Detailed · 17 events
A History of the Internet and the Web
1960s
01 events
DARPA / U.S. Federal Government (Wikimedia Commons) · Public Domain · Commons ↗ 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
01 eventsRay 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
03 eventsARPANET 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.
- Related people
- Vint Cerf
- Appears in
- A General History of Information Technology
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.
Geni (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Commons ↗ 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.
- Related people
- Tim Berners-Lee
- Appears in
- A General History of Information Technology
1990s
04 eventsMarc 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.
- Related people
- Brendan Eich
- Appears in
- A History of Programming Languages
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.
- Related organizations
- Appears in
- A General History of Information Technology · A History of Search Engines
2000s
05 eventsJimmy 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.
- Appears in
- A History of Social Media
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.
- Related organizations
- Appears in
- A History of Social Media
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.
- Appears in
- A History of Social Media
Apple Inc. (Wikimedia Commons) · Public Domain (PD-textlogo; trademark of Apple Inc.) · Commons ↗ 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.
- Related people
- Steve Jobs
- Related organizations
- Apple Inc.
- Related products
- iPhone
- Appears in
- A History of the iPhone
2020s
03 events
Gage Skidmore (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Commons ↗ Proposed in April, attempted to withdraw in July with litigation following, the deal finally closed on 27 October. Purchase price: US$44 billion. Within hours of closing, Musk dismissed the CEO, CFO, and head of legal; within a week he laid off roughly half the workforce (about 3,700 people), replaced the verified badge with a monthly subscription (Twitter Blue), and shrank content moderation. Citing free-speech grounds, he reinstated accounts permanently suspended including Donald Trump's. The platform was renamed X in July 2023. One of the largest social-media platforms became, unusually, the personal property of a billionaire.
Meta Platforms, Inc. (Wikimedia Commons) · Public domain (logo, below threshold of originality) · Commons ↗ Meta launched Threads, an Instagram-linked text-based social network, in 100 countries. It reached 100 million users in five days—wildly surpassing ChatGPT's two-month record and becoming the fastest-growing consumer product of its time. The play was to capture Twitter users disrupted under Musk's management by leveraging Instagram's two-billion-user base. By 2025, Threads had grown to roughly 350 million monthly active users, comparable in scale to Twitter/X. A continuation of the microblogging form introduced in 2006—but launched as a hijack of an existing social graph rather than from cold.
- Appears in
- A History of Social Media
Google AI Overviews / uploaded by Alza08 (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Commons ↗ At Google I/O in May, Google rolled out LLM-generated 'AI Overviews' atop search results across the United States. In parallel, Perplexity AI (founded 2022) grew rapidly as an 'answer engine', and OpenAI formally launched ChatGPT Search in 2025. The transition from 'search that sends you to links' to 'answer engines that show the answer directly' began in earnest, with structural consequences for publishers, the SEO industry, and online advertising. Shortly after AI Overviews launched, headline-grabbing hallucinations—'put glue on pizza', 'eat rocks'—made LLM hallucination a household problem.
- Related organizations
- Appears in
- A History of Search Engines