Timeline: Rick McGuire's History of the Internet Timeline

May 31, 1962

ARPA is created

Found a way that computers can talk to each other in case of
nuclear attack.

Oct 29, 1969

Computers at stanford and UCLA connected for the first time

The first hosts on what would one day become the Internet.

Oct 1, 1970

An Arpanet network is established.

Network between Harvard, MIT, and BBN (the company that created the "interface message processor" computers used to connect to the network) in 1970 was created.

Oct 1, 1971

Email was first developed

Developed by Ray Tomlinson, who also made the decision to use the "@" symbol to separate the user name from the computer name (which later on became the domain name).

Oct 1, 1974

The beginning of TCP/IP

A proposal was published to link Arpa-like networks together into a so-called "inter-network", Which would have no central control and would work around a transmission control protocol (which eventually became TCP/IP).

Oct 2, 1977

The first Personal Computer Modem is Invented

The modem was invented by Dennis Hayes and Dale Heatherington, and was introduced and initially sold to computer hobbyists.

Oct 2, 1978

Spam is Born

The first unsolicited commercial email message(later known as spam), was sent out to 600 California Arpanet users by Gary Thuerk.

Oct 2, 1979

MUD-The earliest form of multiplayer games was debuted

The precursor to World of Warcraft and Second Life was developed in 1979, and was called MUD (short for MultiUser Dungeon). MUDs were entirely text-based virtual worlds, combining elements of role-playing games, interactive, fiction, and online chat.

Oct 2, 1982

The first emoticon :-)

The first emoticon was used While many people credit Kevin MacKenzie with the invention of the emoticon in 1979, it was Scott Fahlman in 1982 who proposed using :-) after a joke, rather than the original -) proposed by MacKenzie.

Oct 2, 1984

The domain name system was created

The first Domain Name Servers (DNS) was created. The domain name system was important in that it made addresses on the Internet more human-friendly compared to its numerical IP address counterparts. DNS servers allowed Internet users to type in an easy-to-remember domain name and then converted it to the IP address automatically.

Oct 2, 1990

World Wide Web protocols finished

The code for the World Wide Web was written by Tim Berners-Lee, based on his proposal from the year before, along with the standards for HTML, HTTP, and URLs.

Oct 2, 1991

First web page created

1991 brought some major innovations to the world of the Internet. The first web page was created and, much like the first email explained what email was, its purpose was to explain what the World Wide Web was.

Jan 4, 1994