Timeline

R. Craig Collins > Web Page Design > Timeline

Highlights from: Hobbes' Internet Timeline Copyright ©1993- by Robert H Zakon.

Permission is granted for use of this document in whole or in part for non commercial purposes as long as appropriate credit is given to the author/maintainer. A copy of the material the Timeline appears in is appreciated. For commercial uses, please contact the author first. The author wishes to acknowledge the Internet Society for hosting this document, and the many Net folks who have contributed suggestions and helped with the author's genealogy search.

1950s
1957	My Notes (Stuff for Review over here :)
USSR launches Sputnik, first artificial earth satellite. In response, US 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 (:amk:)	This was huge to the US, it meant that the Russians beat us into space, and had the ability to perhaps drop bombs from space, and knock out our communications. So, The US knew they needed a better way for Generals to talk to each other in case of war, and a better way for scientists to talk to each other, to get caught up technologically.
1960s
1962
Paul Baran, RAND: "On Distributed Communications Networks"	It took 5 years for someone to think of an idea of communications that could survive a nuclear bomb... by de-centralizing the network, and letting the parts be responsible for moving the messages.
• Packet-switching (PS) networks; no single outage point
1965
ARPA sponsors study on "cooperative network of time-sharing computers"	ARPA is the guys that gave us the stealth bomber... now they want to build that bomb proof network... 8 years after the need arose.
1967
ACM Symposium on Operating Principles
• First design paper on ARPANET published by Lawrence G. Roberts	10 years after Sputnik, now we have a design.
• Plan presented for a packet-switching network
1969
ARPANET commissioned by DoD for research into networking	The Internet goes on-line in 1969... same year man walked on the moon. Which is more important, now?
First Request for Comment (RFC): "Host Software" by Steve Crocker	Instead of letting problems fester for years, they designed a method of letting people know there is an issue to tackle... the RFC.
1970s
1970
ALOHAnet developed by Norman Abrahamson, U of Hawaii (:sk2:)
ARPANET hosts start using Network Control Protocol (NCP).
1971
15 nodes (23 hosts): UCLA, SRI, UCSB, U of Utah, BBN, MIT, RAND, SDC, Harvard, Lincoln Lab, Stanford, UIU(C), CWRU, CMU, NASA/Ames	Hold on, the Internet had only 23 server computers back then?
1972
ALOHAnet connected to the ARPANET	The Internet leaves the Continental US.
InterNetworking Working Group (INWG) created to address need for establishing agreed upon protocols. Chairman: Vinton Cerf.
Ray Tomlinson of BBN invents email program to send messages across a distributed network. (:amk:)	Birth of e-mail.
Telnet specification (RFC 318)
1973
First international connections to the ARPANET: University College of London (England) and Royal Radar Establishment (Norway)	The Internet expands beyond the US.
Bob Metcalfe's Harvard PhD Thesis outlines idea for Ethernet (:amk:)	This is how you connect little computers to a network. Bob went on to found 3Com... maybe you see football games played in his stadium in San Francisco.
Bob Kahn poses Internet problem, starts internetting research program at ARPA. Vinton Cerf sketches gateway architecture in March on back of envelope in hotel lobby in San Francisco (:vgc:)	Vinton Cerf is a neat guy. Designs a way to connect lots of different kinds of computers together. I met him a few years ago... looks just like me. Tall, bald, bearded, good looking...
File Transfer specification (RFC 454)	You still will use this 30 year old technology to upload to a web server
1974
Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn publish "A Protocol for Packet Network Internetworking" which specified in detail the design of a Transmission Control Program (TCP). (:amk:)
1976
Elizabeth, Queen of the United Kingdom sends out an e-mail (various Net folks have e-mailed dates ranging from 1971 to 1978; 1976 was the most submitted and the only found in print)	Note when a US President goes online... and our country invented this stuff!
