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Soviet Union launches Sputnik
Sputnik was an artificial satellite made and controlled by the Soviet Union. It was the first ever artificial satellite made to orbit Earth. This allowed communications from wide distances around the world, and as the Cold War was taking place between Russia and America, the Americans believed this was some new way for the Russians to spy on them.
The satellite was originally made to find out information about the atmosphere, and caused development in the technology of meteoroid detection. -
US sets up Advanced Research Projects Agency
As the American's got worried, in response to Sputnik, they set up the Advanced Research Projects Agency to progress in science and their militrary skills. They created USA's first satellite within 18 months and slowly progressed into computer networking.
ARPA was originally set up by Americans to prevent countries such as Russia from getting into space first, as it was considered a huge achievement. From 1975, it was renamed to Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). -
Packet Switching developed
The internet is reliant on packet switching, and the network was reliable as there could be no eavesdroppers on the data being sent for military purpose, so America's plans could not be found out by the Russian's. Leonard Kleinrock several years before published a book about packet switching, and played an important role within the development of it with ARPA. -
Arpanet is developed
Arpanet is created by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for research into networking. First host-to-host starts. Few graduate students send first message of "login" to distant computer, yet the system crashes on the third letter. It is the worlds first packet switching network, and was a major component in today's global internet. Before this, many data communication methods had been done using corcuit switching, common in many telephones, so using packet switching was a whole new concept. -
E-mail invented
Ray Tomlinson creates the first e-mail (electronic mail) program for use of the arpanet. This allowed people to send messages resulting in the @ sign being created. The first conversation between a patient and a doctor over computers is done using the program. The program originally started as an instant messenger, requiring both computers to be online for the data to be sent, but overtime this developed so that people could send email to offline computers. -
Bulletin Board System created
Bases of the internet created, although not made public yet, it allowed users to log in and upload and download content with other users. This was commonly done with email message and posting messages to things such as todays forums. It was called Bulletin Board System after the usual bulletin boards commonly used in shops etc to advertise and post ideas publicly. -
75% of all arpanet usage is e-mail
After arpanet is made open for public use, 75% of it's use is email related. Many of the emails sent in this time are common to the ones used today, with the format of sender address and message body. -
Bulletin Board System Online
This allowed a wider use of the internet - people could now view and see new ideas, than just communicating through e-mail. Other groups were beginning to set up in the US such as Computer Science Department. The online public one was created by Ward Christensen. It involved using a dial-up system and were therefore extremely slow to use. -
First spam message
First spam message sent of a marketing company advertising their new computers. -
Emotions introduced to e-mail
Kevin Mackenzie suggests adding punctuation to e-mails to stop them coming across dry and boring. Many didn't agree with the idea until in September Scott Falham introduces the idea of using :-) and :-( -
Domain Name Server introduced
Number of hosts breaks 1000 and many networks are established in different countries. Domain Name Server allows easier remembrance instead of numbers. It gives all users their own unique code so that they can be located when accessing the internet, and allows the code to be easily interpreted by many people. The DNS is then translated into IP addresses. Without DNS' the internet would be a lot more difficult to use. -
Tim Berners-Lee creates the world wide web
Tim Berners-Lee is a British engineer born on the 8th of June 1955 and is known for creating the world wide web. The world wide web is the worlds first commerical provider, with dial-up allowing users to access the internet. It allowed easy public use for everyone to reach access to the internet. Tim Berners-Lee is now the founder/director of many scientific research/engineering companies, and he also studied a degree in physics at The Queens College, Oxford between 1973 and 1976. -
Mosaic - first web browser created
Many people begin using the internet such as the president and businesses. The new web browser allowed ease of access around the internet that anyone could use. This would then help to allow others to develop on the ideas. It was also the first web browser to contain images with text, intead of just using the browser for reading. It was first designed by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina. -
45 million users of the internet
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150 million users of the internet
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407 million users of the internet
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600-800 million users of the internet
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1.3 billion users of the internet
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1,996,514,816 users of the internet worldwide
