Timeline of the history of the Internet
A timeline of the history of the Internet can stretch back as far as the 19th century.[1][2] This timeline begins in 1960,[3] and lists key events including the emergence of novel ideas, the first implementation of new technologies, and the introduction of new products and services that were significant at that point in time in the history of the Internet. These events led to the Internet as we know it today.
Early research and development (1960-1981)
- 1960–1964: J. C. R. Licklider ideas about human-computer interaction and networking; becomes the director of Project MAC work on time-sharing.[4][5][6]
- 1960–1964: Distributed networking concepts for digital voice communication developed by Paul Baran at RAND.[7][8][9]
- 1965–1967: Packet switching concepts for data communication in high-speed computer networks conceived by Donald Davies.[10][11][12]
- 1967: ARPANET planning begins to enable resource sharing over a wide area network.[13]
- 1967: Symposium on Operating Systems Principles in Gatlinburg, Tennessee.[14][15]
- 1969: NPL network followed by the ARPANET carry their first packets.[16][17]
- 1970: Network Information Center (NIC).[18]
- 1971: Tymnet switched-circuit network.[19]
- 1972: Merit Network, founded in 1966, begins operation of a packet-switched network.[20][21]
- 1972: Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) established.[22]
- 1973: CYCLADES network demonstrated by Louis Pouzin and Hubert Zimmerman.[23][24]
- 1973: PARC Universal Packet development begins
- 1974: Transmission Control Program specification published
- 1975: Telenet commercial packet-switched network
- 1976: X.25 protocol, developed by Rémi Després and others, is approved by the CCITT and deployed on public data networks
- 1978: Minitel introduced
- 1979: Internet Activities Board (IAB)
- 1980: USENET news using UUCP
- 1980: Ethernet standard introduced
- 1981: BITNET established
Merging the networks and creating the Internet (1981-1994)
- 1981: Computer Science Network (CSNET)
- 1982: TCP/IP protocol suite formalized
- 1982: Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP)
- 1983: Domain Name System (DNS)
- 1983: MILNET split off from ARPANET
- 1984: OSI Reference Model released.
- 1984: JANET network online.[25][26]
- 1985: First .COM domain name registered
- 1986: NSFNET with 56 kbit/s links
- 1986: Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)
- 1987: UUNET founded
- 1988: NSFNET upgraded to 1.5 Mbit/s (T1)
- 1988: Morris worm
- 1988: Complete Internet protocol suite
- 1989: Border Gateway Protocol (BGP)
- 1989: PSINet founded, allows commercial traffic
- 1989: Federal Internet Exchanges (FIX East|FIXes)
- 1990: GOSIP (without TCP/IP)
- 1990: ARPANET decommissioned
- 1990: Advanced Network and Services (ANS)
- 1990: UUNET/Alternet allows commercial traffic
- 1990: Archie search engine
- 1991: Wide area information server (WAIS)
- 1991: Gopher
- 1991: Commercial Internet eXchange (CIX)
- 1991: ANS CO+RE allows commercial traffic
- 1991: World Wide Web (WWW)
- 1992: NSFNET upgraded to 45 Mbit/s (T3)
- 1992: Internet Society (ISOC) established
- 1993: Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR)
- 1993: InterNIC established
- 1993: AOL added USENET access
- 1993: Mosaic web browser released
- 1994: Full text web search engines
- 1994: North American Network Operators' Group (NANOG) established
Commercialization, privatization, broader access leads to the modern Internet (1995-present)
- 1995: New Internet architecture with commercial ISPs connected at NAPs
- 1995: NSFNET decommissioned
- 1995: GOSIP updated to allow TCP/IP
- 1995: very high-speed Backbone Network Service (vBNS)
- 1995: IPv6 proposed
- 1996: AOL changes pricing model from hourly to monthly
- 1998: Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)
- 1999: IEEE 802.11b wireless networking
- 1999: Internet2/Abilene Network
- 1999: vBNS+ allows broader access
- 2000: Dot-com bubble bursts
- 2001: New top-level domain names activated
- 2001: Code Red I, Code Red II, and Nimda worms
- 2003: UN World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) phase I
- 2003: National LambdaRail founded
