History of the Internet

ARPA

Dec 1, 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.

Email

Jan 1, 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.

TCP/IP

Jan 1, 1983

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.

DNS

Jan 1, 1984

Domain Name System (DNS) is established, with network addresses identified by extensions such as .com, .org, and .edu.

Worm Virus

Nov 2, 1988

A virus called the Internet Worm temporarily shuts down about 10% of the world's Internet servers.

Google

Jan 1, 1998

Google opens its first office, in California.

Napster & MySpace

Feb 1, 1999

College student Shawn Fanning invents Napster, a computer application that allows users to swap music over the Internet. MySpace.com is launched.

iTunes

Jan 1, 2003

Apple Computer introduces Apple iTunes Music Store, which allows people to download songs for 99 cents each.

Facebook

Feb 4, 2004

On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg launched "Thefacebook". Membership was initially restricted to students of Harvard College, and within the first month, more than half the undergraduate population at Harvard was registered on the service. In March 2004, Facebook expanded to Stanford, Columbia, and Yale. This expansion continued to all Ivy League and Boston area schools, and eventually all universities in Canada and the US. Facebook was then opened on September 26, 2006, to everyone.

YouTube

Jan 1, 2005

YouTube.com is launched.

Twitter

Jul 1, 2006

Twitter is an online social networking service and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, known as "tweets". It was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July.