Showing posts with label History. Show all posts
Showing posts with label History. Show all posts

Monday, October 24, 2011

History

Electric Image, Inc. was initially a visual effects production company. They developed their own in-house 3D animation and rendering package for the Macintoshbeginning in the late 1980s, calling it ElectricImage Animation System. (To avoid confusion with the current product with its similar name, we will refer to this initial incarnation of the product simply as ElectricImage.)

When the company later decided to offer their software for sale to others, it quickly gained a customer base that lauded the developers for the software's exceptionally fast rendering engine and high image quality. Because it was capable of film-quality output on commodity hardware, ElectricImage was popular in the movie and television industries throughout the decade. It was used by the "Rebel Unit" at Industrial Light and Magic quite extensively and was in use by a variety of game companies.Bad Mojo, Bad Day on the Midway However, only these high end effects companies could afford it: Electric Image initially sold for US $7500.

EIAS has been used in numerous film and television productions such as Piranha 3D, Alien Trespass, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, Daddy Day Care, K-19: The Widowmaker, Gangs of New York, Austin Powers: Goldmember, Men In Black II, The Bourne Identity, Behind Enemy Lines, Time Machine, Ticker, JAG - Pilot Episode, Spawn, Star Trek: First Contact, Star Trek: Insurrection, Galaxy Quest, Mission to Mars, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace, Titan A.E., U-571, Dinosaur, Terminator 2: Judgement Day - DVD Intro, Jungle Book 2, American President, Sleepers, Star Wars Special Edition, Empire Strikes Back Special Edition, Return of Jedi Special Edition, Bicentennial Man, Vertical Limit, Elf, Blade Trinity, and Lost In Space. TV Shows: The whole Truth, Lost, Flash Forward, Fringe, Surface, Weeds, Pushing Daisies, The X-Files, Alias, Smallville, Star Trek:Next Generation, Babylon 5, Young Indiana Jones, Star Trek Voayager, Mists of Avalon, Star Trek Enterprise...'.

Electric Image, Inc. was always a small company that produced software on the Mac platform and so never had a large a market share. Play, Inc. purchased Electric Image corporation in November 1998. The first version of EIAS released under the Play moniker was version 2.9. Play later released the 3.0 version. This was the first version to run on Windows, and to mark this move, Play renamed the package Electric Image Universe. Play was never a greatly successful company, and so Electric Image Universe stagnated during the time they owned it.

In 2000, Dwight Parscale (former CEO of Newtek) and original Electric Image founders Markus Houy and Jay Roth bought back the original company from Play Inc. On September 19, 2000, the company bought back the shares of Electric Image from Play and set about to recapture the product's former customer base. The new company released version 4.0 and 5.0 under the Electric Image moniker. Then due to a licensing problem with Spatial Technologies, they dropped the Modeler program from the version 5.5 release, and renamed the package back to Electric Image Animation System.

Versions 6.0 and 6.5 were subsequently released with vast improvements to the rendering engine and OpenGL performance. Version 6.5r2 added FBX file importing capability. 6.6 added Universal Binary support and finally drops support for Mac OS 9. Version 7.0 brought Multi-Layer Rendering, Image-Based Lighting, Raytrace Sky Maps and Rigid Body Dynamics. The current version, 8.0, added Photon Mapping, Fast soft shadows, area light, Quadratic light drop-off, EXR and 16bit image input support, Displacement Sea Level, new Weight maps tools, lots of workflow enhancement and Renderama improvements.

EI Technology Group Announces Sale of EIAS Intellectual Property

San Antonio, TX – January 12, 2010 – San Antonio based EI Technology Group (EITG) has sold the intellectual property rights of Electric Image Animation System (EIAS) to new owners Tomas Egger and the Igors . The sale includes the software applications: Animator, Camera, Renderama and all related modules. This transfer will allow accelerated development and new technologies of the software to evolve, without limiting them to EITG’s budget as it continues development of Modeler. Brad Parscale, President of EITG stated, “ This move is best for the future of EIAS. It puts the products in the hands of the artists and developers who use it most. EIAS will swiftly progress with new features as a result of this transaction.”

