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The World Wide Web begins as a CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), initiated by British scientist Tim Berners-Lee.
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AOL launches its Instant Messenger chat service and begins welcoming users with the iconic greeting “You’ve got mail!”
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42% of American Adults use computers
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World’s first website and server go live at CERN, running on Tim Berners-Lee’s NeXT computer, which bears the message “This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER DOWN!”
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Tim Berners-Lee develops the first Web browser WorldWideWeb.
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Archie, the first tool to search the internet is developed by McGill University student Alan Emtage.
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This is the World Wide Web
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Researchers rig up a live shot of a coffee pot so they could tell from their computer screens when a fresh pot had been brewed. Later connected to the World Wide Web, it becomes the first webcam.
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The term “surfing the internet” is coined and popularized.
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Tim Berners-Lee posts the first photo, of the band “Les Horribles Cernettes,” on the Web.
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CERN places its World Wide Web technology in the public domain, donating it to the world.
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The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) releases Mosaic 1.0, the first web browser to become popular with the general public. “The web as we know it begins to flourish,” Wired later writes.
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Marc Andreessen proposes the IMG HTML tag to allow the display of images on the Web.
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11 million American households are “equipped to ride the information superhighway.”
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One of the first known Web purchases takes place: a pepperoni pizza with mushrooms and extra cheese from Pizza Hut.
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President Bill Clinton’s White House comes online.
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Yahoo! is created by Stanford University graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo. They originally named the site “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web.”
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The first banner ad for hotwired.com appears, with the text “Have you ever clicked your mouse right HERE? —> YOU WILL.”
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Two lawyers post the first massive, commercial spam message with the subject “Green Card Lottery -Final One?”
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Amazon.com opens for business, billing itself as the “Earth’s Biggest Bookstore.”
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Match.com, the first online dating site, launches.
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Entrepreneur Pierre Omidyar launches eBay, originally named “AuctionWeb.” He lists the first item for sale: a broken laser pointer. A collector purchases it for $14.83.
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Chris Lamprecht becomes the first person to be banned from the internet by judicial decree. “I told the judge computers were my life,” Lamprecht later recalled.
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Microsoft releases Windows 95 and the first version of Internet Explorer.
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77% of online users send or receive e-mail at least once every few weeks, up from 65% in 1995
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Nokia releases the Nokia 9000 Communicator, the first cellphone with internet capabilities.
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HoTMaiL launches as one of the world’s first Webmail services, its name a reference to the HTML internet language used to build webpages.
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The Dancing Baby, a 3D animation, becomes one of the first viral videos.
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Millions “visit Mars – on the internet” – the Jet Propulsion Lab allows people to watch the Sojourner rover landing and exploration of Mars. The broadcast generates about 40 million to 45 million hits each day.
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Netflix launches as a company that sends DVDs to homes via mail.
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Google.com registers as a domain.
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Jorn Barger becomes the first person to use the term “Weblog” to describe the list of links on his website.
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The Internet Corporations for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) takes over responsibility for the coordination of the global internet’s systems of unique identifiers.
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MP3 downloading service Napster launches, overloading high-speed networks in college dormitories. Many colleges ban the service and it is later shut down for enabling the illegal sharing of music files.
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Jimmy Wales launches Wikipedia. Users write over 20,000 encyclopedia entries in the first year.
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Social networking site Friendster.com launches, but is quickly overtaken by Facebook.
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Microsoft launches Xbox Live, its online multiplayer gaming service.”Critics scoffed at the idea, noting how uncommon broadband connections were at the time.”
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Apple launches the iTunes Music Store with 200,000 songs at 99¢ each. The store sells one million songs in its first week.
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Massively multiplayer online role-playing game(MMORPG) World of Warcraft launches.
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Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg launches thefacebook.com. 1,200 Harvard students sign up within the first 24 hours. Facebook goes on to become the world’s biggest social networking site, with over a billion users worldwide.
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9% of internet users (13 million Americans) went online to donate money to the victims of Gulf Coast hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
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YouTube is founded on Valentine’s Day. The first video, an explanation of what’s cool about elephants, is uploaded by co-founder Jawed Karim on April 23. Google acquires the company a year later.
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Google acquires YouTube for $1.65 billion. YouTube founders Chad and Steve announce the Google acquisition in a video recorded in a parking lot: “The king of search and the king of video have gotten together.”
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HTML5 is introduced.
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Microsoft offers to buy Yahoo! for $44.6 billion, but the two companies cannot agree on a purchase price.
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Social photo-sharing sites Pinterest and Instagram launch.
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Google+ launches.
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Ecommerce sales top $1 trillion worldwide.
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Former CIA employee and NSA contractor Edward Snowden turns over thousands of classified documents to media organizations, exposing a top-secret government data surveillance program.
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A majority (56%) of Americans now own a smartphone of some kind.
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45% of internet users ages 18-29 in serious relationships say the internet has had an impact on their relationship.
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Facebook buys messaging app Whatsapp for $19 billion
