Computer, internet history

- 5 000 000 000

Gravity makes dust and gaz gathering and forming stars and planets

- 13 000 000 000

Space and time starts

-500

As early as the 5th century BC, Greek civilizations designed their tools and workplaces based on ergonomic principles. According to the International Ergonomics Association, ergonomics*—or human factors—*is “the scientific discipline concerned with the understanding of interactions among humans and other elements of a system, and the profession that applies theory, principles, data and methods to design and optimize human well-being and overall system performance.” One of the strongest indications that the Ancient Greeks were well aware of ergonomic principles is the way that Hippocrates described how a surgeon’s workplace should be set up. He refers to the lighting in the room, the surgeon’s positioning*—“the surgeon may stand or be seated, in a posture comfortable for him”—*and the arrangement of tools; “they must be positioned in such a way as to not obstruct the surgeon, and also be within easy reach when required.”

-500

Panini: the Indian Mathematician introduces the forerunner to modern formal language theory

-4000

Dating back some 6,000 years, Feng Shui literally translates as “wind” and “water”, and refers to the spatial arrangement of objects (e.g. furniture) in relation to the flow of energy (chi). In practice, Feng Shui is all about arranging your surroundings in the most optimal, harmonious or user-friendly way— be it an office, bedroom or entire building. It concerns everything from layout and framework to materials and colors.

1492

Leonardo da Vinci: Drawings by Leonardo da Vinci depict inventions such as flying machines, including a helicopter, the first mechanical calculator and one of the first programmable robots

1614

** John Napier:** invents a system of moveable rods (Napier's Rods) based on logarithms which were able to multiply, divide and calculate square and cube roots John Napier invents Napier’s Bones computing machine, a manual calculation device for calculating number quotas.

1624

Wilhelm Schickard constructs the first mechanical computer, which used techniques such as toothed wheels. This computer was called a “computer clock” because the wheels used were originally developed for watches.

1642

Blaise Pascal creates the barometer, the first automatic computing machine, built to help his father in calculating taxes. The machine was doing assemblies and subtractions using wheels numbered from zero to nine.

1671

Gottfried Leibniz: becomes known as one of the founding fathers of calculus

1679

Gottfried Leibniz perfects the binary system, thus laying the foundations for computing machines.

1692

Philosopher and mathematician Gottfried von Leibniz carried on Pascal’s invention through a more advanced computing machine, which could perform multiplications through repeated assembly.

1725

Basile Bouchon used a perforated paper loop in a weaving war to reproduce a template on a fabric.

1726

Jean-Baptiste Falcon, Basile Bouchon’s collaborator, came up with improvements by creating the semi-automatic weaving war, which used perforated paper cards caught together.

1751

Ben Franklin conducts his famous experiment with a kite proving the connection between lightning and small electric sparks.

1801

Joseph-Marie Jaquard invents the first semi-automatic weaving war using the concept of punching cards to weave complex patterns into canvas. This invention becomes the foundation of a programmable machine.

1820

Arithmometer: The Arithmometer was the first mass-produced calculator invented by Charles Xavier Thomas de Colmar

1826

1831

Michael Faraday creates electric dynamite and manages to obtain electricity in a continuous and practical way, an invention that will be used for information technology in the contemporary era.

1833

Charles Babbage designs Analytical Engine, a general-purpose mechanical computer. The idea was too complex for the time because parts could not be made with such precision, so the project was abandoned.

1853

Tabulating Machine: is invented by Per Georg Scheutz and his son Edvard

1854

George Boole publishes the article An Investigation into the Laws of Thought, which lays the foundations of Boolean algebra and develops a new kind of logic, mathematical logic.

1867

Charles Sanders Peirce introduces Boolean algebra in the United States. In addition, Peirce defined concepts such as: inductive reasoning, mathematical induction and logical inference. He noted that logical operations can be performed through electrical switching circuits idea used decades later to produce digital computers.

1878

Thomas Edison and Joseph Swan manage to invent the incandescent filament bulb.

1882

The first power generation station was opened on Pearl Street in Lower Manhattan, New York.

1884

Comptometer: The Comptometer which is operated by pressing keys is developed by Dorr E. Felt

1890

Herman Hollerith: invents a counting machine which has increment mechanical counters Herman Hollerith builds the mechanical tab with perforated cards for the American census, arising from a crisis that by 1880 the population of the United States had grown so large that it took more than seven years to calculate the results of the census.

1900s (early)

Frederick Winslow Taylor, a mechanical engineer and pioneer of Taylorism*—*otherwise known as Scientific Management. On a mission to make human labor more efficient, Taylor conducted extensive research into the interactions between workers and their tools. In 1911, he wrote “The Principles of Scientific Management” in which he asserted that systematic management is the solution to inefficiency. Although Taylorism was widely criticised for the way it reduced people to mere cogs in a machine, Taylor’s focus on optimizing the relationship between humans and their tools.

1910

The Mundaneum was an institution which aimed to gather together all the world's knowledge  and classify it according to a system called the Universal Decimal Classification by Paul Otlet.

1922

n 1922, the world was just emerging from the aftermath of the Spanish flu—1922 ushered in a new era for progress and rebirth. In that year, in the United States: There were ~12 million cars on the road The price of gas was 11 cents per gallon The Ford Model-T cost a mere $319 Only 40% of Americans had electricity in their homesOnly  35% had a telephone Life expectancy was 58 years for men and 61 years for women (about 20 years less than today)Top breakthrough inventions 1922? There were ONLY 7 (that I could find)... The first water skis were demonstrated using wooden boards and a clothesline The first manually retractable, convertible car hardtop was invented The electric blender was invented for making malts and milkshakes The radial arm saw was invented to cut and shape long pieces of stock materialThe use of insulin for the first time in a person to treat diabetesVitamin E was discoveredThe Australians invented Vegemite

1924

Hollerith’s company joins with others to create the IBM corporation, which would later be the world market leader from 1950 to 1980.

1930

Vannevar Bush: develops a partly electronic Difference Engine (the precursor to the digital computer)

1934

Paul Otlet préfigure le concept d’internet.

1936

Allan Turing designs the cars that bear his name. He argued that they could solve any mathematical problem based on an algorithmic procedure. Turing machines will later be the base of modern computers.

1937

Dr. John V. Atanasoff together that Clifford Berry’s assistant built the first digital electronic computer. In 1973, he won the case to cancel the ENIAC patent, and Atanasoff received the merits of inventor of the first digital electronic computer.

1938

Konrad Zuse: creates the Z1 Computer a binary digital computer using punch tape

1939

John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford Berry: develop the ABC (Atanasoft-Berry Computer) prototype

1940’s

Continuing on the quest for workplace efficiency, Toyota developed their famous human-centered production system. Unlike Taylorism, the Toyota Production System was based upon respect for people, and much attention was paid to creating the optimal working environment. Not only that: human input was considered crucial, and was actively encouraged. Toyota factory workers could pull a cord to stop the assembly line if they had feedback or suggestions to improve the process, for example*—*like usability testing in action, if you will. This represents a key step in UX history as it really brought attention to the importance of how humans interact with machines. No matter how advanced technology is, its value is limited to its usability*—*and that’s exactly what UX design is all about.

1943

Colossus: Alan Turing develops the code-breaking machine Colossus The British Colossus computer, the first fully programmable digital electronic computer built by Tommy Flowers, is used during World War II and manages to crack Lord Lorenz’s code.

1945

John von Neumann, a renowned mathematician and computer pioneer, talks about the ability of computers to store programs in the preliminary speech on the logical design of an electronic computing tool. Most modern computers are built on von Neumann architecture and implement the functional model of the Turing machine.

1945

** ENIAC:** John Presper Eckert & John W. Mauchly develop the ENIAC ( Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) John von Neumann, a renowned mathematician and computer pioneer, talks about the ability of computers to store programs in the preliminary speech on the logical design of an electronic computing tool. Most modern computers are built on von Neumann architecture and implement the functional model of the Turing machine.

1945

** Computer Bug:** the term computer ‘bug’ is first used by Grace Hopper

1946

F.C. Williams: develops his cathode-ray tube (CRT) storing device, the forerunner to random-access memory (RAM)

1947

** Pilot ACE:** Donald Watts Davies joins Alan Turing to build the fastest digital computer in England at the time, the Pilot ACE Douglas Engelbart: theorises on interactive computing with keyboard and screen display instead of on punchcards

1948

** Frederic Calland Williams & Tom Kilburn:** develop the SSEM "Small Scale Experimental Machine" digital CRT storage which was soon nicknamed the "Baby" The computer called “Baby” was activated, the first computer with a stored program that used the binary system, in the Manchester University laboratory. Small Scale Experimental Machine was the official name and was the first computer to use von Neumann architecture and perform several operations.

1950

Hideo Yamachito: creates the first electronic computer in Japan Alan Turing: publishes his paper - Computing Machinery and Intelligence which helps create the Turing Test

1951

John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert complete UNIVAC1, the first commercial and administrative computer produced in the United States. It was used by the United States Census Bureau for the population census. The fifth such computer was used by CBS television station in 1952 to successfully predict the outcome of the election using only 1% of the vote.

1951

LEO: T. Raymond Thompson and John Simmons develop the first business computer, the Lyons Electronic Office (LEO) at Lyons Co. UNIVAC: UNIVAC I (UNIVersal Automatic Computer I) is introduced - the first commercial computer made in the United States and designed principally by John Presper Eckert & John W. Mauchly EDVAC: The EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer) begins performing basic tasks. Unlike the ENIAC, it was binary rather than decimal

1953

The IBM 701 becomes available and a total of 19 are sold to the scientific community

1955

Another key figure in the history of UX design is Henry Dreyfuss, an American industrial engineer who was renowned for designing and improving the usability of some of the most iconic consumer products*—*including the Hoover vacuum cleaner, the tabletop telephone and the Royal Typewriter Company’s Quiet DeLuxe model. Dreyfuss’ design philosophy was based on common sense and scientific approaches. In 1955, he wrote Designing for People, which pretty much explains UX design in a nutshell: “When the point of contact between the product and the people becomes a point of friction, then the [designer] has failed. On the other hand, if people are made safer, more comfortable, more eager to purchase, more efficient—or just plain happier—by contact with the product, then the designer has succeeded.”

