COMMUNICATION

INPRIMITIVE TIMES
Dr JANARDHAN JUVVIGUNTA
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR-III
 The history of communication technologies (media and
appropriate inscription tools) has evolved in tandem with
shifts in political and economic systems, and by
extension, systems of power.
 Communication can range from very subtle processes of
exchange to full conversations and mass
communication.
 The history of communication itself can be traced back
since the origin of speech circa 500,000 BCE.
 The use of technology in communication may be
considered since the first use of symbols about 30,000
years BCE.
 Among the symbols used, there are cave paintings,
petroglyphs, pictograms and ideograms.
 Writing was a major innovation, as well as printing
technology and, more recently, telecommunications and
the Internet.
PRIMITIVE TIMES
 Human communication was revolutionized with the
origin of speech approximately 500,000 BCE.
 Symbols were developed about 30,000 years ago.
 The imperfection of speech, which nonetheless allowed
easier dissemination of ideas and resulted in the
creation of new forms of communications,
 improving both the range at which people could
communicate and the longevity of the information.

 All those inventions were based on the key concept of

the symbol.
 The oldest known symbols created for the purpose of
communication were cave paintings,
 A form of rock art, dating to the Upper Palaeolithic age.
 The oldest known cave painting is located within
Chauvet Cave, dated to around 30,000 BC.
 These paintings contained increasing amounts of
information: people may have created the first calendar
as far back as 15,000 years ago
 The connection between drawing and writing is
further shown by linguistics
 In Ancient Egypt and Ancient Greece, the concepts and
words of drawing and writing were one and the same
PETROGLYPHS (Rock Carvings):
Petroglyphs from Häljesta, Sweden. Nordic Bronze Age / Wikimedia
Commons
 The next advancement in the history of
communications came with the production of
petroglyphs
 Carvings into a rock surface.
 It took about 20,000 years for homo sapiens to move
from the first cave paintings to the first petroglyphs
 Which are dated to approximately the Neolithic and late
Upper Palaeolithic boundary, about 10,000 to 12,000
years ago.
 It is possible that Homo sapiens of that time used some
other forms of communication,
Stones
Symbols carved in wood or earth,
Quipu-like ropes
Tattoos
 but The most durable carved stones has survived to
modern times and we can only speculate about their
existence based on our observation of still existing
‘hunter-gatherer’ cultures such as those of Africa or
Oceania.
Quipu-like ropes
PICTOGRAMS
 A pictogram (pictograph) is a symbol representing a
concept, object, activity, place or event by illustration.
 Pictography is a form of proto writing whereby ideas
are transmitted through drawing.
 Pictographs were the next step in the evolution of
communication
 The most important difference between petroglyphs
and pictograms is
that petroglyphs are simply showing an event,
Pictograms are telling a story about the event
 Pictograms were used by various ancient cultures
all over the world since around 9000 BC
 When tokens marked with simple pictures began to be
used to label basic farm produce and become
increasingly popular around 6000–5000 BC.
 They were the basis of calligraphy and symbols,
 Began to develop into logographic writing systems
around 5000 BC.
IDEOGRAMS

 Pictograms, in turn, evolved into ideograms, graphical

symbols that represent an idea.
 The pictograms, could represent only something
resembling their form:
 therefore, a pictogram of a circle could represent a
sun,
 But not concepts like ‘heat’, ‘light’, ‘day’ or ‘Great
God of the Sun’.

 Ideograms, could convey more abstract concepts,

 Ideogram of two sticks can mean not only ‘legs’ but
also a verb ‘to walk’.
WRITING EARLY SCRIPTS
 26th century BC Sumerian cuneiform script in Sumerian language

