Detailed · 14 events
A History of the Internet and the Web
1960s
At UCLA, Charles Kline tried to send the first message—'LOGIN'—to a host at SRI. The connection crashed after the second letter, so only 'LO' arrived. It was the first real operation of ARPANET, the packet-switched network funded by the US Department of Defense's ARPA (later DARPA), and the ancestor of the modern Internet. The initial network had four nodes: UCLA, SRI, UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah.
1970s
Ray Tomlinson at BBN built the mechanism for sending messages between hosts on ARPANET. He chose the otherwise-unused '@' on the keyboard of the day to separate local user name from host name. The format survives as the email address.
1980s
ARPANET switched in a single day from its previous NCP (Network Control Program) to the TCP/IP suite Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn had designed in 1974. The forced cutover, remembered as 'Flag Day', established the protocols that now carry the Internet, and made operational the idea of an 'internetwork' interconnecting many networks.
Paul Mockapetris at USC ISI designed the Domain Name System—a distributed database mapping host names to IP addresses. The previous single HOSTS.TXT file was replaced by a hierarchical, delegable naming structure (RFCs 882 and 883, later 1034 and 1035). The top-level domains—com, org, net, edu, and others—were defined here.
Tim Berners-Lee, a computer engineer at CERN, sent his manager Mike Sendall a hypertext document-management proposal—'Information Management: A Proposal'—as a solution to information sharing inside the laboratory. Sendall wrote in the margin: 'Vague, but exciting...'. The implementation went public in 1991, and the world's first web server, browser, HTTP, and HTML descend from this document.
1990s
Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina at NCSA at the University of Illinois built the first major web browser that displayed text and images inline on the same page. Distributed free for Windows, Mac, and UNIX, it took the Web out of research labs and put it in front of ordinary users almost overnight. Andreessen co-founded Netscape the following year, opening the commercial web era.
Marc Andreessen, the lead behind Mosaic, and Jim Clark co-founded Netscape Communications, which shipped its commercial web browser, Navigator 1.0. The August 1995 IPO tripled in price on the first day; it is often cited as the formal start of the dot-com bubble. Acquired by AOL in 1998 after losing the browser war to Internet Explorer, but the Netscape codebase—released as open source—became the origin of Mozilla and Firefox.
Brendan Eich at Netscape designed a lightweight scripting language for the browser in ten days. Originally Mocha, then LiveScript, finally JavaScript—the last name chosen to benefit, ironically, from the popularity of an unrelated language. JavaScript was treated as a toy for years; then came V8 in 2009, Node.js, server-side JavaScript, and the UI framework wave of React, Vue, and Angular. It is now one of the most widely written languages in the world.
Stanford graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded the search company built around PageRank—an algorithm that estimated importance from the link structure of the web. Where the leading engines of the day (Yahoo!, AltaVista, Excite) depended on human directories and keyword matching, Google's ranking was fully algorithmic and its interface stripped to a single screen. It became a leading search engine within six months.
2000s
Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched Wikipedia as a side project of Nupedia, their earlier, peer-reviewed encyclopedia. A Wiki-based encyclopedia anyone could edit became the largest and most enduring demonstration of the internet's social possibility—the 'wisdom of crowds'. By 2026, more than 300 languages and over 60 million articles.
Mark Zuckerberg launched 'thefacebook.com' in his Harvard dorm. Initially restricted to Harvard students, it opened to the general public in 2006, overtook MySpace in 2008, and crossed a billion users in 2012. The core of the Meta group, alongside Instagram (acquired 2012), WhatsApp (acquired 2014), and Oculus (acquired 2014). Since the late 2010s, it has been the subject of continuous political criticism over data handling and election interference.
Three former PayPal employees—Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim—founded a service on which anyone could upload and share video. The spread of Flash Video and the dominance of the Adobe Flash browser plugin at the time made friction-free in-browser playback possible for the first time. Google bought YouTube in 2006 for US$1.65 billion. Through the 2010s it grew into a distribution platform of broadcast-television scale.
Jack Dorsey and others launched Twitter as a short-message service capped at 140 characters. Starting from SMS interoperability, it became one of the central platforms of the 2010s—for real-time information, public debate, protest movements, and market manipulation. Elon Musk acquired it for US$44 billion in 2022 and renamed it X.
Launched alongside iPhone OS 2.0, the App Store opened with roughly 500 applications. The structure—official Apple distribution, a 70/30 revenue split between developer and platform—would form the spine of mobile economics for the next decade and a half. At the iPhone's original unveiling, Steve Jobs had argued that web apps were enough; eighteen months later, that policy was quietly abandoned.