The Internet

Events that occurred on the path that led TO THE INTERNET
Events that are part and parcel of THE INTERNET
  
The following timeline lists people and events that are part of the Internet story. It is a partial listing because the history of pre-Internet and the Internet is huge, absolutely huge. This list is just a peak into that hugeness.

As in any non-static system, the Internet has been, is, and will continue to be a catalyst to other systems. And vice versa, other dynamic systems were, are, and will be catalysts to the Internet. The stories of these systems intertwine. This list is just a peak into those stories.

Most historical references attribute the invention of the Internet to a collaborated effort of people in government and the university community, and that is where we have started this timeline.

 1950s

1958 
The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was organized after the Soviets launched the first-two human-made satellites in 1957. Massive monies were allotted the ARPA for scientific research to develop programs and technology that would assure that the United States would not fall behind in the space race. As a result of that focus, the ARPA researchers would eventually devise the computer network that predates the Internet, the ARPANET.

1958 
Modems were already in existence, used in teletypewriters. The government relied on these teletypewriters to transmit military data, and contracted with Bell Telephone Laboratories to make improved modems to meet  changing needs. When the military required a faster transmission of Air Force radar data, Bell developed a modem with a faster transmission speed. When the military increased its usage of computers, Bell developed a modem that could convert data from the computer format (digital) to the telephone format (analog) and back again. This modem also made computer networks possible. 

A commercial version of this modem came later. Manufactured In 1962, the Bell 103 by AT&T transferred data at speeds up to 300 bits per second.

 1960s
 
Early 1960s  
J.C.R. Licklider was the first to describe an Internet-like worldwide network of computers. He called it the Galactic Network. Some called Licklider the Johnny Appleseed of the Internet; he planted the seeds of the Internet by articulating the vision that became the ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet, and he was instrumental in finding the funding for the institutions where those inventions were first conceived and developed.

In 1957, while working at MIT, he began to record the amount of time he spent doing various tasks involved in his job of collecting, sorting, and analyzing data, and he determined that nearly 85 percent of his time was spent "getting into position to think" and only a fraction of time was spent actually thinking about the problem at hand.  In his March 1960 published paper, "Man-Computer Symbiosis," he wrote,"...I had this little picture in my mind how we were going to get people and computers really thinking together..."

In 1962, Licklider took over the computer division at ARPA, and made time-sharing systems a research priority.

In 1963 he wrote a memo to his group of university labs and think tanks urging them to think about standardization in order to help computers operate in an integrated network.  Many consider that memo to be the first written description of what was to become the Internet.

Early-1960s
In 1959, computer engineer Paul Baran began working for RAND Corporation, an agency set up to host defense-related research as part of the Cold War effort. In 1960, Baran began formulating ideas for a system that could continue to function effectively even after some of its subcomponents were destroyed, and in 1962 he wrote about two of his theories in a book entitled On Distributed Communication Networks. The process he described later became known as packet switching. It involved sending digital data over a distributed network in small units, each unit able to travel by a different route, and the pieces would then be reassembled into the whole message at the receiving end. His theory was unconventional at the time and did not get the support of communication giants such as AT&T. So Baran focused on other projects. 

Around the same time that Baran stopped work on his idea, coincidentally and independently, physicist Donald Davies at the British National Physical Library developed the chopped-up message idea, and he called the method packet switching.  The name stuck.

In 1964, MIT graduate student Len Kleinrock's 1961 dissertation "Information Flow in Large Communication Nets" was published as a book, Communication Nets. Kleinrock, though he did not use the term packet switching, further developed that concept. His book was to be one of the blueprints for the Internet. 

Mid-1960s
Larry Roberts, a young computer scientist at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory in Boston, created the first long-distance computer connection, a link between his computer and one in Santa Monica, California. Later, in 1964, he attended a national computing conference funded by ARPA where he became enthralled by the prospect of building computer networks after listening to J.C.R. Licklider.

In 1966, ARPA recruited a reluctant Roberts to head its computer networking program. Roberts was reluctant because he was worried the job would have too many undesirable bureaucratic responsibilities. But he took the position and became one of the chief designers and advocates of the ARPANET, the first multiple-computer network. Roberts also hired Len Kleinrock to use his theories in developing ARPANET.

