housands every day.

1974 > The Internet

When Project Gutenberg began in July 1971, the Internet was just a
glimmer. The pre-internet was created in the U.S. In 1969, as a network
set up by the Pentagon. The internet took off in 1974 with the creation
of TCP/IP by Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn. It expanded as a network linking
U.S. Governmental agencies, universities and research centers. It got
its first boost with the invention of the web by Tim Berners-Lee in
1990, and its second boost with the release of the first browser Mosaic
in 1993. The Internet Society was founded in 1992 by Vinton Cerf to
promote the development of the internet, that was quickly spreading
worldwide to become part of our lives.

1977 > ASCII extensions

Used since the beginning of computing, ASCII (American Standard Code
for Information Interchange) is a 7-bit coded character set for
information interchange in English. It was published in 1968 by ANSI
(American National Standards Institute), with an update in 1977 and
1986. The 7-bit plain ASCII, also called Plain Vanilla ASCII, is a set
of 128 characters with 95 printable unaccented characters (A-Z, a-z,
numbers, punctuation and basic symbols), the ones that are available on
the English/American keyboard. With the use of other European
languages, extensions of ASCII (also called ISO-8859 or ISO-Latin) were
created as sets of 256 characters to add accented characters as found
in French, Spanish and German, for example ISO 8859-1 (ISO-Latin-1) for
French.

1977 > UNIMARC, a common bibliographic format

The IFLA (International Federation of Library Associations) published
the first edition of UNIMARC: Universal MARC Format in 1977, followed
by a second edition in 1980 and a UNIMARC Handbook in 1983. UNIMARC
(Universal Machine Readable Cataloging) was set up as a solution to the
20 existing national MARC (Machine Readable Cataloging) formats. 20
formats meant lack of compatibility and extensive editing when
bibliographic records were exchanged. With UNIMARC, catalogers would be
able to process records created in any MARC format. Records in one MARC
format would first be converted into UNIMARC, and then be converted
into another MARC format. UNIMARC would also be promoted as a format on
its own.

1984 > The copyleft

The term "copyleft" was invented in 1984 by Richard Stallman, a
computer scientist at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), who
launched the GNU project to develop a co