Internet

The History of the Internet

  • 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
    On October 29, 1969, ARPAnet delivered its first message: a “node-to-node” communication from one computer to another. (The first computer was located in a research lab at UCLA and the second was at Stanford; each one was the size of a small house.)
  • FTP

    FTP
    FTP was initially defined in 1971, predating TCP and IP, and it has been redefined several times since then to accommodate new technologies, including the use of TCP/IP, or Request for Comments 765 and RFC 959, and IPv6, or RFC 2428. FTP has also undergone several updates to enhance FTP security.
  • Unix

    Unix
    In 1969 a team led by computer scientists Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie created the first version of UNIX on a PDP-7 minicomputer, which was chosen mainly because of Thompson's familiarity with the system from his hobby work on it.
  • Beginning of TCP/IP

    Beginning of TCP/IP
    1974 was a breakthrough year. 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).
  • 1977: The PC Modem

    1977: The PC Modem
    1977 was a big year for the development of the Internet as we know it today. It’s the year the first PC modem, developed by Dennis Hayes and Dale Heatherington, was introduced and initially sold to computer hobbyists.
  • 1978: Spam is Born

    1978: Spam is Born
    1978 is also the year that brought the first unsolicited commercial email message (later known as spam), sent out to 600 California Arpanet users by Gary Thuerk.
  • USENET

    USENET
    Usenet is a worldwide system for Internet discussion that consists of a set of newsgroups that are organized by subject. Users post articles or messages to these newsgroups. The articles are then broadcast to other computer systems, most of which now connect via the Internet.
  • Ethernet

    Ethernet
    Ethernet (/ˈiːθərnɛt/) is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 1983 as IEEE 802.3.
  • Domain Name System (DNS)

    Domain Name System (DNS)
    The rapid growth of the internet caused massive problems in bookkeeping. To deal with this problem a group including Jon Postel, Paul Mockapetris and Craig Partrige published RFC 882 which created the domain name system (DNS) to make Internet navigation easier.
  • World Wide Web

    Where the Web was born. 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
    After its creation in 1991 at the University of Minnesota, use of Gopher exploded. The popular press lauded it as an important step beyond File Transfer Protocol (FTP), in terms of both usability and ease of implementation. The growth of Gopher was soon overshadowed, however, by the World Wide Web.
  • 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.
  • CERN

    CERN
    On 30 April 1993, CERN put the World Wide Web software in the public domain. Later, CERN made a release available with an open licence, a more sure way to maximise its dissemination.