Timeline: Will Donnelly's History of the Internet Timeline

Jan 1, 1962

Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) is created

Found a way for computers to communicate 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

Jan 1, 1970

An Arpanet network was established

Network between Harvard, MIT, and BBN (the company that created the "interfaced Messenger used to connect the network) was created

Jan 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 would later become the domain name)

Jan 1, 1974

The beginning of TCP/IP

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

Jan 1, 1977

The first personal computer modem was invented

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

Jan 1, 1978

Spam is born

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

Jan 1, 1979

MUD- the first form of a multiplayer game was debuted

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

Jan 1, 1982

The first emoticon :-)

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

Jan 1, 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.

Jan 1, 1990

World Wide Web protocols finished

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

Jan 1, 1991

First Web page created

This 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.