IT Hare’s Brief History of the Internet

The Internet was originally designed as a means of maintaining fail-proof communications in the event of a nuclear attack. It has since grown into one of the greatest technological achievements in modern history. The Internet has ushered in the Information Age, in which information around the world is instantly accessible to anyone with a computer that has online connectivity. Because of this relatively new technology, workers are able to telecommute with employers hundreds or even thousands of miles away, people can communicate instantly with anyone else around the world, commerce has truly become global in nature, and news spreads around the world instantly and even while it’s still in the making. A new generation of people are growing up without ever knowing what life was like without being connected globally, and online communities are being formed by people of diverse cultures and backgrounds.

  • 1958: The United States government creates the Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is later responsible for ARPANet and the Internet.
  • 1961: Leonard Kleinrock writes “Information Flow In Large Communication Nets,” a Ph.D thesis for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This thesis is the first step toward establishing packet-switching theory, which is the basis of the future Internet.
  • 1962: The earliest form of electronic mail comes into existence, provided by the Automatic Digital Network, or AUTODIN.
  • 1964: Paul Baran compiles a series of reports titled “On Distributed Communications: Introduction to Distributed Communications Networks” for the United States Air Force Project RAND. This theory proposed distributed networks that would send data in pieces across many routes rather than one. This was intended to make networks resistant to damage in the form of lost nodes.
  • 1967: Dr. Lawrence Roberts writes the paper “Multiple Computer Networks and Intercomputer Communications,” which helps define ARPANet. Meanwhile, Wesley Clark coins the term “Interface Message Processors” (IMP), which refers to packet-switching devices that later evolve into modern network routers.
  • 1969: ARPANet is formed out of the need for redundancy in communications to defend against nuclear attack. It provides a means to connect different networks to each other, primarily those owned by military and educational institutions.
  • 1969: The first IMP devices are built by the Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN) company. The University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) is the first to send data packets between networks.
  • 1970: Peter Kirstein (PDF), a professor at the University of London, establishes the first transatlantic ARPANet connection.
  • 1971: Project Gutenberg is started by American author Michael Hart. It is the world’s first digital library, designed to provide free online access to literature that is either copyright-free or whose copyright has expired. This marks the first appearance of e-books.
  • 1971: Raymond Tomlinson invents the first modern electronic mail system on ARPANet. This is the first time that the @ sign is used to identify the unique user of the machine sending the message. It is also the first time that electronic mail could be sent between two different computers on the ARPANet network.
  • 1971: The first network computer virus, Creeper, infects ARPANet. Written by a BBN programmer named Robert Thomas, it was intended as an experiment in self-replicating software.
  • 1972: John Postel establishes a registry of network addresses at the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California. This later becomes the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA).
  • 1973: Development of the precursor to the modern Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) begins. This enables communication between different types of computers. The TCP/IP protocol evolves from this.
  • 1974: “RFC-675: Specification of Internet Transmission Control Program” is released by the Network Working Group, which consisted of Carl Sunshine, Vinton Cerf, and Yogen Dalal. The first known mention of the word Internet comes from this document. Elizabeth Feinler of the Network Information Center (NIC) helps establish a system of registering host names and a top-level domain naming system. The first top-level domain names are .mil, .edu, .gov, .com, .org, and .net.
  • 1977: Electronic mail systems in ARPANet become standardized by RFC-733. Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) is developed in the same year, enabling the distribution of data such as software and email.
  • 1978: The first unsolicited commercial solicitation message, or spam, is sent out to 400 people over ARPANet electronic mail by Gary Turk.
  • 1979: The concept of a “Users Network,” or USENET, is established by Jim Ellis and Tom Truscott at Duke University. It evolves from UUCP and becomes the first worldwide discussion forum.
  • 1981: The Computer Science Network, or CSNET, is created by University of Wisconsin-Madison computer science professor Lawrence Landweber. CSNET succeeds in connecting many universities as well as international computer science networks to each other as well as bringing nationwide attention to the benefits of networking. It also makes the TCP/IP protocol mainstream within the networking community.
  • 1982: Professor Kilnam Chon of Japan’s Keio University establishes the first Internet connections to Asian nations.
