Appendix 1
Knowledge Management Timeline
(with some related technology
milestones)
- 160k B.C.
- Homo Sapiens sapiens - speech
- Paleolithic
- –mimetic + oral culture
- 10k B.C.
Neolithic
- – oral +
agrarian culture
- Rows and columns (from crop plantings
or from battle formations?)
- List, table (flat representation of
things in rows and columns)
- 2772 B.C.
–egyptian 365 day cal
- 2500 B.C.
–egyptian libraries
- y2k B.C.
Ur – "tablet keeper" an official title (Harris p24)
- 2k B.C.
code of hammurabi
- 1500 B.C.
india : four elements of earth
fire air, water
- 1000 B.C.
chinese dictionary of 40,000
chars
- 1000 B.C.
moses, 10 commandments, the
judges
- 1000 B.C.
Phoenicians encode language
into symbols - the phonetic alphabet is developed.
- 323 B.C.
Euclid –
"Elements"
- 300 B.C.
Alexander’s library
started
- 622 A.D.
encyclopedia of arts &
sciences written by isidore of seville
- 700 A.D.
lindisfarne manuscripts of the
Gospels
- 1450
Gutenberg
- 1500
– Reformation prompts Bibles
to be written in languages other than Latin, boost to
common literacy
- ~1600
Francis Bacon’s
"Salomon’s House"
- 1604
– Cawdry’s "A
Table Alphabetical" – first English dictionary
- ~1750
Linnaeus – taxonomic
species classifications
- 1828
Webster’s Dictionary, along
with public education creates common ground for
communication
- ~1840
Penny dreadfuls – the rise
of paperback publishing
- ~1840
Telegraph
- 1876
Dewey decimal system
- 1895
– Marconi’s radio set,
Lumiere’s moving pictures
- ~1910
HG Wells "we need a sort of
mental clearinghouse" (Cortada, Woods 507)
- 1930
von Bertanffly General Systems
theory
- ~1940
Teilhard de Chardin
–"Phenomenon of Man" posits the Noosphere
- 1941
– RCA TV network debuts (any
knowledge value?)
- 1945
Cybernetics – control
systems
- 1945
Hermann Hesse's - The Glass Bead
Game is published
- 1947:
Alan M. Turing publishes an
article on Intelligent Machinery
- 1948
Vannevar Bush’s Memex
article in The Atlantic
- 1957
Sputnik
- Derek Price begins to get serious
about the study of science (Science since Babylon),
leading to scientometrics
- 1962
Kuhn – Structure of
Scientific Revolutions
- 1964
McLuhan – Understanding
Media
- 1964
– World’s Fair in NY
- 1965
Shera -"Social
Epistemology"
- 1968
Engelbart builds a hypertext
system after Ted Nelson coins the word, also invents the
GUI and Mouse
- 1969
Dennis Ritchie and Kenneth
Thompson, Bell Labs, begin work on the UNIX operating
system, which consists of a central "kernel"
and many "software tools".
- 1969
Xerox opens Palo Alto Research
Center (PARC)
- 1969
Whole Earth Catalog – S. Brand
- 1970
– ARPANET is begun and the
RFC system of collaboration is an integral part of the
working method
- 1972
– CB radio craze launches a
type of virtual community centered around truck drivers,
popularizing the word "handle" for a personal
electronic name
- 1970-75
the idea of Software
Engineering takes hold, based in the Ada and UNIX
communities
- 1976
Richard Dawkins "the
selfish gene" – proposes the meme
- 1977:
Datapoint introduces ARC system,
the first local area network.
- 1979
The Compuserve online service
brings Bulletin Board Systems and online interest
communities to widespread attention
- 1978
– the Walkman –
personal comm. devices proliferate
- 1978
– C. Alexander’s
"A Pattern Language"
- 1980
Fish – interpretive
communities
- 1980
Smalltalk 80, a uniformly
object-oriented programming environment became available
as the first commercial release of the Smalltalk language
- 1984
Steve Jobs delivers the MAC after
"seeing the light" at Xerox PARC. The mouse and
icon come to the people.
- 1984
1000 hosts on the ARPANET
- 1985
the WELL is founded, virtual
communities take off
- 1987
the first Software Patterns paper
is published, applying Alexander’s "Pattern
language" to a different field – this sparks a
practice that will really take off in the mid-90’s
- 1988
Peter Drucker starts using
"knowledge worker" in earnest, though he’d
used it in passing since the early 60’s
-
MeSH, PMBOK, diagnostic manual - other
central bodies of knowledge collected online
- 1990
Senge – 5D
- 1991
Berners-Lee – Web
- 1994
KM is a movement with a name
- 1997
KM fad peaks, but research
interest still building
- 1997
Levy – Cosmopedia
- 1997
– Software Patterns movement
spawns an Organization Patterns interest group, leading
to the AntiPatterns book (Brown et al). These entities
are nearly the same as Senge’s system archetypes,
but specific to the software industry and independently
derived.
- 1998
– The Rocketbook – the
downloadable book reader, another very small piece of the
memex is realized