UUCP (Unix-to-Unix CoPy) developed at AT&T Bell Labs and distributed with UNIX one year later.
1977
Mail specification (RFC 733)
1980s
1982
DCA and ARPA establishes the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP), as the protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, for ARPANET. (:vgc:)	We still use TCP/IP, but it is due for an overhaul, to allow more devices to connect by expanding the number of IP addresses.
• This leads to one of the first definitions of an "internet" as a connected set of networks, specifically those using TCP/IP, and "Internet" as connected TCP/IP internets.
• DoD declares TCP/IP suite to be standard for DoD (:vgc:)
External Gateway Protocol (RFC 827) specification. EGP is used for gateways between networks.
1983
Name server developed at U of Wisconsin, no longer requiring users to know the exact path to other systems.
Cutover from NCP to TCP/IP (1 January)
ARPANET split into ARPANET and MILNET; the latter became integrated with the Defense Data Network created the previous year.	Generals don't want to share anymore...
Desktop workstations come into being, many with Berkeley UNIX which includes IP networking software.
Internet Activities Board (IAB) established, replacing ICCB
Berkeley releases 4.2BSD incorporating TCP/IP (:mpc:)	First computer operating system to include TCP/IP... this is why BSD and other UNIX computers constitute the majority of web servers
1984
Domain Name Server (DNS) introduced.	Instead of using just IP numbers (32 1s and 0s) to identify a computer, we can also use a name, such as DCCCD.EDU or TEMPLEJC.EDU
# of hosts breaks 1,000	Pay attention to the growth now
1986
NSFNET created (backbone speed of 56Kbps)
• NSF establishes 5 super-computing centers to provide high-computing power for all (JVNC@Princeton, PSC@Pittsburgh, SDSC@UCSD, NCSA@UIUC, Theory Center@Cornell).
1987
1000th RFC: "Request For Comments reference guide"
# of hosts breaks 10,000 # of BITNET hosts breaks 1,000	About every 2 1/2 years, the Internet grows by a factor of 10... not doubling, as in 2 to 4, but by a factor of 10, from 1,000 to 10,000
1988
1 November - Internet worm burrows through the Net, affecting ~6,000 of the 60,000 hosts on the Internet (:ph1:)
DoD chooses to adopt OSI and sees use of TCP/IP as an interim. US Government OSI Profile (GOSIP) defines the set of protocols to be supported by Government purchased products (:gck:)
NSFNET backbone upgraded to T1 (1.544Mbps) CERFnet (California Education and Research Federation network) founded by Susan Estrada.
Countries connecting to NSFNET: Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Norway, Sweden
1989
# of hosts breaks 100,000
Cuckoo's Egg written by Clifford Stoll tells the real-life tale of a German cracker group who infiltrated numerous US facilities	Great Story, but Stoll is now an idiot
Countries connecting to NSFNET: Australia, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Puerto Rico, UK
1990s
1990
ARPANET ceases to exist	Al Gore supports a bill to keeps the Internet going when ARPA shuts down; what we now call the Internet. Write a note and thank him. He never said he invented it, by the way.
Archie released by Peter Deutsch, Alan Emtage, and Bill Heelan at McGill
The World comes on-line (world.std.com), becoming the first commercial provider of Internet dial-up access
Countries connecting to NSFNET: Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Chile, Greece, India, Ireland, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland
1991
Gopher released by Paul Lindner and Mark P. McCahill from the U of Minn	Until now, you used one program to search for files, another to transfer files, and yet another to read the file. Gopher did all of that in one program.
Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS), invented by Brewster Kahle, released by Thinking Machines Corporation
PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) released by Philip Zimmerman (:ad1:)
US High Performance Computing Act (Gore 1) establishes the National Research and Education Network (NREN) NSFNET backbone upgraded to T3 (44.736Mbps)
NSFNET traffic passes 1 trillion bytes/month and 10 billion packets/month
Countries connecting to NSFNET: Croatia, Czech Republic, Hong Kong, Hungary, Poland, Portugal, Singapore, South Africa, Taiwan, Tunisia
1992
Internet Society (ISOC) is chartered	There is no King of the Internet, just volunteers who make recommendations... which most people adopt. What a great way to run the world.
