The History of The Internet
It feels like the internet has been around forever, but it was March 1989 that Tim Berners-Lee published a paper titled Information Management: A Proposal, his ideas and proposals became many of components of today’s internet. However there were plenty of people involved before Tim Berners Lee as far back in time as 1958.
Where possible I’ve cross referenced and checked sources as much as much as I could.
1958
The US Department of Defense started the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) which developed into the basics of the Internet in the 1960’s and was the world’s first operational packet switching network. ARPA came about due to threats that were believed to exist relating to the Cold War. This project would change into ARPANET in a few years.
1960s
Leonard Kleinrock at MIT published the very first paper on packet switching theory in the summer of 1961. Douglas Englebart developed NLS – an online hyperlinking system and also invented the mouse; a vital tool that wouldn’t become popular for almost twenty years. Ted Nelson comes up with the term “hypertext”.
On 29th October 1969 the first ever message was sent over ARPANET (sent over the very first host to host connection). It was sent at about 2230 hours by a UCLA student Charley Kline supervised by a UCLA professor (Leonard Kleinrock). The first message was the word “login” but it crashed part way through so only the l and o were sent. About an hour later and it all worked.
1970s
Ray Tomlinson came up with the first electronic mail system. He describes the first mail as something insignificant like QWERTYUIOP, although he can’t remember exactly what it was. Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf developed the TCP/IP networking protocols which still remain the backbone of today’s Internet.
1975
Xerox filed a US patent (4,063,220) for the design of Ethernet. It listed Chuck Thacker, Robert Metcalfe, David Boggs and Butler Lampson as inventors.
1977
Apple launched the first computer that would be recognised today as a personal computer, Apple II.
1978
A DEC marketing representative, Gary Thuerk advertising a DEC product presentation, was sent to 600 ARPANET addresses in 1978. Around half of these are believed to failed to be delivered. This is believed the first example of a spam message (Now it’s around 100 billion messages a day).
1981
IBM launches the IBM PC at US$1,565 with a huge 16K memory running at 4.77Mhz. To give you an idea of how expensive this was in the US in January 1981 a minimum wage was set of US$3.35, at this rate it would take over four months to pay for the PC (taking into account tax rates, and saving everything they’d earnt!)
1983
The Domain Name System (DNS) used to translate domain names into IP addresses and vice versa was created by Paul Mockapetris.
1984
Fidonet, the first dialup network to connect personal computers, with around 100 users was established in 1983 by Tom Jennings of San Francisco, California as a way to join bulletin board services that used his “Fido” BBS software.
Four Berkley Students Douglas Terry, Mark Painter, David Riggle and Songnian Zhou wrote the first UNIX implementation of DNS which is used by a huge chunk of the internet today.
1990s
Tim Berners-Lee starts the use of the term World Wide Web. In Decemeber 1990 he made the first successful communication between a HTTP client and server via the internet. The first web server and web page at http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html was launched later in the year running on a NeXT computer at CERN (CERN – the European Organization for Nuclear Research), it was only available by invite. The site eventually changed to the slighty more catchy and easier to manage http://info.cern.ch, which is still alive today.
1991
Tim Berners-Lee web server and browser becomes publicly available, once this announcement is made other servers began appearing around the world. It works only in plain text, no graphics, no mouse. It did allow you to use hyperlinks.
1992
By the end of 1992, estimates are about 26 (yes twenty six) publicly accessible sites are available on the World World Wide web. The term “Surfing the Internet” is started by Jean Armour Polly.
1993
Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina release the first version of the Mosaic browser. This is the first browser to support the display of images. The first image based banner ad is also sold during this year by Global Net Navigator (GNN) which was the first commercially supported web publication. HotWired soon follows by selling a banner ad placement on their site.
1994
Search engines begin to appear on the internet; Web Crawler and Lycos. Jerry Yang and David Filo publish “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web” online, which later becomes Yahoo.
The first version of the browser Netscape Navigator is released later on 1994.
The first secure ecommerce transaction is reported on Aug. 11, 1994. It was for the CD “Ten Summoner’s Tales” by Sting.
The Fraunhofer Society produce the first software MP3 encoder called l3enc.
Tim Berners-Lee formed the World Wide Consortium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
1995
The first audio streaming service is released – RealAudio, Jeff Bezos launches Amazon.com, eBay launches, Craig Newmark founds Craigslist and Internet Explorer 1.0 is released. On October 24, 1995, the FNC passed a resolution defining the term Internet.
The computer language that will become PHP, PHP/FI, which stood for Personal Home Page / Forms Interpreter was created by Rasmus Lerdorf during this year.
1995 also saw the first pop-up ads come into existence; making the marketeers of the world very happy and horrifying most other surfers (and still causing problems today!)
September 3 French-born Iranian computer programmer Pierre Omidyar creates AuctionWeb, the forerunner of eBay.
The Internet has an estimated 16 million users worldwide.
1996
Larry Page and Sergey Brin begin work on BackRub, the precursor to Google. Yahoo hits the stock market. Amazon.com launches a book store and the world’s first online affiliate program. A quarter of a million sites are estimated to exist.
The first verifiable mention of phishing occurs on January 2, 1996.
The Internet financial boom (also known as the dot com boom) begins.
1997
The word “weblog” is first used by Jorn Barger. Macromedia acquires FutureSplash which is re-released as Flash 1.0.
The domain name, google.com was registered.
AuctionWeb recieves US$5 million from venture capitial firm Benchmark Capitial and becomes eBay. The first item sold was a broken laser pointer for US$14.83, Omidyar contacts the winning bidder to ask if he realised it was broken only to be told “I’m a collector of broken laser pointers. ”
1998
America Online buys Netscape Communications. By this time there were approximately three quarters of a million commercial sites on the world wide web.
