthly unique visitors, especially in English-speaking countries, including Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States, having overtaken main competitor MySpace in April 2008. ComScore reported that Facebook attracted 132.1 million unique visitors in June 2008, compared to MySpace, which attracted 117.6 million. in May 2022 approximately 19.7 billion visits were measured to Facebook.com, making it one of the most-visited websites online. In the first quarter of 2022, Facebook had nearly 2.94 billion monthly active users.

The Facebook website has won awards such as placement into the “Top 100 Classic Websites” by PC Magazine in 2007 and winning the “People’s Voice Award” from the Webby Awards in 2008.

In January 2010 Zuckerberg became the youngest self-made businessman worth more than a billion dollars. His wealth peaked at around $140 billion in Sept. 2021.

Skype was an extremely popular software application that allows users to make voice calls over the Internet, as well as instant messaging, file transfer, and video conferencing.

Its development in 2002 was financed by the Skype Group, founded by Swedish entrepreneur Niklas Zennström and Dane Janus Friis, who had already an experience in venture IT business, founding in 2001 Kazaa Media Desktop (once capitalized as “KaZaA”, but now usually written “Kazaa”)—the famous peer-to-peer file sharing application. Skype calls to other users of the program and, in some countries, to free-of-charge numbers, are free, while calls to other landlines and mobile phones can be made for a fee ($2.95/month gets you unlimited calls in the USA).

The name Skype came from one of the initial names for the project—SKY PEer-to-peer, which was then abbreviated to Skyper. It appeared, however, that some of the domain names associated with Skyper were already taken. Dropping the final r left the current title Skype, for which domain names were available.

The domain names Skype.com and Skype.net were registered in April 2003. In August 2003 was released the first public beta version of the program.

The code of Skype was written by Estonian developers Ahti Heinla, Priit Kasesalu, and Jaan Tallinn, who had also originally developed Kazaa. They used several IDEs and languages—Delphi, C, and C++, developing initially Skype clients for several OS—Windows, Linux, and macOS.

Skype is a real nightmare for phone companies because it provides almost free phone services to each user with a Skype program and Internet connection. With the popularization of wireless networks, the business of pure phone service providers is going to decline. Moreover, Skype is now running not only on computers but also on many models of mobile phones and smartphones.

Skype uses a proprietary Internet telephony (VoIP) network, called the Skype protocol. The protocol has not been made publicly available by Skype and official applications using the protocol are closed-source. The main difference between Skype and standard VoIP clients is that Skype operates on a peer-to-peer model (originally based on the Kazaa software), rather than the more usual client-server model. The Skype user directory is entirely decentralized and distributed among the nodes of the network, i.e. users’ computers, thus allowing the network to scale very easily to large sizes without a complex centralized infrastructure costly to the Skype Group.

Skype uses a secure communication protocol, as encryption cannot be disabled, and is invisible to the user. Skype reportedly uses non-proprietary, widely trusted encryption techniques: RSA for key negotiation and the Advanced Encryption Standard to encrypt conversations. Skype provides an uncontrolled registration system for users with no proof of identity.

Now versions of Skype exist not only for Linux, Mac OS, and Windows but also for Maemo, iPhone OS, Android, and even Sony’s PSP.

In April 2006, the number of registered users reached 100 million. In 2009 this number reached 530 million. In January 2010 were reported over 22 million concurrent Skype users. As of 2022, 40 million people still use Skype on a daily basis, and over 300 million people use Skype every month.

The old dream of a world encyclopedia of Paul Otlet and Herbert Wells from the 1930s became possible in the 1990s, after the rapid progress of the Internet and the World Wide Web.

The first known proposal for an online Internet encyclopedia was made by the Internet enthusiast Rick Gates in October 1993. Gates proposed in a message titled The Internet Encyclopedia, published in the Usenet newsgroup alt.internet.services, to collaboratively create an encyclopedia on the Internet, which would allow anyone to contribute by writing articles and submitting them to the central catalog of all encyclopedias pages. Later the term Interpedia was coined for this encyclopedia, but the project never left the planning stages and finally died.

Several years later, in 1999, the famous open-source activist Richard Stallman popularized his concept of an open-source web-based online encyclopedia, but his idea also remained unrealized.

The first working online encyclopedia became Wikipedia, launched in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. The founders used the concept and technology of a wiki devised in 1994 by the computer programmer Ward Cunningham. A wiki is a website that allows the easy creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser, using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor. A special wiki software has been created, which is often used to create collaborative websites.