1969
The ARPANET, intended to link research centers across the country, is born. Four initial sites were connected: the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of California at Santa Barbara, the University of Utah, and Stanford Research Institute. ARPANET allowed researchers to use the mainframes of any of the networked institutions.

ARPANET proved computer networking was possible, and more and more government and university computers were being linked together with ARPANET each year afterward. By 1971, 19 other sites across the country had joined the ARPANET. But the general public was largely left out of the loop. In 1972, ARPANET made its public debut at the International Conference on Computer Communications in Washington, D.C.

The current Internet grew out of the technology developed for ARPANET. In 1977, ARPANET had 23 nodes (user sites); in 1977, ARPANET had 111 nodes; in 1994, the Internet had almost 4 million nodes. 

 1970s

1971
Programmer Murray Turoff developed what is remembered as the first chat system using computers. It was called EMISARI (Emergency Management Information System and Reference Index), and was developed for the U.S. Office of Emergency Preparedness, networking experts and academics that could help the government respond to emergencies. EMISARI users logged in to the system through teletypewriter terminals that were linked to a central computer by long-distance telephone lines. As with current online chat rooms, the system showed a list of participants and gave alerts when someone joined or left the chat. As many as 300 experts were set up to coordinate how the country would respond. EMISARI was used until 1986.

1971
Michael Hart begins Project Gutenberg to make copyright-free works electronically available. The U.S. Declaration of Independence was Project Gutenberg's first e-text.

Project Gutenberg is now considered the oldest digital library.

1971
Computer engineer Ray Tomlinson implemented an e-mail system on the ARPANET. It was the first system able to send mail between users at different locations across a network. Previously, mail could only be sent to others who used the same computer since it was just a messaging system. Tomlinson also introduced the @ sign as the locator in e-mail addresses.

When Tomlinson traveled, he carried a 40-pound Texas Instruments computer with him so he could check e-mail at the airports.    

Tomlinson in a 2001 quote to New York Newsday: "We used to keep track of phone booths in airports around the world that had electrical outlets near them."

By 1996, more electronic mail was being sent than postal mail.

1972-73
Bob Kahn and Vinton Cerf invented the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). TCP manages the assembling of a message or a file into smaller packets that are transmitted over the Internet and received by a TCP layer that reassembles the packets into the original message.

They continued to perfect the protocol, and in 1978 added a simpler protocol, IP, to the TCP. IP simply addressed and forwarded the packets, and TCP handled more complex tasks of reliable delivery, data flow, and lost packets.

In 1980, TCP/IP became the official protocol for the military. By January 1, 1983, all networks connected to the ARPANET were switched to TCP/IP. With the switch to TCP/IP, the modern Internet was born.

Kahn and Cerf contributed more to the Internet and to technological advances than TCP/IP, but it is for that protocol that they are considered to be the founding fathers of the Internet.

Cerf, in an October 1997 quote to Forbes: "The reason I get this 'father' label is partly because our American culture needs heroes, and partly because I stuck with the program and managed it."

Kahn in a September 1990 quote to the New York Times: "In the beginning it wasn't clear how computer networks were going to be used...A lot of the research community originally thought I had gone off my rocker."
 
1975 
Microsoft was founded by 19-year-old Bill Gates.
 
1978
The first bulletin board system goes online.  Ward Christensen and Randy Seuss developed the Computerized Bulletin Board System (CBBS) that operated like a virtual thumbtack bulletin board. Participants could post messages to a public "board" and others could read and respond to those messages, creating an ongoing virtual discussion. It was one of the first civilian experiments in virtual community. 

In the late '70s, most individuals who owned computers, modems, or had access to and knowledge of computing were computer hobbyists and scientists, so the topics on CBBS were usually computer- or electronics-oriented.  Later, virtual bulletin boards began popping up around the country, and they were given the generic name of BBS.  By the 1990s, most BBSs were connected to the Internet and users expanded their reach and their topics. In the mid-1990s, BBSs began to decline as the World Wide Web came on the scene with its graphics and other attention-getting features.

1979
The National Science Foundation creates NSFnet, a research-oriented sister network to the ARPANET.

 1980s

Early 1980s 
The term cyberspace was coined by William Gibson in the sci-fi book Neuromancer.