Google was started by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while students at Stanford University, it was first incorporated as a privately company on September 4, 1998.
PayPal was founded in late 1998 by American Peter Thei.
The V.90 56Kbps modem standard was approved Sept, 1998.
In June 1998, the first very basic DoS (Denial of Service) tools appear.
The first comparison shopping site, MySimon, is launched and Goto.com introduces Pay Per Click advertising.
The Internet has almost 150 million users worldwide.
Confinity, the forerunner of PayPal was formed.
1999
The first massively multiplayer role-playing game (MMRPG), EverQuest, is released. The term “blog” is coined by Peter Merholz. Napster is also launched during this year.
Netscape’s reign is over and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has almost 100% of browser market.
2000
The NASDAQ peaks in March – and then begins to dive, heralding the commencement of the infamous dot-com bubble burst. Some of the high profile companies who went bust over the following 12 months included GovWorks.com, Kibu.com, Go.com, MVP.com,, Boo.com, eToys.com, Flooz.com, Kozmo.com, Pets.com and Webvan.com
ICANN authorises new TLDs (top level domains) which are .aero, .biz, .coop, .info, .museum, .name and .pro
Confinity is merged with x.com becoming the modern PayPal.
Ten million domain names have been registered at the beginning of the year and there are double that number of web sites on the Internet around the end of the year. Inktomi reports the indexable web now surpasses 1 billion pages.
Faceparty, a social networking site is formed.
2001
Apple launches iTunes. The dot-com bubble burst culls the number of high-flyers, banner advertising prices rapidly go down, putting many of those dependent on ad revenue in a dangerous position.
Wikipedia is launched.
The Internet has an estimated half a billion users.
2002
Mozilla 1.0, which will eventually become Firefox, is released. At that point in time, Internet Explorer has a 95 percent share of the browser market.
Technorati, a blog search engine is officially unveiled with 12,000 weblogs indexed.
I acquired my www.elliottrodgers.com and launched my first commercial site www.carbooting.com (which made a small profit. The late Al Hunter Ashton (actor and script writer, asks me to help him create his first promotional site.
PayPal is bought by eBay for US$1.5 billion.
2003
In August 2003 MySpace is launched, which becomes the world’s biggest social networking service. The term “Web 2.0″ was born.
The origins of Google AdSense launches in March. Deals were made with high traffic site owners; smaller sites were not accepted.
The term “splog” is coined to describe spam blogs created to boost search engine placement of sites they link to. Splogs would become known for existing purely to to generate money through contextual advertising.
Yahoo buys Overture.
Instant messaging (IM) is generating an estimated five billion messages a day
2004
The first version of Firefox is released and quickly develops into serious competition for Internet Explorer.
Google has an initial public offering raising US$1.67 billion, this implies a value for the whole of Google of US$23 billion.
Facebook is launched on Feburary 4 by Mark Zuckerberg, a Harvard University student, orginally launched at thefacebook.com with restricted membership to educational establishments.
Blogs become increasingly mainstream.
2005
Jesse James Garrett comes up with the the term AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript + XML).
In Feburary three former PayPal employees, Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim create YouTube.
Google launches blog search, but Technorati is still the top blog search.
2006
On April 5th the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) releases the first draft specification of AJAX to try and create an official web standard.
Social networking sites and services appear and the term “Web 2.0? becomes a buzz term.
Twitter was started in March as a research and development project.
MessageLabs, estimates the global ratio of spam in email traffic rises to almost 65%.
On 26th September Facebook opened it’s doors to the public, everyone from age of 13 with a valid e-mail address can join.
In November YouTube is bought by Google for US$1.65 billion
Estimates are that there are around ninety two million web sites.
2007
Spam now comprises 90% of all email.
Netscape announces their browser will no longer be developed or supported from February 1, 2008
Google celebrates its 10th birthday
1.1 billion people are using the Internet and women now outnumber men online.
120,000 new blogs are being started every day around the world.
2008
China now has the largest online population in the world but they are heavily restricted by the goverment, many websites are not available to internet users in China. Many journalists covering the Olympics complain about the restrictions.
Over one hundred and sixty million Top Level Domain Names (TLDs) were registered in the first quarter of 2008.
Google’s launches a new web browser, Google Chrome
According to Nielsen Online, 79% of US consumers have made an online purchase in the previous six months.
In July, the High Court, London orders Grant Raphael to pay £22,000 to a former schoolfriend Mathew Firsht for invasion of privacy and defamation over a Facebook page claiming that Firsht was a homosexual and untrustworthy. This is believed to be the first case of it’s kind where a verdict is made against someone over a social networking site.
Over one hundred million web sites were operating as of March 2008
Facebook makes an estimated US$300 million.
Faceparty deletes a huge number of members over the age of 36. Faceparty claim this is to comply with UK goverment legislation to prevent sex offenders (in reality it was a proposal from Home Secretary Jacqui Smith for sex offenders to register email addresses).
2009
The Internet now has 1.5 billion users and Netcraft estimated that in June 2009 there were 238,027,855 websites.
On May 12, 2009, the first message is posted to Twitter from space. Astronaut Mike Massimino (@Astro_Mike) sent his tweet from Space Shuttle Atlantis. He’s now become the most followed astronaut with almost 1.3 million people subscribed to his Twitter feed.
* * *
I wonder how Tim Berners-Lee really feels about his creation. It must be so mind blowing how much his invention has transformed the globe in such a massive way. Personally it’s given me work, I’ve been able to talk to a huge number of people I would simply never have met from a range of cultures.
Given how much the web has developed in the last few years, the next few should be amazing!
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