1956

Optical fibre is invented by Basil Hirschowitz, C. Wilbur Peters, and Lawrence E. Curtiss

1957

Seymor Cray and William Norris founded Control Data (CDC). In the 1960s it produced the fastest computers in the world. In 1972 Seymor Cray, known as the “father of supercomputers”, left the CDC and founded his own company Cray Research, which still exists today as CRAY Inc.

1958

Bell Labs announces the first transistor, which becomes the basis of the electronic age. After this invention it becomes possible to make smaller computers.

1958

Silicon chip: the first integrated circuit, or silicon chip, is produced by Jack Kilby & Robert Noyce

1959

Paul Baran: theorises on the "survivability of communication systems under nuclear attack", digital technology and symbiosis between humans and machines

1961

Unimate: General Motors puts the first industrial robot, Unimate, to work in a New Jersey factory

1962

The first computer game: the Spacewar Computer Game is created invented by Steve Russell & MIT 1961 – Stephen Russell, along with Martin Graetz and Wayne Wiitanen, invents the first video game. Spacewar! initially run on a PDP-1 computer, the first computer that allowed multiple users to exist at once.

1962

At MIT, a wide variety of computer experiments are going on. Ivan Sutherland uses the TX-2 to write Sketchpad, the origin of graphical programs for computer-aided design. J.C.R. Licklider writes memos about his Intergalactic Network concept, where everyone on the globe is interconnected and can access programs and data at any site from anywhere. He is talking to his own ‘Intergalactic Network’ of researchers across the country. In October, ‘Lick’ becomes the first head of the computer research program at ARPA, which he calls the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO). Leonard Kleinrock completes his doctoral dissertation at MIT on queuing theory in communication networks, and becomes an assistant professor at UCLA. The SAGE (Semi Automatic Ground Environment), based on earlier work at MIT and IBM, is fully deployed as the North American early warning system. Operators of ‘weapons directing consoles’ use a light gun to identify moving objects that show up on their radar screens. SAGE sites are used to direct air defense. This project provides experience in the development of the SABRE air travel reservation system and later air traffic control systems.

https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1960s/

1963

The Computer Mouse: Douglas Engelbart invents and patents the first computer mouse (nicknamed the mouse because the tail came out the end) The American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) is developed to standardize data exchange among computers 1963 – Douglas Engelbart and Bill English invent the mouse. Engelbart was also the leader of the team that invented the computer network and hypertext.

1963

Licklider starts to talk with Larry Roberts of Lincoln Labs, director of the TX-2 project, Ivan Sutherland, a computer graphics expert whom he has hired to work at ARPA and Bob Taylor, who joins ARPA in 1965. Lick contracts with MIT, UCLA, and BBN to start work on his vision. Syncom, the first synchronous communication satellite, is launched. NASA’s satellite is assembled in the Hughes Aircraft Company’s facility in Culver City, California. Total payload is 55 pounds. A joint industry-government committee develops ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), the first universal standard for computers. It permits machines from different manufacturers to exchange data. 128 unique 7-bit strings stand for either a letter of the English alphabet, one of the Arabic numerals, one of an assortment of punctuation marks and symbols, or a special function, such as the carriage return.

https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1960s/

1964

Clays CDC 6600 becomes the fastest computer.

1964

Engineers aren’t the only ones who had a part to play in the history of UX. He might not seem like the most obvious candidate, but Walt Disney is often hailed as one of the first UX designers in history. Indeed, Disney was obsessed with creating magical, immersive, near-perfect user experiences, and the way he set about building Disney World was a true stroke of UX genius. In his article for UX Magazine, Joseph Dickerson outlines Walt Disney’s guiding principles for his team of engineers*—*or Imagineers, as he called them: know your audience, wear your guest’s shoes, communicate with color, shape, form and texture… Disney envisioned a place where “the latest technology can be used to improve the lives of people”

1964

Simultaneous work on secure packet switching networks is taking place at MIT, the RAND Corporation, and the National Physical Laboratory in Great Britain. Paul Baran, Donald Davies, Leonard Kleinrock, and others proceed in parallel research. Baran is one of the first to publish, On Data Communications Networks. Kleinrock’s thesis is also published as a seminal text on queuing theory.IBM’s new System 360 computers come onto the market and set the de facto worldwide standard of the 8-bit byte, making the 12-bit and 36-bit word machines almost instantly obsolete. The $5 billion investment by IBM into this family of six mutually compatible computers pays off, and within two years orders for the System 360 reach 1,000 per month.On-line transaction processing debuts with IBM’s SABRE air travel reservation system for American Airlines. SABRE (Semi-Automatic Business Research Environment) links 2,000 terminals in sixty cities via telephone lines.Licklider leaves ARPA to return to MIT, and Ivan Sutherland moves to IPTO. With IPTO funding, MIT’s Project MAC acquires a GE-635 computer and begins the development of the Multics timesharing operating system.

https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1960s/

1965

DEC unveils the PDP-8, the first commercially successful minicomputer. Small enough to sit on a desktop, it sells for $18,000 — one-fifth the cost of a low-end IBM/360 mainframe. The combination of speed, size, and cost enables the establishment of the minicomputer in thousands of manufacturing plants, offices, and scientific laboratories. With ARPA funding, Larry Roberts and Thomas Marill create the first wide-area network connection. They connect the TX-2 at MIT to the Q-32 in Santa Monica via a dedicated telephone line with acoustic couplers. The system confirms the suspicions of the Intergalactic Network researchers that telephone lines work for data, but are inefficient, wasteful of bandwidth, and expensive. As Kleinrock predicts, packet switching offers the most promising model for communication between computers.Late in the year, Ivan Sutherland hires Bob Taylor from NASA. Taylor pulls together the ideas about networking that are gaining momentum amongst IPTO’s computer-scientist contractors.The ARPA-funded JOSS (Johnniac Open Shop System) at the RAND Corporation goes on line. The JOSS system permits online computational problem solving at a number of remote electric typewriter consoles. The standard IBM Model 868 electric typewriters are modified with a small box with indicator lights and activating switches. The user input appears in green, and JOSS responds with the output in black.

https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1960s/

1966

Another key figure in the history of UX design is Henry Dreyfuss, an American industrial engineer who was renowned for designing and improving the usability of some of the most iconic consumer products*—*including the Hoover vacuum cleaner, the tabletop telephone and the Royal Typewriter Company’s Quiet DeLuxe model. Dreyfuss’ design philosophy was based on common sense and scientific approaches. In 1955, he wrote Designing for People, which pretty much explains UX design in a nutshell: “When the point of contact between the product and the people becomes a point of friction, then the [designer] has failed. On the other hand, if people are made safer, more comfortable, more eager to purchase, more efficient—or just plain happier—by contact with the product, then the designer has succeeded.”

1966

Taylor succeeds Sutherland to become the third director of IPTO. In his own office, he has three different terminals, which he can connect by telephone to three different computer systems research sites around the nation. Why can’t they all talk together? His problem is a metaphor for that facing the ARPA computer research community. Taylor meets with Charles Herzfeld, the head of ARPA, to outline his issues. Twenty-minutes later he has a million dollars to spend on networking. The idea is to link all the IPTO contractors. After several months of discussion, Taylor persuades Larry Roberts to leave MIT to start the ARPA network program. Simultaneously, the English inventor of packet switching, Donald Davies, is theorizing at the British National Physical Laboratory (NPL) about building a network of computers to test his packet switching concepts. Honeywell introduces the DDP-516 minicomputer and demonstrates its ruggedness with a sledgehammer. This catches Roberts' eye.

https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1960s/

1967

Larry Roberts convenes a conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to bring the ARPA researchers together. At the conclusion, Wesley Clark suggests that the network be managed by interconnected ‘Interface Message Processors’ in front of the major computers. Called IMPs, they evolve into today’s routers. Roberts puts together his plan for the ARPANET. The separate strands of investigation begin to converge. Donald Davies, Paul Baran, and Larry Roberts become aware of each other’s work at an ACM conference where they all meet. From Davies, the word ‘packet’ is adopted and the proposed line speed in ARPANET is increased from 2.4 Kbps to 50 Kbps. The acoustically coupled modem, invented in the early sixties, is vastly improved by John van Geen of the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). He introduces a receiver that can reliably detect bits of data amid the hiss heard over long-distance telephone connections.

https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1960s/

1968

Roberts and the ARPA team refine the overall structure and specifications for the ARPANET. They issue an RFQ for the development of the IMPs. At Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), Frank Heart leads a team to bid on the project. Bob Kahn plays a major role in shaping the overall BBN designs. BBN wins the project in December. Roberts works with Howard Frank and his team at Network Analysis Corporation designing the network topology and economics. Kleinrock’s team prepares the network measurement system at UCLA, which is to become the site of the first node. The ILLIAC IV, the largest supercomputer of its time, is being built at Burroughs under a NASA contract. More than 1,000 transistors are squeezed onto its RAM chip, manufactured by the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation, yielding 10 times the speed at one-hundredth the size of equivalent core memory. ILLIAC-IV will be hooked to the ARPANET so that remote scientists can have access to its unique capabilities.

https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1960s/

1969

ARPANET: The U.S. Department of Defence sets up the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) with the intention of creating a computer network that can withstand any type of disaster. It becomes the first building block for what the internet is has become today

1969

Frank Heart puts a team together to write the software that will run the IMPs and to specify changes in the Honeywell DDP- 516 they have chosen. The team includes Ben Barker, Bernie Cosell, Will Crowther, Bob Kahn, Severo Ornstein, and Dave Walden. Four sites are selected. At each, a team gets to work on producing the software to enable its computers and the IMP to communicate. At UCLA, the first site, Vint Cerf, Steve Crocker, and Jon Postel work with Kleinrock to get ready. On April 7, Crocker sends around a memo entitled ‘Request for Comments.’ This is the first of thousands of RFCs that document the design of the ARPANET and the Internet. The team calls itself the Network Working Group (RFC 10), and comes to see its job as the development of a ‘protocol,’ the collection of programs that comes to be known as NCP (Network Control Protocol). The second site is the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), where Doug Engelbart saw the ARPA experiment as an opportunity to explore wide-area distributed collaboration, using his NLS system, a prototype ‘digital library.’ SRI supported the Network Information Center, led by Elizabeth (Jake) Feinler and Don Nielson. At the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) Glen Culler and Burton Fried investigate methods for display of mathematical functions using storage displays to deal with the problem of screen refresh over the net. Their investigation of computer graphics supplies essential capabilities for the representation of scientific information. After installation in September, handwritten logs from UCLA show the first host-to-host connection, from UCLA to SRI, is made on October 29, 1969. The first 'Log-In' crashes the SRI host, but the next attempt works!