World-Wide Web (WWW) released by CERN; Tim Berners-Lee developer, a prototype browser	Tim wants folks reading his scientific papers to be able to read similar papers, so he add the ideas of links. He now runs the volunteer group that oversees new ideas for the WWW
# of hosts breaks 1,000,000	Still growing by a factor of 10
IAB reconstituted as the Internet Architecture Board and becomes part of the Internet Society
Veronica, a gopherspace search tool, is released by UofNevada	Computer people are weird. Archie is an FTP search engine, and Veronica and Jughead are Gopher search engines.
Countries connecting to NSFNET: Cameroon, Cyprus, Ecuador, Estonia, Kuwait, Latvia, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Thailand, Venezuela
1993
InterNIC created by NSF to provide specific Internet services: (:sc1:)
• directory and database services (AT&T)
• registration services (Network Solutions Inc.)
• information services (General Atomics/CERFnet)
US White House comes on-line (http://www.whitehouse.gov/):	Finally, 17 years after the Queen.
• President Bill Clinton: president@whitehouse.gov
• Vice-President Al Gore: vice-president@whitehouse.gov
US National Information Infrastructure Act
Mosaic takes the Internet by storm; WWW proliferates at a 341,634% annual growth rate of service traffic.	Marc Andreeson had taken Tim Berners-Lee's idea, added pictures to web pages, and develops a free server and browser while at the University of Illinois. This was the first browser for personal computers Marc later decides to start a company to sell some of this stuff... the first commercial browser was called Netscape.
Gopher's growth is 997%.
Countries connecting to NSFNET: Bulgaria, Costa Rica, Egypt, Fiji, Ghana, Guam, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Liechtenstein, Peru, Romania, Russian Federation, Turkey, Ukrayne, UAE, Virgin Islands
1994
ARPANET/Internet celebrates 25th anniversary
Arizona law firm of Canter & Siegel "spams" the Internet with email advertising green card lottery services; Net citizens flame back
NSFNET traffic passes 10 trillion bytes/month
WWW edges out telnet to become 2nd most popular service on the Net (behind ftp-data) based on % of packets and bytes traffic distribution on NSFNET
Countries connecting to NSFNET: Algeria, Armenia, Bermuda, Burkina Faso, China, Colombia, French Polynesia, Jamaica, Lebanon, Lithuania, Macau, Morocco, New Caledonia, Nicaragua, Niger, Panama, Philippines, Senegal, Sri Lanka, Swaziland, Uruguay, Uzbekistan
1995
WWW surpasses ftp-data in March as the service with greatest traffic on NSFNet based on packet count, and in April based on byte count	It used to take 10 years for a good idea to take root, but look how fast WWW grew.
NSFNET reverts back to a research network.
Traditional online dial-up systems (Compuserve, American Online, Prodigy ) begin to provide Internet access
Registration of domain names is no longer free. Beginning 14 September, a $50 annual fee has been imposed, which up until now was subsidized by NSF.
• NSF continues to pay for .edu registration, and on an interim basis for .gov "
Addendum, (R Craig Collins)
1996
Number of .com sites surpasses .edu sites	The scientists now have their own network, called Internet 2. It is 100 times faster that what you can get at school.
Microsoft goes from desktop computing giant to Internet giant wannabe, refocuses entire line to the Internet
Java programming language released
• Potential for universal programming language for all platforms using Java Virtual machines
1997
Browsing, Java, and TCP/IP embedded in Internet Explorer 4.0 for Windows 95 and Windows NT
1998
Release of Windows 98, and built in Internet connectivity	Now everybody can play on the Internet!