In his 1999 book, “Weaving the Web”, Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web discusses the futuristic, utopian technology that eventually helped create the present day “inter-web” that has become an integral part of our technology based culture. He described the past, present and future of the World Wide Web as follows; “The vision I have for the Web is about anything being potentially connected with anything. It is a vision that provides us with freedom, and allows us to grow faster than we ever could when we were fettered by the hierarchical classification systems into which we bound ourselves. It leaves the entirety of our previous ways of working as just one tool among many. It leaves our previous fears for the future as one set among many. And it brings the workings of society closer to the workings of our minds.”

1957

The Soviet Union sent the satellite Sputnik 1 into space on October 4, 1957. In response, the U.S. government created the Advanced Research Project Agency, known today as DARPA—Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The agency’s specific mission was to prevent technological surprises like the launch of Sputnik, which signaled that the Soviets had beaten the U.S. into space. Today, DARPA’s mission is still to prevent technological surprise to the US, but also to create technological surprise for enemies of the U.S.

1963

In October 1963, J.C.R. Licklider from Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) was appointed head of the Behavioral Sciences and Command and Control programs at the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). He is credited with the earliest ideas for computer networks intended to allow general communications among computer users, and named it the Intergalactic Computer Network. He enlisted Ivan Sutherland and Bob Taylor to help create the network which became known as ARPANET, the first real network to run on packet switching technology which today is the dominant basis for data communications worldwide.  

1969

ARPA awarded the contract to build the ARPANET computer network to BBN in early 1969, and on October 29, 1969 small computers called Interface Message Processors (IMPs), similar to present day routers connected computes between Stanford and UCLA for the first time, becoming the first hosts on what would become the present day Internet. The first message, sent by UCLA student programmer Charley Kline, at 10:30 p.m. was intended to be the word “Login” however the link between the two colleges crashed and only the letters, l and o were transmitted as “lo”. An hour later, the programmers repaired the code and the message was correctly sent as “Login”. By December 5, 1969, the first permanent ARPANET four-node network was established between Stanford, UCLA, UC Santa Barbara and the University of Utah.

1971

In 1971, Ray Tomlinson developed email and made the decision to separate the user name from the domain name using the @ symbol. Also in 1971, Michael Hart manually typed the Declaration of Independence and launched Project Gutenberg to make information contained in books widely available in electronic form, thereby creating the first eBook. 

1973

The Norwegian Seismic Array (NORSAR) connected to the ARPANET in June 1973, making Norway the first country outside the U.S. to be connected to the network. Shortly after, a Terminal Interface Processor (TIP) was installed in London and a communication link from Norway to London was established.

1974

In 1974, after many failed attempts, a paper published by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, also known as “the fathers of the Internet,” resulted in the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). TCP was created to link ARPA-like networks together into an inter-network which had no central control. Nine years later, on January 1, 1983, “flag day,” TCP/IP would become the exclusive communication protocol for ARPANET.

ARPANET expanded to the East Coast when a BBN IMP in Cambridge, Massachusetts  connected to the network in 1974. By 1981, the were 213 host computers with another host connecting every 21 days.

1975

The first modern email program was developed by John Vittal, a programmer at USC, adding “Reply” and “Forward” functionality. 

The ARPANET was declared “operational” by the Defense Communications Agency.  

1976

The Apple 1 personal computer went on sale in July 1976. It had 4K RAM memory and a 6502 processor running at 1.023 MHz. It had a list price of $666.66 because Steve Wozniak liked repeating digits and because of a 1/3 markup on the $500 wholesale price. In October 2014, a vintage Apple 1 sold for $905,000 to the Henry Ford Musem in Dearborn, Michigan.

1977

The first PC modem was developed by Dennis Hayes and Dale Heatherington and was compatible with the Apple II. It was a 300 baud modem that ran at a blazing speed of 300 bits per second.

1978

The first bulletin board system (BBS) was developed in Chicago by Ward Christensen and Randy Seuss during the Great Blizzard. Also this year, the first unsolicited commercial email message, later known as SPAM, was sent out to 600 California ARPANET users by Gary Thuerk.

1980

British computer scientist, Tim Berners-Lee at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland launched ENQUIRE, a hypertext program that allowed scientists ate the particle physics lab to keep track of people, software and projects using hypertext and hyperlinks. 

