Launched in 1984 by the British company Psion, the Psion Organiser was
the first electronic agenda. Later on, Psion launched the Psion Series
3 and Series 5, and the company expanded internationally. In 2000, the
various models (Series 7, Series 5mx, Revo, Revo Plus) competed with
the Palm Pilot and the Pocket PC. With fewer sales, the company decided
to diversify its activities. Following the acquisition of Teklogix,
Psion Teklogix was created in September 2000 to develop wireless mobile
solutions for businesses. Psion Software was founded in 2001 to develop
software for the new generation of mobile devices using the Symbian OS
platform, for example the smartphone Nokia 9210, launched the same
year.
1986 > Franklin launched dictionaries on handheld devices
Franklin, a company based in New Jersey (United States), launched in
1986 the first dictionary available on a handheld device. Fifteen years
later, Franklin distributed 200 reference books on handheld devices:
monolingual and bilingual dictionaries, encyclopedias, Bibles,
textbooks, medical books, and books for entertainment.
1990 > The World Wide Web took off
The World Wide Web was invented in 1989-90 by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN
(European Center for Nuclear Research, that later became the European
Organization for Nuclear Research), Geneva, Switzerland. In 1989, Tim
Berners-Lee networked documents using hypertext. In 1990, he developed
the first HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) server and the first web
browser. In 1991, the web was operational and radically changed the way
people were using the internet. Hypertext links allowed us to move from
one textual or visual document to another with a simple click of the
mouse. Information became interactive. Later on, this interactivity was
further enhanced with hypermedia links that could link texts and images
with graphics, video or music. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was
founded in October 1994 to develop protocols for the web.
January 1991 > Unicode, an encoding system for all languages
First published in January 1991, Unicode "provides a unique number for
every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the
program, no matter what the language" (excerpt from the website). This
double-byte platform-independent encoding provides a basis for the
processing, storage and interchange of text data in any language.
Unicode is maintained by the Unicode Consortium, with its variants UTF-
8 (UTF: Unicode Transformation Format), UTF-16 and UTF-32, and is a
component of the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) specifications. In
2008, 50% of all the documents available on the internet were encoded
in Unicode, with the other 50% still encoded in ASCII, a 7-byte
encoding system dating back from 1968 for English and Latin, with 8-
byte "extensions" added then for a few European languages.
January 1993 > The Online Books Page, a catalog of free ebooks
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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