Chronology of Interesting Web Facts

  • 1971, Project Gutenberg, the first eBook was started by Michael Hart that realized how computers could and will be used as storage, rather than only for computing;
  • 1972, Project Cyclades was a French version of Arpanet that introduced idea of a host being responsible for data transmission and not for the network itself;
  • 1973, Year when email traffic accounted for about 75% of Arpanet activity;
  • 1975, Email client introduced, the first email program developed by John Vittal from University of South California. Added “Reply” and “Forward” functionality;
  • 1978, Bulletin Board System (BBS) was developed in Chicago during a blizzard;
  • 1978, A Spam message is created. They were initially named “unsolicited commercial email message” and were created by Gary Thuerk who sent it out of 600 California Arpanet users;
  • 1979, A multiplier game was made, a strictly text based form of a multiplier game, called MUD (MultiUser Dungeon);
  • 1982, The first Emoticon was proposed by Scott Fahlman after a joke in an email;
  • 1985, The WELL (Whole Earth ‘Letronic Link) as one of the oldest (still in use) online community was developed by Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant. It started out as a community of the readers and writers of the Whole Earth Review magazine;
  • 1987, Switching to TCP/IP protocol enabled internet to grow from 1000 hosts (Arpanet limitation) to almost 30,000;
  • 1988, The first serious malicious Internet attack was deployed. That was the first major “worm”, written by Robert Tappan Morris and referred to as “The Morris Worm”. It caused many interruptions across large parts of Internet;
  • 1989, AOL is launched. After Apple pulled out of AppleLink program, America Online was founded;
  • 1991, MP3 compressed file format was accepted as a standard and later became popular for songs sharing;
  • 1991, The first web cam was developed by University of Cambridge with only purpose of watching the lab’s coffee maker so the lab users don’t waste trips if there’s no coffee left in it;
  • 1993, Government and United Nations initiated using new domain names ending with “.gov” and “.org”;
  • 1994, Internet Magazine launches and reports on London’s, UK, first Internet cybercafé and reviews 100 websites;
  • 1995, Digital Equipment Corporation's Research lab launches search engine Alta Vista, which it claims can store and index the HTML from every internet page. It also introduces the first multilingual search;
  • 1995, Geocities launched (in 2009 it was officially shut down);
  • 1996, Microsoft integrates Internet Explorer and begins “fighting” Netscape head-to-head;
  • 1996, Microsoft launched ActiveX as response to JS (JavaScript);
  • 1996, Hotmail was launched as the first web-based email service;
  • 1998, The first news story broken online was posted by The Drudge Report. It was about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky scandal;
  • 1999, Napster went online, the first file sharing software. It was created and deployed by Shawn Fanning;
  • 1999, SETI@home project was launched. The project was utilizing home based computer’s CPU power once the screensaver comes on (indicating that computer is idle) thus creating a supercomputer out of millions of computers world wide;
  • 2000, Many online companies publically traded went bankrupt and NASDAQ stock exchange crashed;
  • 2001, Apple releases iTunes 1.0. Later the most popular online music store;
  • 2003, MySpace becomes the most popular social media online (later overtaken by Facebook);
  • 2004, Digg, a social news site appeared and paved the way for some others (i.e. Yahoo!Buzz) with some new ideas regarding finding web content and letting community review and vote on it;
  • 2004, Photo sharing website Flickr is born;
  • 2006, Twitter, another very popular social media was launched;
  • 2007, TV shows start moving online as a part of new development in entertainment industry. Hulu was launched first as joined venture between ABC, NBC and Fox;
  • 2008, The first “Internet” election in United States. This election year was the first one that used Internet for major campaign donations and also political promotion, specifically via YouTube;