- 2004: UN Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG)
- 2005: UN WSIS phase II
- 2006: First meeting of the Internet Governance Forum
- 2010: First internationalized country code top-level domains registered
- 2012: ICANN begins accepting applications for new generic top-level domain names
- 2013: Montevideo Statement on the Future of Internet Cooperation
- 2014: NetMundial international Internet governance proposal
- 2016: ICANN contract with U.S. Dept. of Commerce ends, IANA oversight passes to the global Internet community on October 1st
Examples of Internet services (to be merged into the sections above)
- 1989: AOL dial-up service provider, email, instant messaging, and web browser
- 1990: IMDb Internet movie database
- 1994: Yahoo! web directory
- 1995: Amazon online retailer
- 1995: eBay online auction and shopping
- 1995: Craigslist classified advertisements
- 1995: AltaVista search engine
- 1996: Outlook (formerly Hotmail) free web-based e-mail
- 1996: RankDex search engine
- 1997: Google Search
- 1997: Babel Fish automatic translation
- 1998: Yahoo Groups (formerly Yahoo! Clubs)
- 1998: PayPal Internet payment system
- 1998: Rotten Tomatoes review aggregator
- 1999: 2ch Anonymous textboard
- 1999: i-mode mobile internet service
- 1999: Napster peer-to-peer file sharing
- 2000: Baidu search engine
- 2001: 2chan Anonymous imageboard
- 2001: BitTorrent peer-to-peer file sharing
- 2001: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- 2003: LinkedIn business networking
- 2003: Myspace social networking site
- 2003: Skype Internet voice calls
- 2003: iTunes Store
- 2003: 4chan Anonymous imageboard
- 2003: The Pirate Bay, torrent file host
- 2004: Facebook social networking site
- 2004: Podcast media file series
- 2004: Flickr image hosting
- 2005: YouTube video sharing
- 2005: Reddit link voting
- 2005: Google Earth virtual globe
- 2006: Twitter microblogging
- 2007: WikiLeaks anonymous news and information leaks
- 2007: Google Street View
- 2007: Kindle, e-reader and virtual bookshop
- 2008: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
- 2008: Dropbox cloud-based file hosting
- 2008: Encyclopedia of Life, a collaborative encyclopedia intended to document all living species
- 2008: Spotify, a DRM-based music streaming service
- 2009: Bing search engine
- 2009: Google Docs, Web-based word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, form, and data storage service
- 2009: Kickstarter, a threshold pledge system
- 2009: Bitcoin, a digital currency
- 2010: Instagram, photo sharing and social networking
- 2011: Google+, social networking
- 2011: Snapchat, photo sharing
- 2012: Coursera, massive open online courses
- 2016: TikTok, video sharing and social networking
See also
References
- ^ Moschovitis, Christos J.; Poole, Hilary; Senft, Theresa M. (1999). History of the Internet: A Chronology, 1843 to the Present. ABC-CLIO Ltd. ISBN 978-1-57607-118-2.
- ^ Feinler, Elizabeth; Vittal, John (2022-07-01). "Email Innovation Timeline" (PDF). Computer History Museum. Retrieved 2023-08-18.
- ^ RFC 2235 , Hobbes' Internet Timeline (November 1997), essentially also begins in the 1960s.
- ^ Hauben, Michael; Hauben, Ronda (1997). "5 The Vision of Interactive Computing And the Future". Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet (PDF). Wiley. ISBN 978-0-8186-7706-9. Archived (PDF) from the original on 3 January 2021. Retrieved 2 March 2020.
- ^ Roberts, Lawrence G. (November 1978). "The evolution of packet switching" (PDF). Proceedings of the IEEE. 66 (11): 1307–13. Bibcode:1978IEEEP..66.1307R. doi:10.1109/PROC.1978.11141. S2CID 26876676.
- ^ Roberts, Lawrence G. (May 1995). "The ARPANET & Computer Networks". Archived from the original on March 24, 2016. Retrieved 13 April 2016.
- ^ Yoo, Christopher S. (2018–2019). "Paul Baran, Network Theory, and the Past, Present, and Future of the Internet" (PDF). Colorado Technology Law Journal. 17: 161.
Paul Baran's seminal 1964 article
- ^ Baran, P. (2002). "The beginnings of packet switching: some underlying concepts" (PDF). IEEE Communications Magazine. 40 (7): 42–48. Bibcode:2002IComM..40g..42B. doi:10.1109/MCOM.2002.1018006. ISSN 0163-6804.
