Major Events in the History of the Internet and Computers

Time Frame When Large Universities and Government Had Access to Email on the Internet 1969-mid 80's

Jan 1, 1969

1969 - Birth of a NetworkThe Internet as we know it today, in the mid-1990s, traces it origins back to a Defense Department project in 1969. The subject of the project was wartime digital communications. At that time the telephone system was about the only theater-scale communications system in use. A major problem had been identified in its design - its dependence on switching stations that could be targeted during an attack. Would it be possible to design a network that could quickly reroute digital traffic around failed nodes? A possible solution had been identified in theory. That was to build a "web" of datagram network, called an "catenet", and use dynamic routing protocols to constantly adjust the flow of traffic through the catenet. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) launched the DARPA Internet Program.1970s - InfancyDARPA Internet, largely the plaything of academic and military researchers, spent more than a decade in relative obscurity. As Vietnam, Watergate, the Oil Crisis, and the Iranian Hostage Crisis rolled over the nation, several Internet research teams proceeded through a gradual evolution of protocols. In 1975, DARPA declared the project a success and handed its management over to the Defense Communications Agency. Several of today's key protocols (including IP and TCP) were stable by 1980, and adopted throughout ARPANET by 1983.Mid 1980s - The Research NetLet's outline key features, circa-1983, of what was then called ARPANET. A small computer was a PDP-11/45, and a PDP-11/45 does not fit on your desk. Some sites had a hundred computers attached to the Internet. Most had a dozen or so, probably with something like a VAX doing most of the work - mail, news, EGP routing. Users did their work using DEC VT-100 terminals. FORTRAN was the word of the day. Few companies had Internet access, relying instead on SNA and IBM mainframes. Rather, the Internet community was dominated by universities and military research sites. It's most popular service was the rapid email it made possible with distant colleagues. In August 1983, there were 562 registered ARPANET hosts (RFC 1296).UNIX deserves at least an honorable mention, since almost all the initial Internet protocols were developed first for UNIX, largely due to the availability of kernel source (for a price) and the relative ease of implementation (relative to things like VMS or MVS). The University of California at Berkeley (UCB) deserves special mention, because their Computer Science Research Group (CSRG) developed the BSD variants of AT&T's UNIX operating system. BSD UNIX and its derivatives would become the most common Internet programming platform.Many key features of the Internet were already in place, including the IP and TCP protocols. ARPANET was fundamentally unreliable in nature, as the Internet is still today. This principle of unreliable delivery means that the Internet only makes a best-effort attempt to deliver packets. The network can drop a packet without any notification to sender or receiver. Remember, the Internet was designed for military survivability. The software running on either end must be prepared to recognize data loss, retransmitting data as often as necessary to achieve its ultimate delivery.

Time Frame When Only Large Universities and Government had Access to Email on the Internet

Period: Jan 1, 1969 to Apr 5, 1985

From 1969 through the mid 80's

Steve Wozniak Invents Apple I Computer

Jun 29, 1975

On Sunday, June 29th, 1975, Steve Wozniak took a computer he hobbled together out of an old Motorola 6800 CPU and a collection of disjointed parts that he had soldered onto a motherboard, booted it up, and showed his good friend Steve Jobs what would end up being the prototype for the Apple I, the world’s first consumer-marketed, assembled personal computer.Read more at http://www.cultofmac.com/176466/37-years-ago-today-steve-jobs-steve-wozniak-invented-apple/#1kyaVz6ZZG5IVI6d.99

IBM Introduces the PC

Sep 5, 1975

Drawing on its pioneering SCAMP (Special Computer, APL Machine Portable) prototype of 1973, IBM's General Systems Division announced the IBM 5100 Portable Computer in September 1975. Weighing approximately 50 pounds, the 5100 desktop computer was comparable to the IBM 1130 in storage capacity and performance but almost as small and easy to use as an IBM Selectric Typewriter. It was followed by similar small computers such as the IBM 5110 and 5120.

World WideWeb opens up for General Public

Aug 6, 1991

Today is a significant day in the history of the Internet. On 6 August 1991, exactly twenty years ago, the World Wide Web became publicly available. Its creator, the now internationally known Tim Berners-Lee, posted a short summary of the project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup and gave birth to a new technology which would fundamentally change the world as we knew it.