History


The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded by Tim Berners-Lee after he left the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in October, 1994. It was founded at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Laboratory for Computer Science (MIT/LCS) with support from the European Commission and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which had pioneered the Internet.
W3C was created to ensure compatibility and agreement among industry members in the adoption of new standards. Prior to its creation, incompatible versions of HTML were offered by different vendors, increasing the potential for inconsistency between web pages. The consortium was created to get all those vendors to agree on a set of core principles and components which would be supported by everyone.
It was originally intended that CERN host the European branch of W3C; however, CERN wished to focus on particle physics, not information technology. In April 1995 the Institut national de recherche en informatique et en automatique (INRIA) became the European host of W3C, with Keio University becoming the Japanese branch in September 1996. Starting in 1997, W3C created regional offices around the world; as of September 2009, it has eighteen World Offices covering Australia, the Benelux countries (NetherlandsLuxembourg, and Belgium), BrazilChinaFinlandGermanyAustriaGreeceHong KongHungaryIndiaIsraelItalySouth KoreaMoroccoSouth AfricaSpainSweden, and the United Kingdom and Ireland.[3]
In January 2003, the European host was transferred from INRIA to the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM), an organization that represents European national computer science laboratories.

History


The basic idea of restructuring information about web sites goes back to as early as 1995, when Ramanathan V. Guha and others in Apple Computer's Advanced Technology Group developed the Meta Content Framework (MCF).[1] For a more detailed discussion of these early developments, see the history of web syndication technology.
Large scale web syndication of content started in 1999 when Studio One Networks produced and distributed the first series of syndicated programs designed to be distributed on the Internet for its sponsor American Honda.[2] Nowadays, many different types of content are syndicated on the Internet. Millions of online publishers, including newspapers, commercial websites and blogs, now publish their latest news headlines, product offers or blog postings in standard format news feed.

History


Christopher Allen supported this definition and traced the core ideas of this concept back through Computer Supported Cooperative or Collaborative Work (CSCW) in the 1990s, Groupware in the 1970s and 1980s, to Englebart’s "augmentation" (1960s) and Bush’s "Memex" (1940s). Although he identifies a "lifecycle" to this terminology that appears to reemerge each decade in a different form, this does not necessarily mean that social software is simply old wine in new bottles.[17]
The augmentation capabilities of social software were demonstrated in early internet applications for communication such as e-mail, newsgroups, groupware, virtual communities etc. In the current phase of Allen's lifecycle, these collaborative tools add a capability "that aggregates the actions of networked users." This points to a powerful dynamic that distinguishes social software from other group collaboration tools and as a component of Web 2.0 technology. Capabilities for content and behavior aggregation and redistribution present some of the more important potentials of this media.[citation needed] In the next phase, academic experiments, Social Constructivism and the open source software movement are expected to be notable influences.
Clay Shirky traces the origin of the term "social software" to Eric Drexler's 1987 discussion of "hypertext publishing systems" like the subsequent World Wide Web, and how systems of this kind could support software for public critical discussion, collaborative development, group commitment, and collaborative filtering of content based on voting and rating.[1][2]
Social technologies (or conversational technologies) is a term used by organizations (particularly network-centric organizations). It describes the technology that allows the storage and creation of knowledge through collaborative writing.

History

It is difficult to be precise about "dynamic web page beginnings" or chronology, because the precise concept makes sense only after the "widespread development of web pages": HTTP has been in use since 1990,HTML, as standard, since 1996. The web browsers explosion started with 1993's Mosaic. It is obvious, however, that the concept of dynamically driven websites predates the internet, and in fact HTML. For example, in 1990, before the general public use of the internet, a dynamically driven remotely accessed menu system was implemented by Susan Biddlecomb, at the University of Southern California BBS on a 16 line TBBS system with TDBS add-on.