https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1960s/

1970

RAM: Intel introduces the world's first available dynamic RAM ( random-access memory) chip and the first microprocessor, the Intel 4004

1970

Nodes are added to the ARPANET at the rate of one per month. Programmers Dennis Ritchie and Kenneth Thompson at Bell Labs complete the UNIX operating system on a spare DEC minicomputer. UNIX combines many of the time-sharing and file-management features offered by Multics and wins a wide following, particularly among scientists. Bob Metcalfe builds a high-speed (100 Kbps) network interface between the MIT IMP and a PDP-6 to the ARPANET. It runs for 13 years without human intervention. Metcalfe goes on to build another ARPANET interface for Xerox PARC’s PDP-10 clone (MAXC). DEC announces the Unibus for its PDP-11 minicomputers to allow the addition and integration of myriad computer-cards for instrumentation and communications. In December, the Network Working Group (NWG) led by Steve Crocker finishes the initial ARPANET Host-to-Host protocol, called the Network Control Protocol (NCP).

https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1970s/

1970’s

The 1970s kicked off the era of personal computers, with psychologists and engineers working together to focus on the user experience. Many of the most influential developments came out of Xerox’s PARC research center, such as the graphical user interface and the mouse. In many ways, PARC set the tone for personal computing as we know it today. And now over to Apple. In 1984, the original Macintosh was released*—*Apple’s first mass-market PC featuring a graphical user interface, built-in screen and mouse. Since then, Apple has been a true innovator of user experience, from the first iPod in 2001 to the iPhone in 2007. The tech giant even had a hand in coining the term UX design…

1971

Pocket calculator: is invented by Sharp Corporation Floppy Disk: is created by David Noble with IBM - Nicknamed the "Floppy" for its flexibility.

1971

The ARPANET begins the year with 14 nodes in operation. BBN modifies and streamlines the IMP design so it can be moved to a less cumbersome platform than the DDP-516. BBN also develops a new platform, called a Terminal Interface Processor (TIP) which is capable of supporting input from multiple hosts or terminals. The Network Working Group completes the Telnet protocol and makes progress on the file transfer protocol (FTP) standard. At the end of the year, the ARPANET contains 19 nodes as planned. Intel’s release of the 4004, the first ‘computer on a chip,’ ushers in the epoch of the microprocessor. The combination of memory and processor on a single chip reduces size and cost, and increases speed, continuing the evolution from vacuum tube to transistor to integrated circuit. Many small projects are carried out across the new network, including the demonstration of an aircraft-carrier landing simulator. However, the overall traffic is far lighter than the network’s capacity. Something needs to stimulate the kind of collaborative and interactive atmosphere consistent with the original vision. Larry Roberts and Bob Kahn decide that it is time for a public demonstration of the ARPANET. They choose to hold this demonstration at the International Conference on Computer Communication (ICCC) to be held in Washington, DC, in October 1972.

https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1970s/

1972

The ARPANET grows by ten more nodes in the first 10 months of 1972. The year is spent finishing, testing and releasing all the network protocols, and developing network demonstrations for the ICCC. At BBN, Ray Tomlinson writes a program to enable electronic mail to be sent over the ARPANET. It is Tomlinson who develops the ‘user@host’ convention, choosing the @ sign arbitrarily from the non-alphabetic symbols on the keyboard. Unbeknownst to him, @ is already in use as an escape character, prompt, or command indicator on many other systems. Other networks will choose other conventions, inaugurating a long period known as the e-mail ‘header wars.’ Not until the late 1980s will ‘@’ finally become a worldwide standard. Following the lead of Intel’s 4004 chip, hand-held calculators ranging from the simple Texas Instruments four-function adding machines to the elaborate Hewlett-Packard scientific calculators immediately consign ordinary slide rules to oblivion. Xerox PARC develops a program called Smalltalk, and Bell Labs develops a language called ‘C.’ Steve Wozniak begins his career by building one of the best-known ‘blue boxes;’ tone generators that enable long-distance dialing while bypassing the phone company’s billing equipment. The ICCC demonstrations are a tremendous success. One of the best known demos features a conversation between ELIZA, Joseph Weizenbaum’s artificially-intelligent psychiatrist located at MIT, and PARRY, a paranoid computer developed by Kenneth Colby at Stanford. Other demos feature interactive chess games, geography quizzes, and an elaborate air traffic control simulation. An AT&T delegation visits ICCC but leaves in puzzlement.

https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1970s/

1972

BBN’s Ray Tomlinson introduces network email. The Internet Working Group (INWG) forms to address need for establishing standard protocols.

https://www.livescience.com/20727-internet-history.html

1972

In 1972 Seymor Cray, known as the “father of supercomputers”, left the CDC and founded his own company Cray Research, which still exists in 2020 as CRAY Inc.

https://www.livescience.com/20727-internet-history.html

1973

** Personal computer:** The minicomputer Xerox Alto (1973) was a landmark step in the development of personal computers Gateways: Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn develop gateway routing computers to negotiate between the various national networks

1973

Thirty institutions are connected to the ARPANET. The network users range from industrial installations and consulting firms like BBN, Xerox PARC and the MITRE Corporation, to government sites like NASA’s Ames Research Laboratories, the National Bureau of Standards, and Air Force research facilities. The ICCC demonstrations prove packet-switching a viable technology, and ARPA (now DARPA, where the ‘D’ stands for ‘Defense’) looks for ways to extend its reach. Two new programs begin: Packet Radio sites are modeled on the ALOHA experiment at the University of Hawaii designed by Norm Abramson, connecting seven computers on four islands; and a satellite connection enables linking to two foreign sites in Norway and the UK. Bob Kahn moves from BBN to DARPA to work for Larry Roberts, and his first self-assigned task is the interconnection of the ARPANET with other networks. He enlists Vint Cerf, who has been teaching at Stanford. The problem is that ARPANET, radio-based PRnet, and SATNET all have different interfaces, packet sizes, labeling, conventions and transmission rates. Linking them together is very difficult. Kahn and Cerf set about designing a net-to-net connection protocol. Cerf leads the newly formed International Network Working Group. In September 1973, the two give their first paper on the new Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) at an INWG meeting at the University of Sussex in England. Meanwhile, at Xerox PARC, Bob Metcalfe is working on a wire-based system modeled on ALOHA protocols for Local Area Networks (LANs). It will become Ethernet.

https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1970s/

1973

Global networking becomes a reality as the University College of London (England) and Royal Radar Establishment (Norway) connect to ARPANET. The term internet is born.

https://www.livescience.com/20727-internet-history.html

1974

WYSIWYG: Charles Simonyi coins the term WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) to describe the ability of being able to display a file or document exactly how it is going to be printed or viewed

1974

Ethernet is demonstrated by networking Xerox PARC’s new Alto computers. BBN recruits Larry Roberts to direct a new venture, called Telenet, which is the first public packet-switched service. Roberts’ departure creates a crisis in the DARPA IPTO office. DARPA has fulfilled its initial mission. Discussions about divesting DARPA of operational responsibility for the network are held. Because it is DARPA-funded, BBN has no exclusive right to the source code for the IMPs. Telenet and other new networking enterprises want BBN to release the source code. BBN argues that it is always changing the code and that it has recently undergone a complete rewrite at the hands of John McQuillan. Their approach makes Roberts’ task of finding a new director for IPTO difficult. J.C.R. Licklider agrees to return to IPTO from MIT on a temporary basis. In addition to DARPA, The National Science Foundation (NSF) is actively supporting computing and networking at almost 120 universities. The largest NSF installation is at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado. There, scientists use a home-built ‘remote job entry’ system to connect to NCAR’s CDC 7600 from major universities. Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf publish "A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection"" in the May 1974 issue of IEEE Transactions on Communications Technology. Shortly thereafter, DARPA funds three contracts to develop and implement the Kahn-Cerf TCP protocol described in their paper, one at Stanford (Cerf and his students), one at BBN (Ray Tomlinson), and one at University College London (directed by Peter Kirstein and his students). Daily traffic on the ARPANET exceeds 3 million packets.

https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1970s/

1974

The first Internet Service Provider (ISP) is born with the introduction of a commercial version of ARPANET, known as Telenet.

https://www.livescience.com/20727-internet-history.html

1974

Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn (the duo said by many to be the Fathers of the Internet) publish "A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection," which details the design of TCP.

https://www.livescience.com/20727-internet-history.html

1975

Portable computers: The Altair 8800 is developed by Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS)

1975

The ARPANET geographical map now shows 61 nodes. Licklider arranges its administration to be turned over to the Defense Communications Agency (DCA). BBN remains the contractor responsible for network operations. BBN agrees to release the source code for IMPs and TIPs. The Network Working Group maintains its open system of discussion via RFCs and e-mail lists. Discomfort grows with the bureaucratic style of DCA. The Department of Energy creates its own net to support its own research. This net operates over dedicated lines connecting each site to the computer centers at the National Laboratories. NASA begins planning its own space physics network, SPAN. These networks have connections to the ARPANET so the newly developed TCP protocol begins to get a workout. Internally, however, the new networks use such a variety of protocols that true interoperability is still an issue.

https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1970s/

1975/01/23

Microsoft Corporation: is founded April 4, 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800

1976

DARPA supports computer scientists at UC Berkeley who are revising a Unix system to incorporate TCP/IP protocols. Berkeley Unix also incorporates a second set of Bell Labs protocols, called UUCP, for systems to use dial-up connections. Seymour Cray demonstrates the first vector-processor supercomputer, the CRAY-1. The first customers include Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and NCAR. The CRAY-1 hardware is more compact and faster than previous supercomputers. No wire is more than 4 feet long, and the clock period is 12.5 nanoseconds (billionths of a second). The machine is cooled by freon circulated through stainless steel tubing bonded within vertical wedges of aluminum between the stacks of circuit boards (Cray patents the bonding process). The CRAY-1’s speed and power attract researchers, who want access to it over networks. Vint Cerf moves from Stanford to DARPA to work with Bob Kahn on networking and the TCP/IP protocols.

https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1970s/

1976

Queen Elizabeth II hits the “send button” on her first email.