- ^ "Paul Baran and the Origins of the Internet". RAND Corporation. Retrieved 2020-02-15.
- ^ Edmondson-Yurkanan, Chris (2007). "SIGCOMM's archaeological journey into networking's past". Communications of the ACM. 50 (5): 63–68. doi:10.1145/1230819.1230840. ISSN 0001-0782.
In his first draft dated Nov. 10, 1965 [5], Davies forecast today's "killer app" for his new communication service: "The greatest traffic could only come if the public used this means for everyday purposes such as shopping... People sending enquiries and placing orders for goods of all kinds will make up a large section of the traffic... Business use of the telephone may be reduced by the growth of the kind of service we contemplate."
- ^ Davies, D. W. (1966). "Proposal for a Digital Communication Network" (PDF).
Computer developments in the distant future might result in one type of network being able to carry speech and digital messages efficiently.
- ^ Davies, D. W.; Bartlett, K. A.; Scantlebury, R. A.; Wilkinson, P. T. (October 1967). "A digital communication network for computers giving rapid response at remote terminals" (PDF). Proceedings of the ACM symposium on Operating System Principles - SOSP '67. Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 2.1 – 2.17. doi:10.1145/800001.811669. ISBN 978-1-4503-7370-8.
- ^ Pelkey, James. "4.7 Planning the ARPANET: 1967-1968 in Chapter 4 - Networking: Vision and Packet Switching 1959 - 1968". The History of Computer Communications. Archived from the original on December 23, 2022. Retrieved May 9, 2023.
- ^ Moschovitis, Christos J. P. (1999). History of the Internet: A Chronology, 1843 to the Present. ABC-CLIO. pp. 58–9. ISBN 978-1-57607-118-2.
- ^ Hempstead, C.; Worthington, W., eds. (2005). Encyclopedia of 20th-Century Technology. Vol. 1, A–L. Routledge. p. 574. ISBN 9781135455514.
It was a seminal meeting
- ^ John S, Quarterman; Josiah C, Hoskins (1986). "Notable computer networks". Communications of the ACM. 29 (10): 932–971. doi:10.1145/6617.6618. S2CID 25341056.
The first packet-switching network was implemented at the National Physical Laboratories in the United Kingdom. It was quickly followed by the ARPANET in 1969.
- ^ Haughney Dare-Bryan, Christine (June 22, 2023). Computer Freaks (Podcast). Chapter Two: In the Air. Inc. Magazine. 35:55 minutes in.
Leonard Kleinrock: Donald Davies ... did make a single node packet switch before ARPA did
- ^ Feinler, Elizabeth (2010). "The Network Information Center and its Archives". IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. 32 (3): 83–89. Bibcode:2010IAHC...32c..83F. doi:10.1109/MAHC.2010.54. ISSN 1934-1547.
- ^ Kopf, John (1977-06-13). "TYMNET as a multiplexed packet network". Proceedings of the June 13-16, 1977, national computer conference on - AFIPS '77. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 609–613. doi:10.1145/1499402.1499509. ISBN 978-1-4503-7914-4.
- ^ "About". Merit. Retrieved 2025-12-21.
- ^ "1990s". The History of Domain Names. Retrieved 2025-12-21.
- ^ "The History of IANA". Internet Society. Retrieved 2025-12-21.
- ^ Russell, Andrew L.; Schafer, Valérie (2014). "In the Shadow of ARPANET and Internet: Louis Pouzin and the Cyclades Network in the 1970s". Technology and Culture. 55 (4): 880–907. doi:10.1353/tech.2014.0096. ISSN 0040-165X. JSTOR 24468474.
- ^ Pouzin, Louis (1973). "Presentation and major design aspects of the CYCLADES computer network". Proceedings of the third ACM symposium on Data communications and Data networks Analysis and design - DATACOMM '73. ACM Press. pp. 80–87. doi:10.1145/800280.811034. ISBN 978-1-4503-7384-5.
- ^ Wells, Mike (1988-11-01). "JANET-the United Kingdom Joint Academic Network". Serials. 1 (3): 28–36. doi:10.1629/010328. ISSN 1475-3308.
- ^ Rutter, Dorian (2005). From Diversity to Convergence: British Computer Networks and the Internet, 1970-1995 (PDF) (Computer Science thesis). The University of Warwick.