1980s
Since the 1980s, cybermillionaire John Gilmore has funneled his wealth into groups concerned with the protection of Internet freedom and privacy, most notably the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the first civil rights organization for cyberspace.

Radia Perlman invented the spanning tree algorithm. Her algorithm allowed efficient bridging between separate networks. Without a good bridging solution, large-scale networks like the Internet would be impractical.

1982
The first definitions of the term Internet surface.

1982
Scott Fahlman starts the smiley culture by suggesting the use of :-) and :-(  to convey emotions in e-mails.

1984
The Domain Name System (DNS) is introduced.

DNS had been created in the early 1980s by Jon Postel and Paul Mockapetris in order to provide a unique name for each host computer connected to the Internet.  It divided the hosts into five top-level domains using the three-letter abbreviations of com, org, gov, edu, and net.

1985 
Three of the oldest registered .com domain names were registered: symbolics.com; bbn.com; and think.com

1985 
QuantumLink, the predecessor to AOL, launched in November.

1986 
Jessica Mulligan starts Rim Worlds War, the first play by e-mail game on a commercial online server.

1986
NSFnet was created with a 56Kbps backbone.

1986
Internet newsgroups are born. Rick Adams at the Center for Seismic Studies releases software enabling news transmission, posting and reading using Internet-standard TCP/IP connections.

1988
The first Internet worm is unleashed, infecting about 6,000 host computers; it calls attention to security concerns.

1989
Tim Berners-Lee invents the World Wide Web (Web), a system by which words, pictures, sounds, and hyperlinks can be combined and formatted across different platforms to create digital pages. He started developing the idea for the system in 1980 and grew the idea into the system called the Web, a combination of refined hypertext and innovative software applications and networking protocols that changed the Internet from a collection of separate networks into a web of interconnected networks. Berners-Lee described the Web as an abstract (imaginary) space of information. The information that appears on the Web pages -- documents, sounds, videos -- is information weaved together by hypertext. 

Berners-Lee started developing the idea of the Web in 1980 when he worked as a computer software consultant for CERN, an atomic research lab in Geneva Switzerland. CERN worked with a global network of individual scientists who worked on various projects; Berners-Lee developed what he called a "memory substitute" to help him recall who worked where and on what project, to help him remember the connections. He then expanded that program to help the scientists locate files on their computer networks. Berners-Lee left CERN in 1981, and then returned there three years later. He started thinking about the possibility of linking the information that was stored on computers all over the world, to make computers work more like human brains, linking random bits of data. 

Over the next few years, Berners-Lee refined hypertext for linking documents. He invented HTML (hypertext markup language), a coding system that used tags to identify various elements in a document and allowed the user to decide how to display the elements. It also allowed hypertext links to be embedded within documents that allowed a user to click and jump to related information. Berners-Lee invented HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol), a set of rules that guided the transfer of HTML files among computers on the Internet.

Berners-Lee did not invent hypertext; he refined it. Hypertext started out as a concept that  electrical engineer Vannevar Bush described in an article he wrote for the Atlantic Monthly in 1945 that was entitled "As We May Think." Some call Bush the Godfather of the Internet. In his article, Bush described a Memex machine that would store, retrieve, and cross-reference documents linked by association; the links were made through microfilm; though not digital links, the concept was the same as modern hypertext. 

Scientists were deeply influenced by Bush's writing. In 1965, computer scientist Ted Nelson coined the term hypertext to describe linking ideas in electronic text based on Bush's Memex machine; legend has it that Nelson's grandfather read "As We May Think" to him when he was a child. Computing pioneer Douglas Englebart read "As We May Think" while stationed in the Philippines during World War II; in the early 1960s. Englebart used the Memex model to create the first successful implementation of hypertext in digital form.

As a child,Tim Berners-Lee made make-believe computers out of cardboard boxes and computer tape. When studying physics at Oxford University, he made his first real computer using a soldering iron, spare computer parts, and an old television set. 

Tim Berners-Lee in a speech at MIT Lab in 1999: "For me the fundamental Web is the Web of people. It's not the Web of machines talking to each other. It's not the network of machines talking to each other. It's not the Web of documents."

 1990s

1990
ARPANET ceases to exist. Its lines and nodes were considered antiquated. Instead, information was routed through the faster infrastructure of the National Science Foundation Network (NSFnet)

1990
The World comes online (world.std.com), becoming the first commercial provider of Internet dial-up access.

Early 1990s 
The term cyberspace was coined by William Gibson in his sci-fi book Neuromancer.