 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
Alphabetic
Logographic
syllabic
Alphabetic
 The invention of the first writing systems is roughly
contemporary with the beginning of the Bronze Age in
the late Neolithic of the late 4000 BC.
 The first writing system is generally believed to have
been invented in the late 3000’s BC
 The original Sumerian writing system was derived from
a system of clay tokens used to represent commodities.
 By the end of the 4th millennium BC, this had evolved
into a method of keeping accounts, using a round-
shaped stylus impressed into soft clay at different angles
for recording numbers.
 Finally, handwriting writing became a general-purpose
writing system for logograms, syllables, and numbers.
 By the 26th century BC, this script had been adapted to
another Mesopotamian language, Akkadian, and from
there 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 BC
(early Shang Dynasty), out of a late neolithic Chinese
system of proto-writing dating back to c. 6000 BC.
 The pre-Columbian writing systems of the Americas,
including Olmec and Mayan, are also generally believed
to have had independent origins.
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 categorized 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.[7] 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.[8] 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 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.[9] 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.
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.[10]
 14,000 BC – In what is now Mezhirich, Ukraine, the first
known artifact with a map on it is made using bone. [10]
 Prior to 3500 BC – Communication was carried out
through paintings of indigenous tribes.
 3500s BC – The Sumerians develop cuneiform writing
and the Egyptians develop hieroglyphic writing.
 16th century BC – 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.[10]
Timeline of Printing Technology
 1305 – The Chinese develop wooden block movable type
printing.
 1450 – Johannes Gutenberg invents a printing press with
metal movable type.
 1844 – Charles Fenerty produces paper from a wood
pulp, eliminating rag paper which was in limited supply.
 1849 – Associated Press organizes Nova Scotia pony
express to carry latest European news for New York
newspapers.
 1958 – Chester Carlson presents the first photocopier
suitable for office use.
History of Telecommunication
Overview
The history of telecommunication – the transmission of
signals over a distance for the purpose of communication –
began thousands of years ago with the use of smoke signals
and drums in Africa, America and parts of Asia. In the 1790s
the first fixed semaphore systems emerged in Europe
however it was not until the 1830s that electrical
telecommunication systems started to appear.
Pre-Electric
Wikimedia Commons
 AD 26–37 – 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
Demonstration of the semaphore / Wikimedia
Commons
 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
Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone patent drawing,
March 7, 1876 / National Archives and Records
Administration, Wikimedia Commons
 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
Photograph of the 9th floor KDKA transmission room.
c. 1921 / Wikimedia Commons
 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 radiofax
 1964 – First modern fax machine commercially available
(Long Distance Xerography)
Mobile Telephone

Nordic Mobile Telephone / Wikimedia Commons

  1947 – Douglas H. Ring and W. Rae Young of Bell Labs
propose a cell-based approach which led to “cellular
phones.”
 1981 – Nordic Mobile Telephone, the world’s first
automatic mobile phone is put into operation
 1991 – GSM is put into operation
 1992 – Neil Papworth sends the first SMS (or text
message).
 1999 – 45% of Australians have a mobile phone.
Computers and Internet
 ARPANET logical
map, March 1977 / The Computer History
Museum, Wikimedia Commons
 1949 – Claude Elwood Shannon, the “father of
information theory”, mathematically proves the Nyquist–
Shannon sampling theorem.
 1965 – First email sent (at MIT).[11]
 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.[12]
 1971 – Erna Schneider Hoover invent a computerized
switching system for telephone traffic.
 1971 – 8-inch floppy disk removable storage medium for
computers is introduced.[13]
 1975 – “First list servers are introduced.”[13]
 1976 – The personal computer (PC) market is born.
 1977 – Donald Knuth begins work on TeX.
 1981 – Hayes Smartmodem introduced.[14]
 1983 – Microsoft Word software is launched.[15]
 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.[14]
 1989 – Lotus Notes software is launched.[16]
 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.[14]
 1993 – Mosaic graphical web browser is launched. [16]
 1994 – Internet radio broadcasting is born.
 1996 – Motorola StarTAC mobile phone introduced. It was
significantly smaller than previous cellphones. [14]
 1997 – SixDegrees.com is launched, the first of a
number of early social networking services
 1999 – Napster peer-to-peer file sharing is launched.[14]
 2001 – Cyworld adds social networking features and
becomes the first of a number of 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.
 2006 – Twitter is launched.
 2007 – iPhone is launched.
 2009 – Whatsapp is launched.
 2010 – Instagram is launched.
 2011 – Snapchat is launched.
 2015 – Discord is launched.