Detailed · 21 events
A History of the Internet and the Web
1960s
SRI International (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Commons ↗ At the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco's Civic Auditorium, Douglas Engelbart of the Stanford Research Institute delivered his session — 'A Research Center for Augmenting Human Intellect' — as a live demonstration lasting about ninety minutes. He drove NLS on an SDS 940 some thirty miles away in Menlo Park through home-built 1200-baud modems over a leased telephone line, with the video returned to the hall over microwave links and thrown onto a large screen. What he showed: the mouse, multiple on-screen windows with view control, jumping between documents by link, structured document editing, and shared-screen collaboration with remote colleagues over live audio and video. The first mouse prototype had been built by Bill English to Engelbart's design. The name 'The Mother of All Demos' was applied long afterwards, not by anyone in the room.
DARPA / U.S. Federal Government (Wikimedia Commons) · Public Domain · Commons ↗ At 22:30, UCLA's Charley Kline set out to type 'login' to an SDS 940 at SRI; the remote host went down on the third character, so only 'lo' arrived. It came back about an hour later and the full word went through. This was the first host-to-host communication over 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—complete on 5 December 1969.
1970s
Andreu Veà, WiWiW.org · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Commons ↗ Ray Tomlinson at BBN folded code from CPYNET, an experimental file-transfer program, into SNDMSG, the local message program, so that it could append to a mailbox on another host across the ARPANET. Single-computer electronic mail had existed since the early 1960s; this was the first to cross a network. The first messages went in late 1971, between two PDP-10s running TENEX that sat side by side and were connected only through the ARPANET. For the separator between user name and host name he chose '@' — by his own account not because the key was spare, but because the sign already meant 'at' in English ('10 items @ $1.95'), so it read as the user being at some other host. The format survives as the email address.
Questions this page answers
- Why did Ray Tomlinson choose the @ sign?
- By his own account, not because the key was spare: the sign already meant at in English, as in 10 items @ $1.95, so it read as the user being at some other host.
- Was email invented in 1971?
- Electronic mail within a single computer had existed since the early 1960s. What was first in 1971 was mail crossing a network to a mailbox on another host.
Sascha Pohflepp (Wikimedia Commons, via Flickr) · CC BY 2.0 · Commons ↗ Robert Metcalfe circulated an internal memo at Xerox PARC describing a broadcast network for connecting Altos. It took the collision-and-retransmit idea of the University of Hawaii's ALOHA system off the radio and onto coaxial cable, with no central controller: every station arbitrates for the channel itself. The name came from the luminiferous aether of nineteenth-century physics. What the memo produced was a proposal, not a standard. The Experimental Ethernet, the 1976 Metcalfe–Boggs paper, the 1980 DEC-Intel-Xerox specification at 10 Mbit/s, and IEEE 802.3 — approved in 1983 and published in 1985 — are four different things, and they are constantly conflated.
- EVT.005T1New Directions in Cryptography — Sharing a Secret Without Delivering a KeyA History of CybersecurityA General History of Information TechnologyRead more →
1980s
ARPANET / The Computer History Museum (Wikimedia Commons) · Public domain · Commons ↗ ARPANET switched in a single day from NCP (Network Control Program) to TCP/IP. What Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn published in 1974 was a single Transmission Control Program, not a two-part suite; the split into a transport layer (TCP) and an internetwork layer (IP) came in 1978. Jon Postel's RFC 801 (November 1981) set the cutover plan — a complete switch from NCP to IP/TCP by 1 January 1983 — and on that date NCP was withdrawn. The 'Flag Day' put the idea of an internetwork interconnecting many networks into full production.
Questions this page answers
- What was the TCP/IP flag day?
- It was 1 January 1983, the day ARPANET switched from NCP to TCP/IP all at once rather than gradually. Jon Postel's RFC 801, of November 1981, set the deadline, and NCP was withdrawn on that date.
- When were TCP and IP split apart?
- In 1978. What Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn published in 1974 was a single Transmission Control Program, not a two-part suite; the transport and internetwork layers were separated four years later.