History

A precursor to the public Bulletin Board System was Community Memory, started in August, 1973 in Berkeley, California, using hardwired terminals located in neighborhoods.[1]
The first public dial-up Bulletin Board System was developed by Ward Christensen. According to an early interview, while he was snowed in during the Great Blizzard of 1978 in Chicago, Christensen along with fellow hobbyist Randy Suess, began preliminary work on the Computerized Bulletin Board System, or CBBS. CBBS went online on February 16, 1978 in Chicago, Illinois.[2] CBBS, which kept a count of callers, reportedly connected 253,301 callers before it was finally retired.[citation needed]
With the original 110 and 300 baud modems of the late 1970s, BBSes were particularly slow, but speed improved with the introduction of 1200 bit/s modems in the early 1980s, and this led to a substantial increase in popularity. The demand for complex ANSI and ASCII screens and larger file transfers taxed available channel capacity, which in turn propelled demand for faster modems.
Most of the information was displayed using ordinary ASCII text or ANSI art, though some BBSes experimented with higher resolution visual formats such as the innovative but obscure Remote Imaging Protocol. Many systems became quite sophisticated in graphic presentation, especially considering that the system was confined to ASCII codes. Several systems attempted to simulate the appearance of GUI displays which were just appearing as DOS add-ons or Apple systems. Probably the ultimate development of graphic presentations was the Dynamic page implementation of the University of Southern California BBS (USCBBS) by Susan Biddlecomb, which predated the implementation of the HTML Dynamic web page. A complete "Dynamic web page" implementation was accomplished using TBBS with a TDBS add-on presenting a complete menu system individually customized for each user.
During the mid 1980s, a very popular BBS software "RBBS-PC" became commonly used by students, schools, churches and more. One of the largest BBSes of the time was known as "Avery I" and run by a young System Operator from a small town in North Carolina (Greg J. Gardner). This was one of the largest private and non-profit BBSes of the time.
Towards the early 1990s, the BBS industry became so popular that it spawned three monthly magazines, Boardwatch, BBS Magazine, and in Asia and Australia, Chips 'n Bits Magazine which devoted extensive coverage of the software and technology innovations and people behind them, and listings to US and worldwide BBSes.[3] In addition, in the USA, a major monthly magazine, Computer Shopper, carried a list of BBSes along with a brief abstract of each of their offerings.
According to the FidoNet Nodelist, BBSes reached their peak usage around 1996, which was the same period that the World Wide Web suddenly became mainstream. BBSes rapidly declined in popularity thereafter, and were replaced by systems using the Internet for connectivity. Some of the larger commercial BBSes, such as ExecPC BBS, became actual Internet Service Providers.
The website textfiles.com serves as an archive that documents the history of the BBS. The owner of textfiles.com, Jason Scott, also produced BBS: The Documentary, a DVD film that chronicles the history of the BBS and features interviews with well-known people (mostly from the United States) from the heyday BBS era.
The historical BBS list on textfiles.com contains over 105,000 BBSes that have existed over a span of 20 years in North America alone.

