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Launch of Sputnik
On October 4, 1957 the Soviet Union launched a basketball-sized satellite weighing 183.9 pounds. This event would serve as the impetus to the creation of ARPA which directly lead to multiple other technologies that can be traced to the eventual creation of the Internet -
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A Brief History of the Internet
This timeline explores the significant events that lead to the creation of the Internet -
Creation of ARPA
On February 7, 1958 Neil McElroy, Department of Defense (DoD) Secretary issues DoD Directive 5105.15 establishing ARPA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency. ARPA (which later would be known as DARPA) was a division in the DoD where defense related research and development was conducted. It's creation was an effort to not be surprised by and another "Sputnik type" event. -
Creation of APRANET
On December 5, 1969 APRANET was established linking UCLA, Stanford, The University of California - Santa Clara, and The University of Utah's Computer Science Department in a 4-node interconnected network. APRANET would become the first "packet-switching network" allowing information sharing between the universities. -
TCP/IP Development
DARPA's Robert Kahn and Stanford's Vinton Cerf collaborate on a project to develop a communication protocol with the ability to send packets of data across the APRANET. TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol as it was called, remains the underlying technical foundation of today's system we call the internet. -
Development of Email
Ray Tomlinson, an APRANET contractor, is generally considered the inventor of email. Tomlinson selected the @ symbol to create the format, name-of-user@name-of-computer, that is still used today. -
World Wide Web Development (WWW)
Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist at CERN, is credited with creating the World Wide Web (WWW.) Originally created as an information sharing platform between universities and research institutions, in 1993 CERN put WWW software in the Public Domain. Included were such innovations as HTML, URLs, and HTTP. This allowed graphical information exchange vs. primarily textual prior. -
Web Browser Creation
MOSAIC is created by NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) and the University of Illinois-Champaign as a Web Browser capable of accessing files, graphics, and other documents on the WWW. MOSAIC is generally credited with being the application that made the WWW available to the general public. Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Mozilla all incorporated features of MOSAIC.
