The @folio project is a reading device project conceived in October
1996 by Pierre Schweitzer, an architect-designer living in Strasbourg,
France. It is meant to download and read any text and/or illustrations
from the web or hard disk, in any format, with no proprietary format
and no DRM (Digital Rights Management). The technology of @folio is
novel and simple. It is inspired from fax and tab file folders. The
flash memory is "printed" like Gutenberg printed his books. The
facsimile mode is readable as is for any content, from sheet music to
mathematical or chemical formulas, with no conversion necessary,
whether it is handwritten text, calligraphy, free hand drawing or non-
alphabetical writing. An international patent was filed in April 2001.
The French start-up iCodex was created in July 2002 to promote and
develop @folio.
1996 > A web version for the Ethnologue, a catalog of all living
languages
Published by SIL International (SIL was initially known as the Summer
Institute of Linguistics) since 1951, and freely available on the web
since 1996, The Ethnologue: Languages of the World is an encyclopedic
reference work cataloging all of the world's known living languages. As
stated by Barbara Grimes, its editor from 1971 to 2000: "It is a
catalog of the languages of the world, with information about where
they are spoken, an estimate of the number of speakers, what language
family they are in, alternate names, names of dialects, other socio-
linguistic and demographic information, dates of published Bibles, a
name index, a language family index, and language maps." Thousands of
linguists have contributed to the Ethnologue worldwide. A new edition
is published approximately every four years. The 16th edition was
published in 2009, in print (for sale) and on the web (for free), with
information on the 6,909 living languages of our planet.