History of communication systems

Communication systems: In telecommunication, a

communications system is a collection of individual communications
networks, transmission systems, relay stations, tributary stations, and data
terminal equipment (DTE) usually capable of interconnection and
interoperation to form an integrated whole. The components of a
communications system serve a common purpose, are technically
compatible, use common procedures, respond to controls, and operate in
unison. Telecommunications is a method of communication (e.g., for sports
broadcasting, mass media, journalism, etc.). A communications subsystem is
a functional unit or operational assembly that is smaller than the larger
assembly under consideration.

Visual signals(non-electronic communication):

Prehistoric:
In ancient times, when electronics has not any existence fires, beacons
and smoke signals are used for communicating at long distances.

Fires: Fire is the rapid oxidation of a material in the exothermic

chemical process of combustion, releasing heat, light, and various
reaction products.
Beacons: A beacon is an intentionally conspicuous device designed to
attract attention to a specific location. It is mainly used for defensive
communication.
Smoke signal: The smoke signal is one of the oldest forms of longdistance communication. It is a form of visual communication used
over long distance.

4th century BC:

Hydraulic semaphores: A hydraulic telegraph was one of two hydraulictelegraphic telecommunication systems, one developed in 4th century BCE
Greece, and the other in 19th century AD Britain. The Greek system was
deployed in combination with semaphoric fires, while the latter British
system was purely hydraulic.

5th century BC:

In 5th century BC pigeons are the source of communication
Pigeons: Pigeon post is the use of homing pigeons to carry messages.
Pigeons were effective as messengers due to their natural homing abilities.

The pigeons were transported to a destination in cages, where they would be

attached with messages, and then naturally the pigeon would fly back to its
home where the owner could read his mail. Pigeons have been used to great
effect in military situations, with 32 birds winning the Dickin Medal.

6th century BC:

In 6th century BC mail is used mainly for communication purposes.
Mail: Mail, or post, is a system for transporting letters and other tangible
objects: written documents typically enclosed in envelopes, and also small
packages are delivered to destinations around the world. Anything sent
through the postal system is called mail or post.

490 BC:
Heliographs: A heliograph (Greek: helios, meaning "sun", and
graphein, meaning "write") is a wireless solar telegraph that signals
by flashes of sunlight (generally using Morse code) reflected by a mirror. The
flashes are produced by momentarily pivoting the mirror, or by interrupting
the beam with a shutter. The heliograph was a simple but effective
instrument for instantaneous optical communication over long distances

15th century AD:

Maritime flags: A maritime flag is a flag designated for use on ships, boats,
and other watercraft. Naval flags are considered important at sea and the
rules and regulations for the flying of flags are strictly enforced. The flag
flown is related to the country of registration: so much so that the word
"flag" is often used symbolically as a synonym for "country of registration".

1790 AD:
Semaphore lines: A semaphore telegraph, optical telegraph, shutter
telegraph chain, Chappe telegraph, or Napoleonic semaphore is a system of
conveying information by means of visual signals, using towers with pivoting
shutters, also known as blades or paddles. Information is encoded by the
position of the mechanical elements; it is read when the shutter is in a fixed
position. These systems were popular in the late 18th to early 19th century.
In modern usage, "semaphore line" and "optical telegraph" may refer to a
relay system using flag semaphore, and "optical telegraph" may refer to a
heliograph (optical telegraphy using mirror-directed sunlight reflections).

Semaphore lines were a precursor of the electrical telegraph. They were far
faster than post riders for bringing a message over long distances, but far
more expensive and less private than the electrical telegraph lines which
would replace them. The distance that an optical telegraph can bridge is
limited by geography and weather; thus, in practical use, most optical
telegraphs used lines of relay stations to bridge longer distances.

19th century AD:

Signal lamps: A signal lamp (sometimes called an Aldis lamp, named after
Arthur C. W. Aldis who invented a widely used design) is a visual signaling
device for optical communication (typically using Morse code). Modern signal
lamps are a focused lamp which can produce a pulse of light. Signal lamps
are mainly used in naval communication.

Audio signals:

After that the era of audio signal communication

started and drums and horns were used at first. Then electrical telegraph is
invented.

1838 AD:
Electrical telegraph: An electrical telegraph is a telegraph that uses
electrical signals, usually conveyed via telecommunication lines or radio. The
electromagnetic telegraph is a device for human-to-human transmission of
coded text messages.

1876:
Telephone: The telephone, colloquially referred to as a phone, is a
telecommunications device that transmits and receives sounds, usually the
human voice. Telephones are a point-to-point communication system whose
most basic function is to allow two people separated by large distances to
talk to each other. Developed in the mid-1870s by Alexander Graham Bell
and others, the telephone has long been considered indispensable to
businesses, households and governments, is now one of the most common
appliances in the developed world.