Jordiipa (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Commons ↗ Paul Mockapetris at USC ISI designed the Domain Name System—a distributed database mapping host names to IP addresses—publishing it in November 1983 as RFC 882 (concepts) and RFC 883 (implementation). Until then the namespace lived in a single HOSTS.TXT distributed by SRI's Network Information Center, run by Elizabeth Feinler's group; RFC 882 states that the size of that table and the frequency of updates to it 'are near the limit of manageability.' DNS replaced it with a hierarchical, delegable structure. The top-level domains COM, EDU, GOV, MIL and ORG were actually established a year later by RFC 920 (Postel and Reynolds, October 1984), with NET added in 1985. The specification was superseded in November 1987 by RFCs 1034 and 1035, on which today's DNS still rests.
Questions this page answers
- When were .com and .edu created?
- In RFC 920, by Postel and Reynolds, in October 1984. The November 1983 RFCs 882 and 883 defined the mechanism of DNS, not the list of top-level domains; .net was added in 1985.
- Are RFCs 882 and 883 still the DNS specification?
- No. They were superseded in November 1987 by RFCs 1034 and 1035, on which today's DNS still rests.
Donna Cox and Robert Patterson, NCSA / University of Illinois; data collected by Merit Network, Inc. (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Commons ↗ The backbone the US National Science Foundation built for academic networking. The first NSFNET ran at 56 kbps and linked six nationally funded supercomputer sites — five NSF centres and NCAR. In the autumn of 1987 NSF chose Merit Network with MCI, IBM and the State of Michigan; eight months later a T1 (1.544 Mbps) backbone served 13 sites, and by late 1991 a T3 (45 Mbps) backbone served 16. The Acceptable Use Policy barred "use for for-profit activities" as a general matter, and that clause kept commercial traffic off the backbone for years. Public Law 102-476, approved 23 October 1992, amended the NSF Act to permit networks used substantially for other purposes; awards for the Network Access Points and the vBNS followed in early 1994; and at midnight in each time zone on 30 April 1995 the backbone was switched off. No single date marks "the day the internet went commercial" — only a sequence does.
Geni (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Commons ↗ Tim Berners-Lee, a software engineer at CERN, handed 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 first server and browser were running by the end of 1990 and the software was announced publicly in August 1991; the world's first web server, browser, HTTP, and HTML descend from this document.
1990s
JD Lasica (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY 2.0 · Commons ↗ The web browser built by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina at NCSA, University of Illinois. Version 1.0 for the X Window System was posted to www-talk on 21 April 1993; the Windows and Macintosh ports followed that autumn. It was not the first graphical browser — Erwise, ViolaWWW, and MidasWWW came first — but it was the first widely adopted one to render images inline with the text rather than in a separate window, and it pulled the Web out of research labs and in front of ordinary users. Non-commercial use was free of charge, though Mosaic was proprietary, not open source. Andreessen co-founded Netscape's predecessor the following year.
Marcin Wichary · CC BY 2.0 · Commons ↗ Marc Andreessen, a lead developer of NCSA Mosaic, and Silicon Graphics founder Jim Clark set up Mosaic Communications in April 1994; the company gave its first public beta away on 13 October. Trademark objections from the University of Illinois forced a rename on 14 November—the company became Netscape Communications and the browser Netscape Navigator—and version 1.0 shipped on 15 December 1994. The IPO of 9 August 1995 priced at $28, opened at $71, touched $74.75 and closed its first day at $58.25; it is often cited as the formal start of the dot-com bubble. After losing the browser war to Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Netscape announced in January 1998 that it would release the Communicator source code—the origin of Mozilla and later Firefox—agreed in November to sell itself to AOL, and the acquisition closed in March 1999.
- EVT.012T2JavaScript Announced — Born of a Ten-Day PrototypeA History of Programming Languages
Ehud Kenan (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY 2.0 · Commons ↗ Larry Page and Sergey Brin incorporated the search company around PageRank — the link-structure ranking they had started as the BackRub research project in 1996. As their 1998 paper put it, information seeking on the web then split between 'high quality human maintained indices such as Yahoo!' and 'automated search engines that rely on keyword matching', which 'usually return too many low quality matches'. Google cut in with ranking derived entirely from the link graph and an interface stripped to a single screen. In June 1999 it raised $25 million from Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia; on 26 June 2000 it became Yahoo!'s default search results provider.
Questions this page answers
- When was Google founded?
