Palm, a company based in California, launched the Palm Pilot in March
1996 as the first PDA, and sold 23 million devices between 1996 and
2002. Its operating system was the Palm OS and its reading software the
Palm Reader. In March 2001, Palm users could also use the Mobipocket
Reader, and Palm bought Peanutpress.com, a company specializing in
digital books for PDA, with its Peanut Reader and 2,000 titles that
were transferred to Palm's digital bookstore, called Palm Digital
Media. While some book professionals were concerned about the small
screen, Palm users found the screen size wasn't a problem to read a
book.
April 1996 > The Internet Archive, to archive the web every two months
or so
Founded in April 1996 by Brewster Kahle, the Internet Archive is a non-
profit organization that has built an "internet library" to offer
permanent access to historical collections in digital format for
researchers, historians and scholars. An archive of the web is stored
every two months or so. In late 1999, the Internet Archive started to
include collections of archived webpages on specific topics. It also
became an online digital library of text, audio, software, image and
video content. In October 2001, with 30 billion stored webpages, the
Internet Archive launched the Wayback Machine, for users to be able to
surf the archive of the web by date. In 2004, there were 300 terabytes
of data, with a growth of 12 terabytes per month. There were 65 billion
webpages (from 50 million websites) in 2006, 85 billion webpages in
2008, and 150 billion webpages in March 2010.
April 1996 > OneLook Dictionaries, a "fast finder" in online
dictionaries
Robert Ware launched his website OneLook Dictionaries in April 1996 as
a "fast finder" in hundreds of online dictionaries. On September 2,
1998, the fast finder could "browse" 2,058,544 words in 425
dictionaries covering various topics: business, computer/internet,
medical, miscellaneous, religion, science, sports, technology, general,
and slang. OneLook Dictionaries was provided as a free service by the
company Study Technologies, in Englewood, Colorado. OneLook
Dictionaries could browse 2.5 million words from 530 dictionaries in
2000, 5 million words from 910 dictionaries in 2003, and 19 million
words from 1,060 dictionnaries in 2010.