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The History of the Internet

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  • ARPA Goes Online

    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.

  • Email

    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.

  • TCP/IP

    Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) is designed and in 1983 it becomes the standard for communicating between computers over the Internet. One of these protocols, FTP (File Transfer Protocol), allows users to log onto a remote computer, list the files on that computer, and download files from that computer.

  • Royal mail

    Presidential candidate Jimmy Carter and running mate Walter Mondale use email to plan campaign events.
    Queen Elizabeth sends her first email. She's the first state leader to do so.

  • Internet

    The word “Internet” is used for the first time.

  • DNS

    Domain Name System (DNS) is established, with network addresses identified by extensions such as .com, .org, and .edu.

  • America Online

    Quantum Computer Services, which later changes its name to America Online, debuts. It offers email, electronic bulletin boards, news, and other information.

  • Worm

    A virus called the Internet Worm temporarily shuts down about 10% of the world's Internet servers.

  • Rebirth

    The World (world.std.com) debuts as the first provider of dial-up Internet access for consumers.
    Tim Berners-Lee of CERN (European Laboratory for Particle Physics) develops a new technique for distributing information on the Internet. He calls it the World Wide Web. The Web is based on hypertext, which permits the user to connect from one document to another at different sites on the Internet via hyperlinks (specially programmed words, phrases, buttons, or graphics). Unlike other Internet protoc

  • Archie

    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.

  • Gopher

    Gopher, which provides point-and-click navigation, is created at the University of Minnesota and named after the school mascot. Gopher becomes the most popular interface for several years.

  • Mosaic

    Mosaic is developed by Marc Andreeson at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). It becomes the dominant navigating system for the World Wide Web, which at this time accounts for merely 1% of all Internet traffic.

  • Commerce

    Initial commerce sites are established and mass marketing campaigns are launched via email, introducing the term “spamming” to the Internet vocabulary.

  • Netscape Navigator

    Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark start Netscape Communications. They introduce the Navigator browser.

  • White House

    The White House launches its website, www.whitehouse.gov.

  • Dial-Up

    CompuServe, America Online, and Prodigy start providing dial-up Internet access.

  • java

    Sun Microsystems releases the Internet programming language called Java.

  • Vatican

    The Vatican launches its own website, www.vatican.va.

  • 45 Million Online

    Approximately 45 million people are using the Internet, with roughly 30 million of those in North America (United States and Canada), 9 million in Europe, and 6 million in Asia/Pacific (Australia, Japan, etc.). 43.2 million (44%) U.S. households own a personal computer, and 14 million of them are online.

  • Google

    oogle opens its first office, in California.