From Cave Paintings to the Internet A Chronological and Thematic Database on the History of Information and Media Accounting / Business Machines Outline

Neolithic Tokens Replace Paleolithic Tally Sticks
(Circa 8,000 BCE)

The First Securely Datable Mathematical Table in World History
(Circa 2,600 BCE)

The Most Famous Document of Babylonian Mathematics
(Circa 1,822 BCE – 1,784 BCE)

The Egyptians Reckon with Pebbles and Probably Use the Sandboard Abacus
(Circa 440 BCE)

The Earliest Surviving Counting Board
(Circa 300 BCE)

The First Income Tax
(10 CE)

The European Table Abacus
(Circa 1299)

The First Dated Printed Book on Arithmetic and the Operation of the Abacus
(December 10, 1478)

The First Great General Work on Mathematics
(November 10 – November 20, 1494)

The Soroban
(Circa 1600)

The First Copying Device?
(1603 – 1605)

Depiction of Record Keeping by Pieter Breughel the Younger
(1620 – 1640)

More Affordable and Easier to Use than the Pascaline
(1671)

First Book on a Calculating Machine Published in English
(1672)

Charles Thomas de Colmar Invents the Arithmometer
(1820)

Typing a Letter Takes Longer than Writing by Hand
(1829)

The First of the Industrial Insurance Companies that Processed Immense Amounts of Data
(May 30, 1848)

Printing Telegraph Messages
(1855)

Origins of the Internal Revenue Service
(July 1, 1861 – 1862)

The First Device to Allow the Operator to Write Faster than a Person Writing by Hand
(1868)

The First QWERTY Keyboard
(1873 – 1874)

Traveler's Cheques
(1874)

Calculators Using a True Variable-Toothed Gear
(Circa 1875)

The Electric Pen
(1875)

300 Clerks Reviewing 2,500,000 Policies with 24 Calculators
(1877)

Allowing the Typing of Both Upper and Lower Case Letters
(1878)

The Cash Register
(1879)

A Librarian Suggests the Idea for Electric Punched Card Tabulating
(1882)

NCR
(1884)

The Mimeograph
(1884)

First Use of the Term "Credit Card"
(1887)

Electromechanical Punched Card Tabulating
(1890)

His Dependable Key-Driven Printing Adding Machine
(1890)

The Comptometer
(1890)

The Millionaire
(1893)

Ancestor of IBM
(1896)

The Automatic Punched Card Feed
(1900)

Hollerith Sells the Tabulating Machine Company to Flint
(1911)

C-T-R
(1911)

A Mechanical Punched-Card Tabulating System
(1911)

20,000 Calculators
(1912)

How the Quipu System of Mathematical Record-Keeping Worked
(1912)

Thomas J. Watson President of CTR
(1914)

800,000 Burroughs Calculators Have Been Sold
(1919)

IBM is Founded
(1924)

Formation of Remington Rand
(January 25, 1927)

The Eighty-Column Punched Card
(1928)

Using a Commercial Accounting Machine as a Difference Engine
(1928)

The First Commercially Successful Electric Typewriter
(1933)

The Social Security Program Creates a Giant Data-Processing Challenge
(1935 – 1936)

Charga-Plate Precursor of the Credit Card
(Circa 1935 – 1950)

The First Automatic Sequence-Controlled Calculator
(September 1935)

Carlson invents Xerography
(1938)

A Typewriter with Proportional Spacing
(1941)

The First Xerographic Copier
(1949)

The First Credit Card
(March 1950)

First Stored-Program Computer to Run Business Programs on a Routine Basis
(November 17, 1951)

The First Report on the Application of Electronic Computers to Business
(June 1953)

First Computer to be Sold to a Non-Governmental Customer in the U.S.
(1954)

The Beginning of Computerization of Banking
(September 1955)

Magnetic Ink Character Reading
(July 1956)

BankAmericard
(September 1958)

The American Express Card
(October 1, 1958)

ERMA and MICR
(1959)

The U.S. Banking Industry Adopts Magnetic Ink Character Recognition
(1959 – 1960)

The Xerox 914
(September 16, 1959)

Computerized Stock-Quotation System
(1961)

Social Security Numbers as Identifiers
(1964)

The Beginning of "Word Processing"
(1964)

The First ATM
(Circa 1970)

Invention of the Laser Printer
(1971)

The Universal Product Code
(1971)

U.S. v. IBM is in Trial
(May 19, 1975)

Inaugurating the Concept of Office Automation
(1977)

The First Spreadsheet Program
(1979)

Lotus Development Corporation is Founded
(1982)

The First "Killer App" for the PC
(January 1983)

Electronic Tax Filing
(1986)

Customer Account Data Engine
(2003)

The First Intelligible Word from an Extinct South American Civilization?
(August 12, 2005)