Internet History

By John P. Healy

1957

· The USSR launches Sputnik, the first artificial earth satellite. In response, the United States forms the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) within the Department of Defense (DoD) to establish US lead in science and technology applicable to the military.

1962

· RAND Paul Baran, of the RAND Corporation (a government agency), was commissioned by the U.S. Air Force to do a study on how it could maintain its command and control over its missiles and bombers, after a nuclear attack. This was to be a military research network that could survive a nuclear strike, decentralized so that if any locations (cities) in the U.S. were attacked, the military could still have control of nuclear arms for a counter-attack.

Baran's finished document described several ways to accomplish this. His final proposal was a packet switched network.

"Packet switching is the breaking down of data into datagrams or packets that are labeled to indicate the origin and the destination of the information and the forwarding of these packets from one computer to another computer until the information arrives at its final destination computer. This was crucial to the realization of a computer network. If packets are lost at any given point, the message can be resent by the originator."

1966

· Lawrence G. Roberts, MIT: "Towards a Cooperative Network of Time-Shared Computers" (October)

o First ARPANET plan

1968

· ARPA awarded the ARPANET contract to BBN. BBN had selected a Honeywell minicomputer as the base on which they would build the switch. The physical network was constructed in 1969, linking four nodes: University of California at Los Angeles, SRI (in Stanford), University of California at Santa Barbara, and University of Utah. The network was wired together via 50 Kbps circuits.

1970

· ARPANET hosts start using Network Control Protocol (NCP), first host-to-host protocol .

· First cross-country link installed by AT&T between UCLA and BBN at 56kbps. This line is later replaced by another between BBN and RAND. A second line is added between MIT and Utah

1972

· Ray Tomlinson of BBN invents email program to send messages across a distributed network. The original program was derived from two others: an intra-machine email program (SENDMSG) and an experimental file transfer program (CPYNET)

· Ray Tomlinson (BBN) modifies email program for ARPANET where it becomes a quick hit. The @ sign was chosen from the punctuation keys on Tomlinson's Model 33 Teletype for its "at" meaning (March)

· Larry Roberts writes first email management program (RD) to list, selectively read, file, forward, and respond to messages (July)

· First computer-to-computer chat takes place at UCLA, and is repeated during ICCC, as psychotic PARRY (at Stanford) discusses its problems with the Doctor (at BBN).

1973

· Development began on the protocol later to be called TCP/IP, it was developed by a group headed by Vinton Cerf from Stanford and Bob Kahn from DARPA. This new protocol was to allow diverse computer networks to interconnect and communicate with each other.

· Network Voice Protocol (NVP) specification (RFC 741) and implementation enabling conference calls over ARPAnet.

· ARPA study shows email composing 75% of all ARPANET traffic

1974

· First Use of term Internet by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn in paper on Transmission Control Protocol.

1975

· First ARPANET mailing list, MsgGroup, is created by Steve Walker. Einar Stefferud soon took over as moderator as the list was not automated at first. A science fiction list, SF-Lovers, was to become the most popular unofficial list in the early days

1976

· UUCP (Unix-to-Unix CoPy) developed at AT&T Bell Labs and distributed with UNIX one year later.

1979

· First MUD, MUD1, by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw at U of Essex

· On April 12, Kevin MacKenzie emails the MsgGroup a suggestion of adding some emotion back into the dry text medium of email, such as -) for indicating a sentence was tongue-in-cheek. Though flamed by many at the time, emoticons became widely used

1980

· ARPANET grinds to a complete halt on 27 October because of an accidentally-propagated status-message virus First C/30-based IMP at BBN

1983

· Name server developed at Univ of Wisconsin, no longer requiring users to know the exact path to other systems

· Cutover from NCP to TCP/IP (1 January)

· Desktop workstations come into being, many with Berkeley UNIX (4.2 BSD) which includes IP networking software

1984

· Domain Name System (DNS) introduced

1985

· Symbolics.com is assigned on 15 March to become the first registered domain. Other firsts: cmu.edu, purdue.edu, rice.edu, berkeley.edu, ucla.edu, rutgers.edu, bbn.com (24 Apr); mit.edu (23 May); think.com (24 may); css.gov (June); mitre.org, .uk (July)

1986

· Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) designed to enhance Usenet news performance over TCP/IP.

1988

· 2 November - Internet worm burrows through the Net, affecting ~6,000 of the 60,000 hosts on the Internet

· CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) formed by DARPA in response to the needs exhibited during the Morris worm incident. The worm is the only advisory issued this year.

· Internet Relay Chat (IRC) developed by Jarkko Oikarinen

1989

· Cuckoo's Egg by Clifford Stoll tells the real-life tale of a German cracker group who infiltrated numerous US facilities

1990

· ARPANET ceases to exist

· The World comes on-line (world.std.com), becoming the first commercial provider of Internet dial-up access

· Tim Berners-Lee and CERN in Geneva implements a hypertext system to provide efficient information access to the members of the international high-energy physics community.