Mid-1990s 
James Gosling invents Java, a new programming language that revolutionized the Internet. It had a "write once, run anywhere" capability that allowed it to run on any platform -- Apple, Windows, or UNIX. It allowed for real-time interactivity, multimedia capabilities, and animation and allowed anyone with a browser to experience dynamic Web pages, not just static documents. These ideas had been around for years in computing circles but Gosling brought the ideas together in one product.

At age 12, he made a primitive machine that played tic-tac-toe; he made it out of a television set and discarded switches and relays that he got from dumpsters behind a local telephone company. At age 14, he began breaking into the computer lab at the University of Calgary -- just to use the computers; at age 15, impressed by his programming abilities and his desire to learn, the University hired him on a part-time basis to write code at $2 per hour. 

Gosling in a 1999 quote to Network Week: "(Java is) just a language, but, my God, language is one of the most important developments of the human race. 

1991
In 1991, the Internet that was running on the NSFnet connected university, research, government and nonprofit networks. Commercial traffic was not allowed on the Internet.

There were several commercial networks, but they operated independent of the Internet. In 1991, the Commercial Internet eXchange Association (CIX), a nonprofit trade organization, was formed and allowed those commercial networks who became members of the CIX to have access to the Internet.  However, those commercial networks were prohibited from sending commercial traffic to the Internet. Arguments and discussions followed -- some wanted the restriction lifted, others claimed opening the Internet to commercial traffic would lead to undesirable mass advertising and solicitation.

1991
The World Wide Web is made available to the public for the first time.

1992 
The Internet Society is chartered.

1992
The term "Surfing the Internet" is coined by Jean Armour Polly.

1993
InterNIC is created by the NSF to provide specific Internet services: directory and database services (AT&T); registration services (Network Solutions Inc.); information services (General Atomics/CERFnet). Businesses and media take real notice of the Internet.

1993
The number of hosts on the Internet breaks 2 million, and total worldwide Internet users reaches an estimated 3 million.

1993
Mosaic, the first graphical Web browser, developed by Marc Andreesen and a group of student programmers, is released.

1993
Internet radio was pioneered by Carl Malamud. He launched Internet Talk Radio, the first computer-radio talk show; each week, Malamud interviewed a computer expert.

1993
Marc Andreessen, while in college, creates one of the first and most popular browsers, Mosaic. Mosaic made the Web easier to use; it allowed images and text to appear on the Web page at the same time. It also introduced the concepts of a bookmark and a window history which allowed users to navigate through Web pages they had previously visited. 

After college, he went on to found the company that would become Netscape. 

Marc Andreessen, while recuperating from an operation, using a Radio Shack computer, taught himself to program at age 12.

Andreessen in a 2003 quote to Newsweek: "Fundamental change comes out of left field. It has to be an idea that's viewed as crazy at the time. If any idea looks like a good idea, there's lots of big companies out there like Microsoft that would already be doing it." 

1994
Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web is renamed Yahoo!, and receives 100,000 visitors. In 1995, it begins displaying advertisements.

Jerry Yang and David Filo, two electrical engineering doctoral students at Stanford University, started the Guide in 1993 as a hobby; it listed their favorite sites on the Web. Yahoo! turned into the most successful company in Internet history.

Yang in a 2000 quote to Fortune: "There may be a textbook on how to found a company, but we didn't read it."

1994 
Web-crawler came out, one of the first full-text search engines; letting users search for any word in any Web page which became the standard for all major search engines since.

1994 
The NSF redirects its strategy, turning over network provision to the private sector and abolishing commercial restrictions.

1994
Communities begin to be wired up directly to the Internet. Shopping malls arrive on the Internet and mass marketing finds its way to the Internet with mass e-mailings.

1994
There are approximately 10,000 sites on the World Wide Web.

1994
Since 1994, Rob Glaser's company, RealNetworks, brought sound and video to the Internet.

Glaser in a 2000 quote to the Wall Street Journal: "I think we all know there is going to be sort of this celestial jukebox...I am just as impatient as hell to get there as soon as possible."