Jimmy Donal Wales was on born 7 August 1966, in Huntsville, Alabama. He received his bachelor’s degree in finance from Auburn University and entered the Ph.D. finance program at the University of Alabama before leaving with a master’s degree to enter the Ph.D. finance program at Indiana University. He taught at both universities during his postgraduate studies but did not write the doctoral dissertation required for a Ph.D., something which he has ascribed to boredom.

In 1994, rather than writing his doctoral dissertation, Wales took a job in a Chicago futures and options trading firm. By speculating on the interest rate and foreign currency fluctuations, he had soon earned enough to support himself and his wife for the rest of their lives.

Wales was addicted to the Internet from an early stage and used to write computer code as a pastime. Inspired by the remarkable initial public offering of Netscape in 1995, he decided to become an internet entrepreneur, and in 1996 founded the web portal Bomis with two partners. The website featured user-generated webrings and for a time sold erotic photographs. It was something like a “guy-oriented search engine” with a market similar to that of a male magazine and was positioned as the Playboy of the Internet. Bomis did not become successful, but in 2000 hosted and provided the initial funding for the Nupedia project.

Wales began thinking about an open-content online encyclopedia built by volunteers in the fall of 1999, and in January 2000, he hired Sanger to oversee its development. The project, called Nupedia, officially went online in March 2000. Nupedia was designed as a free content encyclopedia, whose articles were written by experts and intended to generate revenue from online ads. It was initially not based on the wiki concept, it was instead characterized by an extensive peer-review process, designed to make its articles of a quality comparable to that of professional encyclopedias. In 2001 Sanger brought the wiki concept to Wales and suggested it be applied to Nupedia and then, after some initial skepticism, Wales agreed to try it. Nupedia’s however ceased operating in 2003, producing only 24 articles that completed its complex review process.

In January 2001, Wales decided to switch to the GNU Free Documentation License at the urgings of Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation, and started the Wikipedia project, reserving Wikipedia.com and Wikipedia.org domain names. Initially, Wikipedia (the word was devised by Sanger) was created as a side-project and feeder to Nupedia, in order to provide an additional source of draft articles and ideas, but it quickly overtook Nupedia, growing to become a large global project, and originating a wide range of additional reference projects. Jimmy Wales announced that he would never run commercial advertisements on Wikipedia.

There was another similar project at this time—GNUPedia, but it had a somewhat bureaucratic structure, that’s why it was never really developed and soon died, surpassed by Wikipedia.

Initially, Wikipedia ran on UseModWiki, written in Perl. The server has run on Linux to this day, although the original text was stored in files rather than in a database. In 2002 it was replaced by new software, written specifically for the project, which included a PHP wiki engine. Later a new version, MediaWiki, was developed, which has been updated many times and is working till now.

As Wikipedia grew and attracted contributors, it quickly developed a life of its own and began to function largely independently of Nupedia, although Sanger initially led activity on Wikipedia by virtue of his position as Nupedia’s editor-in-chief. Due to the collapse of the internet economy at that time, Jimmy Wales decided to discontinue funding for a salaried editor-in-chief in December 2001 and the next year Sanger resigned.

During the years, a lot of sister Wikipedia projects evolved—Wiktionary (dictionary and thesaurus), Wikiquote, Wikibooks, Wikisource, Wikimedia Commons. etc.

Wikipedia has been blocked on some occasions by national authorities. To date, these have been related to China, France, Germany, Iran, Myanmar, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, Uzbekistan, and Venezuela.

As of December 2022, there are some 6.7 million articles (57 million pages) in the English Wikipedia.

In 2001 an American computer programmer, named Bram Cohen, began his work on a protocol and a program, which would change the entertainment industry and the interchange of information on the Web. This peer-to-peer (P2P) protocol was named BitTorrent, as well as the first file-sharing program to use the protocol, also known as BitTorrent.

Bram Cohen was born in 1975 in New York in a Jewish family (a teacher and computer scientist) and grew up in Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where his father taught him the basics of computer coding at age 6. In first grade, he flummoxed friends with comparisons of the Commodore 64 vs. the Timex Sinclair personal computers and was actively programming by age 10. Cohen graduated from Stuyvesant High School and later attended for 2 years State University of New York at Buffalo. In 1995 he decided to drop out of college, bored out of his mind, he said, to work for several dot-com companies throughout the mid to late 1990s, the last being MojoNation, an ambitious but ill-fated project.