  • 1983: Paul Mockapetris, an ARPANet researcher at the University of Southern California, develops the Domain Naming System (DNS), which automates the tasks performed by the NIC.
  • 1984: Dr. Jun Murai brings the Internet to multiple universities in Japan, forming the Japanese University UNIX Network, or JUNET. He is known as “the father of the Internet in Japan.”
  • 1986: The National Science Foundation Network, or NSFNET, goes online. This enabled multiple university supercomputer centers to connect, and it later evolved into a major route for data moving through the Internet, an Internet backbone.
  • 1986: RFC-977, the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP), is established to facilitate USENET transmissions.
  • 1987: UUNET is founded as a nonprofit corporation to provide services such as UUCP, USENET, email, and other functions for commercial customers.
  • 1988: The Morris computer worm spreads across the Internet, prompting the creation of the Computer Emergency Response Team, or CERT. CERT is dedicated to improving computer and network security.
  • 1989: Tim Berners-Lee invents the World Wide Web using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). It becomes the primary medium of global Internet-based communications years later.
  • 1990: ARPANet is decommissioned.
  • 1990: Mitch Kapor, John Gilmore, and John Barlow found the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). The EFF’s purpose is to protect freedom of Internet usage through advocacy, dissemination of information, and legal actions in courts.
  • 1991: Phil Zimmerman creates “Pretty Good Privacy,” or PGP. PGP is designed to encrypt email and enhance the privacy of email communications.
  • 1991: U.S. Sen. Al Gore successfully pushes for the passage of the High Performance Computing Act of 1991. This leads to the creation of the National Information Infrastructure, or the “Information superhighway.” This results in the acceleration of the Internet into mainstream society.
  • 1991: America Online, first founded in 1985, begins to provide commercial Internet access through its portal system. Its main competitors are Prodigy, Genie, and CompuServe.
  • 1993: The “Eternal September” event occurs, in which large numbers of new Internet users began to appear on USENET. This is due to America Online offering USENET access to its subscribers.
  • 1993: The NCSA Mosaic Web browser is released for free by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). This brings the World Wide Web to the masses and is the final catalyst for the Internet boom that occurs in the 1990s.
  • 1993: W3Catalog becomes the first World Wide Web search engine. It indexes the Web, enabling users to find Web pages.
  • 1994: Jerry Yang and David Filo found Yahoo!, which begins as a Web search engine. It becomes one of the primary means by which the world searches for Web pages online.
  • 1994: The Netscape Navigator Web browser is released and eventually overcomes Mosaic in popularity.
  • 1994: The first known Internet-based chain letter and scam email, “Make Money Fast,” is sent out by a user going by the name of Dave Rhodes.
  • 1994: The first form of USENET spam appears. Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel, two lawyers from Arizona, advertise legal help for immigrants seeking green cards. The message is titled “Green Card Lottery: Final One?” The resulting backlash leads the lawyers to write a book titled “How to Make a Fortune on the Information Superhighway.”
  • 1994: “Ten Summoner’s Tales,” a CD by Sting, becomes the first product to be sold over the Web in a secure, encrypted fashion. Internet commerce, or e-commerce, subsequently flourishes, marking the true start of the Internet boom.
  • 1995: The online auction company and website eBay is founded by Pierre Omidyar.
  • 1995: Microsoft creates the Internet Explorer Web browser based on the Mosaic code.
  • 1998: Google is founded by Stanford students Sergey Brin and Larry Page. It becomes the world’s most influential search engine.
  • 1998: The first Web logs, or blogs, come into existence.
  • 1998: The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is founded and takes over the task of managing the Domain Name System and assigning addresses for networks on the Internet.
  • 1998: The Mozilla Project is formed at Netscape, which introduces the Mozilla family of Web software, which is descended from Netscape’s source code.
  • 2000: The dot-com crash begins. Large numbers of Internet-based startup companies go out of business, sparking a NASDAQ stock market crash and a major loss of jobs in the Internet startup industry.
  • 2001: Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger found Wikipedia, forming a user-made encyclopedia online.
  • 2008: China’s Internet user population becomes the largest in the world at 298 million.