1995
The NSFnet reverts back to a research-oriented network, leaving interconnected private Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to provide the backbone of the Internet.

1995
Digital Equipment Corporation's Research lab launched search engine Alta Vista, and claimed it could store and index the HTML from every Internet page. It also introduces the first multilingual search.

1995
Traditional online dial-up systems (Compuserve, America Online, Prodigy) begin to provide Internet access.

1995
RealAudio, an audio streaming technology, lets the Net hear in near real-time.

1995
HardRadio, a hard rock and heavy metal format station, was the first dot-com Internet-only radio station.  It is the oldest surviving Internet-only radio station.

1995
Registration of domain names is no longer free, though the NSF continues to pay for .edu registration and, on an interim basis, for .gov registration.

1995
Jeff Bezos launched Amazon.com, an online bookseller that pioneers ecommerce.

1995
ebay was launched.

1996
The browser wars begin, headed by Netscape and Microsoft.

1996
Internet phones catch the attention of U.S. telecommunication companies who ask the U.S. Congress to ban the technology (which had been around for years).

1996
The Internet2 project is formed, a consortium of more than 170 high-speed networks belonging to universities, corporations, and government agencies.

1996
There are approximately 650,000 sites on the World Wide Web.

1997
The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) is established to handle administration and registration of IP numbers to the geographical areas currently handled by Network Solutions (InterNIC), starting March 1998.

1998
Sergey Brin and Larry Page form a company, Google,Inc.

1999
There are approximately 150 million Internet users worldwide.

1999
Napster, created by 19-year-old Shawn Fanning operated between June 1999 and July 2001 before being shut down by court order. It allowed music fans to easily share MP3-format song files with each other, and made a major impact on how people, especially university students, used the Internet.

Fanning in a 2002 quote to the Wall Street Journal: "You can't stop technology. Even if they succeed in shutting down those particular services, new services will spring up.  It's the nature of the Internet."

1999
The Internet2 project came online, providing a forum for advanced networking experiments. One of the main goals involved creating new applications that could not run on the existing Internet, and then developing the infrastructure necessary to support them. The project helped networking experts design and test Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), an upgrade of the TCP/IP protocol.

The Internet2 network allows scientists to share access to sophisticated and expensive tools like electron microscopes and high-powered telescopes, and enables doctors to manipulate high-resolution, three-dimensional images of body scans and even to simulate surgery.

 2000s

2000
The dot-com bubble burst.

2001
The number of sites on the World Wide Web is estimated at 30 million.

2003
Spam accounts for over one-half of all e-mail sent.

2003
Consumer spending on the Internet approaches $100 billion.

2004
The number of worldwide Internet users is estimated at 800 million.

The number of sites on the World Wide Web is estimated at 4.2 billion.

2004
Vermont Governor Howard Dean demonstrates the value of the Internet for fundraising during his bid for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination.
 
2004 
The official site of MySpace is launched.

2004
As broadband becomes more popular, media companies start selling music and video online. Napster relaunched as a paid-music download store. It competed against iTunes, Apple's download store for the iPod portable music players.

2007 
Myspace membership is estimated at 150 million.

2008 
According to Nielsen NetRatings' the average Web usage for March in the United States was approximately 36 hours at home and 84 hours at work, with the average domain visits of 66 at home and 119 at work.

2008
According to The Nielsen Company, more than 85 percent of the world's online population has used the Internet to make a purchase. In 2006, when Nielsen conducted its first global survey, it showed 627 million people shopped online; two years later, that number increased to 875 million people. 

South Korea was ranked with the highest percentage shopping online (99 percent), then United Kingdom (97%), Germany (97%), Japan (97%); the United States ranked eighth, at 94 percent. 

Globally, the most popular item purchased over the Internet was books. Nielsen's latest monthly stats showed that to be true for the United Kingdom, Germany; however, clothing/accessories ranked as the most popular U.S. online purchase.

As mentioned in the introduction, the above timeline is a partial list of people and events that are a part of the history of the pre-Internet and the Internet. It leaves available a wide area to be researched and explored. If you search the catalog of the Broward County Library, you will find resources that elaborate on these topics. For example, much of the above data was found in The Internet: A Historical Encyclopedia, Volume I, Volume II, Volume III; these volumes are available for check-out. And, of course, the Internet remains a wonderful exploration tool.