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The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) goes online for the first time, in December, creating a connection between four major universities across the United States. This provided the U.S with a communications network to link the country in the event of a military attack destroying conventional communications systems.
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Electronic mail, or 'Email' is created by Cambridge computer scientist, Ray Tomlinson. He decides to use the '@' symbol as a means to distinguish between a sender's name and their network name in their email address.
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Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, is designed. This is a way for a computer to provide a host access to the internet. by 1983, this design becomes the standard for communication over the internet.
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U.S Presidential candidate Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale, Carter's running mate, use email to plan campaign events. During this year, Queen Elizabeth sends her very first email and is the first state leader to do so.
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As the Domain Name System is established, network addresses become identified by extensions including '.com', '.org', and '.edu'
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'The Internet Worm' virus spreads across the web, temporarily shutting down about 10% of the world's Internet servers.
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The 'World Wide Web' makes its debut. Creator, Tim Berners-Lee develops this design as a means to distribute information across the internet. The design is based on hypertext, which allows users to connect from one document to another on different websites, via hyperlinks.
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Peter Deutsch makes the first effort to index the internet, creating a search engine called 'Archie'.
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Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark establish their computer services company, Netscape Communications. The two introduce the Navigator browser.
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By 1996, 45 million people are using the internet. 30 million of these users are from North America, 9 million are from Europe and 6 million are from Asia/Pacific.
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NASA releases images taken by Pathfinder on Mars, generating 46 million hits, a record breaking number at the time.
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Google opens its first office in California.
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Almost 10 billion electronic messages are sent each day
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Wikipedia, a free, online encyclopedia is created
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Online spending reaches $117 billion, a record high at the time.
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Mark Zuckerberg launches Facebook, it takes the world by storm.
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YouTube, a video sharing and viewing website is created
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Online (legal) music downloads triple to almost 7 million downloads per week.
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More than half of online time is spent on smartphone apps across developed countries.
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Videos across social media receive 4 billion views daily.
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The vast majority of the U.S Federal Communications Commission votes to revoke net neutrality.
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The number of devices that connect online such as smart TVs, webcams and even refrigerators exceeds 7 billion, almost matching the human population