1982

Scott Fahlman created the first popular emoticon 🙂 and proposed using it after a joke. Kevin MacKenzie, who created the similar emoticon -) in 1979 missed popularity by one character. 

Because of government funding, certain types of network communications were discouraged or prohibited. The following excerpt from the 1982 MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab Handbook regarding network etiquette is quite laughable with regard to today’s standards:

It is considered illegal to use the ARPANET for anything which is not in direct support of Government business … personal messages to other ARPANET subscribers (for example, to arrange a get-together or check and say a friendly hello) are generally not considered harmful … Sending electronic mail over the ARPANet for commercial profit or political purposes is both anti-social and illegal. By sending such messages, you can offend many people, and it is possible to get MIT in serious trouble with the Government agencies which manage the ARPANet.

1983

Name servers were developed in 1983 and the deadline for ARPANET computers to switch over to the TCP/IP protocols developed by Vinton Cerf took place on January 1, 1983. 

1984

On January 24th, Apple Computer introduced Macintosh, so that 1984 didn’t have to be like 1984. That same year, the Domain Name System (DNS) was created to make addresses on the Internet more human-friendly compared to its numerical IP address counterparts.

1985

The Whole Earth ‘Electronic Link, or “The Well” was developed by Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant in February of 1985. It began as a community of the readers and writers of the Whole Earth Review. It was the most influential online community in the world. An unknown writer by the name of David Bolling helped put together their publication in prehistoric times.

1987

By 1987, there were nearly 30,000 hosts on the internet

1988

The first major malicious internet-based attack was caused by “The Morris Worm” written by Robert Tappan Morris and caused major interruptions across large parts of the Internet.

1989

Apple Computer terminated its AppleLink program in 1989 and the project was renamed America Online. It made the Internet popular among average internet users, like my Dad. And, who can’t forget the plethora of AOL Subscribe Now CDs everywhere?

Tim Berners-Lee proposed the World Wide Web in his article in the March 1990 issue of MacWorld magazine. It was originally called “Mesh” and later changed to the term World Wide Web in 1990.

1990

ARPANET was formally decommissioned on February 28, 1990 when the original IMPs were phased out after the introduction of the National Science Foundation Network (NSFNet). Support at NSFNet was provided by the NSF Network Service Center (NNSC) with the publication of the Internet Manager’s Phonebook which listed the contact information for every domain name and IP address issued. Ed Krol at the University of Illinois authored the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Internet to help NSFNet users understand its capabilities. The first commercial dial-up Internet provider, The World, was launched the same year.

The code for the World Wide Web, written by Tim Berners-Lee, was introduced, along with the standards for HTML, HTTP ad URLs

1991

Senator Albert Gore, Jr. began crafting the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991, commonly referred to as the Gore Bill. The bill passed on December 9, 1991 and led to the National Information Infrastructure (NII) which he called the “Information Superhighway”. 

The first web page went live on August 6, 1991. It was dedicated to information on the World Wide Web project and was created by Tim Berners-Lee on a NeXT computer at CERN. The address was http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html  It still exists today via any web browser. His email address was timbal@info.cern.ch

The MP3 file format for compressed audio files became a standard in 1991 and was eventually used by Napster to share songs and albums freely over the internet.

The first webcam was deployed at a Cambridge University computer lab with the sole purpose to monitor a particular coffee maker so that lab users could avoid wasted trips to an empty coffee pot.

1993

Mosaic, the first graphical web browser for the general public, co-written by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, was released in June 1993. Version 1.0 for Macintosh was released in September and for Windows in November.

The White House and United Nations went online and marked the beginning of the .gov and .org domain names.

1994

Netscape Navigator, Mosaic’s first competitor was released in 1994 and dominated the web browser category throughout the 1990s, but by 2002 its usage almost disappeared being replaced by Internet Explorer from Microsoft. It’s source code was the base for Mozilla Application Suite, later renamed SeaMonkey which served as the base for Firefox, Safari and Google Chrome.

1995

Echo Bay made their first online sale in 1995 (they later changed their name to eBay). Amazon.com also launched in 1995 although it didn’t make a profit for six years. Also this year, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption was developed by Netscape to make financial transactions safer online.

1996

HoTMail (homage to HTML), the first webmail service was launched by Saber Bhatia and Jack Smith in Mountain View, California. They were acquired by Microsoft i 1997 for an estimated $400 million and became MSN Hotmail. 