History

The earliest known linguistic activities date to Iron Age India (around the 8th century BC) with the analysis of Sanskrit. The Pratishakhyas were a proto-linguistic ad hoc collection of observations about mutations to a given corpus particular to a given Vedic school. Systematic study of these texts gives rise to the Vedanga discipline of Vyakarana, the earliest surviving account of which is the work of Pāṇini (c. 520 – 460 BC), who looked back on what are, it is presumed, several generations of grammarians, whose opinions he occasionally refers to. Pāṇini formulates close to 4,000 rules that together form a compact generative grammar of Sanskrit. Inherent in his analytic approach are the concepts of the phoneme, the morpheme, and the root. Due to its focus on brevity, his grammar has a highly unintuitive structure.
Indian linguistics maintained a high level for several centuries; Patanjali in the 2nd century BC still actively criticizes Pāṇini. In the later centuries BC, Pāṇini's grammar came to be seen as prescriptive, and commentators came to be fully dependent on it. Bhartṛhari (c. 450 – 510) theorized the act of speech as being made up of four stages: first, conceptualization of an idea, second, its verbalization and sequencing (articulation), third, delivery of speech into atmospheric air, and fourth, the interpretation of speech by the listener, the interpreter.
In the West, linguistics begins in Classical Antiquity with grammatical speculation such as Plato's Cratylus. The first important milestone in Western linguistics was the introduction of the Phoenician alphabet to the Greeks, who modified the alphabet by adding vowels, giving rise to the ancestor of all alphabets in the West. As a result of the introduction of writing, poetry such as the Homeric poems became written and several editions were created and commented, forming the basis of philology and criticism. The sophists and Socrates introduced dialectics as a new text genre. Aristotle defined the logic of speech and the argument, and his works on rhetoric and poetics developed the understating of tragedy, poetry, and public discussions as text genres.
One of the greatest of the Greek grammarians was Apollonius Dyscolus.[18] Apollonius wrote more than thirty treatises on questions of syntax, semantics, morphology, prosody, orthography, dialectology, and more. In the 4th c., Aelius Donatus compiled the Latin grammar Ars Grammatica that was to be the defining school text through the Middle Ages.[19] In De vulgari eloquentia ("On the Eloquence of Vernacular"), Dante Alighieri expanded the scope of linguistic enquiry from the traditional languages of antiquity to include the language of the day.[citation needed]
In China, linguistics starts with the development of Xiaoxue (小學 "elementary studies"), which began as an aid to understanding classics in the Han dynasty (c. 3d c. BCE)[20]. Early Chinese philologists included Yang Xiong, who studied the linguistic geography of China, Xu Shen, a lexicographer, and the phonologist Chen Di, who pioneered the study of Old Chinese.[20] Xiaoxue came to be divided into three branches: Xungu (訓詁 "exegesis"), Wenzi (文字 "script [analysis]") and Yinyun (音韻 "[study of] sounds")[21] and reached its golden age in the 17th. c. AD (Qing Dynasty). The advent of character glossaries and vocabularies during the Han Dynasty, including Sima Xiangru's The General Primer, Shi You's The Instant Primer, and Li Chang's The Yuanshang Primer, greatly contributed to the development of Chinese philology.[22] The Chinese study of phonology appeared later, and was heavily influenced by Indian philology.
In the Middle East, the Persian linguist Sibawayh made a detailed and professional description of Arabic in 760, in his monumental work, Al-kitab fi al-nahw (الكتاب في النحو, The Book on Grammar), bringing many linguistic aspects of language to light. In his book, he distinguished phonetics from phonology.[citation needed]
Sir William Jones noted that Sanskrit shared many common features with classical Latin and Greek, the notable ones being verb roots and grammatical structures, such as the case system. This led to the theory that all languages sprang from a common source and to the discovery of the Indo-European language family. He began the study of comparative linguistics, which would uncover more language families and branches.
In 19th-century Europe, the study of linguistics was largely from the perspective of philology (or historical linguistics). Some early-19th-century linguists were Jakob Grimm, who devised a principle of consonantal shifts in pronunciation – known as Grimm's Law – in 1822; Karl Verner, who formulated Verner's Law; August Schleicher, who created the "Stammbaumtheorie" ("family tree"); and Johannes Schmidt, who developed the "Wellentheorie" ("wave model") in 1872.
Ferdinand de Saussure was the founder of modern structural linguistics, with an emphasis on synchronic (i.e., nonhistorical) explanations for language form.
In North America, the structuralist tradition grew out of a combination of missionary linguistics (whose goal was to translate the Bible) and anthropology. While originally regarded as a sub-field of anthropology in the United States,[23][24] linguistics is now considered a separate scientific discipline in the US, Australia, and much of Europe.
Edward Sapir, a writer in American structural linguistics, was one of the first who explored the relations between language studies and anthropology. His methodology had some influence on all his successors. Noam Chomsky's formal model of language, transformational-generative grammar, developed under the influence of his teacher Zellig Harris, who was in turn strongly influenced by Leonard Bloomfield, has been the dominant model since the 1960s.
The structural linguistics period was largely superseded in North America by generative grammar in the 1950s and 1960s. This paradigm views language as a mental object, and emphasizes the role of the formal modeling of universal, and language specific rules. Noam Chomsky remains an important but controversial linguistic figure. Generative grammar gave rise to such frameworks such as Transformational grammar, Generative Semantics, Relational Grammar, Generalized phrase structure grammar, Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), and Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG). Other linguists working in Optimality Theory state generalizations in terms of violable constraints that interact with each other, and abandon the traditional rule-based formalism first pioneered by early work in generativist linguistics.
Functionalist linguists working in functional grammar, and Cognitive Linguistics tend to stress the non-autonomy of linguistic knowledge and the non-universality of linguistic structures, thus differing significantly from the formal approaches.

Saturday, October 22, 2011

History

Main article: History of mobile phones
An evolution of mobile phones

Radiophones have a long and varied history going back to Reginald Fessenden's invention and shore-to-ship demonstration of radio telephony, through the Second World War with military use of radio telephony links and civil services in the 1950s.