https://www.livescience.com/20727-internet-history.html

1976/04/01

Apple: Apple Computers is founded by Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs on 1 Apr 1976 (April Fools Day)

https://www.livescience.com/20727-internet-history.html

1977

Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs announce the Apple II computer. Apple Computer’s Apple II, the first personal computer with colour graphics, is demonstrated

https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1970s/

1977

Tandy TRS-80 and the Commodore Pet. These off-the-shelf machines create the consumer and small business markets for computers. (with Apple II)

https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1970s/

1977

Cerf and Kahn mount a major demonstration, ‘internetting’ among the Packet Radio net, SATNET, and the ARPANET. Messages go from a van in the Bay Area across the US on ARPANET, then to University College London and back via satellite to Virginia, and back through the ARPANET to the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute. This shows its applicability to international deployment. Larry Landweber of the University of Wisconsin creates THEORYNET providing email between over 100 researchers and linking elements of the University of Wisconsin in different cities via a commercial packet service like Telenet.

https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1970s/

1978

The appearance of the first very small computers and their potential for communication via modem to dial up services starts a boom in a new set of niche industries, like software and modems. Vint Cerf at DARPA continues the vision of the Internet, forming an International Cooperation Board chaired by Peter Kirstein of University College London, and an Internet Configuration Control Board, chaired by Dave Clark of MIT. The ARPANET experiment formally is complete. This leaves an array of boards and task forces over the next few years trying to sustain the vision of a free and open Internet that can keep up with the growth of computing.

https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1970s/

1979

Over half a million computers are in use in the United States

https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1970s/

1979

USENET forms to host news and discussion groups.

https://www.livescience.com/20727-internet-history.html

1980

Paul Allen and Bill Gates: IBM hires Paul Allen and Bill Gates to create an operating system for a new PC. They buy the rights to a simple operating system manufactured by Seattle Computer Products and use it as a template to develop DOS

https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1970s/

1980

Larry Landweber at Wisconsin holds a meeting with six other universities to discuss the possibility of building a Computer Science Research Network to be called CSNET. Bob Kahn attends as an advisor from DARPA, and Kent Curtis attends from NSF’s computer research programs. The idea evolves over the summer between Landweber, Peter Denning (Purdue), Dave Farber (Delaware), and Tony Hearn (Utah). In November, the group submits a proposal to NSF to fund a consortium of eleven universities at an estimated cost of $3 million over five years. This is viewed as too costly by the NSF. USENET starts a series of shell scripts written by Steve Bellovin at UNC to help communicate with Duke. Newsgroups start with a name that gives an idea of its content. USENET is an early example of a client server where users dial in to a server with requests to forward certain newsgroup postings. The server then ‘serves’ the request.

https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1970s/

1980

Landweber’s proposal has many enthusiastic reviewers. At an NSF-sponsored workshop, the idea is revised in a way that both wins approval and opens up a new epoch for NSF itself. The revised proposal includes many more universities. It proposes a three-tiered structure involving ARPANET, a TELENET-based system, and an e-mail only service called PhoneNet. Gateways connect the tiers into a seamless whole. This brings the cost of a site within the reach of the smallest universities. Moreover, NSF agrees to manage CSNET for two years, after which it will turn it over to the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), which is made up of more than 50 academic institutions. The National Science Board approves the new plan and funds it for five years at a cost of $5 million. Since the protocols for interconnecting the subnets of CSNET include TCP/IP, NSF becomes an early supporter of the Internet. NASA has ARPANET nodes, as do many Department of Energy (DOE) sites. Now several Federal agencies support the Internet, and the number is growing. Research by David Patterson at Berkeley and John Hennessy at Stanford promotes ‘reduced instruction set’ computing. IBM selects the disk operating system DOS, developed by Microsoft, to operate its planned PC.

https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1980s/

1981

Microsoft: MS-DOS Computer Operating System increases its success

https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1970s/

1981

The National Science Foundation (NSF) provided a grant to establish the Computer Science Network (CSNET) to provide networking services to university computer scientists.

https://www.livescience.com/20727-internet-history.html

1982

Commodore 64: becomes the best-selling computer of all time. SMTP: SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) is introduced for the first time

https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1970s/

1982

By the beginning of the year, more than 200 computers in dozens of institutions have been connected in CSNET. BITNET, another startup network, is based on protocols that include file transfer via e-mail rather than by the FTP procedure of the ARPA protocols. The Internet Working Group of DARPA publishes a plan for the transition of the entire network from the Network Control Protocol to the TCP/IP protocols developed since 1974 and already in wide use (RFC 801). At Berkeley, Bill Joy incorporates the new TCP/IP suite into the next release of the Unix operating system. The first ‘portable’ computer is launched in the form of the Osborne, a 24-pound suitcase-sized device. The IBM PC is launched in August 1981. Meanwhile, Japan mounts a successful challenge to US chip makers by producing 64-kbit chips so inexpensively that U.S. competitors charge the chips are being ‘dumped’ on the U.S. market.

https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1980s/

1982

Time magazine names ‘the computer’ its ‘Man of the Year.’ Cray Research announces plans to market the Cray X-MP system in place of the Cray-1. At the other end of the scale, the IBM PC ‘clones’ begin appearing. An NSF panel chaired by the Courant Institute’s Peter Lax reports that U.S. scientists lack access to supercomputers. It contains the testimony of University of Illinois astrophysicist Larry Smarr that members of his discipline have been forced to travel to Germany to use American-made supercomputers. The period during which ad hoc networking systems have flourished has left TCP/IP as only one contender for the title of ‘standard.’ Indeed, the International Organization for Standards (ISO) has written and is pushing ahead with a ‘reference’ model of an interconnection standard called Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) — already adopted in preliminary form for interconnecting DEC equipment. But while OSI is a standard existing for the most part on paper, the combination of TCP/IP and the local area networks created with Ethernet technology are driving the expansion of the living Internet. Drew Major and Kyle Powell write Snipes, an action game to be played on PC’s over the network. They package the game as a ‘demo’ for a PC software product from SuperSet Software, Inc. This is the beginning of Novell. Digital Communications Associates introduces the first coaxial cable interface for micro-to-mainframe communications.

https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1980s/

1982

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP), as the protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, emerge as the protocol for ARPANET. This results in the fledgling definition of the internet as connected TCP/IP internets. TCP/IP remains the standard protocol for the internet.

https://www.livescience.com/20727-internet-history.html

1983

More than 10 million computers are in use in the United States ** Domain Name System (DNS):** is pioneered by Jon Postel, Paul Mockapetris and Craig Partridge. Seven 'top-level' domain names are initially introduced: edu, com, gov, mil, net, org and int. Microsoft Windows: is introduced eliminating the need for a user to have to type each command, like MS-DOS, by using a mouse to navigate through drop-down menus, tabs and icons

https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1970s/

1983

The Domain Name System (DNS) establishes the familiar .edu, .gov, .com, .mil, .org, .net, and .int system for naming websites. This is easier to remember than the previous designation for websites, such as 123.456.789.10.

https://www.livescience.com/20727-internet-history.html

1984

Dell Computer is founded in Austin Texas on 3 May, 1984

https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1970s/

1984

In January, the ARPANET standardizes on the TCP/IP protocols adopted by the Department of Defense (DOD). The Defense Communications Agency decides to split the network into a public ‘ARPANET’ and a classified ‘MILNET, ‘ with only 45 hosts remaining on the ARPANET. Jon Postel issues an RFC assigning numbers to the various interconnected nets. Barry Leiner takes Vint Cerf’s place at DARPA, managing the Internet. Numbering the Internet hosts and keeping tabs on the host names simply fails to scale with the growth of the Internet. In November, Jon Postel and Paul Mockapetris of USC/ISI and Craig Partridge of BBN develop the Domain Name System (DNS) and recommend the use of the now familiar user@host.domain addressing system. The number of computers connected via these hosts is much larger, and the growth is accelerating with the commercialization of Ethernet. Having incorporated TCP/IP into Berkeley Unix, Bill Joy is key to the formation of Sun Microsystems. Sun develops workstations that ship with Berkeley Unix and feature built-in networking. At the same time, the Apollo workstations ship with a special version of a token ring network. In July 1983, an NSF working group, chaired by Kent Curtis, issues a plan for ‘A National Computing Environment for Academic Research’ to remedy the problems noted in the Lax report. Congressional hearings result in advice to NSF to undertake an even more ambitious plan to make supercomputers available to US scientists.

https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1980s/

1984

n January, Apple announces the Macintosh. Its user-friendly interface swells the ranks of new computer users. Novelist William Gibson coins the term cyberspace in Neuromancer, a book that adds a new genre to science fiction and fantasy. The newly developed DNS is introduced across the Internet, with the now familiar domains of .gov, .mil, .edu, .org, .net, and .com. A domain called .int, for international entities, is not much used. Instead, hosts in other countries take a two-letter domain indicating the country. The British JANET explicitly announces its intention to serve the nation’s higher education community, regardless of discipline. Most important for the Internet, NSF issues a request for proposals to establish supercomputer centers that will provide access to the entire U.S. research community, regardless of discipline and location. A new division of Advanced Scientific Computing is created with a budget of $200 million over five years. Datapoint, the first company to offer networked computers, continues in the marketplace, but fails to achieve critical mass.

https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1980s/

1984

William Gibson, author of "Neuromancer," is the first to use the term "cyberspace.”

https://www.livescience.com/20727-internet-history.html

1985

Paul Brainard introduces Pagemaker for the Macintosh creating the desktop publishing field Nintendo: The Nintendo Entertainment System makes its debut. Microsoft Windows 1.0 is introduced on 19 Nov, 1985 and is initially sold for $100.00

https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1970s/

1985

NSF announces the award of five supercomputing center contracts: • Cornell Theory Center (CTC), directed by Nobel laureate Ken Wilson; • The John Von Neumann Center (JVNC) at Princeton, directed by computational fluid dynamicist Steven Orszag; • The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), directed at the University of Illinois by astrophysicist Larry Smarr; • The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), sharing locations at Westinghouse, the University of Pittsburgh, and Carnegie Mellon University, directed by Michael Levine and Ralph Roskies; • The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), on the campus of the University of California, San Diego, and administered by the General Atomics Company under the direction of nuclear engineer Sid Karin. • By the end of 1985, the number of hosts on the Internet (all TCP/IP interconnected networks) has reached 2,000. MIT translates and publishes Computers and Communication by Dr. Koji Kobayashi, the Chairman of NEC. Dr. Kobayashi, who joined NEC in 1929, articulates his clear vision of ‘C & C’, the integration of computing and communication.

https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1980s/

1985

Symbolics.com, the website for Symbolics Computer Corp. in Massachusetts, becomes the first registered domain.

