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• The USSR launches the first satellite, Sputnik. To compete against the USSR's success at launching the first satellite, the United States Department of Defense creates the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). ARPA is responsible for the development of new technology for use by the military.
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• The paper, A Conceptual Framework for the Augmentation of Man’s Intellect is published by Douglas Engelbart. The work outlines multimedia paradigms to be integrated into the Internet.
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The first node is connected to the internet's military ancestor, ARPANET. With no HQ and the ability to bounce messages between surviving nodes until they reach their destination, ARPANET was intended to be America's bomb-proof communications network at the height of the Cold War.
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Michael Hart begins Project Gutenberg to make copyright-free works electronically available. The first is the US declaration of independence.
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ARPANET begins to be used for communicating email.
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Bolt Beranek and Newman computer engineer Ray Tomlinson invents email by adapting an internal messaging program and extending it to use the ARPANET to send messages between sites. Within a year, three quarters of ARPANET traffic is email.
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The term “Internet” begins to be used.
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University College of London is one of the first international connections to ARPANET.
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Comet, the first commercial email software, is offered by the Computer Corporation of America for $40,000.
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The Queen sends an email from the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment in Malvern.
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Near Menlo Park, California, SRI scientists demonstrate that a TCP (transmission control protocol) will successfully support seamless end to end transmission over mobile radio.
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Gary Thuerk sends what is widely considered to be the first spam message, promoting DEC
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Al Gore coins the term for the Internet “The Information Superhighway.”
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Joint Academic Network (JANET) built to connect UK universities to each other over the internet.
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Internet newsgroups are born. Rick Adams at the Center for Seismic Studies releases software enabling news transmission, posting and reading using internet-standard TCP/IP connections. His software builds on work begun in 1979 at Duke University to exchange information between Unix machines.
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The first internet worm is unleashed by Robert Morris. It infects about 6000 computers. Although it causes no physical damage, it clogs up the internet and loses hundreds of thousands of dollars in computer time.
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Tim Berners-Lee and the team at CERN invent the World Wide Web to make information easier to publish and access on the internet.
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The phrase “World Wide Web” is coined by Tim Berners-Lee.
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Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC) becomes the first web server on the Internet.
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internet registration begins for .com, .net. .org, .edu, and .gov.
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The Internet takes off as part of the world’s fastest growing information network
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• The MOSAIC Web Browser is born on the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign campus.
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Jim Clark and Marc Andreeson found Netscape Communications in Mountain View, California. Netscape is the first successful commercial Web browser.
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The World Wide Web is developed in CERN, the Institute for Particle Physics in Switzerland. Note the difference between the Internet and the World Wide Web: The Internet is a computer network consisting of a worldwide network of computer networks and cables that use the TCP/IP network protocols to facilitate data transmission and exchange. The World Wide Web is a computer network consisting of a collection of internet sites that offer text, graphics, sound and animation resources through the hyp
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The independent programming language, JAVA, is created by Jim Gosling at Sun Microsystems.
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yahoo! is founded in Santa Clara, California, and provides a web search engine, email service, mapping and more.
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The Dot-Com Boom roughly begins around this time.
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In 1997, there are 1 million domain registrants on the Internet
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Lucent Technology (a spin-off of AT&T) develops the first telephony system. The telephony system allows users to make phone calls over the Internet. Ironically, this led to the eventual demise of the AT&T phone network.
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The term “weblog” is coined (and later shorted to “blog”).
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There are now 3 million domain registrants on the Internet. The number of Web pages on the Internet is 300 million and growing by over 1.5 million per day.
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Google is founded in Menlo Park, California.
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The Internet celebrates is 30th anniversary.
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There are over 5 million domain names registered on the Internet.
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There are approximately 100 million computers connected online.
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Traffic over the Internet is doubling every 100 days.
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The Internet economy is responsible for over 2.3 million jobs and over $507 billion in revenue.
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he Dot-Com Bubble bursts.
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Wikipedia is launched
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Internet World Stats counted over 544 million users on the Internet.
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Facebook is founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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YouTube launches
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There are over 92 million websites online.
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• Twitter is founded in San Francisco, California.
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nternet World Stats counts over 1.3 billion web surfers worldwide as of December, 2007.
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Internet World Stats counts over 1.4 billion web surfers worldwide as of June, 2008.
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Internet World Stats counts over 1.6 billion web surfers worldwide as of June, 2009
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The Internet celebrates its 40th anniversary.
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Internet World Stats counts over 1.9 billion web surfers worldwide as of June, 2010.
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Twitter and Facebook are the primary means of communication for the Middle East revolts.
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Scott Fahlman kick-starts smiley-culture by suggesting using the :-) and :-( smileys to convey emotions in emails. His message has been preserved at http://research.microsoft.com/~mbj/Smiley/Smiley.html.