The first mobile telephone call made from a car occurred in St. Louis, Missouri, USA on June 17, 1946, using the Bell System's Mobile Telephone Service. The equipment weighed 80 pounds (36 kg), and the AT&T service, basically a massive party line, cost US$30 per month (equal to $337.33 today) plus 30–40 cents per local call, equal to $3.37 to $4.5 today.[5]

In 1956, the world’s first partly automatic car phone system, Mobile System A (MTA), was launched in Sweden. MTA phones were composed of vacuum tubes and relays, and had a weight of 40 kg. In 1962, a more modern version called Mobile System B (MTB) was launched, which was a push-button telephone, and which used transistors to enhance the telephone’s calling capacity and improve its operational reliability, thereby reducing the weight of the apparatus to 10 kg. In 1971, the MTD version was launched, opening for several different brands of equipment and gaining commercial success.[6][7]

Martin Cooper, a Motorola researcher and executive is considered to be the inventor of the first practical mobile phone for handheld use in a non-vehicle setting, after a long race against Bell Labs for the first portable mobile phone. Using a modern, if somewhat heavy portable handset, Cooper made the first call on a handheld mobile phone on April 3, 1973 to his rival, Dr. Joel S. Engel of Bell Labs.[8]

The first commercially automated cellular network (the 1G) was launched in Japan by NTT in 1979, initially in the metropolitan area of Tokyo. Within five years, the NTT network had been expanded to cover the whole population of Japan and became the first nationwide 1G network. In 1981, this was followed by the simultaneous launch of the Nordic Mobile Telephone (NMT) system in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden.[9] NMT was the first mobile phone network featuring international roaming. The first 1G network launched in the USA was Chicago-based Ameritech in 1983 using the Motorola DynaTAC mobile phone. Several countries then followed in the early-to-mid 1980s including the UK, Mexico and Canada.

The first "modern" network technology on digital 2G (second generation) cellular technology was launched by Radiolinja (now part of Elisa Group) in 1991 in Finland on the GSM standard, which also marked the introduction of competition in mobile telecoms when Radiolinja challenged incumbent Telecom Finland (now part of TeliaSonera) who ran a 1G NMT network.

In 2001, the launch of 3G (Third Generation) was again in Japan by NTT DoCoMo on the WCDMA standard.[10]

One of the newest 3G technologies to be implemented is High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA). It is an enhanced 3G (third generation) mobile telephony communications protocol in the high-speed packet access (HSPA) family, also coined 3.5G, 3G+ or turbo 3G, which allows networks based on Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) to have higher data transfer speeds and capacity.