1998

The first news story to be broken online was the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal, or “Monicagate”. It was posted on The Drudge Report after Newsweek killed the story. Maybe Al Gore shouldn’t have invented the internet.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin meet at Stanford in 1995, and begin collaborating on a search engine called “BackRub” They register their domain on September 15, 1997. After taking up too much bandwidth on Stanford servers, they launch their search engine company with the help of Andy Bechtolsheim and his $100,000 check to an entity that doesn’t exist yet – a company called Google Inc. The name, a play on the word “googol” a mathematical term for the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros, reflects Larry and Sergey’s mission to organize a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web.

2000

The dotcom collapse of 2000 resulted in huge losses in the technology sector. Hundreds of companies shut down, some of which never turned a profit. The NASDAQ, which listed a large number of tech companies affected by the bubble, peaked at over 5,000 the lost 10% of its value in a single day, and finally hit bottom in October 2002

2001

Wikipedia launched their online encyclopedia paving the way for collective web content generation and social media.

2003

MySpace, the popular social network, opened its online doors and became the largest social networking site in the world from 2005 to 2009. In June of 2006, it surpassed Google as the most visited website in the U.S. It was acquired by News Corporation in July 2005 for $580 million. In 2009, Justin Timberlake and Specific Media Group purchased the site for $35 million. In February 2016, it was sold to Time, Inc.

2004

The term “Social Media” coined by Chris Sharpley and Web 2.0 coined by Darcy DiNucci became mainstream concepts instantly.

The Digg social news site was launched in November 2004, followed by Reddit, Mixx, Yahoo! and Buzz. And last, but not least, the Facebook social media website was launched on February 2, 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg along with Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. It was only open to college students and was originally called The Facebook. As of March 2016, Facebook has more than 1.65 billion monthly active users.

2005

YouTube launched in 2005 offering free online video hosting and sharing. 

2006

Twitter, the online social networking service that enables users to send and read short, 140 character messages or “tweets”, was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey (founder of Square), Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Noah Glass. It went live in July of 2006. As of March 2016, Twitter has more than 310 million monthly active users.

2007

The most significant technology innovation of the 21st century, the iPhone, was introduced on June 29, 2007 and went on to sell over 6 million units over the next five quarters. Since 2007, Apple has released nine generations of iPhone models with nine major iOS releases. As of July 27, 2016 Apple has sold over 1 billion iPhones.

2016 and Beyond

There’s a certain feeling of freedom when using the internet, surfing the web, sending emails and texting messages. However, with this freedom comes the responsibility of abiding by basic rules of conduct and mutual respect in our communication with others. In the last twenty years, it has become too easy to get caught up in the efficiency of technology and yet miss the importance of direct interconnection with each other outside of technology. Hopefully, in the near future, technological innovations will focus more on bringing us together and living in the moment than on convenience and control.

FURTHER READING – 

Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet by Katie Hefner & Matthew Lyon

Hackers by Steven Levy

Weaving The Web by Tim Berners-Lee

GLOSSARY – 

IMAP – Internet Message Access Protocol (protocol, messaging)

A protocol allowing a client to access and manipulate electronic mail messages on a server. It permits manipulation of remote message folders (mailboxes), in a way that is functionally equivalent to local mailboxes. IMAP includes operations for creating, deleting, and renaming mailboxes;checking for new messages; permanently removing messages; searching; and selective fetching of message attributes, texts, and portions thereof. It does not specify a means of posting mail; this function is handled by a mail transfer protocolsuch as SMTP.

SMTP – Simple Mail Transfer Protocol is the standard e-mail protocol on the Internet and part of the TCP/IP protocol suite, as defined by IETF RFC 2821. SMTP defines the message format and the message transfer agent (MTA), which stores and forwards the mail. SMTP was originally designed for only plain text (ASCII text), but MIME and other encoding methods enable executable programs and multimedia files to be attached to and transported with the e-mail message. SMTP servers route SMTP messages throughout the Internet to a mail server that provides a message store for incoming mail. The mail server uses the POP3 or IMAP4 access protocol to communicate with the user’s e-mail program.

POP – A protocol designed to allow single-user computers to retrieve electronic mail from a POP server via TCP/IP. The default port is 110.

