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Communications Network
An MIT and ARPA scientist, J.C.R. Licklider, proposed connecting computers to keep a communications network active in the US in the event of a nuclear attack. -
ARPANET
Another MIT scientist, Lawrence G. Roberts, developed a way of sending information from one computer to another that he called “packet switching." This network was called ARPANET. -
First Message
ARPANET delivered its first message, "LO," from one computer (at Stanford) to another (at UCLA). Charles Kline, a student, failed to send the complete attempted message, "LOGIN," because the network system crashed. -
E-mail
E-mail (first called network mail) was introduced by Ray Tomlinson of BBN. -
Internet
The term "Internet" was coined as an abbreviation of "internetworking." -
TCP/IP
Two ARPA scientists, Vincent Cerf and Bob Kahn, create "Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)," a system that converts messages into streams of packets at the source then reassembles them back into messages at the destination. Cerf and Kahn also created "Internet Protocol (IP)," a system that ensures packets are routed across multiple networks with multiple standards. Together they were known as TCP/IP. -
The Queen
Queen Elizabeth II sends her first email. -
MILnet
ARPANET's military sector separated and became MILnet, assigning a subset for public research. -
NSFnet
The National Science Foundation created a network (NSFNET), and then so did other government agencies like NASA, the National Institutes of Health, and the Department of Energy. -
New domains
The Domain Name System (DNS) created six different domain names to denote different institutions' websites (edu, mil, org, net, com, gov). -
Internationalization
The internationalization of the Internet started when Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist from the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) opened its first external IP connections. -
World Wide Web
Tim Berners-Lee introduced the World Wide Web: an Internet that was not simply a way to send files from one place to another but was itself a “web” of information that anyone on the Internet could retrieve. -
Mosaic
Students and researchers from the University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign created a browser, Mosaic, which allowed web-users to see words and pictures on the same page for the first time and to navigate using scrollbars and clickable links. -
Commercialization
Congress decided the Web can be used for commercial purposes, thus leading companies to set up websites of their own, and e-commerce entrepreneurs to use the Internet to sell goods directly to customers. -
Windows 95
Bill Gates's Microsoft creates a Web browser for Windows 95. -
Yahoo!
Jerry Yang and David Filo created Yahoo! -
No more NSFNET
NSFNET is eventually decommissioned as the Internet develops into a commercial enterprise. -
Google
Larry Page and Sergey Brin launched the Google search engine. -
Facebook
Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook, and the social networking era began. -
YouTube
Jawed Karim, Steve Chen and Chad Hurley launched YouTube, and streaming videos began. -
Twitter
Jack Dorsey and Noah Glass launched Twitter. -
Instagram
Kevin Systrom launched Instagram. -
Arab Revolution
Facebook and Twitter drive a successful online (and real life) revolution in six Middle Eastern countries (Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen and Bahrain).
