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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.
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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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The word “Internet” is used for the first time.
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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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Gopher, which provides point-and-click navigation, is created at the University of Minnesota and named after the school mascot. Another indexing system, WAIS (Wide Area Information Server), is developed by Brewster Kahle of Thinking Machines Corp.
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Approximately 45 million people are using the Internet, with roughly 30 million of those in North America, 9 million in Europe, and 6 million in Asia/Pacific. 43.2 million U.S. households own a personal computer, and 14 million of them are online.
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Google opens its first office, in California
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YouTube.com is launched
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There are more than 92 million websites online.
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Legal online music downloads triple to 6.7 million downloads per week. Colorado Rockies' computer system crashes when it receives 8.5 million hits within the first 90 minutes of World Series ticket sales. The online game World of Warcraft hits a milestone when it surpasses 9 million subscribers worldwide in July.