Friday, October 21, 2011

History

Charlie Chaplin, the Marriage Bond.ogg
A clip from the Charlie Chaplin silent film The Bond (1918)
Preceding film in origin by thousands of years, early plays and dances had elements common to film: scripts, sets, costumes, production, direction, actors, audiences, storyboards, and scores. Much terminology later used in film theory and criticism apply, such as mise en scene (roughly, the entire visual picture at any one time). Owing to an absence of technology for doing so, moving visual and aural images were not recorded for replaying as in film.
In the 1860s, mechanisms for producing two-dimensional drawings in motion were demonstrated with devices such as the zoetrope, mutoscope and praxinoscope. These machines were outgrowths of simple optical devices (such as magic lanterns) and would display sequences of still pictures at sufficient speed for the images on the pictures to appear to be moving, a phenomenon called persistence of vision. Naturally the images needed to be carefully designed to achieve the desired effect, and the underlying principle became the basis for the development of film animation.
With the development of celluloid film for still photography, it became possible to directly capture objects in motion in real time. An 1878 experiment by English photographer Eadweard Muybridge in the United States using 24 cameras produced a series of stereoscopic images of a galloping horse, is arguably the first "motion picture", though it was not called by this name.[1] This technology required a person to look into a viewing machine to see the pictures which were separate paper prints attached to a drum turned by a handcrank. The pictures were shown at a variable speed of about 5 to 10 pictures per second, depending on how rapidly the crank was turned. Commercial versions of these machines were coin operated.
A frame from Roundhay Garden Scene, the world's earliest film produced using a motion picture camera, by Louis Le Prince, 1888
By the 1880s the development of the motion picture camera allowed the individual component images to be captured and stored on a single reel, and led quickly to the development of a motion picture projector to shine light through the processed and printed film and magnify these "moving picture shows" onto a screen for an entire audience. These reels, so exhibited, came to be known as "motion pictures". Early motion pictures were static shots that showed an event or action with no editing or other cinematic techniques. The first public exhibition of projected motion pictures in America was shown at Koster and Bial's Music Hall in New York City on the 23rd of April 1896.
Ignoring Dickson's early sound experiments (1894), commercial motion pictures were purely visual art through the late 19th century, but these innovative silent films had gained a hold on the public imagination. Around the turn of the 20th century, films began developing a narrative structure by stringing scenes together to tell narratives. The scenes were later broken up into multiple shots of varying sizes and angles. Other techniques such as camera movement were realized as effective ways to portray a story on film. Rather than leave the audience with noise of early cinema projectors, theater owners would hire a pianist or organist or a full orchestra to play music that would cover noises of projector. Eventually, musicians would start to fit the mood of the film at any given moment. By the early 1920s, most films came with a prepared list of sheet music for this purpose, with complete film scores being composed for major productions.
A shot from Georges Méliès Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon) (1902), an early narrative film.
The rise of European cinema was interrupted by the outbreak of World War I when the film industry in United States flourished with the rise of Hollywood, typified most prominently by the great innovative work of D. W. Griffith in The Birth of a Nation (1914) and Intolerance (1916). However in the 1920s, European filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein, F. W. Murnau, and Fritz Lang, in many ways inspired by the meteoric war-time progress of film through Griffith, along with the contributions of Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton and others, quickly caught up with American film-making and continued to further advance the medium. In the 1920s, new technology allowed filmmakers to attach to each film a soundtrack of speech, music and sound effects synchronized with the action on the screen. These sound films were initially distinguished by calling them "talking pictures", or talkies.
The next major step in the development of cinema was the introduction of so-called "natural color", which meant color that was photographically recorded from nature rather than being added to black-and-white prints by hand-coloring, stencil-coloring or other arbitrary procedures, although the earliest processes typically yielded colors which were far from "natural" in appearance. While the addition of sound quickly eclipsed silent film and theater musicians, color replaced black-and-white much more gradually. The pivotal innovation was the introduction of the three-strip version of the Technicolor process, which was first used for short subjects and for isolated sequences in a few feature films released in 1934, then for an entire feature film, Becky Sharp, in 1935. The expense of the process was daunting, but continued favorable public response and enhanced box-office receipts increasingly justified the added cost. The number of films made in color slowly increased year after year.
In the early 1950s, as the proliferation of black-and-white television started seriously depressing theater attendance in the US, the use of color was seen as one way of winning back audiences. It soon became the rule rather than the exception. Some important mainstream Hollywood films were still being made in black-and-white as late as the mid-1960s, but they marked the end of an era. Color television receivers had been available in the US since the mid-1950s, but at first they were very expensive and few broadcasts were in color. During the 1960s, prices gradually came down, color broadcasts became common, and the sale of color television sets boomed. The strong preference of the general public for color was obvious. After the final flurry of black-and-white film releases in mid-decade, all major Hollywood studio film production was exclusively in color, with rare exceptions reluctantly made only at the insistence of "star" directors such as Peter Bogdanovich and Martin Scorsese.
Since the decline of the studio system in the 1960s, the succeeding decades saw changes in the production and style of film. Various New Wave movements (including the French New Wave, Indian New Wave, Japanese New Wave and New Hollywood) and the rise of film school educated independent filmmakers were all part of the changes the medium experienced in the latter half of the 20th century. Digital technology has been the driving force in change throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s.

Thursday, October 20, 2011

History

Hippocrates (ca. 460 BC – ca. 370 BC) described several kinds of cancers, referring to them with the Greek word carcinos (crab or crayfish), among others.[110] This name comes from the appearance of the cut surface of a solid malignant tumour, with "the veins stretched on all sides as the animal the crab has its feet, whence it derives its name".[111] Since it was against Greek tradition to open the body, Hippocrates only described and made drawings of outwardly visible tumors on the skin, nose, and breasts. Treatment was based on the humor theory of four bodily fluids (black and yellow bile, blood, and phlegm). According to the patient's humor, treatment consisted of diet, blood-letting, and/or laxatives. Through the centuries it was discovered that cancer could occur anywhere in the body, but humor-theory based treatment remained popular until the 19th century with the discovery of cells.

Engraving with two views of a Dutch woman who had a tumor removed from her neck in 1689.

Celsus (ca. 25 BC - 50 AD) translated carcinos into the Latin cancer, also meaning crab. Galen (2nd century AD) called benign tumours oncos, Greek for swelling, reserving Hippocrates' carcinos for malignant tumours. He later added the suffix -oma, Greek for swelling, giving the name carcinoma.

