Classroom Companion: Business

2.2 
 Timeline for the ICT Evolution
.
Figure 
2.1
 shows the timeline for selected innovations that were essential for the 
development of the digital economy and the year they became commercially avail-
able or reached the mass market. The technologies listed in 
.
Fig. 
2.1
 are catego-
rized as hardware, mobile/wireless, or software/services.
Prior to the commercialization of the World Wide Web in 1993, the telecom-
munications technology and the information technology were developed along two 
different paths.
1. Telecommunications is an old technology branch going back to the first elec-
tronic telegraph systems developed in the early nineteenth century. The prede-
cessor of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) was established 
in 1865 with the task to standardize the telegraph technology and encourage 
2.2 · Timeline for the ICT Evolution

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20
2
the establishment of a global telegraph network. Since then, specification and 
design of telecommunications networks and services have been done by the 
ITU and other standardization organization, the telecommunications industry, 
and international research programs in close cooperation. Until 1993, the 
development was primarily associated with digital transmission and switching 
of telephone services and simple data services.
2. Information technology is a much younger science with roots back to the 1950s 
when the first transistorized computers were designed. It has now become one of 
the world’s largest and most influential industries. Basic information technologies 
such as computer architecture, processing platforms, data storage, algorithms, 
and programming were studied and developed at universities, by research organi-
zations, and in the computer industry. In 1993, there were still only few applica-
tions of the information technology that required extensive support of 
communication technologies, the most important of which was e-mail on the 
Internet.
All this changed in 1993 when the two fields of information technology and tele-
communications merged as a single technology now known as information and 
communication technology (ICT). The event that led to this transformation was 
commercialization of the World Wide Web in 1993, soon leading to a massive 
requirement for remote interactions between computers and for distributed pro-
cessing of information. Since 1993, information technology cannot exist without 
telecommunications and vice versa.
The World Wide Web is enabled by the following technologies: Uniform 
Resource Locator (URL) for accurate addressing of information packages on the 
web, Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) for communication with web pages, and 
Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) for formatting and writing web pages. 
Together, these technologies allow users to post and access documents, images, 
videos, and other information across the Internet. Mosaic (1993) was the first