- It was incorporated on 4 September 1998. The PageRank work behind it had begun two years earlier, in 1996, as a Stanford research project called BackRub.
- Who founded Google?
- Larry Page and Sergey Brin, both graduate students at Stanford at the time.
- What made Google different from the search engines before it?
- Ranking derived entirely from the link graph. Their 1998 paper split the field between 'high quality human maintained indices such as Yahoo!' and 'automated search engines that rely on keyword matching', which it said 'usually return too many low quality matches'.
2000s
Wikipedia contributors; captured via the Wayback Machine · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Commons ↗ Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched Wikipedia at wikipedia.com as a side project of Nupedia, their peer-reviewed encyclopedia. Sanger had posted 'Let's make a wiki' to the Nupedia-L list on 10 January and proposed the name on 11 January. Who founded it is unsettled between the two men: Sanger claims co-founder status and Wales disputes it. A wiki-based encyclopedia anyone could edit became the largest and most enduring demonstration of the internet's social possibility. As of August 2026 there are 348 active language editions holding roughly 68 million articles in total.
Questions this page answers
- Who founded Wikipedia?
- Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched it on 15 January 2001, but the question is unsettled between them: Sanger claims co-founder status and Wales disputes it.
Jason McELweenie · CC BY 2.0 · Commons ↗ Mark Zuckerberg launched 'thefacebook.com' from his Harvard dorm, with co-founders Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, Andrew McCollum and Chris Hughes. Access was restricted to Harvard students at first; on 26 September 2006 registration opened to anyone aged 13 or over with a valid email address. In 2008 it passed MySpace in comScore's worldwide monthly unique visitors, and as of 30 September 2012 it reported more than one billion monthly active users. 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.
Questions this page answers
- Was Facebook open to everyone from the start?
- No. It was restricted to Harvard students at first. Registration opened to anyone aged 13 or over with a valid email address on 26 September 2006.
- Who co-founded Facebook?
- Mark Zuckerberg, with Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, Andrew McCollum and Chris Hughes.
Composite by Ianmacm, from photographs by World Economic Forum, Rico Shen and Robin Brown · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Commons ↗ Three former PayPal employees—Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim—founded a service on which anyone could upload and share video. The first upload came on 23 April 2005, when Karim posted "Me at the zoo" himself. The spread of Flash Video and the dominance of the Flash browser plugin—then Macromedia's; Adobe's acquisition closed in December 2005—made friction-free in-browser playback possible for the first time. On 9 October 2006 Google announced it was buying YouTube for US$1.65 billion in stock, closing the deal that November. Through the 2010s it grew into a distribution platform of broadcast-television scale.
Questions this page answers
- What was the first video on YouTube?
- Me at the zoo, posted by co-founder Jawed Karim on 23 April 2005. The service itself had been founded on 14 February that year.
Jack Dorsey · CC BY 2.0 · Commons ↗ The day Jack Dorsey posted the first message—"just setting up my twttr." The post carries its own timestamp of 12:50 PM Pacific on 21 March 2006; the service did not open to the public until 15 July that year. Built by Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone and Evan Williams around SMS interoperability, the 140-character short-message service (raised to 280 in 2017) became one of the central platforms of the 2010s—for real-time information, public debate, protest movements, and market manipulation. Elon Musk's acquisition closed on 27 October 2022 at $54.20 a share, roughly US$44 billion, and the service was renamed X in July 2023.
Questions this page answers
- What was the first tweet?
- Jack Dorsey's message just setting up my twttr, timestamped 12:50 PM Pacific on 21 March 2006. Twitter itself did not open to the public until 15 July that year.
- EVT.018T1The App Store OpensA History of the iPhoneRead more →
2020s
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 over 100 countries. By Zuckerberg's own posts it took 10 million sign-ups in seven hours and 100 million in five days—sign-ups, not retained users, and the distinction mattered: Sensor Tower measured daily actives falling 82%, from a peak of about 44 million the day after launch to about 8 million on 31 July. The design was to carry Instagram's social graph across wholesale—Instagram had about two billion monthly actives at the time—into the space Twitter was vacating under Musk. The EU launch was held back five months over Digital Markets Act compliance and came on 14 December 2023. Growth since has been steady: on the Q2 2026 earnings call Meta reported Threads past 500 million monthly actives.
