Evolution of the Internet

First Mouse Demo

Dec 9, 1968

Douglas Engelbart releases his demo of one of the first computer mouses, his first prototype he was accompanied by Bill English. They named it the 'mouse' because it resemblied a small creature with a chord for a tail.

ARPANET Founded

Sep 16, 1969

A military computer network created in order to share data across long distances with an initial fund of $1 million. It influenced the creation of the actual internet.

Email?

Sep 15, 1971

Ray Tomlinson invents an email program to send messages across a distributed network. This program was derived from an intra-machine email program (SENDMSG) and an experimental file transfer program(CPYNET).

Edit Email

Jul 15, 1972

First email management program created to list, selectively read, file, forward, and respond to messages by Larry Roberts,

Xerox Alto

Mar 15, 1973

The minicomputer, Xerox Alto, is constructed and released. This was a landmark step in the construction and development of personal computers.

TCP/IP Proposed

May 1, 1974

'A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection' is published by Vinton G. Cerf and Robert E. Kahn. This technology would be what gets your information from A to Z, eventually to be called TCP/IP, almost the most significant development in Net history.

You've Got Spam!

May 1, 1978

The first commercial spam message is sent out on this date by DEC marketer advertising an upcoming presentation of its new DECSYSTEM-20 computers.

Usenet Created

Oct 1, 1979

Before any online chat service, the first to come about was Usenet, which was a vast discussion service and a precursor to every Web-based message board around the world.

W3

Aug 6, 1991

The world's first website, a text-only effort describing the world wide web browser, goes live on the world's first server. It was run on Tim Burners-Lee's NeXT computer at CERN.

Mosaic 1.0 Released

Apr 1, 1993

The first web browser to be used by many, developed by Marc Andreessen. Ignited the suddent interest and growth in the World Wide Web.

PizzaNet

Feb 1, 1994

One of the first known online purchases takes place: a large mushroom and pepperoni pizza with extra cheese from Pizza Hut's "electric storefront", PizzaNet.

Pre-Google

Jan 1, 1995

The first search engine to enable full-text searches, allowing users to look for keywords anywhere on any webpage. It is called- NOT google- but WebCrawler.

Internet Radio

Feb 1, 1995

The first full-time internet only radio station that broadcasted music from unsigned independent bands, Radio HK, is founded by Norman Hajjar.
*Reached 100,000 people in 46 countries.

Internet Archive

Apr 1, 1996

Brewster Kahle creates the internet archive to stride towards his goal of archiving all web sites, text, images, video, and audio contained within the entire internet and make it universally available -- and 100% free-- to everyone, forever.

@Gmail.com

Apr 1, 2004

Google launches a free email program with 1gb of free space in order to one up other email services such as Hotmail and Yahoo.