"early history of tarot indicates that the cards were used to compose poems before they were used for divination"

History of profanity at the New Yorker. Ha!

This is some quality bloggin'

How can you show the details of a history visually? Time provides one obvious dimension. What else can you show to tell the story? Most timeline charts use a 2D representation, time x {place or theme}. Some are more successful in integrating additional dimensions.
This page is an annotated visual gallery of some timeline designs from their origin to today. Although time is one-dimensional, telling some story of history visually is much more complex, and it is quite instructive to see together how different graphic designers have aproached this problem.

Ugly but interesting!

"This Internet Timeline begins in 1962, before the word ‘Internet’ is invented. The world’s 10,000 computers are primitive, although they cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. They have only a few thousand words of magnetic core memory, and programming them is far from easy."

had to look this up after seeing a form design categorized as "Web 2.0" and lolling all over the place

scroll down to the table of geologic time

Quitting this old school terminal emulator and staring at my own fancy computer makes me wonder how many years it'll be until someone is laughing at me.