History of the Internet By lauren.lebel Oct 21, 1961 First packet-switching papers Oct 21, 1966 ARPANET planning starts Oct 21, 1980 Ethernet standard introduced Oct 21, 1981 Computer Science Network (CSNET) Oct 21, 1982 TCP/IP Protocol suite formalized Oct 21, 1990 ARPANET decommissioned Oct 21, 1995 NSFNET decommissioned Oct 21, 1998 NSFNET decommissioned Oct 21, 2006 First meeting of the Internet Governance Forum Oct 21, 2012 ICANN begins accepting applications for new generic top-level domain names