-
-
On the October 29, 1969, computers at Stanford and UCLA connected for the first time. In effect, they were the first hosts on what would one day become the Internet. This was first known as Arpanet. The first message sent across the network was supposed to be "Login", the computers crashed on the letter g and therefore this never happened, although it was the first attempt
-
An Arpanet network was established between Harvard, MIT, and BBN (the company that created the "interface message processor" computers used to connect to the network) in 1970. The year that arpanet was created. This was between the 3 businesses, Harvard, MIT and BBN
-
One of the most impressive developments of 1971 was the start of Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg, This project was to make ebooks and documents available to the genral public through the internet.
-
Email was first developed in 1971 by Ray Tomlinson, who also made the decision to use the "@" symbol to separate the user name from the computer name (which later on became the domain name).
-
Arpanet made its first trans-Atlantic connection in 1973, with the University College of London. Main uses of arpanet was email
-
A program called (called MSG) was created, it was the first email service to have "Reply" and "Forward" functionality.
-
1978 is the year that brought the first commercial email message (later known as spam), sent out to 600 California Arpanet users.
-
this emoticon was created :-) after a joke, rather than the original -) proposed by MacKenzie. The modern emoticon was born.
-
The domain name system was created in 1984 along with the first Domain Name Servers (DNS). The domain name system was important in that it made addresses on the Internet more human-friendly.
-
By 1987, there were nearly 30,000 hosts on the Internet. The original Arpanet protocol had been limited to 1,000 hosts, although more hosts were possible
-
One of the first major Internet worms was released in 1988. Referred to as "The Morris Worm".
-
When Apple pulled out of the AppleLink program in 1989, the project was renamed and America Online was born. AOL, still in existence today, later on made the Internet popular amongst the average internet users.
-
1990 also brought about the first commercial dial-up Internet provider, The World. The same year, Arpanet ceased to exist.
-
Also in the same year, the first search protocol that examined file contents instead of just file names was launched, called Gopher.
-
Also, the MP3 file format was accepted as a standard in 1991. MP3 files, being highly compressed, later become a popular file format to share songs and entire albums via the internet.
-
1991 brought some major innovations to the world of the Internet. The first web page was created and, much like the first email explained what email was, its purpose was to explain what the World Wide Web was.
-
In 1993, both the White House and the United Nations came online, marking the beginning of the .gov and .org domain names.
-
1995 is often considered the first year the web became commercialized. While there were commercial enterprises online prior to ’95, there were a few key developments that happened that year. First, SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) encryption was developed by Netscape, making it safer to conduct financial transactions (like credit card payments) online. In addition, two major online businesses got their start the same year. The first sale on "Echo Bay" was made that year. Echo Bay later became eBay. A
-
In 1996, HoTMaiL (the capitalized letters are an homage to HTML), the first webmail service, was launched.
-
Google went live in 1998, revolutionizing the way in which people find information online.
-
In 1998 as well, Napster launched, opening up the gates to mainstream file-sharing of audio files over the internet.
-
2000 was the year of the dotcom collapse, resulting in huge losses for legions of investors. Hundreds of companies closed, some of which had never turned a profit for their investors. The NASDAQ, which listed a large number of tech companies affected by the bubble, peaked at over 5,000, then lost 10% of its value in a single day, and finally hit bottom in October of 2002.
-
With the dotcom collapse still going strong, Wikipedia launched in 2001, one of the websites that paved the way for collective web content generation/social media.
-
Also in 2003, MySpace opens up its doors. It later grew to be the most popular social network at one time (though it has since been overtaken by Facebook).
-
Facebook launched in 2004, though at the time it was only open to college students and was called "The Facebook"; later on, "The" was dropped from the name, though the URL http://www.thefacebook.com still works.
-
YouTube launched in 2005, bringing free online video hosting and sharing to the masses.
-
Twitter launched in 2006. It was originally going to be called twittr (inspired by Flickr); the first Twitter message was "just setting up my twttr".
-
Hulu was first launched in 2007, a joint venture between ABC, NBC, and Fox to make popular TV shows available to watch online.
-
The biggest innovation of 2007 was almost certainly the iPhone, which was almost wholly responsible for renewed interest in mobile web applications and design.
-
The first "Internet election" took place in 2008 with the U.S. Presidential election. It was the first year that national candidates took full advantage of all the Internet had to offer. Hillary Clinton jumped on board early with YouTube campaign videos. Virtually every candidate had a Facebook page or a Twitter feed, or both.