Timeline of the Internet

Essentially, Internet is the technology that allows information from one computer to reach another computer. The creation of this idea was triggered when two world powers, the United States of America (USA) and the Union Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR), began a race for space technology dominance. Thus, the beginnings of the Internet were planted on a military field, but as time went by, Internet conquered all other aspects of human existence. Here is a timeline of the development of the Internet.

The Take-Off: For more than a decade, the backbone of Internet technology was developed: Here are the significant events:

1957: The first artificial satellite, Sputnik, was launched by the USSR. Realizing the apparent superiority of its rival, the USA created the ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency), an agency tasked to make the United States the leader in military technology.

1962: Anticipating a nuclear attack, the US Air Force wanted to find a method in which the United States can still have command over its military and can still mount a counter-attack even when one of its cities already suffered a nuclear strike. Thus, Paul Baran of the RAND Corporation created the “packet switched network”. In packet switching, data is broken down and sent as packets from one computer to another until the data reaches the target destination computer.

1968: To test run, ARPA contracted BBN (Bolt Beranek and Newman, Inc) to build Interface Message Processors (IMPs). Each IMP built has a node. And in 1969, there are four nodes: The University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah.

1970: The ARPANET used the Network Control Protocol (NCP). In the same year, AT&T created the first cross-country link between BBN and UCLA which operates at 56kbps.

The Refinements: As Internet develops, more features are being added to it. And as more features are added, Internet began to be utilized for purposes other than national security.

1972: Ray Tomlinson of BBN formulated the first email program

1973: Vinton Cerf of (SRI) and Bob Kahn from DARPA (formerly called ARPA) developed the TCP/IP, the protocol that allows communication between two different computer networks. A year later, their work was published and the word “Internet” was coined.

1976: The Atlantic Packet Satellite Network was established and this network bridged the US and Europe.

1979: Steve Bellovin of the University of California, together with Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis, created the USENET, a decentralized news group network.

1983: The Domain Name System was formed by the University of Wisconsin. Such a system made accessing to servers more convenient since meaningless numbers need not be memorized anymore.

1990: A hypertext system was introduced so that there will be a more efficient access of information. This system was developed by Tim Berners-Lee and the CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire or the European Laboratory for Particle Physics) for their physicists.

The Expansion: Internet’s potential for other areas, such as in commerce and politics, was immediately recognized and explored.

1991: The NREN (National Research and Education Network) was created by the National Science Foundation (NSF) so there will be a high-speed networking research.

1992: The CERN released the World Wide Web

1994: The company Pizza Hut offered the online method of ordering their products. In the same year, First Virtual, a bank in cyberspace, started its operations.

1995: Domain names, except those that are .edu and .gov will now be paying an annual fee.

1996: Three world leaders, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammad, Philippine President Fidel V. Ramos, and PLO leader Yasser Arafat had a ten-minute interactive chat on January 17. In the same year, more laws were passed regarding Internet use, and Netscape and Microsoft were competing for browser dominance.

2000: The Y2K scare placed many systems in a panic. The European Commission formed a contract with 30 national research networks to develop the Géant, which started operations in October of the next year.

2001: “The Technophobe & The Madman”, a live musical, was distributed over the Internet on February 20. In Australia, forwarding email is rendered illegal by the Digital Agenda Act.

2002: Internet radio stations protested the increase of song royalty rate by observing a “day of silence”. And on this year, the popularity of having blogs skyrocketed.

2003: The government of Switzerland conducted its first online election on January 7, while the rest of Europe (the EU) go for collecting value added tax on digital downloads.

2004: The RIPE NCC (Réseaux IP Européens Network Coordination Centre), a regional Internet registry that caters to Europe, the Middle East, some parts of Asia, and some parts of Africa, launched the any-cast instance which made possible the creation of more DNS root servers outside the US.

2005: At the end of this year, about 15.7% of the world’s population, or more than one billion people, are using the Internet. The biggest slice of this is in Asia, followed by North America and Europe.