1991

· Gopher released by Paul Lindner and Mark P. McCahill from the Univ of Minnesota

· World-Wide Web (WWW) released by CERN; Tim Berners-Lee developer

· PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) released by Philip Zimmerman

1992

· The term "surfing the Internet" is coined by Jean Armour Polly

1994

· Shopping malls arrive on the Internet

· First cyberstation, RT-FM, broadcasts from Interop in Las Vegas

· Arizona law firm of Canter & Siegel "spams" the Internet with email advertising green card lottery services; Net citizens flame back

· Yes, it's true - you can now order pizza from the Hut online

· First Virtual, the first cyberbank, open up for business

· The first banner ads appear on hotwired.com in October. They were for Zima (a beverage) and AT&T

1995

· The National Science Foundation announced that as of April 30, 1995 it would no longer allow direct access to the NSF backbone. The National Science Foundationcontracted with four companies that would be providers of access to the NSF backbone (Merit). These companies would then sell connections to groups, organizations, and companies. $50 annual fee is imposed on domains, excluding .edu and .gov domains which are still funded by the National Science Foundation.

· Hong Kong police disconnect all but one of the colony's Internet providers for failure to obtain a license; thousands of users are left without service

· Sun launches JAVA on May 23

· RealAudio, an audio streaming technology, lets the Net hear in near real-time

· Radio HK, the first commercial 24 hr., Internet-only radio station starts broadcasting

· Traditional online dial-up systems (Compuserve, America Online, Prodigy) begin to provide Internet access

· The first official Internet wiretap was successful in helping the Secret Service and Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) apprehend three individuals who were illegally manufacturing and selling cell phone cloning equipment and electronic devices

1996

· Most Internet traffic is carried by backbones of independent ISPs, including MCI, AT&T, Sprint, UUnet, BBN planet, ANS, and more.

· Currently the Internet Society, the group that controls the INTERNET, is trying to figure out new TCP/IP to be able to have billions of addresses, rather than the limited system of today. The problem that has arisen is that it is not known how both the old and the new addressing systems will be able to work at the same time during a transition period.

· Internet phones catch the attention of US telecommunication companies who ask the US Congress to ban the technology (which has been around for years)

1996 (cont.)

· The controversial US Communications Decency Act (CDA) becomes law in the US in order to prohibit distribution of indecent materials over the Net. A few months later a three-judge panel imposes an injunction against its enforcement. Supreme Court unanimously rules most of it unconstitutional in 1997.

· Restrictions on Internet use around the world:

o China: requires users and ISPs to register with the police

o Germany: cuts off access to some newsgroups carried on Compuserve

o Saudi Arabia: confines Internet access to universities and hospitals

o Singapore: requires political and religious content providers to register with the state

o New Zealand: classifies computer disks as "publications" that can be censored and seized

o source: Human Rights Watch

1998

· Internet users get to be judges in a performance by 12 world champion ice skaters on 27 March, marking the first time a television sport show's outcome is determined by its viewers.

· Network Solutions registers its 2 millionth domain on 4 May

· CDA II and a ban on Net taxes are signed into US law (21 October)

· Chinese government puts Lin Hai on trial for "inciting the overthrow of state power" for providing 30,000 email addresses to a US Internet magazine (December) [ He is later sentenced to two years in jail ]

· Open source software comes of age

1999

· First Internet Bank of Indiana, the first full-service bank available only on the Net, opens for business on 22 February

· First large-scale Cyberwar takes place simultaneously with the war in Serbia/Kosovo

1999 (Cont.)

· The Web becomes the focal point of British politics as a list of MI6 agents is released on a UK Web site. Though forced to remove the list from the site, it was too late as the list had already been replicated across the Net. (15 May)

· Free computers are all the rage (as long as you sign a long term contract for Net service)

2000

· The US timekeeper (USNO) and a few other time services around the world report the new year as 19100 on 1 Jan

· A massive denial of service attack is launched against major web sites, including Yahoo, Amazon, and eBay in early February

· After months of legal proceedings, the French court rules Yahoo! must block French users from accessing hate memorabilia in its auction site (Nov). Given its inability to provide such a block on the Internet, Yahoo! removes those auctions entirely (Jan 2001).

2001

· Forwarding email in Australia becomes illegal with the passing of the Digital Agenda Act, as it is seen as a technical infringement of personal copyright (4 Mar)

· Radio stations broadcasting over the Web go silent over royalty disputes (10 Apr)

Sources:

www.zako.org/robert/internet/timeline/ Hobbs’ Internet Timeline v5.5, by Robert H Zakon.

www.davesite.com/webstation/net-history.shtml The History of the Internet, By Dave Kristula, March 1997 / Update: August 2001