MojoNation allowed people to break up confidential files into encrypted chunks and distribute those pieces on computers also running the software. If someone wanted to download a copy of this encrypted file, he would have to download it simultaneously from many computers. Cohen found this concept as perfect for a file-sharing program and protocol since programs like the popular then KaZaA take a long time to download a large file because the file is (usually) coming from one source.

That’s why Cohen designed BitTorrent to be able to download files from many different sources, thus speeding up the download time, especially for users with faster download, than upload speeds, which is the case with the vast majority of users. Thus, the more popular a file is, the faster a user will be able to download it, since many people will be downloading it at the same time, and these people will also be uploading the data to other users.

In April 2001, Cohen quit MojoNation and began work on BitTorrent. He wrote the first BitTorrent client implementation in Python language, and several other programs have since implemented the protocol.

BitTorrent gained fame for its ability to share large music and movie files online quickly. Cohen himself has claimed he has never violated copyright law using his software and initially he designed it for the community at etree.org, a site that shares only music by artists who expressly allow the practice. It however didn’t take long for the software to take hold with illegal music and movie swapping.

So how exactly BitTorrent works?

BitTorrent is a protocol that offloads some of the file-tracking work to a central server (called a tracker). Another basic rule is that it uses a principle called tit-for-tat, which means that in order to receive files, you have to give them. This solves the problem of leeching, which was one of developer Bram Cohen’s primary goals. With BitTorrent, the more files you share with others, the faster your downloads are. And as was already mentioned, to make better use of available network bandwidth (the pipeline for data transmission), BitTorrent downloads different pieces of the file you want simultaneously from multiple computers.

To download a file with BitTorrent, you have to open a Web page and click on a link for the file you want. BitTorrent client software communicates with a tracker to find other computers running BitTorrent, that have the complete file (so-called seed computers) and those with a portion of the file (peers that are usually in the process of downloading the file).

The tracker identifies the swarm, which is the connected computers that have all of or a portion of the file and are in the process of sending or receiving it.

The tracker helps the client software trade pieces of the file you want with other computers in the swarm. Your BitTorrent client receives multiple pieces of the file simultaneously.

If you continue to run the BitTorrent client software after your download is complete, others can receive .torrent files from your computer and your future download rates improve because you are ranked higher in the tit-for-tat system.

By 2004, Cohen formed BitTorrent, Inc., with his brother Ross Cohen and business partner Ashwin Navin. The company still exists as Rainberry, Inc., but in 2018 it was acquired by cryptocurrency startup TRON, and Bram Cohen left.

Soon P2P network BitTorrent became extremely popular. According to some estimations, in 2004 its traffic represented from 20 to 35% of all traffic on the Internet, and 170 million people used the protocol every month. Around 2008 BitTorrent traffic began to decline, but in the late 2010s was once again on the rise, something many observers attribute to the growing number of streaming services now available.

Due to his principle of contacting many (up to 300-500 servers per second), BitTorrent leads to an interesting network issue. Routers that use NAT (Network address translation), must maintain tables of source and destination IP addresses and ports. Typical home routers are limited to about 2000 table entries while some more expensive routers have larger table capacities. As BitTorrent frequently contacts many servers per second, it rapidly fills the NAT tables, causing home routers to lock up.

Another “copyright-related” issue is that, as the BitTorrent protocol provides no way to index torrent files, a comparatively small number of websites have hosted a large majority of torrents, many linking to copyrighted material, rendering those sites especially vulnerable to lawsuits.

There has been much controversy over the use of BitTorrent trackers. BitTorrent metafiles themselves do not store copyrighted data. Whether the publishers of BitTorrent metafiles violate copyrights by linking to copyrighted material is controversial. Various jurisdictions have pursued legal action against websites that host BitTorrent trackers. High-profile examples include the closing of the trackers Suprnova.org, Torrentspy, LokiTorrent, Demonoid, Mininova, and OiNK.cd. The Pirate Bay torrent website was noted for the “legal” section of its website in which letters and replies on the subject of alleged copyright infringements are publicly displayed. In 2006 the Pirate Bay’s servers in Sweden were raided by Swedish police on allegations of copyright infringement, the tracker however was up and running again three days later.