Internet History

By osodog

  • CERN

    CERN
    The first website at CERN – and in the world – was dedicated to the World Wide Web project itself and was hosted on Berners-Lee's NeXT computer. In 2013, CERN launched a project to restore this first ever website: info.cern.ch.

  • Email

    Email
    The very first version of what would become known as email was invented in 1965 at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as part of the university's Compatible Time-Sharing System, which allowed users to share files and messages on a central disk, logging in from remote terminals.

  • ARPANET

    ARPANET
    The U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first public packet-switched computer network. It was first used in 1969 and finally decommissioned in 1989. ARPANET's main use was for academic and research purposes.

  • FTP

    FTP
    The original specification for the File Transfer Protocol was written by Abhay Bhushan and published as RFC 114 on 16 April 1971.

  • PC Modem

    PC Modem
    Dennis C. Hayes invented the personal computer modem in 1977, marking the emergence of the online and Internet era. In the beginning modems were used primarily to communicate between data terminals and a host computer.

  • USENET

    USENET
    Usenet is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was established in 1980.

  • Domain Name System (DNS)

    Domain Name System (DNS)
    Paul Mockapetris expanded the Internet beyond its academic origins by inventing the Domain Name System (DNS) in 1983.

  • IRC

    IRC
    History. IRC was created by Jarkko Oikarinen in August 1988 to replace a program called MUT (MultiUser Talk) on a BBS called OuluBox at the University of Oulu in Finland, where he was working at the Department of Information Processing Science.

  • World Wide Web

    World Wide Web
    Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist, invented the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1989, while working at CERN. The Web was originally conceived and developed to meet the demand for automated information-sharing between scientists in universities and institutes around the world.

  • Gopher

    Gopher
    Origins. Gopher system was released in mid-1991 by Mark P. McCahill, Farhad Anklesaria, Paul Lindner, Daniel Torrey, and Bob Alberti of the University of Minnesota in the United States.

  • First Webcam

    First Webcam
    The Trojan Room coffee pot was a coffee machine located in the Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge, England. Created in 1991 by Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Paul Jardetzky, it was migrated from their laboratory network to the web in 1993 becoming the world's first webcam.

  • Javascript

    Javascript
    The first ever JavaScript was created by Brendan Eich at Netscape, and has since been updated to conform to ECMA-262 Edition 5 and later versions. This engine, code named SpiderMonkey, is implemented in C/C++.

  • HTML

    HTML
    The first version of HTML was written by Tim Berners-Lee in 1993. Since then, there have been many different versions of HTML. The most widely used version throughout the 2000's was HTML 4.01, which became an official standard in December 1999. Another version, XHTML, was a rewrite of HTML as an XML language.