The oldest known description and surgical treatment of cancer was discovered in Egypt and dates back to approximately 1600 BC. The Papyrus describes 8 cases of ulcers of the breast that were treated by cauterization, with a tool called "the fire drill." The writing says about the disease, "There is no treatment."[112]

In the 16th and 17th centuries, it became more acceptable for doctors to dissect bodies to discover the cause of death. The German professor Wilhelm Fabry believed that breast cancer was caused by a milk clot in a mammary duct. The Dutch professor Francois de la Boe Sylvius, a follower of Descartes, believed that all disease was the outcome of chemical processes, and that acidic lymph fluid was the cause of cancer. His contemporary Nicolaes Tulp believed that cancer was a poison that slowly spreads, and concluded that it was contagious.[113]

The first cause of cancer was identified by British surgeon Percivall Pott, who discovered in 1775 that cancer of the scrotum was a common disease among chimney sweeps. The work of other individual physicians led to various insights, but when physicians started working together they could make firmer conclusions.

With the widespread use of the microscope in the 18th century, it was discovered that the 'cancer poison' spread from the primary tumor through the lymph nodes to other sites ("metastasis"). This view of the disease was first formulated by the English surgeon Campbell De Morgan between 1871 and 1874.[114] The use of surgery to treat cancer had poor results due to problems with hygiene. The renowned Scottish surgeon Alexander Monro saw only 2 breast tumor patients out of 60 surviving surgery for two years. In the 19th century, asepsis improved surgical hygiene and as the survivalstatistics went up, surgical removal of the tumor became the primary treatment for cancer. With the exception of William Coley who in the late 19th century felt that the rate of cure after surgery had been higherbefore asepsis (and who injected bacteria into tumors with mixed results), cancer treatment became dependent on the individual art of the surgeon at removing a tumor. During the same period, the idea that the body was made up of various tissues, that in turn were made up of millions of cells, laid rest the humor-theories about chemical imbalances in the body. The age of cellular pathology was born.

The genetic basis of cancer was recognised in 1902 by the German zoologist Theodor Boveri, professor of zoology at Munich and later in Würzburg.[115] He discovered a method to generate cells with multiple copies of the centrosome, a structure he discovered and named. He postulated that chromosomes were distinct and transmitted different inheritance factors. He suggested that mutations of the chromosomes could generate a cell with unlimited growth potential which could be passed onto its descendants. He proposed the existence of cell cycle check points, tumour suppressor genes and oncogenes. He speculated that cancers might be caused or promoted by radiation, physical or chemical insults or by pathogenic microorganisms.

1938 poster identifying surgery, x-raysand radium as the proper treatments for cancer.

When Marie Curie and Pierre Curie discovered radiation at the end of the 19th century, they stumbled upon the first effective non-surgical cancer treatment. With radiation also came the first signs of multi-disciplinary approaches to cancer treatment. The surgeon was no longer operating in isolation, but worked together with hospital radiologists to help patients. The complications in communication this brought, along with the necessity of the patient's treatment in a hospital facility rather than at home, also created a parallel process of compiling patient data into hospital files, which in turn led to the first statistical patient studies.

A founding paper of cancer epidemiology was the work of Janet Lane-Claypon, who published a comparative study in 1926 of 500 breast cancer cases and 500 control patients of the same background and lifestyle for the British Ministry of Health. Her ground-breaking work on cancer epidemiology was carried on by Richard Doll andAustin Bradford Hill, who published "Lung Cancer and Other Causes of Death In Relation to Smoking. A Second Report on the Mortality of British Doctors" followed in 1956 (otherwise known as the British doctors study). Richard Doll left the London Medical Research Center (MRC), to start the Oxford unit for Cancer epidemiology in 1968. With the use of computers, the unit was the first to compile large amounts of cancer data. Modern epidemiological methods are closely linked to current[when?] concepts of disease and public health policy. Over the past 50 years, great efforts have been spent on gathering data across medical practise, hospital, provincial, state, and even country boundaries to study the interdependence of environmental and cultural factors on cancer incidence.

Cancer patient treatment and studies were restricted to individual physicians' practices until World War II, when medical research centers discovered that there were large international differences in disease incidence. This insight drove national public health bodies to make it possible to compile health data across practises and hospitals, a process that many countries do today. The Japanese medical community observed that the bone marrow of victims of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasakiwas completely destroyed. They concluded that diseased bone marrow could also be destroyed with radiation, and this led to the discovery of bone marrow transplants forleukemia. Since World War II, trends in cancer treatment are to improve on a micro-level the existing treatment methods, standardize them, and globalize them to find cures through epidemiology and international partnerships.