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USSR launches Sputnik, and with it the oppurtunity for global communications.
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Bell Lab researchers create the modem, which changes digital signals to electronic signals and back, enabling communications between computers.
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U.S. government creates the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in response to Sputnik launch.
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ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Exchange) is developed by a joint industry-government committee. ASCII lets machines from different makers exchange data.
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Rand Corporations' Paul Baran develops message blocks in the U.S., while in Britain, Donald Davies creates packet-switching, which is similar to message blocks.
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Lawrence Roberts and Thomas Marill get an ARPA contract to create the first wide-area network.This network proves that packet-switchingm offers the best model for communication between computers.
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Robert Taylor, who is directing ARPA's computer research, initiates the ARPAnet project, the foundation for today's Internet.
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Roberts comes to ARPA to help design and experiment with the ARPAnet plans.
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Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc. (BBN) are awarded the ARPA contract to build the Interface Message Processers.
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The first data packets are sent between networked computers at UCLA by Charlie Klein. The first try was unsuccessful, as the "G" of "LOGIN" crashed the system. The second try succeeded.
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Professer Peter Kirstein of UCL in London starts the first European ARPAnet that has transatlantic IP connectivity.
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Ray Tomilson of BBN invents the email program to send messages across a distributed network. The standard address was made "user@host".
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Jon Postel helps create the first Internet address registry, which later becomes the Internet Assigned Number Authority (IANA). This administeres IPaddresses and other important Internet functions.
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Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn publish a paper which uses the term "Internet" for the first time.
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Professor David Farber helps concieve and organize the National Science Foundation's Computer Science Network (CSNet).
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Kilnam Chon, a professor at Keio University in Japan, develops first Internet connection in Asia, called SDN.
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Mark Andreessen and Eric Bina create the Mosaic Browser at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).
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The World Wide Web is finally made available to the public for the first time on the internet.
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Al Gore creates the High-performance Computing and Communications Act of 1991 (the Gore Bill), which gives $600 million to improve high performance computing and create the National Research and Educational Network. It also creates the National Information Infrustructure, or Information Superhighway. (website refused to put event in correct place)
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Brandenburg and his team settle on a file extention for the audio format, shortening MPEG, Layer 3 to MP3.
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Google.com is registered as a domain, and is a play on the mathematical term for 1 followed by 100 zeros a "googol", to represent its seemingly infinite amount of data.
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Jimmy Wales launches Wikipedia. There are a half a million Internet users.
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YouTube.com was registered on February 14, 2005, as a video sharing site where anyone can upload a video and anyone can choose to view it.
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A timeline is uploaded to TimeToast.com for a school project showing the history of the Internet by user bexgoodharttheawesome.