1880:
Photo phone: The photophone (also known as a radiophone) is a
telecommunications device which allowed for the transmission of both

articulated sounds and normal human conversations on a beam of light. It

was invented jointly by Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant Charles
Sumner Tainter on February 19, 1880, at Bell's laboratory at 1325 L Street in
Washington, D.C. Both were later to become full associates in the Volta
Laboratory Association, created and financed by Bell.
On April 1, 1880, Bell's assistant transmitted the world's first wireless
telecommunication to him from the roof of the Franklin School to the window
of Bell's laboratory, some 213 metres (700 ft) away.
Bell believed the Photophone was his most important invention. Of the 18
patents granted in Bell's name alone, and the 12 he shared with his
collaborators, four were for the Photophone, which Bell referred to as his
'greatest achievement', writing that the Photophone was "the greatest
invention [I have] ever made, greater than the telephone".

1896:
Radio: Radio is the transmission of signals through free space by
electromagnetic waves with frequencies significantly below visible light, in
the radio frequency range, from about 3 kHz to 300 GHz. These waves are
called radio waves. Electromagnetic radiation travels by means of oscillating
electromagnetic fields that pass through the air and the vacuum of space.
Information, such as sound, is carried by systematically changing
(modulating) some property of the radiated waves, such as their amplitude,
frequency, phase, or pulse width. When radio waves strike an electrical
conductor, the oscillating fields induce an alternating current in the
conductor. The information in the waves can be extracted and transformed
back into its original form.

Advanced electrical/electronic signals:

1927:
Television: Television (TV) is a telecommunication medium for transmitting
and receiving moving images that can be monochrome (black-and-white) or
colored, with or without accompanying sound. "Television" may also refer
specifically to a television set, television programming, or television
transmission.
The etymology of the word has a mixed Latin and Greek origin, meaning "far
sight": Greek tele (), far, and Latin visio, sight (from video, vis- to see, or
to view in the first person).

1930:
Videophone: A videophone is a telephone with a video display, capable of
simultaneous video and audio for communication between people in realtime. Videophone service provided the first form of video telephony, later to
be followed by videoconferencing, webcams, and finally high-definition tele
presence.
At the dawn of its commercial deployment from the 1950s through the
1990s, video telephony also included 'image phones' which would exchange
still images between units every few seconds over conventional POTS-type
telephone lines, essentially the same as slow scan TV systems. The
development of advanced technology video codecs and high bandwidth
Internet telecommunication services allowed videophones to provide high
quality colour service between users almost any place in the world that the
Internet is available, often at low or nominal costs.
In the present day videophones have become widely available at reasonable
cost, although not widely used in everyday communications for a variety of
reasons. However, they are particularly useful to the deaf and speechimpaired who can use them with sign language, and are becoming
increasingly popular for educational instruction, telemedicine and to those
with mobility issues.

1964:
Fiber optical telecommunications: An optical fiber is a flexible,
transparent fiber made of glass (silica) or plastic, slightly thicker than a
human hair. It functions as a waveguide, or light pipe, to transmit light
between the two ends of the fiber. The field of applied science and
engineering concerned with the design and application of optical fibers is
known as fiber optics. Optical fibers are widely used in fiber-optic
communications, which permits transmission over longer distances and at
higher bandwidths (data rates) than other forms of communication. Fibers
are used instead of metal wires because signals travel along them with less
loss and are also immune to electromagnetic interference. Fibers are also
used for illumination, and are wrapped in bundles so that they may be used
to carry images, thus allowing viewing in confined spaces. Specially
designed fibers are used for a variety of other applications, including sensors
and fiber lasers.
Optical fibers typically include a transparent core surrounded by a
transparent cladding material with a lower index of refraction. Light is kept
in the core by total internal reflection. This causes the fiber to act as a
waveguide. Fibers that support many propagation paths or transverse modes
are called multi-mode fibers (MMF), while those that only support a single
mode are called single-mode fibers (SMF). Multi-mode fibers generally

have a wider core diameter, and are used for short-distance communication
links and for applications where high power must be transmitted. Singlemode fibers are used for most communication links longer than 1,050
meters (3,440 ft).

1969:
Computer networking: A computer network, or simply a network, is a
collection of computers and other hardware components interconnected by
communication channels that allow sharing of resources and information.
Where at least one process in one device is able to send/receive data
to/from at least one process residing in a remote device, then the two
devices are said to be in a network. Simply, more than one computer
interconnected through a communication medium for information
interchange is called a computer network.
Networks may be classified according to a wide variety of
characteristics, such as the medium used to transport the data,
communications protocol used, scale, topology, and organizational scope.
Communications protocols define the rules and data formats for
exchanging information in a computer network, and provide the basis for
network programming. Well-known communications protocols include
Ethernet, hardware and link layer standard that is ubiquitous in local area
networks, and the Internet protocol suite, which defines a set of protocols for
internetworking, i.e. for data communication between multiple networks, as
well as host-to-host data transfer, and application-specific data transmission
formats.
Computer networking is sometimes considered a sub-discipline of electrical
engineering, telecommunications, computer science, information technology
or computer engineering, since it relies upon the theoretical and practical
application of these disciplines.