https://www.livescience.com/20727-internet-history.html

1986

More than 30 million computers are in use in the United States.

https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1970s/

1986

The 56Kbps backbone between the NSF centers leads to the creation of a number of regional feeder networks - JVNCNET, NYSERNET, SURANET, SDSCNET and BARRNET - among others. With the backbone, these regionals start to build a hub and spoke infrastructure. This growth in the number of interconnected networks drives a major expansion in the community including the DOE, DOD and NASA. Between the beginning of 1986 and the end of 1987 the number of networks grows from 2,000 to nearly 30,000. TCP/IP is available on workstations and PCs such as the newly introduced Compaq portable computer. Ethernet is becoming accepted for wiring inside buildings and across campuses. Each of these developments drives the introduction of terms such as bridging and routing and the need for readily available information on TCP/IP in workshops and manuals. Companies such as Proteon, Synoptics, Banyan, Cabletron, Wellfleet, and Cisco emerge with products to feed this explosion. At the same time, other parts of the U.S. Government and many of the traditional computer vendors mount an attempt to validate their products being built to the OSI theoretical specifications, in the form of the Corporation for Open Systems. USENET starts a major shakeup which becomes known as the ‘Great Renaming’. A driving force is that, as many messages are traveling over ARPANET, desirable new news groups such as ‘alt.sex’ and ‘alt.drugs’ are not allowed.

https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1980s/

1986

he National Science Foundation’s NSFNET goes online to connected supercomputer centers at 56,000 bits per second — the speed of a typical dial-up computer modem. Over time the network speeds up and regional research and education networks, supported in part by NSF, are connected to the NSFNET backbone — effectively expanding the Internet throughout the United States. The NSFNET was essentially a network of networks that connected academic users along with the ARPANET.

https://www.livescience.com/20727-internet-history.html

1987

The NSF, realizing the rate and commercial significance of the growth of the Internet, signs a cooperative agreement with Merit Networks which is assisted by IBM and MCI. Rick Adams co-founds UUNET to provide commercial access to UUCP and the USENET newsgroups, which are now available for the PC. BITNET and CSNET also merge to form CREN. The NSF starts to implement its T1 backbone between the supercomputing centers with 24 RT-PCs in parallel implemented by IBM as ‘parallel routers’. The T1 idea is so successful that proposals for T3 speeds in the backbone begin. In early 1987 the number of hosts passes 10,000 and by year-end there have been over 1,000 RFCs issued. Network management starts to become a major issue and it becomes clear that a protocol is needed between routers to allow remote management. SNMP is chosen as a simple, quick, near term solution.

https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1980s/

1987

The number of hosts on the internet exceeds 20,000. Cisco ships its first router.

https://www.livescience.com/20727-internet-history.html

1987

Microsoft introduces Microsoft Works

https://www.livescience.com/20727-internet-history.html

1987

Perl: Larry Wall introduces Perl 1.0

https://www.livescience.com/20727-internet-history.html

1988

Over 45 million PCs are in use in the United States.

https://www.livescience.com/20727-internet-history.html

1988

The upgrade of the NSFNET backbone to T1 completes and the Internet starts to become more international with the connection of Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. In the US more regionals spring up - Los Nettos and CERFnet both in California. In addition, Fidonet, a popular traditional bulletin board system (BBS) joins the net. Dan Lynch organizes the first Interop commercial conference in San Jose for vendors whose TCP/IP products interoperate reliably. 50 companies make the cut and 5,000 networkers come to see it all running, to see what works, and to learn what doesn’t work. The US Government pronounces its OSI Profile (GOSIP) is to be supported in all products purchased for government use, and states that TCP/IP is an interim solution! The Morris WORM burrows on the Internet into 6,000 of the 60,000 hosts now on the network. This is the first worm experience and DARPA forms the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) to deal with future such incidents. CNRI obtains permission from the Federal Networking Council and from MCI to interconnect the commercial MCI Mail service to the Internet. This broke the barrier to carrying commercial traffic on the Internet backbone. By 1989 MCI Mail, OnTyme, Telemail and CompuServe had all interconnected their commercial email systems to the Internet and, in so doing, interconnected with each other for the first time. This was the start of commercial Internet services in the United States (and possibly the world).

https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1980s/

1989

The number of hosts increases from 80,000 in January to 130,000 in July to over 160,000 in November! Australia, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand and the United Kingdom join the Internet. Commercial e-mail relays start between MCIMail through CNRI and Compuserve through Ohio State. The Internet Architecture Board reorganizes again reforming the IETF and the IRTF. Networks speed up. NSFNET T3 (45Mbps) nodes operate. At Interop 100Mbps LAN technology, known as FDDI, interoperates among several vendors. The telephone companies start to work on their own wide area packet switching service at higher speeds - calling it SMDS. Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf at CNRI hold the first Gigabit (1000Mbps) Testbed workshops with funding from ARPA and NSF. Over 600 people from a wide range of industry, government and academia attend to discuss the formation of 6 gigabit testbeds across the country. The Cray 3, a direct descendant of the Cray line, starting from the CDC 6600, is produced. In Switzerland at CERN Tim Berners-Lee addresses the issue of the constant change in the currency of information and the turn-over of people on projects. Instead of an hierarchical or keyword organization, Berners-Lee proposes a hypertext system that will run across the Internet on different operating systems. This was the World Wide Web.

https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1980s/

1989

World.std.com becomes the first commercial provider of dial-up access to the internet.

https://www.livescience.com/20727-internet-history.html

1989-1990

based on "a large hypertext database with typed links". It described a system called "Mesh" that referenced ENQUIRE, the database and software project he had built in 1980, with a more elaborate information management system based on links embedded as text: "Imagine, then, the references in this document all being associated with the network address of the thing to which they referred, so that while reading this document, you could skip to them with a click of the mouse." Such a system, he explained, could be referred to using one of the existing meanings of the word hypertext, a term that he says was coined in the 1950s. Berners-Lee notes the possibility of multimedia documents that include graphics, speech and video, which he terms hypermedia.[9] Although the proposal attracted little interest, Berners-Lee was encouraged by his manager, Mike Sendall, to begin implementing his system on a newly acquired NeXT workstation. He considered several names, including Information Mesh, The Information Mine or Mine of Information, but settled on World Wide Web. Berners-Lee found an enthusiastic supporter in his colleague and fellow hypertext enthusiast Robert Cailliau. Berners-Lee and Cailliau pitched Berners-Lee's ideas to the European Conference on Hypertext Technology in September 1990, but found no vendors who could appreciate his vision. Berners-Lee's breakthrough was to marry hypertext to the Internet. In his book Weaving The Web, he explains that he had repeatedly suggested to members of both technical communities that a marriage between the two technologies was possible. But, when no one took up his invitation, he finally assumed the project himself. In the process, he developed three essential technologies: • a system of globally unique identifiers for resources on the Web and elsewhere, the universal document identifier (UDI), later known as uniform resource locator (URL); • the publishing language Hypertext Markup Language (HTML); • the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).[10] With help from Cailliau, he published a more formal proposal on 12 November 1990 to build a "hypertext project" called World Wide Web (abbreviated "W3") as a "web" of "hypertext documents" to be viewed by "browsers" using a client–server architecture.[11][12] The proposal was modelled after the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) reader Dynatext by Electronic Book Technology, a spin-off from the Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship at Brown University. The Dynatext system, licensed by CERN, was considered too expensive and had an inappropriate licensing policy for use in the general high energy physics community, namely a fee for each document and each document alteration.[citation needed] At this point HTML and HTTP had already been in development for about two months and the first web server was about a month from completing its first successful test. Berners-Lee's proposal estimated that a read-only Web would be developed within three months and that it would take six months to achieve "the creation of new links and new material by readers, [so that] authorship becomes universal" as well as "the automatic notification of a reader when new material of interest to him/her has become available".  By December 1990, Berners-Lee and his work team had built all the tools necessary for a working Web: the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), the HyperText Markup Language (HTML), the first web browser (named WorldWideWeb, which was also a web editor), the first web server (later known as CERN httpd) and the first web site(http://info.cern.ch) containing the first web pages that described the project itself was published on 20 December 1990.[13][14] The browser could access Usenet newsgroups and FTP files as well. A NeXT Computer was used by Berners-Lee as the web server and also to write the web browser.[15] Working with Berners-Lee at CERN, Nicola Pellow wrote a simple text browser that could run on almost any computer, the Line Mode Browser, which worked with a command-line interface.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_World_Wide_Web

1990

ARPANET formally shuts down. In twenty years, ‘the net’ has grown from 4 to over 300,000 hosts. Countries connecting in 1990 include Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Chile, Greece, India, Ireland, South Korea, Spain, and Switzerland. Several search tools, such as ARCHIE, Gopher, and WAIS start to appear. Institutions like the National Library of Medicine, Dow Jones, and Dialog are now on line. More ‘worms’ burrow on the net, with as many as 130 reports leading to 12 real ones! This is a further indication of the transition to a wider audience.

https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1990s/

1990

Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, develops HyperText Markup Language (HTML). This technology continues to have a large impact on how we navigate and view the internet today.

https://www.livescience.com/20727-internet-history.html

1990/02/19

Adobe Systems released a raster graphics editor called Photoshop 1.0 . The program was only available for the Macintosh platform  (Mac System 6.0.3) and required at least 2 MB of RAM and an 8 MHz processor for its operation.

https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1990s/

1990/09/10

Three university students Alan Emtage, Peter Deutsch and Bill Heelen launched a search engine called Archie . The search engine enabled its users to find and download specific files on the Internet by indexing files stored on public FTP  servers. Its name comes from the word archive, dropping the letter v. Archie is often considered to be the world's first Internet search engine ever . At the end of the 1990s, the search engine gradually ceased to exist.

https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1990s/

1990/12/25

At CERN, a Swiss research center, a British physicist and internet pioneer Tim Berners-Lee  created the world's first web browser, called WorldWideWeb . The browser was also a simple WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor for editing web pages. WorldWideWeb only worked with the NeXTStep operating system. Later, the browser was renamed Nexus to avoid confusion with the World Wide Web (WWW).

https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1990s/

1991

The net’s dramatic growth continues with NSF lifting any restrictions on commercial use. Interchanges form with popular providers such as UUNET and PSInet. Congress passes the Gore Bill to create the National Research and Education Network, or NREN initiative. In another sign of popularity, privacy becomes an ‘issue,’ with proposed solutions such as PGP (Pretty Good Privacy). The NSFNET backbone upgrades to T3, or 44 Mbps. Total traffic exceeds 1 trillion bytes, or 10 billion packets per month! Over 100 countries are now connected with over 600,000 hosts and nearly 5,000 separate networks. WAIS’s and Gophers help meet the challenge of searching for information throughout this exploding infrastructure of computers.

https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1990s/

1991

CERN introduces the World Wide Web  to the public.

https://www.livescience.com/20727-internet-history.html

1991-1993

Initial launch[edit] In January 1991, the first web servers outside CERN were switched on. On 6 August 1991, Berners-Lee published a short summary of the World Wide Web project on the newsgroup alt.hypertext, inviting collaborators.[16] Paul Kunz from the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) visited CERN in September 1991, and was captivated by the Web. He brought the NeXT software back to SLAC, where librarian Louise Addis adapted it for the VM/CMS operating system on the IBM mainframe as a way to host the SPIRES-HEP database and display SLAC's catalog of online documents.[17][18][19][20] This was the first web server outside of Europe and the first in North America.[21] The World Wide Web had several differences from other hypertext systems available at the time. The Web required only unidirectional links rather than bidirectional ones, making it possible for someone to link to another resource without action by the owner of that resource. It also significantly reduced the difficulty of implementing web servers and browsers (in comparison to earlier systems), but in turn, presented the chronic problem of link rot. Early browsers[edit] The WorldWideWeb browser only ran on NeXTSTEP operating system. This shortcoming was discussed in January 1992,[22] and alleviated in April 1992 by the release of Erwise, an application developed at the Helsinki University of Technology, and in May by ViolaWWW, created by Pei-Yuan Wei, which included advanced features such as embedded graphics, scripting, and animation. ViolaWWW was originally an application for HyperCard.[23] Both programs ran on the X Window System for Unix. In 1992, the first tests between browsers on different platforms were concluded successfully between buildings 513 and 31 in CERN, between browsers on the NexT station and the X11-ported Mosaic browser. ViolaWWW became the recommended browser at CERN. To encourage use within CERN, Bernd Pollermann put the CERN telephone directory on the web—previously users had to log onto the mainframe in order to look up phone numbers. The Web was successful at CERN and spread to other scientific and academic institutions.  Students at the University of Kansas adapted an existing text-only hypertext browser, Lynx, to access the web in 1992. Lynx was available on Unix and DOS, and some web designers, unimpressed with glossy graphical websites, held that a website not accessible through Lynx was not worth visiting. In these earliest browsers, images opened in a separate "helper" application. From Gopher to the WWW[edit]Main article: Gopher (protocol) In the early 1990s, Internet-based projects such as Archie, Gopher, Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS), and the FTP Archive list attempted to create ways to organize distributed data. Gopher was a document browsing system for the Internet, released in 1991 by the University of Minnesota. Invented by Mark P. McCahill, it became the first commonly used hypertext interface to the Internet. While Gopher menu items were examples of hypertext, they were not commonly perceived in that way. In less than a year, there were hundreds of Gopher servers.[24] It offered a viable alternative to the World Wide Web in the early 1990s and the consensus was that Gopher would be the primary way that people would interact with the Internet.[25][better source needed] However, in 1993, the University of Minnesota declared that Gopher was proprietary and would have to be licensed.[24] In response, on 30 April 1993, CERN announced that the World Wide Web would be free to anyone, with no fees due, and released their code into the public domain.[26] This made it possible to develop servers and clients independently and to add extensions without licensing restrictions.[citation needed] Coming two months after the announcement that the server implementation of the Gopher protocol was no longer free to use, this spurred the development of various browsers which precipitated a rapid shift away from Gopher.[27] By releasing Berners-Lee's invention for public use, CERN encouraged and enabled its widespread use.[28] Early websites intermingled links for both the HTTP web protocol and the Gopher protocol, which provided access to content through hypertext menus presented as a file system rather than through HTML files. Early Web users would navigate either by bookmarking popular directory pages or by consulting updated lists such as the NCSA "What's New" page. Some sites were also indexed by WAIS, enabling users to submit full-text searches similar to the capability later provided by search engines. After 1993 the World Wide Web saw many advances to indexing and ease of access through search engines, which often neglected Gopher and Gopherspace. As its popularity increased through ease of use, incentives for commercial investment in the Web also grew. By the middle of 1994, the Web was outcompeting Gopher and the other browsing systems for the Internet.[29] NCSA[edit]Main article: Mosaic (web browser) The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (UIUC) established a website in November 1992. After Marc Andreessen, a student at UIUC, was shown ViolaWWW in late 1992,[23] he began work on Mosaic with another UIUC student Eric Bina, using funding from the High-Performance Computing and Communications Initiative, a US-federal research and development program initiated by US Senator Al Gore.[30][31][32] Andreessen and Bina released a Unix version of the browser in February 1993; Mac and Windows versions followed in August 1993. The browser gained popularity due to its strong support of integrated multimedia, and the authors' rapid response to user bug reports and recommendations for new features.[23] Historians generally agree that the 1993 introduction of the Mosaic web browser was a turning point for the World Wide Web.[33][34][35] Before the release of Mosaic in 1993, graphics were not commonly mixed with text in web pages, and the Web was less popular than older protocols such as Gopher and WAIS. Mosaic could display inline images[36] and submit forms[37][38] for Windows, Macintosh and X-Windows. NCSA also developed HTTPd, a Unix web server that used the Common Gateway Interface to process forms and Server Side Includes for dynamic content. Both the client and server were free to use with no restrictions.[39] Mosaic was an immediate hit;[40] its graphical user interface allowed the Web to become by far the most popular protocol on the Internet. Within a year, web traffic surpassed Gopher's.[24] Wired declared that Mosaic made non-Internet online services obsolete,[41] and the Web became the preferred interface for accessing the Internet.[citation needed] Early growth[edit] The World Wide Web enabled the spread of information over the Internet through an easy-to-use and flexible format. It thus played an important role in popularising use of the Internet.[42] Although the two terms are sometimes conflated in popular use, World Wide Web is not synonymous with Internet.[43] The Web is an information space containing hyperlinked documents and other resources, identified by their URIs.[44] It is implemented as both client and server software using Internet protocols such as TCP/IP and HTTP. In keeping with its origins at CERN, early adopters of the Web were primarily university-based scientific departments or physics laboratories such as SLAC and  Fermilab. By January 1993 there were fifty web servers across the world.[45] By October 1993 there were over five hundred servers online, including some notable websites.[46] Practical media distribution and streaming media over the Web was made possible by advances in data compression, due to the impractically high bandwidth requirements of uncompressed media. Following the introduction of the Web, several media formats based on discrete cosine transform (DCT) were introduced for practical media distribution and streaming over the Web, including the MPEG video format in 1991 and the JPEG image format in 1992. The high level of image compression made JPEG a good format for compensating slow Internet access speeds, typical in the age of dial-up Internet access. JPEG became the most widely used image format for the World Wide Web. A DCT variation, the modified discrete cosine transform(MDCT) algorithm, led to the development of MP3, which was introduced in 1991 and became the first popular audio format on the Web. In 1992 the Computing and Networking Department of CERN, headed by David Williams, withdrew support of Berners-Lee's work. A two-page email sent by Williams stated that the work of Berners-Lee, with the goal of creating a facility to exchange information such as results and comments from CERN experiments to the scientific community, was not the core activity of CERN and was a misallocation of CERN's IT resources. Following this decision, Tim Berners-Lee left CERN for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he continued to develop HTTP.[citation needed] The first Microsoft Windows browser was Cello, written by Thomas R. Bruce for the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School to provide legal information, since access to Windows was more widespread amongst lawyers than access to Unix. Cello was released in June 1993.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_World_Wide_Web

1991/04

Gopher system  was created at the University of Minnesota as a text-based system that used the hierarchical menu structure for navigation. It was a system working on a client-server basis. Gopher integrated the services of FTP, Usenet, Veronica, Archie and WAIS . Since 1996, Gopher has been on a decline and is currently used very rarely.

https://www.livescience.com/20727-internet-history.html

1991/05/14

A team made up of Tim Berners-Lee, Henrik Frystyk Nielsen and Nicola Pellow designed a simple browser called Line Mode Browser  (The Libwww Line Mode Browser). This was the second browser ever made for the World Wide Web.

https://www.livescience.com/20727-internet-history.html

1991/08

The creator of HTML and WWW, Tim Berners-Lee compiled the first index of websites called the WWW Virtual Library . The hyperlinks were organized into a tree of categories and subcategories depending on the individual fields of human activity or interest.

https://www.livescience.com/20727-internet-history.html

1991/08/06

he World Wide Web (WWW) creator, Tim Berners-Lee  launched the world's first website at http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html . Unfortunately, the original website has not been preserved until today and the link shows only its 1992 copy.

https://www.livescience.com/20727-internet-history.html

1991/10/29

The internet pioneer, Tim Berners-Lee , published a document entitled HTML Tags . The document contained a description of the first 18 HTML tags: <title> , <nextid> , <a> , <isindex> , <plaintext> , <listing> , <p> , <h1> …<h6> , <address> , <hp1> , <hp2> …, <dl> , <dt> , <dd> , <ul> , <li> ,<menu>  and <dir> . The design of the first version of HTML language was influenced by the SGML universal markup language.

https://www.livescience.com/20727-internet-history.html

1991/11

The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an Internet protocol designed to exchange hypertext documents (images, websites, etc.) between the server and the web browser. The first protocol design, later called HTTP v0.9, was created by Tim Berners-Lee as part of the WWW service specification. The HTTP v0.9 version was extremely simple, using only the GET method with one parameter, i.e. the name of the requested document.

https://www.livescience.com/20727-internet-history.html

1991/12/06

A particle physicist and software developer Paul Kunz  launched the first web server in the USA in the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center  (SLAC). Paul Kunz was inspired by the World Wide Web project directly from its creator Tim Berners-Lee, whom he met in person at the CERN Swiss Research Center in September of the same year.

https://www.livescience.com/20727-internet-history.html

1992

The Internet becomes such a part of the computing establishment that a professional society forms to guide it on its way. The Internet Society (ISOC), with Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn among its founders, validates the coming of age of inter-networking and its pervasive role in the lives of professionals in developed countries. The IAB and its supporting committees become part of ISOC. The number of networks exceeds 7,500 and the number of computers connected passes 1,000,000. The MBONE for the first time carries audio and video. The challenge to the telephone network’s dominance as the basis for communicating between people is seen for the first time; the Internet is no longer just for machines to talk to each other. During the summer, students at NCSA in University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign modify Tim Berners-Lee’s hypertext proposal. In a few weeks MOSAIC is born within the campus. Larry Smarr shows it to Jim Clark, who founds Netscape as a result. The WWW bursts into the world and the growth of the Internet explodes like a supernova. What had been doubling each year, now doubles in three months. What began as an ARPA experiment has, in the span of just 30 years, become a part of the world’s popular culture.

https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1990s/

1992

The first audio and video are distributed over the internet.

https://www.livescience.com/20727-internet-history.html

1992

The phrase "surfing the internet" is popularized.

https://www.livescience.com/20727-internet-history.html

1992/03/09

Pei-Yuan Wei developed the ViolaWWW browser  for Unix while he was working at the University of California at Berkeley. ViolaWWW was the first browser to support scripting, table rendering and forms . The browser also contained a simple stylesheet  to define the website's visual appearance. In March 1994, Pei-Yuan Wei released its last version, the lone developer no longer being able to keep up with the Mosaic Communications Corporation, which launched the Mosaic Netscape 0.9 browser the same year.

https://www.livescience.com/20727-internet-history.html

1992/04/12

Bare Bones Software released the first version of the BBEdit freeware HTML  and text editor . The editor was designed for the Macintosh platform.

https://www.livescience.com/20727-internet-history.html

1992/07/18

Silvano de Gennaro, an Italian computer scientist who worked at CERN research labs, was asked by Tim Berners-Lee to scan and upload a photo of a parody pop-group called Les Horribles Cernettes  (The Horrible CERN Girls) onto the info.cern.ch website. This photo became one of the first images to be published on the World Wide Web.

https://www.livescience.com/20727-internet-history.html

1992/11

Steven Foster and Fred Barrie developed a search engine called Veronica  at the University of Nevada. The search engine was used to browse and index information in Gopher menu items. The name Veronica is an acronym for “Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computer Archives”.

https://www.livescience.com/20727-internet-history.html

1993

At the beginning of the year only 50 World Wide Web servers are known to exist

https://www.livescience.com/20727-internet-history.html

1993

The number of websites reaches 600 and the White House and United Nations go online. Marc Andreesen develops the Mosaic Web browser at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. The number of computers connected to NSFNET grows from 2,000 in 1985 to more than 2 million in 1993. The National Science Foundation leads an effort to outline a new internet architecture that would support the burgeoning commercial use of the network.

https://www.livescience.com/20727-internet-history.html

1993/04/22

Students Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina from the University of Illinois programmed one of the first web browsers with a graphical interface. Mosaic  (full name NCSA Mosaic) worked on multiple platforms including Windows and was available for free, thanks to which it gained worldwide popularity among the general public shortly after being launched. Its development officially ended on January 7, 1997.

https://www.livescience.com/20727-internet-history.html

1993/11/30

A Dutch software engineer Martijn Koster announced the first Aliweb search engine  (Archie-Like Indexing in the Web) designed specifically for the World Wide Web service . In May 1994, Aliweb was introduced to the public at the first international WWW conference at the CERN Research Center in Geneva. Aliweb did not have a web crawler to search and index web pages. Sites were added to the database upon request from users using special files that contained their exact description and location.

https://www.livescience.com/20727-internet-history.html

1994

The World Wide Web Consortium is founded by Tim Berners-Lee to help with the development of common protocols for the evolution of the World Wide Web

https://www.livescience.com/20727-internet-history.html

1994

Netscape Communications is born. Microsoft creates a Web browser for Windows 95.

https://www.livescience.com/20727-internet-history.html

1994

Yahoo! is created by Jerry Yang and David Filo, two electrical engineering graduate students at Stanford University. The site was originally called "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web." The company was later incorporated in March 1995. Jerry Yang and David Filo, two Ph.D. students from Stanford University, created a list of websites entitled "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web." In March 1994, the portal was renamed Yahoo! and the yahoo.com domain was registered on January 18, 1995. Yahoo is an acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle”. In March 1995, the Yahoo! search engine was launched as part of the portal.

https://www.livescience.com/20727-internet-history.html https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/web-design-history/yahoo-1994

1994-2003

The rate of web site deployment increased sharply around the world, and fostered development of international standards for protocols and content formatting. Berners-Lee continued to stay involved in guiding web standards, such as the markup languages to compose web pages, and he advocated his vision of a Semantic Web (sometimes known as Web 3.0) based around machine-readability and interoperability standards. World Wide Web Conference[edit]Main article: The Web Conference In May 1994, the first International WWW Conference, organized by Robert Cailliau, was held at CERN; the conference has been held every year since.Robert Cailliau , Jean-François Abramatic, and Tim Berners-Lee  at the tenth anniversary of the World Wide Web Consortium . World Wide Web Consortium[edit]Main articles: World Wide Web Consortium and Web standardsSee also: Internet Information Services, Browser extension, and Acid1 The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded by Tim Berners-Lee after he left the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in September/October 1994 in order to create open standards for the Web.[47] It was founded at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Laboratory for Computer Science (MIT/LCS) with support from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which had pioneered the Internet. A year later, a second site was founded at INRIA (a French national computer research lab) with support from the European Commission; and in 1996, a third continental site was created in Japan at Keio University. W3C comprised various companies that were willing to create standards and recommendations to improve the quality of the Web. Berners-Lee made the Web available freely, with no patent and no royalties due. The W3C decided that its standards must be based on royalty-free technology, so they can be easily adopted by anyone. Netscape and Microsoft, in the middle of a browser war, ignored the W3C and added elements to HTML ad hoc (e.g., blink and marquee). Finally, in 1995, Netscape and Microsoft came to their senses and agreed to abide by the W3C's standard.[48] The W3C published the standard for HTML 4 in 1997, which included Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), giving designers more control over the appearance of web pages without the need for additional HTML tags. The W3C couldn't enforce compliance so none of the browsers were fully compliant. This frustrated web designers who formed the Web Standards Project (WaSP) in 1998 with the goal of cajoling compliance with standards.[49] A List Apart and CSS Zen Garden were influential websites that promoted good design and adherence to standards.[50] Nevertheless, AOL halted development of Netscape[51] and Microsoft was slow to update IE.[52] Mozilla and Apple both released browsers that aimed to be more standards compliant (Firefox and Safari), but were unable to dislodge IE as the dominant browser. 1997 advertisement in State Magazine  by the US State Department Library  for sessions introducing the then-unfamiliar Web. Commercialization, dot-com boom and bust, aftermath[edit] As the Web grew in the mid-1990s, web directories and primitive search engines were created to index pages and allow people to find things. Commercial use restrictions on the Internet were lifted in 1995 when NSFNET was shut down.  In the US, the online service America Online (AOL) offered their users a connection to the Internet via their own internal browser, using a dial-up Internet connection. In January 1994, Yahoo! was founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo, then students at Stanford University. Yahoo! Directory became the first popular web directory. Yahoo! Search, launched the same year, was the first popular search engine on the World Wide Web. Yahoo! became the quintessential example of a first mover on the Web.  Online shopping began to emerge with the launch of Amazon's shopping site by Jeff Bezos in 1995 and eBay by Pierre Omidyar the same year.  By 1994, Marc Andreessen's Netscape Navigator superseded Mosaic in popularity, holding the position for some time. Bill Gates outlined Microsoft's strategy to dominate the Internet in his Tidal Wave memo in 1995.[53] With the release of Windows 95 and the popular Internet Explorer browser, many publicly companies began to develop a Web presence. At first, people mainly anticipated the possibilities of free publishing and instant worldwide information. By the late 1990s, the directory model had given way to search engines, corresponding with the rise of Google Search, which developed new approaches to relevancy ranking. Directory features, while still commonly available, became after-thoughts to search engines. Netscape had a very successful IPO valuing the company at $2.9 billion despite the lack of profits and triggering the dot-com bubble.[54] Increasing familiarity with the Web led to the growth of direct Web-based commerce (e-commerce) and instantaneous group communications worldwide. Many dot-com companies, displaying products on hypertext webpages, were added into the Web. Over the next 5 years, over a trillion dollars was raised to fund thousands of startups consisting of little more than a website.  During the dot-com boom, many companies vied to create a dominant web portal in the belief that such a website would best be able to attract a large audience that in turn would attract online advertising revenue. While most of these portals offered a search engine, they were not interested in encouraging users to find other websites and leave the portal and instead concentrated on "sticky" content.[55] In contrast, Google was a stripped-down search engine that delivered superior results.[56] It was a hit with users who switched from portals to Google. Furthermore, with AdWords, Google had an effective business model.[57][58] AOL bought Netscape in 1998.[59] In spite of their early success, Netscape was unable to fend off Microsoft.[60] Internet Explorer and a variety of other browsers almost completely replaced it. Faster broadband internet connections replaced many dial-up connections from the beginning of the 2000s. With the bursting of the dot-com bubble, many web portals either scaled back operations, floundered,[61] or shut down entirely.[62][63][64] AOL disbanded Netscape in 2003.[65] Web server software[edit]Further information: Comparison of web server software, Comparison of server-side web frameworks, and List of content management systems Web server software was developed to allow computers to act as web servers. The first web servers supported only static files, such as HTML (and images), but now they commonly allow embedding of server side applications. Web framework software enabled building and deploying web applications. Content management systems (CMS) were developed to organize and facilitate collaborative content creation. Many of them were built on top of separate content management frameworks. After Robert McCool joined Netscape, development on the NCSA HTTPd server languished. In 1995, Brian Behlendorf and Cliff Skolnick created a mailing list to coordinate efforts to fix bugs and make improvements to HTTPd.[66] They called their version of HTTPd, Apache. Apache quickly became the dominant server on the Web.[67] After adding support for modules, Apache was able to allow developers to handle web requests with a variety of languages including Perl, PHP and Python. Together with Linux and MySQL, it became known as the LAMP platform. Following the success of Apache, the Apache Software Foundation was founded in 1999 and produced many open source web software projects in the same collaborative spirit. Browser wars[edit]Main articles: Browser wars and History of the web browserSee also: Comparison of web browsers, List of web browsers, and Usage share of web browsers After graduating from UIUC, Andreessen and Jim Clark, former CEO of Silicon Graphics, met and formed Mosaic Communications Corporation in April 1994 to develop the Mosaic Netscape browser commercially. The company later changed its name to Netscape, and the browser was developed further as Netscape Navigator, which soon became the dominant web client. They also released the Netsite Commerce web server which could handle SSL requests, thus enabling e-commerce on the Web.[68] SSL became the standard method to encrypt web traffic. Navigator 1.0 also introduced cookies, but Netscape did not publicize this feature. Netscape followed up with Navigator 2 in 1995 introducing frames, Java applets and JavaScript. In 1998, Netscape made Navigator open source and launched Mozilla.[69] Microsoft licensed Mosaic from Spyglass and released Internet Explorer 1.0 that year and IE2 later the same year. IE2 added features pioneered at Netscape such as cookies, SSL, and JavaScript. The browser wars became a competition for dominance when Explorer was bundled with Windows.[70] This led to the United States v. Microsoft Corporation antitrust lawsuit. IE3, released in 1996, added support for Java applets, ActiveX, and CSS. At this point, Microsoft began bundling IE with Windows. IE3 managed to increase Microsoft's share of the browser market from under 10% to over 20%.[71] IE4, released the following year, introduced Dynamic HTML setting the stage for the Web 2.0 revolution. By 1998, IE was able to capture the majority of the desktop browser market.[60] It would be the dominant browser for the next fourteen years. Google released their Chrome browser in 2008 with the first JIT JavaScript engine, V8. Chrome overtook IE to become the dominant desktop browser in four years,[72] and overtook Safari to become the dominant mobile browser in two.[73] At the same time, Google open sourced Chrome's codebase as Chromium.[74] Ryan Dahl used Chromium's V8 engine in 2009 to power an event driven runtime system, Node.js, which allowed JavaScript code to be used on servers as well as browsers. This led to the development of new software stacks such as MEAN. Thanks to frameworks such as Electron, developers can bundle up node applications as standalone desktop applications such as Slack. Acer and Samsung began selling Chromebooks, cheap laptops running Chrome OS capable of running web apps, in 2011. Over the next decade, more companies offered Chromebooks. Chromebooks outsold MacOS devices in 2020 to become the second most popular OS in the world.[75] Other notable web browsers emerged including Mozilla's Firefox, Opera's Opera browser and Apple's Safari.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_World_Wide_Web

1994/07/03

Martijn Koster presented the robots.txt standard  (Robots exclusion standard or Robots exclusion protocol) as part of the W3C www-talk mailing list. The rules defined in the robots.txt file are used to prevent or restrict indexing robots from accessing a website.

https://www.livescience.com/20727-internet-history.html https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/web-design-history/yahoo-1994

1994/07/13

Software engineers Dan Connolly and Mark Gaither created the first version of an online HTML validator. The tool served to check the validity of documents, i.e. compare the document code with valid standards and look for potential errors.

https://www.livescience.com/20727-internet-history.html https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/web-design-history/yahoo-1994

1994/10/01

Tim Berners-Lee founded an international organization called World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) . The main objective of the consortium is the development of Web standards for the World Wide Web (WWW). For example, W3C developed standards for HTML , XHML , XML , or CSS  markup languages. Another aim of the organization is education and development of Web Accessibility Rules (WCAG) .

https://www.livescience.com/20727-internet-history.html https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/web-design-history/yahoo-1994

1994/10/13

The Mosaic Communications Corporation (renamed Netscape Communications Corporation on November 14, 1994) launched, under the name Mosaic Netscape 0.9 , the first one in a series of browsers, called Netscape Navigator  in the subsequent versions. Shortly after being released, Mosaic Netscape 0.9 and Netscape Navigator 1.0 (released on December 15, 1994) became widely popular and, within a few months, assumed a dominant position on the market.

https://www.livescience.com/20727-internet-history.html https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/web-design-history/yahoo-1994

1994/10/27

The AT&T Telecommunications Company placed the first web banner in Internet history  on the HotWired magazine website. The first web banner in the world was 476x56 px and contained only the phrase "Have You Ever Clicked Your Mouse Right Here?". Clicking on the banner led to a virtual tour of world galleries and museums.

https://www.livescience.com/20727-internet-history.html https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/web-design-history/yahoo-1994

1994/11

David Bohnett and John Rezner founded the Beverly Hills Internet web hosting company, which was renamed GeoCities  in 1995. The original concept of the service was to create a virtual community of websites organized in "internet cities" . In its early years, GeoCities offered its users an unprecedented 2 MB of free disk space . In 1999, GeoCities was bought by Yahoo! and ten years later, on October 26, 2009, Yahoo! definitively terminated the GeoCities service.

https://www.livescience.com/20727-internet-history.html https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/web-design-history/yahoo-1994

1995

EBay is founded by Pierre Omidyar on 20 Sep,1995 Hotmail is started by Jack Smith and Sabeer Bhatia on 20 Sep, 1995

https://www.livescience.com/20727-internet-history.html

1995

Compuserve, America Online and Prodigy begin to provide internet access. Amazon.com, Craigslist and eBay go live. The original NSFNET backbone is decommissioned as the internet’s transformation to a commercial enterprise is largely completed.

https://www.livescience.com/20727-internet-history.html

1995

The first online dating site, Match.com, launches.

https://www.livescience.com/20727-internet-history.html

1995/04/10

The Norwegian company Opera Software first introduced to the public a new MultiTorg Opera 1.0 web browser that used MDI(Multiple Document Interface) technology. The use of MDI enabled users to simultaneously open several windows of webpages within the browser. As of version 2.0, the browser’s name was shortened to Opera.

https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/web-design-history/timeline-1995-1997

1995/04/13

Michael Loren Mauldin from Carnegie Mellon University developed one of Lycos's oldest search engines . The name of the search engine is derived from Lycosidae, a Latin name for a family of wolf spiders.

https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/web-design-history/timeline-1995-1997

1995/05

The term User Experience was probably first heard in public at the CHI '95 Conference Companion on Human Factors in Computing Systems held on May 7-11, 1995 in Denver, Colorado. The combination of the two words User Experience first appeared in a presentation by Donald Norman , Jim Miller and Austin Henderson of Apple Computer entitled What You See, Some of What's in the Future, And How We Go About Doing It: HI at Apple Computer, particularly in the sentence: “In this organizational overview, we cover some of the critical aspects of human interface research and application at Apple or, as we prefer to call it, the ‘User Experience.’” By this point, user experience design was very much happening*—*it just didn’t have a label yet. Cue Donald Norman! Donald Norman, a cognitive scientist, joined the team at Apple in the early 90s as their User Experience Architect*—*making him the first person to have UX in his job title. He came up with the term “user experience design” as a way of encompassing all that UX is. As he explains, “I invented the term because I thought human interface and usability were too narrow: I wanted to cover all aspects of the person’s experience with a system, including industrial design, graphics, the interface, the physical interaction, and the manual.” In 1988, Norman published The Psychology of Everyday Things (later updated to The Design of Everyday Things)*—*which continues to be a UX design staple to this day. This book dives into so many practical aspects of design, such as affordances, signifiers, feedback, and more What does Don Norman think about the way the term “UX design” is used in the modern-day context? He shares his thoughts in this video.

https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/web-design-history/timeline-1995-1997

1995/05/25

Three web designers - Jeffrey Zeldman , Steve McCarron  and Alec Pollak  - created an official website for Batman Forever . At the time, it was one of the first web projects that used the WWW service as a marketing and visual medium.

https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/web-design-history/timeline-1995-1997

1995/06/08

The Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf  designed the first version of the popular PHP 1.0  scripting language. The term PHP originally stood for Personal Home Page . In 1997, Israeli developers Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski rewrote the parser to create the basis for PHP 3. They also changed the name of the language to a recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.

https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/web-design-history/timeline-1995-1997

1995/06/16

Amazon, founded by Jeff Bezos , launched one of the first online stores on Amazon.com on July 5, 1994 . Amazon first began as an online bookstore and later expanded its range of products to CDs, DVDs, software, clothes, toys, etc. In 1998, Amazon purchased the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) , and, a year later, the Alexa.com  web service. In 2002, Amazon started running a cloud platform called Amazon Web Services (AWS) , and as of November 2007, the Amazon Kindle e-reader  belongs to one of its major products.

https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/web-design-history/timeline-1995-1997

1995/08/16

Microsoft released, as a part of its bonus package, the Microsoft Plus! Internet Jumpstart Kit (later also known as the Internet Connection Wizard) for Windows 95, which included Internet Explorer 1.0 . In the original version of Windows 95 , a web browser was not available, as Microsoft underestimated the potential of the rapidly developing Internet. The source code for Internet Explorer 1.0 was based on the older Spyglass Mosaic browser for which Microsoft purchased license rights. Internet Explorer 1.0 occupied only 1 MB of disk space  and its features were considerably limited compared to other browsers at the time.

https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/web-design-history/timeline-1995-1997

1995/09/03

An Iranian-American programmer, Pierre Omidyar , programmed a simple auction website called AuctionWeb . The first item Pierre Omidyar allegedly sold on the portal was his own broken laser pointer for $ 14.83. In September 1997, the portal was officially renamed to eBay . In October 2002, eBay switched to the PayPal online payment system and in 2005, eBay bought Skype VoIP.

https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/web-design-history/timeline-1995-1997

1995/09/18

The Netscape Communications Corporation launched Netscape Navigator 2.0  as its new major product. The browser contained a wide range of innovations and enhancements. Among other features, Netscape Navigator 2.0 supported JavaScript , animated GIFs , the HTML tag <frame>  and proprietary tag <blink> . Netscape Mail 2.0 was also part of version 2.0, making Netscape Navigator 2.0 a fully operational Web application package.

https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/web-design-history/timeline-1995-1997

1995/11

Vermeer Technologies developed the FrontPage 1.0 editor for WYSIWYG  web development. In January 1996, Microsoft bought Vermeer and, in June, released an editor called Microsoft FrontPage 1.1. Microsoft expected that extending its software portfolio to a web editor would provide a considerable advantage in the impending browser wars.

https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/web-design-history/timeline-1995-1997

1995/11/24

The IETF organization published the RFC 1866 specification for HTML 2.0 . HTML 2.0 supported forms, tables, graphics, and a number of new tags, such as <!DOCTYPE> , <head> , <body> , <form> , <img> , <input> , <select> , <strong>  and others.

https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/web-design-history/timeline-1995-1997

1995/12

Adobe Systems released a WYSIWYG HTML editor called Adobe PageMill 1.0 . The editor allowed users to easily create websites without any knowledge of the basics of HTML.