The POP server might be a computer with a permanent Internet connection whereas its clients might only connect to it occasionally. There are three versions: POP, POP2, and POP3. 

TCP/IP – Transmission Control Protocol over Internet Protocol is the de facto standard Ethernet protocols incorporated into 4.2BSD Unix. TCP/IPwas developed by DARPA in the1970s for internetworking and encompasses both network layer and transport layer protocols. While TCP and IP specify two protocols at specific protocol layers, TCP/IP is often used to refer to the entire DoD protocol suite based upon these, including telnet, FTP, UDP and RDP.

INTERNET – A system connecting computers around the world using a common software protocol for transmitting and receiving data. This protocol is known as TCP/IP, which stands for Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol. Although the Internet is an immense global network that reaches millions of homes and businesses, it began as a relatively simple computer network called ARPANET, funded by a Department of Defense(DoD) research agency. ARPANET linked educational institutions and research facilities. Users could transfer files, send e-mail, and post messages in a forum called USENET. Later, the development of HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol) allowed users to make connections from one electronic document to others by using hyperlinks. Such hyperlinked electronic documents (called web pages) can consist of text, pictures, and sound files. Over a billion of these webpages form the World Wide Web. The transmission of web pages, e-mails, files, and similar electronic data takes place on the massive network known as the Internet. What began as a simple way for military and educational researchers to communicate has developed into an international means of communicating ideas, as well as transmitting text, pictures, sound files, and even entire movies.

The internet is the global, distributed packet-switching network that interconnects computers. The Internet was initially developed by the US Defense Department in the1970s as a safeguard against the failure of military communications systems during a nuclear attack. By the mid-1980s, Internet technology was being appropriated by educational and research institutions as well as businesses and government organizations where it was widely viewed as an opportunity to document and access information. The Internet is now present in millions of organizations and private households around the globe and is essentially available to anyone with access to a personal computer and a service provider (cable, DSL, satellite or dial-up). Its wide variety of uses range from what are regarded as legitimate applications such as advertising, shopping, library catalogues,newspaper archives, and financial pages, to its use for recreational or illicit surfing, chat-rooms, gossip, and eroticism. Because of its use by individuals and groups wanting to broadcast and access illicit or illegal material, the Internet is often regarded as providing a democratic forum for underground subcultures and organizations to communicate their desires, beliefs, and political agendas. These democratizing implications also extend to the economy with consumers being able to access the best (cheapest) prices and products available. However, there is the issue that these possibilities remain limited to those with access to the technology and knowledge. The immense amount of information available on the Internet and the know-how required to make effective use of the technology restrict the applications for the average user who may spend hours moving between trivial sites. Alongside possibilities for global networking runs the danger that information-rich countries will monopolize both the technology and know-how required to distribute information and exclude dispossessed nations from the advantages available to those with access to the World Wide Web.

HTTP – HyperText Transfer Protocol is a protocol utilizing TCP to transfer hypertext requests and information between servers and browsers

WPA – Wi-Fi Protected Access is a security scheme for wireless networks, developed by the networking industry in response to the shortcomings of Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP). WPA uses Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) encryption and provides built-in authentication, giving security comparable to VPN tunneling with WEP, with the benefit of easier administration and use.

HDTV – High-Definition Television is a television system with a resolution of more than 1000 scan lines, as compared to 525-625 scan lines in conventional systems. Abbreviated HDTV.

DVI – Digital Visual Interface (DVI) is a video display interface developed by the Digital Display Working Group (DDWG). The digital interface is used to connect a video source to a display device, such as a computer monitor. DVI was developed to create an industry standard for the transfer of digital video content. The interface is designed to transmit uncompressed digital video and can be configured to support multiple modes such as DVI-D (digital only), DVI-A (analog only), or DVI-I (digital and analog).

HDMI – HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface) is a compact audio/video interface for transferring uncompressed video data and compressed/uncompressed digital audio data from a HDMI-compliant device to a compatible computer monitor, video projector, digital television, or digital audio device. HDMI is a digital replacement for existing analog video standards.

DNS – A general-purpose distributed, replicated, data query service chiefly used on the Internet to map the easily remembered names of host computers (domain names) to their respective Internet Protocol (IP) numbers. It is also a software database program that converts domain names to Internet Protocol addresses, and vice versa.