Atlas Trail
Six Forms, Six Firsts: The Media History Nobody Wrote Down
Six stops, one founding moment from each of this atlas thinnest media forms: a home console, a superhero debut, a newsmagazine, a technical trick inside an RSS feed, a friends list nobody called social media yet, and a streaming series that changed how television gets made.
Stop 1 of 6.
Milestones
September 1972: Magnavox begins selling the console Ralph Baer built as the Brown Box, bringing video games into ordinary homes for the first time.
Stop 2 of 6.
Milestones
April 1938: Action Comics #1 goes on sale, introducing Superman and, by most accounts, the superhero genre itself.
Stop 3 of 6.
Milestones
March 1923: Henry Luce and Briton Hadden publish the first issue of Time, the first weekly news magazine in the United States.
Stop 4 of 6.
Milestones
2000: Dave Winer implements the RSS enclosure mechanism, the technical trick that lets software fetch a new audio file automatically. Podcasting has no other starting point.
Stop 5 of 6.
Milestones
1997: Andrew Weinreich launches SixDegrees.com, letting members list friends years before anyone called it social media.
Stop 6 of 6.
Milestones
2007: Netflix launches video streaming, the pivot that eventually produced House of Cards and rewrote how television gets commissioned.
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