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1969
ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) goes online in December, connecting four major U.S. universities. Designed for research, education, and government organizations, it provides a communications network linking the country in the event that a military attack destroys conventional communications systems. -
1972
Electronic mail is introduced by Ray Tomlinson, a Cambridge, Mass., computer scientist. He uses the @ to distinguish between the sender's name and network name in the email address. -
1973
Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) is designed and in 1983 it becomes the standard for communicating between computers over the Internet. One of these protocols, FTP (File Transfer Protocol), allows users to log onto a remote computer, list the files on that computer, and download files from that computer. -
1976
Presidential candidate Jimmy Carter and running mate Walter Mondale use email to plan campaign events.
Queen Elizabeth sends her first email. She's the first state leader to do so. -
1982
The word “Internet” is used for the first time. -
1984
Domain Name System (DNS) is established, with network addresses identified by extensions such as .com, .org, and .edu.
Writer William Gibson coins the term “cyberspace.” -
1985
Quantum Computer Services, which later changes its name to America Online, debuts. It offers email, electronic bulletin boards, news, and other information. -
1988
A virus called the Internet Worm temporarily shuts down about 10% of the world's Internet servers. -
1989
The World debuts as the first provider of dial-up Internet access for consumers. Tim Berners-Lee of CERN develops a new technique for distributing information on the Internet. He calls it the World Wide Web. The Web is based on hypertext, which permits the user to connect from one document to another at different sites on the Internet via hyperlinks. Unlike other Internet protocols, such as FTP and email, the Web is accessible through a graphical user interface. -
1990
The first effort to index the Internet is created by Peter Deutsch at McGill University in Montreal, who devises Archie, an archive of FTP sites. -
1991
Gopher, which provides point-and-click navigation, is created at the University of Minnesota and named after the school mascot. Gopher becomes the most popular interface for several years. Another indexing system, WAIS (Wide Area Information Server), is developed by Brewster Kahle of Thinking Machines Corp. -
1993
Mosaic is developed by Marc Andreeson at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). It becomes the dominant navigating system for the World Wide Web, which at this time accounts for merely 1% of all Internet traffic. -
1994
The White House launches its website, www.whitehouse.gov. Initial commerce sites are established and mass marketing campaigns are launched via email, introducing the term “spamming” to the Internet vocabulary. Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark start Netscape Communications. They introduce the Navigator browser. -
1995
CompuServe, America Online, and Prodigy start providing dial-up Internet access. Sun Microsystems releases the Internet programming language called Java. The Vatican launches its own website, www.vatican.va. -
1996
Approximately 45 million people are using the Internet, with roughly 30 million of those in North America (United States and Canada), 9 million in Europe, and 6 million in Asia/Pacific (Australia, Japan, etc.). 43.2 million (44%) U.S. households own a personal computer, and 14 million of them are online. -
1997
On July 8, 1997, Internet traffic records are broken as the NASA website broadcasts images taken by Pathfinder on Mars. The broadcast generates 46 million hits in one day. The term “weblog” is coined. It’s later shortened to “blog.” -
1998
Google opens its first office, in California. -
1999
College student Shawn Fanning invents Napster, a computer application that allows users to swap music over the Internet.
The number of Internet users worldwide reaches 150 million by the beginning of 1999. More than 50% are from the United States. “E-commerce” becomes the new buzzword as Internet shopping rapidly spreads. MySpace.com is launched. -
2001
Napster is dealt a potentially fatal blow when the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco rules that the company is violating copyright laws and orders it to stop distributing copyrighted music. The file-swapping company says it is developing a subscription-based service. About 9.8 billion electronic messages are sent daily.
Wikipedia is created. -
2002
As of January, 58.5% of the U.S. population (164.14 million people) uses the Internet. Worldwide there are 544.2 million users.
The death knell tolls for Napster after a bankruptcy judge ruled in September that German media giant Bertelsmann cannot buy the assets of troubled Napster Inc. The ruling prompts Konrad Hilbers, Napster CEO, to resign and lay off his staff. -
2004
Internet Worm, called MyDoom or Novarg, spreads through Internet servers. About 1 in 12 email messages are infected.
Online spending reaches a record high—$117 billion in 2004, a 26% increase over 2003. -
2005
YouTube.com is launched. -
2006
There are more than 92 million websites online. -
2007
Legal online music downloads triple to 6.7 million downloads per week. Colorado Rockies' computer system crashes when it receives 8.5 million hits within the first 90 minutes of World Series ticket sales. The online game, World of Warcraft, hits a milestone when it surpasses 9 million subscribers worldwide in July. -
2012
A major protest online in January shakes up Congressional support for anti-Web piracy measures. The protest, including a 24-hour shutdown of the English-language Wikipedia site, is over two bills, the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House and the Protect IP Act in the Senate. The main goal of both bills is to stop illegal downloading and streaming of TV shows and movies online. The tech industry is concerned that the bills will give media companies too much power to shut down websites. -
2014
A coding error discovered in April in OpenSSL, encryption software that makes transactions between a computer and a remote secure, makes users vulnerable to having their usernames, passwords, and personal information stolen. Millions of banks, Internet commerce companies, email services, government sites, and social media sites rely on OpenSSL to conduct secure transactions. The coding error was made in 2012. Computer security experts encourage computer users to change their passwords. -
2015
On September 26, Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) spoke during the 70th annual U.N. General Assembly session, to increase awareness and garner support for the initiative, ONE--an organization "taking action to end extreme poverty and preventable disease." Zuckerberg's goal is to bring the Internet to the masses; universal Internet access, he claims, is a basic human right and is an essential tool in the fight to achieve global justice.