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ARPANET — the beginning of the internet
In 1969, in the midst of the Cold War, the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA) initiated a project called ARPANET with the goal of creating a network for computers to communicate with each other over large distances. -
The First Email
Ray Tomlinson, an American programmer working at ARPANET came up with the “@” symbol. In 1971, Tomlinson proposed to separate the user’s name from the destination computer with an “@”, addressing the messages “username@name of computer.” This is how we’ve been addressing emails ever since. Initially, the email was used to communicate within internal networks of universities and research institutions. -
ARPANET switches to TCP/IP
Until 1983, ARPANET computers had been using NCP (Network Control Protocol) to communicate with each other. But NCP had limitations and was not suitable for connecting different types of computer networks. To solve this problem, developers created the TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol). TCP/IP was more flexible and could connect different computer networks, enabling better communication. -
DNS created!
DNS (Domain Name System) comes in. DNS was created in 1984 to translate human-readable domain names into numerical IP addresses. -
The Launch of AOL
AOL (formerly known as America Online) was launched in 1985 and rebranded as AOL in 1991. It was an online service provider that opened the door to consumer internet. AOL provided an easy-to-access online platform that introduced millions of users to the internet for the first time. -
IRC for direct messaging
With email on the rise, the need for live messaging came along, and IRC (Internet Relay Chat) fulfilled it. The IRC is a real-time communication protocol and text-based chat system that allows people to send each other direct messages over the internet. In 1988, Jarkko Oikarinen, a Finnish computer scientist, created the IRC for group communication in discussion forums, private messaging, data transfer, and file sharing among users in different locations. -
Beginning of the World Wide Web
In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, working at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), proposed creating a networked hypertext system to navigate and link documents stored on different CERN’s computers. Berners-Lee’s approach eliminated the need for centralized servers and allowed for the growth and scalability of the web. His ideas laid the groundwork for the interconnected and accessible web we know today. -
The First Commercial Dial-up
There is debate about which commercial internet service provider (ISP) was the first one, but one called “The World” was definitely among the earliest ones, when it started serving customers in 1989. Established by Joel Furr, it started out by providing direct connection to the internet for businesses and home users in the San Francisco Bay Area. -
The first search engine Archie
In 1990, Alan Emtage from Monreal, Canada, developed the first search engine, Archie. Back then the internet primarily consisted of FTP , Archie created an index of files on FTP (File Transfer Protocol) sites. However, Archie could not search for content within web pages and would index only specific files formats. But it laid the groundwork for more advanced search engines of the 90s, like Gopher, Veronika, and Jughead! -
The First Home page!
In 1991, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, created yet another piece of pioneering technology — the first web page. It had a simple design and consisted of plain text. The first web page provided an overview of the WWW project, an explanation of hypertext, and instructions on how to create web pages. It also introduced hyperlinks that allowed users to navigate between web pages by clicking on the text. InfoCernProject -
The First Webcam
In 1991, a team of researchers led by Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Paul Jardetzky set up the first webcam in the computer laboratory of the University of Cambridge. They called it the “coffee pot cam” because the webcam’s purpose was to provide live video feed of the coffee pot in the coffee room so that the researchers would see if the pot was full or not and save themselves the walk to the coffee room. -
First Photo Posted online
There are urban legends surrounding the upload of the first photo on the internet, and no one can say for sure which one was truly the first. However, in 1992, Tim Berners-Lee shared a photo that was for many years considered to be the first one. It was a photo of four women, the members of the parody musical group called Les Horribles Cernettes. The photo was in the basic GIF format, commonly used for images at the time. 1stPhoto.Vsauce -
Bill Clinton introduced the National Information Infrastructure (NII)
Government Participation:
In the early 1990s, seeing how popular the internet was becoming and how much it was starting to affect society, the governments joined in. In 1993, US President Bill Clinton introduced the National Information Infrastructure (NII), an initiative to develop policies and the necessary infrastructure to support the growth of the internet, ensure universal access, and address issues like privacy, security, and intellectual property rights. -
First secure ecommerce transaction
The first secure online transaction took place in 1994, opening a new page in the history of e-commerce. A man named Phil Brandenberger from Philadelphia used the Netscape Navigator web browser to buy a CD from the NetMarket website, an online retailer founded by Daniel Kohn. The CD was Sting’s album “Ten Summoner’s Tales” and cost $12.48 plus $4.95 shipping. FastCompany.Story -
The first social media platform
Six Degrees is widely considered to be the first social media platform. Founded in 1996 by Andrew Weinreich, this social networking site offered popular features like customizable profiles, friends lists, school affiliations, and messaging. Six Degrees had a relatively small user base — only around 1 million users — compared to modern social networks, like Facebook SixDegrees.Recap -
The Invention of WIFI
Wireless fidelity (or simply Wi-Fi) is a type of internet that allows devices to connect to the web and communicate wirelessly over a local area network (LAN) without any cables. Before this, Ethernet was primarily used to create these networks. In 1997, a team of engineers and researchers at the NCR Corporation, led by Vic Hayes, developed the first wireless local area network (WLAN) standard — the IEEE 802.11. -
First Search Engine
In 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, students at Stanford University, created the Google search engine. They collaborated on a research project that aimed at analyzing and organizing the immense amount of information on the web. Their breakthrough was Page’s development of a concept called PageRank — an algorithm that ranked web pages according to their relevance and importance by analyzing links between the pages GOOGLE -
The burst of the dot-com bubble
early 2000s, mostly impacting technology and internet-related stocks of the so-called dot-com companies, primarily in the United States. In the late 1990s, seeing the internet’s potential and eager to capitalize on it, venture capitalists and private investors started pouring money into the hyped-up internet industry, and the stock prices of dot-com companies skyrocketed. -
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Beginning of Internet Hype
The 2000s was a period of internet hype, first social networks, and user-driver content creation. The internet was becoming increasingly popular not just in society but also among investors, which inflated the dot-com bubble until it eventually burst in the early 2000s. Wikipedia, MySpace, and Digg gathered momentum and a wide circle of users. -
The launch of Wikipedia
Wikipedia, one of the most widely used online encyclopedias, was launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, authors of an earlier web-based encyclopedia project Nupedia which hosted expert-written articles. Nupedia’s slow progress inspired its authors to develop a new model for faster and broader content creation. So they came up with a new concept — a collaborative, community-driven website for sharing knowledge.
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MySpace Explodes
MySpace was the pioneering social networking platform, launched in 2003 by Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe. MySpace users could create personalized profiles, connect with friends, and share photos and music. A distinguishing MySpace feature at the time was the possibility it gave its users to customize their profiles through HTML and CSS coding. Users could create unique and expressive online identities. -
Iphones & the Mobile Web
Launched in 2007, the iPhone changed the landscape of the mobile phone industry and the mobile web. The iPhone introduced a user-friendly multi-touch interface which instantly popularized touchscreen smartphones and encouraged competitors to develop similar devices. For example, Android came up with its touchscreen smartphone equivalent just a year later. APPLE