Yahoo! Directory Goes Online

Jan 1, 1994

Yahoo! was started at Stanford University. It was founded in January 1994 by Jerry Yang and David Filo, who were Electrical Engineering graduate students when they created a website named "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web". The Guide was a directory of other websites, organized in a hierarchy, as opposed to a searchable index of pages. In April 1994, Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web was renamed "Yahoo!".[1][2] The yahoo.com domain was created on January 18, 1995.[3]Yahoo! grew rapidly throughout the 1990s and diversified into a web portal, followed by numerous high-profile acquisitions. The company's stock price skyrocketed during the dot-com bubble and closed at an all-time high of US$118.75 in 2000;[4] however, after the dot-com bubble burst, it reached an all-time low of US$8.11 in 2001.[5] Yahoo! formally rejected an acquisition bid from the Microsoft Corporation in 2008.[6] In early 2012, the largest layoff in Yahoo!'s history was completed and 2,000 employees (14 percent of the workforce) lost their jobs.[7]

Creators of Google and Google Goes Online

Mar 1, 1996

Google began in March 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Ph.D. students at Stanford University.[2]In search of a dissertation theme, Page had been considering—among other things—exploring the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web, understanding its link structure as a huge graph.[3] His supervisor, Terry Winograd, encouraged him to pick this idea (which Page later recalled as "the best advice I ever got"[4]) and Page focused on the problem of finding out which web pages link to a given page, based on the consideration that the number and nature of such backlinks was valuable information for an analysis of that page (with the role of citations in academic publishing in mind).[3]In his research project, nicknamed "BackRub", Page was soon joined by Brin, who was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship.[5] Brin was already a close friend, whom Page had first met in the summer of 1995—Page was part of a group of potential new students that Brin had volunteered to show around the campus.[3] Both Brin and Page were working on the Stanford Digital Library Project (SDLP). The SDLP's goal was “to develop the enabling technologies for a single, integrated and universal digital library" and it was funded through the National Science Foundation, among other federal agencies.[5][6][7][8]Page's web crawler began exploring the web in March 1996, with Page's own Stanford home page serving as the only starting point.[3] To convert the backlink data that it gathered for a given web page into a measure of importance, Brin and Page developed the PageRank algorithm.[3] While analyzing BackRub's output—which, for a given URL, consisted of a list of backlinks ranked by importance—the pair realized that a search engine based on PageRank would produce better results than existing techniques (existing search engines at the time essentially ranked results according to how many times the search term appeared on a page).[3][9]

Youtube Founded

Feb 1, 2005

<a href='http://https://www.youtube.com/yt/about/' ounded in February 2005, YouTube allows billions of people to discover, watch and share originally-created videos. YouTube provides a forum for people to connect, inform, and inspire others across the globe and acts as a distribution platform for original content creators and advertisers large and small.</a>About YouTube. Founded in February 2005, YouTube allows billions of people to discover, watch and share originally-created videos. YouTube provides a ...

First Tweet Sent

Mar 21, 2006

Twitter's origins lie in a "daylong brainstorming session" held by board members of the podcasting company Odeo. Dorsey, then an undergraduate student at New York University, introduced the idea of an individual using an SMS service to communicate with a small group.[15][16] The original project code name for the service was twttr, an idea that Williams later ascribed to Noah Glass,[17] inspired by Flickr and the five-character length of American SMS short codes. The developers initially considered "10958" as a short code, but later changed it to "40404" for "ease of use and memorability."[18] Work on the project started on March 21, 2006, when Dorsey published the first Twitter message at 9:50 PM Pacific Standard Time (PST): "just setting up my twttr".[1] Dorsey has explained the origin of the "Twitter" title:...we came across the word 'twitter', and it was just perfect. The definition was 'a short burst of inconsequential information,' and 'chirps from birds'. And that's exactly what the product was.[19]

Amazon Releases the First Kindle

Nov 19, 2007

Developer Amazon.comManufacturer FoxconnProduct family KindleType E-book readerRelease date November 19, 2007Introductory price US$399

Inatgram Begins

Oct 1, 2010

A self-described ‘huge nerd’ as a teenager, pasty-faced Systrom spent endless hours on the ultra-violent computer game Doom II, not just playing it but using his computer genius to reprogramme it.‘I credit Doom II for everything,’ he said recently of his fascination with computing. It was hardly surprising, given his obsession with the net, that he ended up at Stanford University in California, the academic heart of Silicon Valley which has long been a breeding ground for dotcom billionaires.Systrom was already well-connected in Silicon Valley when, as a second-year student, he came up with his first creation — a service called Photobox that allowed people to send large photos to each other over the internet.Photobox was spotted by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who offered Systrom a job. But Systrom turned it down — it was back in 2004 and Facebook, which is now set to be valued at $100 billion, had yet to really take off.‘Unfortunately, I decided to stay in school,’ he explained last year, ‘that’s one of those decisions that I look back at — I would’ve loved to have been part of Facebook’s growth.‘But being at Stanford, I was given the opportunity to be in the middle of innovation and meet some of the smartest people. When I finally did it [myself], it just felt so right.’After university, Systrom worked for Google but spent his weekends building a photo and note sharing web service he called Burbn, after his favourite tipple, bourbon. It attracted no more than a few hundred users but they included his future partner Kriegler, who had also been at Stanford, although they had not known each other.Together, they made a simpler version of Burbn for the Apple iPhone and called it Instagram. They launched it in October 2010 with $7 million from a venture capital firm, Benchmark Capital. Now they have made it available on Android smartphones as well.Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2128518/Instagram-The-nerds-billion-551-days-camera-app.html#ixzz2y43wOrut Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook