Scientific Achievements Leading to Internet

  • 1836, The first electric Telegraph message was sent by Samuel Morse in U.S;  
  • 1866, The first Transatlantic cable is operational;
  • 1876, A telephone exhibited by Alexander Graham Bell;
  • 1893, Nikola Tesla explains how wireless communication works. His parts are later used in long distance wireless communication apparatus tested by Guillermo Marconi;
  • 1936, Konrad Zuse invented Z1 Computer, the World’s first freely programmable computer;

Web & Internet in Development

  • 1945, Vannevar Bush writes an article about a device called a Memex which could make and follow links between documents on microfiche;
  • 1957, USSR launches Sputnik, first artificial earth satellite. That marked the start of global telecommunications;
  • 1958, As a response to Sputnik, Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) is created by the US Department of Defense (DoD);
  • 1963, Doug Engelbart prototypes an "oNLine System" (NLS) which does hypertext browsing and editing. He invents the mouse for this purpose in 1963;
  • 1965, Ted Nelson coins the word Hypertext in the publication Literary Machines;
  • 1969, The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), the world's first operational packet switching network and predecessor to modern days Internet, connected computers between Stanford and UCLA universities;
  • 1969, UNIX, A multitasking and multi-user operating system that heavily influenced designs of Linux and FreeBSD. It was developed by AT&T employees at Bell Labs;
  • 1970, Arpanet network tested communication link between Harvard, MIT and company BBN;
  • 1971, Email developed by Ray Tomlinson. Symbol “@” was used to separate user from computer name;
  • 1973, The first trans-Atlantic connection to University College of London by Arpanet;
  • 1974, The introduction to TCP/IP. Arpanet like networks loose central control and work based on a transmission control protocol and are together called “internetwork”;
  • 1977, Modem invented by Dennis Hayes and Dale Heatherington;
  • 1979, Usenet, an Internet-based discussion system that was allowing people to converse about the same topics by posting public messages categorized by newsgroups. It was created by Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis;
  • 1980, Enquire software was created by European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). It was written by Tim Barnes-Lee and it allowed scientists at the particle physics lab to keep track of people, software, and projects using hypertext (hyperlinks);
  • 1982, The word "Internet" (short for interconnected networks) is coined;
  • 1983, Arpanet switches to TCP/IP. Arpanet computers switched to TCP/IP protocols after a deadline;
  • 1984, Domain Name System (DNS) introduced together with Domain Name Server that allows users to type an easy to use name address that then gets converted into IP address;
  • 1986, The Protocol Wars, a conflict between European community that wanted to use Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) and U.S. that was using Internet / Arpanet protocol. The second won;
  • 1988, IRC (Internet Relay Chat), a the precursor to modern day’s real-time chats and instant messaging programs;

World Wide Web

  • 1989, World Wide Web proposal, originally referred as Mesh, WWW was written and proposed by Tim Barnes-Lee to CERN as an idea that hypertext is an ideal solution for CERN;
  • 1990, World Wide Web name was proposed by Tim Barnes-Lee in May 1990;
  • 1990, ISP, the first commercial Internet Service Provider (ISP) The World was launched;
  • 1990, Arpanet ends!;
  • 1990, WWW protocols were finished by Tim Barnes-Lee who wrapped up a proposal for new WWW together with the standards for HTML, HTTP, and URLs;
  • 1991, The first web page was written with the only purpose to explain what World Wide Web is;
  • 1991, Gopher, the first content-based search protocol was developed by a team from University of Minnesota and was using content instead of file names only as searched material;
  • 1993, Mosaic, the first GUI (Graphical User Interface) Internet browser was released and became hugely popular with non-technical users due it’s easy to use graphic interface. It was developed by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina;

Modern Days

  • 1994, Netscape, the first competitor to Mosaic, was founded by Marc Andreessen and James Clark (developer). Netscape became the leader in Browsing programming;
  • 1994, Yahoo!, Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web is renamed and receives 100,000 visitors;
  • 1995, Yahoo! starts displaying first adverts;
  • 1995, SSL, a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption was developed by Netscape for safer online payments;
  • 1995, This year is considered the first in commercialization of Internet for few reasons: beside SSL being developed two major online companies started up, these are eBay.com (initially called Echo Bay) and Amazon.com;
  • 1995, JavaScript (originally called LiveScript) was released by Netscape Navigator and written by developer Brendan Eich while ActiveX came out as a respond from Microsoft;
  • 1996, Macromedia Flash 1.0 launches to add interactive animation to web pages;
  • 1997, The term weblog is coined;
  • 1998, Google, a new revolutionary web search engine went online. Its glory was mainly achieved due a new way of content based crawling called PageRank (after Larry Page, co-founder). Google started using internal links to define page’s popularity;
  • 2001, Wikipedia, the first user based online encyclopedia that paved the road to many social media appearing later on was deployed;
  • 2003, Skype is released giving a user friendly interface to voice over IP calling;
  • 2003, CAN-SPAM act was signed as Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act and it suppose to regulate commercial emailing with introducing un-subscribe policies that let user receive a commercial message but un-subscribe at will;
  • 2004, The term Web 2.0 was coined in 1999 by Darcy DiNucci but it became widely used around 2004. It refers to websites and Rich Internet Applications (RIA) that are user-driven and highly interactive;
  • 2004, Facebook started at Harvard by Marc Zuckeberg and initially was opened only to college students but later overtook MySpace and become by far the most popular social media website;
  • 2005, YouTube, the most popular free streaming video website was launched;
  • 2007, Although not the first smart phone with these abilities, IPhone was most definitely the most influential device for moving the web towards mobile industry;