4: Lecture Notes

I can't imagine a world without television or computers... We take so much for granted these days. I guess I hadn't really thought about when cinema was born. I had known that television was brought to Australia in 1956 as it is the year my Dad was born, but that is about the extent of my prior knowledge of the timeline of the big and small screens.

The big milestone birthdays in our 'Very Big Screen to the Very Small' timeline are:

1895 - The birth of cinema in France.
1906 - First full-length feature film titled "The Story Of The Kelly Gang".
1939 - Introduction of TV at the New York World's Fair.
1952 - 3D movie "Bwana Devil" was released to avoid losing the battle with television.
1955 - Movies on the television.
1963 - First practical videotape recorder (at the basement bargain price of $30,000).
1969 - VCR was released for home use by Sony.
1972 - Pay TV was first transmitted, surprisingly by HBO (which is still around today).
1985 - First Blockbuster Video was opened in Texas.
1985 - First film designed explicitly for the video market, "Blood Cult".
1986 - Pixar released the first fully computer-generated short film.
1997 - The wonderful world of DVD's was unleashed.
1998 - Online DVD movie rental service was established.
2005 - Blu-Ray was released as the evolution of DVD.
2006 - YouTube. No more needs to be said.

If all of this has happened in the last 150 years, I for one cannot wait to see where we are headed.