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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.
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ARPANET, and all networks attached to it, officially adopts the TCP/IP networking protocol. From now on, all networks that use TCP/IP are collectively known as the Internet. The number of Internet sites and users grow exponentially.
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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.”
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A virus called the Internet Worm temporarily shuts down about 10% of the world's Internet servers.
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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.
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CERN releases the World Wide Web software developed earlier by Tim Berners-Lee. Specifications for HTML (hypertext markup language), URL (uniform resource locator), and HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol) launch a new era for content distribution.At the University of Minnesota, a team of programmers led by Mark McCahill releases a point-and-click navigation tool, the "Gopher" document retrieval system, simplifying access to files over the Internet.
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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. -
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.
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Google opens first office in California, now the largest business in the world.
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Youtube is launched. Now one of the most visited websites in the entire web.
