I was recently thinking about my early days as a book collector before the internet and recalled this timeline I put together for the Houston Book Hunters club
A Select Time Line of Books and Computers
1943 Construction of Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer (ENIAC) begins
1947 Transistor invented at Bell Labs
1958 Texas Instruments manufactures first integrated circuit
1967 Ohio College Library Center(OCLC) founded
1971 Project Gutenberg begins at the Materials Research Lab at the University of Illinois
1974 Altair personal computer kit introduced
1975 Bill Gates and Paul Allen form Microsoft
1976 First Apple computer designed
1977 TRS-80 personal computer introduced by Tandy
1983 Dick Weatherford publishes “Computers in the Antiquarian Book Trade” in AB Bookman
1984 Apple Macintosh computer features multiple typefaces for the first time
1989 Abacis (BookQuest) formed as the first dial-up computer database of books for sale
1991 First world wide web server and browser opened for commercial use
1993 Project MUSE database of academic journals founded at Johns Hopkins University
Mid-1993 Interloc debuts as a modem based listing service for book dealers
Oct. 13, 1994 Library of Congress announces the National Digital Library Program
1995 JSTOR digital library founded
July 16, 1995 First book sold on Amazon.com Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies
September 3, 1995 Ebay opens for business as AuctionWeb. A broken laser pointer sells for $14.83
Fall 1995 Making of America digital library project begins at Cornell & the University of Michigan
1996 Abebooks goes live and Interloc moves to the internet
1997 Alibris begins as online book sale site
2001 Million Book Project (Universal Library) book digitization project starts led by Carnegie Mellon
Late-2003 WorldCat launched as an online public access catalog of library holdings
2004 Google announces Google Print project
November 19, 2007 Kindle introduced by Amazon
October 24, 2011 American Book Collecting blog is born