Timelines

Timelines provide perspective, often surprising you how long some things have been around and how recently others came upon the scene. As the millenium's birthday raised our consciousness of time, more timelines were be published in the latter part of 1999 than in the rest of recorded history. Get 'em while they're hot.

An analogy: the height of the Empire State Building represents the history of the world. Put a Bible on the pinnacle: its thickness represents how long humans have been on earth. Slap a stamp on the Bible: that's the duration of recorded history. The glue represents the years since Gutenberg.

We're so early into this that we don't know what comes next. In the 00's ("the oughts"), digital things will be imbedded everywhere, mixed in with analog devices. Homes will go on-line ("turning the Crayolas into Crays.")

Thanks to MIT's Michael Hawley for this

Time Magazine, July 23, 2001

The Long Now Foundation 's elegant timelines.

And here's our take on Stewart Brand's book, The Clock of the Long Now

Timeline of knowledge-representation is simply awesome.

Met Museum's Timeline of Art History

Timeline of Change Management & HR

Cosmic Timeline

Geological Timeline

Time magazine's site gives timelines of leaders, arists, builders, heroes, scientists, and more. With photos and soundclips.

	1900	Now
Life expectency, U.S	47	73
Hours worked/week, Germany	51	29
French workforce in farming	50%	6%

Not to be outdone, U.S. News looks at what things were like ten centuries back. You won't recognize many of the era's important events.

Medieval Timeline

Abbreviated history, 750 BC to 1500 AD

Hobbes' Internet Timeline

The short now

Time Space & Knowledge

Ommmmm... let's see what Buddha would say about all this.

Time Machine timeline

Astronomical & geologic time

AVirtualSpaceTimeTravelMachine

History of Photography

Scientific visualization. Deterministic fractals. Far out.

(Click for image)

American Heritage Time Machine

50 years ago, 100 years ago, etc.

Geologic Time

The really big picture. Description and graphic of each era

The Cosmic Calendar

History of the universe in one year -- from Carl Sagan

Short History

History of the Universe in 200 Words or Less

Pre-Computer

30,000 B.C. - 1975 per Microsoft

A Walk Through Time

The history of time from NIST. "...in the early-to-mid-14th century, large mechanical clocks began to appear in the towers of several large Italian cities

The Long Now Foundation

"I want to build a clock that ticks once a year. The century hand advances once every one hundred years, and the cuckoo comes out on the millennium. I want the cuckoo to come out every millennium for the next 10,000 years. If I hurry I should finish the clock in time to see the cuckoo come out for the first time." --Denny Hillis

History of California

is a Medieval alchemy symbol for time.
Pre-digital. Pre-analog. Pre-clock.