1981:
Analog cellular mobile phones: A mobile phone (also known as a cellular
phone, cell phone and a hand phone) is a device that can make and receive
telephone calls over a radio link whilst moving around a wide geographic
area. It does so by connecting to a cellular network provided by a mobile
phone operator, allowing access to the public telephone network. By
contrast, a cordless telephone is used only within the short range of a single,
private base station.
In addition to telephony, modern mobile phones also support a wide variety
of other services such as text messaging, MMS, email, Internet access, shortrange wireless communications (infrared, Bluetooth), business applications,

gaming and photography. Mobile phones that offer these and more general
computing capabilities are referred to as smartphones.
The first hand-held mobile phone was demonstrated by Dr Martin Cooper
of Motorola in 1973, using a handset weighing around 2.2 pounds (1 kg).
In 1983, the DynaTAC 8000x was the first to be commercially available. From
1990 to 2011, worldwide mobile phone subscriptions grew from 12.4 million
to over 5.6 billion, penetrating about 70% of the global population and
reaching the bottom of the economic pyramid.

1982:
SMTP email: Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is an Internet standard
for electronic mail (e-mail) transmission across Internet Protocol (IP)
networks. SMTP was first defined by RFC 821 (1982, eventually declared STD
10), and last updated by RFC 5321 (2008) which includes the extended SMTP
(ESMTP) additions, and is the protocol in widespread use today. SMTP uses
TCP port 25. The protocol for new submissions (MSA) is effectively the same
as SMTP, but it uses port 587 instead. SMTP connections secured by SSL are
known by the shorthand SMTPS, though SMTPS is not a protocol in its own
right.
While electronic mail servers and other mail transfer agents use SMTP to
send and receive mail messages, user-level client mail applications typically
only use SMTP for sending messages to a mail server for relaying. For
receiving messages, client applications usually use either the Post Office
Protocol (POP) or the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) or a
proprietary system (such as Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes/Domino) to
access their mail box accounts on a mail server.

1983:
Internet: The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer
networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite (often called TCP/IP,
although not all applications use TCP) to serve billions of users worldwide. It
is a network of networks that consists of millions of private, public,
academic, business, and government networks, of local to global scope, that
are linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless and optical networking
technologies. The Internet carries an extensive range of information

resources and services, such as the inter-linked hypertext documents of the

World Wide Web (WWW) and the infrastructure to support email.
Most traditional communications media including telephone, music,
film, and television are reshaped or redefined by the Internet, giving birth to
new services such as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and Internet
Protocol Television (IPTV). Newspaper, book and other print publishing are
adapting to Web site technology, or are reshaped into blogging and web
feeds. The Internet has enabled and accelerated new forms of human
interactions through instant messaging, Internet forums, and social
networking. Online shopping has boomed both for major retail outlets and
small artisans and traders. Business-to-business and financial services on
the Internet affect supply chains across entire industries.
The origins of the Internet reach back to research of the 1960s,
commissioned by the United States government in collaboration with private
commercial interests to build robust, fault-tolerant, and distributed computer
networks. The funding of a new U.S. backbone by the National Science
Foundation in the 1980s, as well as private funding for other commercial
backbones, led to worldwide participation in the development of new
networking technologies, and the merger of many networks. The
commercialization of what was by the 1990s an international network
resulted in its popularization and incorporation into virtually every aspect of
modern human life. As of 2011, more than 2.2 billion people nearly a third
of Earth's population use the services of the Internet.[1]
The Internet has no centralized governance in either technological
implementation or policies for access and usage; each constituent network
sets its own standards. Only the overreaching definitions of the two principal
name spaces in the Internet, the Internet Protocol address space and the
Domain Name System, are directed by a maintainer organization, the
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The
technical underpinning and standardization of the core protocols (IPv4 and
IPv6) is an activity of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a non-profit
organization of loosely affiliated international participants that anyone may
associate with by contributing technical expertise.

1998:
Satellite phones: A satellite telephone, satellite phone, or satphone is a
type of mobile phone that connects to orbiting satellites instead of terrestrial
cell sites. They provide similar functionality to terrestrial mobile telephones;
voice, short messaging service and low-bandwidth internet access are
supported through most systems.
Depending on the architecture of a particular system, coverage may include
the entire Earth, or only specific regions.

The mobile equipment, also known as a terminal, varies widely. Early

satellite phone handsets had a size and weight comparable to that of a late1980s or early-1990s mobile phone, but usually with a large retractable
antenna. More recent satellite phones are similar in size to a regular mobile
phone while some prototype satellite phones have no distinguishable
difference from an ordinary smartphone. Satphones are popular on
expeditions into remote areas where terrestrial cellular service is
unavailable.
A fixed installation, such as one used aboard a ship, may include large,
rugged, rack-mounted electronics, and a steerable microwave antenna on
the mast that automatically tracks the overhead satellites. Smaller
installations using VoIP over a two-way satellite broadband service such as
BGAN or VSAT bring the costs within the reach of leisure vessel owners.
Internet service satellite phones have notoriously poor reception indoors,
though it may be possible to get a consistent signal near a window or in the
top floor of a building if the roof is sufficiently thin. The phones have
connectors for external antennas that can be installed in vehicles and
buildings. The systems also allow for the use of repeaters, much like

terrestrial mobile phone systems.