television 2.9 – Slow-scan although Nipkow Disk is also a great choice, and Slow-scan can go to videotelephony as well (I have fond memories of poetry readings in the mid-90s with the Electronic Café in Santa Monica from the basement of a cybercafe in Paris using a PicturePhone mod I and flashing puppets that were stored in the basement…)
videotelephony 3.0 – PicturePhone. While I’m at it, I also remember a really funny 1996 experience with a 5 ISDN lines PictureTel (3 were used for video, and 2 for audio): we were waiting for a call and the lines started blinking. It took about a minute for all five to light up and show the picture of a corporate guy who looks at us, a bit puzzled, and goes: “Sorry, wrong number.” before he hanged up.
I don’t think that’s quite a fit … 2.4 is “writing”, so going with
Some idea of timeline:
2.1
petroglyph
Bhimbetka
~30,000 years ago
2.2
pictogram
La Pasiega
~15,000 years ago
2.3
ideogram
Vinča
~4500 BC
2.4
writing
Cuneiform
~2600 BC
Next up, alphabet is also looking clearly Greek, at 800 BC
By at least the 8th century BCE the Greeks borrowed the Phoenician alphabet and adapted it to their own language, creating in the process the first “true” alphabet, in which vowels were accorded equal status with consonants. According to Greek legends transmitted by Herodotus, the alphabet was brought from Phoenicia to Greece by Cadmos. The letters of the Greek alphabet are the same as those of the Phoenician alphabet, and both alphabets are arranged in the same order.
Amazingly, forum, forest, foreign, forfeit, hors d’oeuvre and thyroid all come from the same root: for meaning ‘outdoors, outside’.
Forum in Ancient Greece was outdoors
A forest is obviously outside
A foreign person comes from outside the borders of your country
To forfeit something is to lose it because of misconduct, but originally forfeit meant the misconduct itself: something outside the bounds of acceptable behaviour
An hors d’oeuvre is a little snack served outside of the normal meal
And these all come from the proto-Indo-European root dhwer, meaning door (door → outdoors). Your thyroid gets that name because it’s vaguely door-shaped… and -oid always means ‘shaped’, as in humanoid, android (man-shaped) and asteroid (star-shaped).
