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ARPANET founded
ARPANET, as it would become, was not in fact a Command and Control System that would survive a nuclear attack, but simply a military computer network for sharing data across long distances. It influenced the creation of the Internet, and was initially instigated by a $1m funding by then-ARPA director Charlie Herzfeld, to then-IPTO director Bob Taylor, a Texan. -
First Network E-mail
Electronic messages date back to the time-sharing terminals of the 1960s, but the first landmark step towards today's email was made when computer programmer Ray Tomlinson sent the first 'network email' (between more than one machine, as opposed to messages sent between single terminals) using a program he wrote called SNDMSG. Tomlinson was also responsible for introducing the '@' symbol into the email standard. -
TCP/IP Proposed
'A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection' was a paper published in 1974 by Vinton G Cerf and Robert E Kahn. It detailed what would eventually be called TCP/IP -- the packet-switching technology that makes the entire Internet possible. It's what gets your data from A to Z, even if most of the Internet implodes, and is possibly the most significant development in Net history. -
First Peer-to-Peer Chat System
Before any online chat service used today, there was Usenet, and it still exists. In some ways one of the first peer-to-peer systems, Usenet was, and is, a vast discussion service, and the precursor to every Web-based message board and Internet Relay Chat application used around the globe. -
.com Introduced
Described as 'administrative entities', Internet pioneer Dr Jon Postel introduces the top-level domains .com, .org, .gov, .edu and .mil in one of a series of documents called Request For Comments, which were papers published by the Internet Engineering Task Force. Postel also ran and managed the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, which was set up to coincide with the introduction of the domains. -
The GIF Image
After reading in a 1984 magazine article about an efficient lossless compression algorithm called LMZ, CompuServe developers released the GIF image, not knowing the algorithm had a patent pending. The Graphics Interchange Format became insanely popular for its efficiency, and years later transformed the Web into full colour. In 1986, Unisys successfully patented the LZW algorithm, but did nothing to stop CompuServe. A few years later, the two companies banded together and decreed developers must -
MP3 Patented
MP3 is probably the most common format for music on the Internet, and has been hugely popular for over a decade. It fuelled the digital music revolution, it's the codec behind YouTube videos, it saturates P2P networks and it's now the must-use format for DRM-free digital music downloads. This ancient patent marked its public arrival. -
WWW Proposed
British CERN employee Tim Berners-Lee saw that the European Organisation for Nuclear Research needed a more efficient way for scientists to share information, much like ARPA. And just like that, the World Wide Web began as a rudimentary experiment with hypertext. The final project proposal to CERN in 1990, entitled WorldWideWeb: Proposal for the HyperText Project, was Berners-Lee's way of saying, "Hello. I'd like to invent the Web." -
First Web Browser
In 1992, long before Firefox and Internet Explorer, there were a few browsers knocking about, including Erwise, Viola and Arena. But the first Web browser to really take off was called Mosaic. Developed by Marc Andreessen, a student at Illinois University, it ignited the explosive growth of the WWW and interest in Web sites and was eventually ported to the Macintosh OS by Aleks Totic, a Yugoslav. The 1.0 release was made available in April 1993. -
First Internet Newspaper
The Tech is MIT's campus newspaper and was the first newspaper to be available on the Web. Its Web server was the first to serve up a complete newspaper, predating every newspaper in existence's Web presence. Popular 2008 opinion claims print magazines and newspapers will be completely replaced by online versions, making The Tech even more notable. -
eBay opens as AuctionWeb
Back when the site began as AuctionWeb -- selling a broken laser pointer to a collector of broken laser pointers -- you didn't have to pay to list or sell the crap stashed in your garage. That eventually changed, earning eBay founder Pierre Omidyar billions. Apart from turning a profit from the start, not to mention surviving the dotcom bubble, what makes eBay particularly interesting is that it relies on its users being honest. And interested in buying utter rubbish. -
Google Gets Funding
Co-founder of Sun Microsystems Andy Bechtolsheim cut Google a $100,000 cheque in this month, just a decade ago. He was the first outside investor in the search giant which, at the time, wasn't even a legal entity. Two weeks later it was, as Google Technology Inc, and the rest is history. -
Napster Launched
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Wikipedia Created
Originally launched atop the commercial .com domain before switching to .org, Wikipedia is now one of the most visited sites on the Web, and testament to the possibilities of harnessing the Wisdom of Crowds -- one of the fundamental aspects of what is known as Web 2.0. -
iTunes Launched
With just 200,000 songs but all major record labels on board, Apple's iTunes Music Store launched and became the first Web store to sell major-label music legally for download. The software initially only ran on the Mac, but it allowed purchased songs to be played on iPods and it sold over a quarter of a million songs within 24 hours. -
Gmail Launched
By 2004, Hotmail offered users of its free email service just 2MB of storage, while Yahoo offered 4MB. So when Google announced it was launching a free email service with 1GB of storage, a News.com reader wrote "This sounds like an April Fool's joke if I've ever heard one." In their defence, it was 1 April. But it sparked a paradigm shift in the free email world, with major Web-based email providers now providing gigabytes of storage as standard. -
YouTube Launched
YouTube ushered in the era of Flash-based video and global Web-based video sharing. Founded by three ex-PayPal employees and acquired for $1.6bn by Google in 2006, YouTube has been at the front of the Web-based video revolution. Despite criticism of its low-quality videos, it hosted the first official online American Democratic presidential debate. -
PirateBay raided
In 2006, Swedish police raided PRQ -- host of the enormous Pirate Bay BitTorrent tracker -- confiscating its servers, resulting in mass protests. Only a few servers contained Pirate Bay files, leading to ten affected sites suing the Swedish government. Over 100 sites were wrongfully forced offline and the Bay was relocated, restored from backups and back online after three days, with huge numbers of new users thanks to all the media coverage. -
Facebook abandons college-only approach, allows anyone to join
