Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876, though Elisha Gray filed a patent application only hours later, leading to over 600 subsequent patent suits over the next eleven years. An undertaker named Almon Strowger developed the dial telephone system to avoid relying on operators, like the wife of a competitor who routed his calls to her husband. The 1984 breakup of AT&T into Baby Bells following an antitrust suit is estimated to have cost over $5 billion in legal fees and settlements alone.

2. Alexander Graham Bell invents the telephone
in 1876. Elisha Gray files a patent application
3 hours after Bell. In the next eleven years
there are over 600 patent suits filed. Settled in
Bell's favor. Bell offers his patent to Western
Union for $100,000.

3. Almon Strowger, a St. Louis undertaker, upset
because a wife of a competitor was a telephone
operator who made his line busy transferring
calls meant for him to her husband. "Necessity
is the mother of invention" , Strowger
developed the dial telephone system to remove
the operator out of the system. He forms a
Chicago firm, Automatic Electric, to
manufacture step-by-step central office
equipment.

4. Ordered by the court division of AT&T based
on Department of Justice suit in 1984. Fred
Henck, publisher of Telecommunications
Reports and Bernie Strassburg, retired Chief
of the Common Carrier Bureau, in their book
covering the split of AT&T estimated that legal
fees and settlements cost AT&T more than $5
billion.

5. The first modem, Dataphone designed in 1960
by AT&T specifically for converting digital
computer data to analog signals for transmission
across its long distance network. The
development of equalization techniques and
bandwidth-conserving modulation systems
improved transmission efficiency in national
and global systems.

6. The ARPANET splits 1983 into the ARPANET
and MILNET. split into military (MILNET)
and civilian (ARPANET) segments because of
the success of the ARPANET as a way for
researchers in universities and the military to
collaborate. Three years earlier a networking
standard was made by the adoption of TCP/IP.
The ARPANET was renamed the “Internet” in
1995.

7. The World Wide Web was born in 1990 when a
researcher Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, a high-
energy physics laboratory in Geneva
developed Hyper Text Markup Language.
Today commonly known HTML, has allowed
the Internet to expand into the World Wide Web,
using specifications he developed such as URL
(Uniform Resource Locator) and HTTP (Hyper
Text Transfer Protocol).

8. Voice over Internet Protocol or VoIP was invented with Vocaltec's
software in 1995 allowing a PC to talk to another over an Internet
connection. Several companies developed software and maintained
hardware to make calls from PC-to-phone and phone-to-phone over
Internet and outside traditional phone lines. The first VoIP calls where
made in 1973 and the capability to send voice across a digital network
was pioneered on the ARPANET. Carrying only data and voice
between the private network of computers on the APRPANET.

9. The telecommunication evolutions timeline
consist of many events over the many years
starting from the time Indians and tribal
communities used smoke signals and their
drums to communicate. The few major
milestones are just a few from a very long list
that could have went on for many if not
hundreds of slides. These are the one that have
influenced where we are at today with the ever
changing and advancing telecommunications
world.

10.  Timeline in Telecommunications, Retrieved
December 16, 2012
ttp://www.telephonetribute.com/timeline.html
 Timeline in Computer History, Retrieved
December 16, 2012
http://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/?ca
tegory=net