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ARPA is created
Found a way that computers can talk to each other in case of a nuclear attack -
Computers at Stanford and UCLA connected for the first time
The first hosts on what would one day become the Internet -
An Arpanet network was established
Network between Harvard, MIT, and BBN (the company that created the "interface message processor" computers used to connect to the network) in 1970 was created. -
Email was first developed
Developed 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) -
The beginning of TCP/IP
A proposal was published to link Arpa-like networks together into a so-called "inter-network", which would have no central control and would work around a transmission control protocol (which eventually became TCP/IP). -
The first Personal Computer Modem is Invented
The modem was invented by Dennis Hayes and Dale Heatherington, and was introduced and initially sold to computer hobbyists. -
Spam is Born
The first unsolicited commercial email message(later known as spam), was sent out to 600 California Arpanet users by Gary Thuerk. -
MUD – The earliest form of multiplayer games was debuted
The precursor to World of Warcraft and Second Life was
developed in 1979, and was called MUD (short for MultiUser Dungeon). MUDs were entirely text-based virtual worlds, combining elements of role-playing games, interactive, fiction, and online chat. -
The first emoticon :-)
The first emoticon was used While many people credit Kevin MacKenzie with the invention of the emoticon in 1979, it was Scott Fahlman in 1982 who proposed using :-) after a joke, rather than the original -) proposed by MacKenzie. -
Adobe Founded
Source
John Warnock and Chuck Geschke leave Xeros PARC to found Adobe systems with $2.5 million in seed money from Hambrecht & Quist. The company is named after a creek tan ran behind John's home in Los Altos, CA. Revenue for 1982 was $0; number of employees: 2. -
The domain name system was created
The first Domain Name Servers (DNS) was created. The domain name system was important in that it made addresses on the Internet more human-friendly compared to its numerical IP address counterparts. DNS servers allowed Internet users to type in an easy-to-remember domain name and then converted it to the IP address automatically. -
World Wide Web protocols finished
The code for the World Wide Web was written by Tim Berners-Lee, based on his proposal from the year before, along with the standards for HTML, HTTP, and URLs. -
First Photoshop released
Source
The project started as a thesis on the processing of digital images, and evolved first into a small set of graphical subroutines, and then into a program named Display. This grew into a better featured version named ImagePro in 1988, and finally Photoshop 1.0 in 1989. Adobe took interest in this final version, and the first ever version of Photoshop was released in 1990. -
First web page created
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. -
Amazon opens it's virtual doors
Source
Amazon unveils as a shopping website for people to order items to their house. It is still widely used today, -
Google founders begin work on a search engine
Source
Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Stanford computer science grad students, begin collaborating on a search engine called BackRub. BackRub operates on Stanford servers for more than a year—eventually taking up too much bandwidth to suit the university. -
Backrub becomes Google
Source
Larry and Sergey decide that the BackRub search engine needs a new name. After some brainstorming, they go with Google—a play on the word “googol,” a mathematical term for the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros. The use of the term reflects their mission to organize a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web. -
Half-Life is released
Source
Half-Life is released through Sierra On-Line after some initial difficulty in finding a publisher largely due to Valve's reputation of being overly ambitious. It quickly becomes a bestseller and wins high critical acclaim, snagging no less than 51 Game of the Year awards from various publications. To this day it is generally regarded as one of the greatest games ever made. -
Steam is unvieled
At the Game Developers’ Conference, Valve unveils Steam, which at the time is simply intended to be a digital distribution service. There is no mention made of any of the other features it would ultimately ship with.
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The Pirate Bay launches
Swedish anti-copyright organization Piratbyrån (The Piracy Bureau) launched this BitTorrent indexer. It becomes one of the most popular sites on the Internet, and is subsequently subject to various police raids. In 2007, it attempted to by its own tiny island nation to avoid litigation.
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Facebook Founded
Source
Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. -
Limewire Closes
SourceThanks to a permanent injunction issued by a New York-based federal court, LimeWire becomes the latest P2P casualty.
