1924 IBM Corporation is founded.
1939 The first electronic digital computer is built using vaccuum tubes. Vacuum tubes served as valves for electricity in the early computers. Here is a picture of a vacuum tube.
1948 Shockley and his team at Bell Labs invents the transitor. The transistor provided much of the same functionality as the vacuum tube but was much smaller, faster, more inexpensive. Here is a picture of a transistor.
1957 Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) formed in response to USSR launching the Sputnik satellite.
1961 First paper published on packet switching theory by Kleinrock.
1966 Planning for ARPANET begins.
1969 Construction begins on original four-node ARPANET network connecting University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), Scientific Research Institute (SRI) at Stanford, University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB), and the University of Utah. Bolt, Beranak, and Newmann, Inc. (BBN) developed most of the hardware for this project.
| Site | Online Date | Connected To | Function | System |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| UCLA | 9/69 | SRI, UCSB | Network Measurement | SDS Sigma 7 |
| SRI | 10/69 | UCLA, UCSB, Utah | Network Info | SDS 940 |
| UCSB | 11/69 | UCLA, SRI | Interactive Math | IBM 360 |
| Utah U | 12/69 | SRI | Graphics | PDP-10 |
Here is a diagram from historical archives of the original four-node ARPANET.
1971 The first e-mail program operating over a distributed network is developed. ARPANET now contains 15 nodes and 23 hosts.
1973 Basic ideas for the Internet proposed by Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn.
1974 Cerf and Kahn publish design of TCP (Transmission control program).
1978 TCP splits into TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) and IP (Internet Protocol).
1981 Many alternative networks to ARPANET are developed. Some of these are BITNET (Because It's Time Network), CSNET (Computer Science Research Network, SATNET (Atlantic Satellite Packet Network), EUNET (European Unix Network).
1982 CSNET/ARPANET gateway put in place. A gateway is a type of router.
1983 A name server is installed at the University of Wisconsin, so users are no longer required to know the exact path to other systems.
1984 The Domain Name System (DNS) was introduced. Here is a year-by-year account of registered country domains.
1984 JUNET (Japan Unix Network) is introduced.
1986 NSFNET created to connect the five supercomputing centers (Princeton, Carnegie-Mellon, UCSD, Cornell, UIUC) to the Internet.
1990 ARPANET ceases to exist.
1991 The Internet protocol Gopher is released by the University of Minnesota. It is desiged only for text files.
1991 WWW released by CERN. It is a text-based web browser using SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language). Later WWW would become a generic term for the portion of the Internet that could be accessed by a web browser (as opposed to other communication like email or voice-over-IP.)
1992 HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) released to the public. Hypertext is a link to another document file existing anywhere on the Internet. The major developer of HTML was Tim Berners-Lee of CERN.
1992 The Hypertext Transmission Protocol
(HTTP) is released. This is the process of retrieving a web document:
1993 Mosaic released as a browser for HTML files. It quickly superceded WWW. Mosaic immediately became popular and existed until 1997. The development team was led by Marc Andreeson at Illinois U. at NCSA.
1993 InterNIC (International Internet Consortium) is created to manage DNS and provide other internet services.
1993 Many companies and organizations establish an online presence including the White House and United Nations.
1993 MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) is introduced for transmitting binary data like images or sound in email messages.
1994 Many shopping malls come online. It becomes possible to order pizza over the internet: http://www.pizzahut.com/default.asp.
1994 Since 1994, the growth of the Internet has been exponential. Here is some information related to that growth of the web.
