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History of Internet & Programming


 
Internet history home - top of the page -

• http://www.isoc.org/internet-history/brief.html - history of the Internet
• http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/index.shtml - index of Internet Histories - All About internet.
• http://www.internetvalley.com/intval1.html - very good and short history with pictures (and the role of Al Gore)
• http://www.internetvalley.com/archives/mirrors/davemarsh-timeline-1.htm - very good timeline
• http://dir.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/Internet/History/ - history of Internet on Yahoo
• http://www.davesite.com/webstation/net-history.shtml - history of internet - mostly from network perspective
• http://www.isoc.org/guest/zakon/Internet/History/HIT.html - growth in numbers and charts
 

1964 - MIT, Leonard Kleinrock - packet switching theory (theoretical feasibility of communications using packets rather than circuits).

1967 - MIT, Lawrence G. Roberts, plan for the "ARPANET"  (ARPA = Advanced Research Projects Agency)

1967 - First node of ARPANET at UCLA (University of California), second - at Stanford Research Institute (SRI, California).

1969 - 4 computers are connected

1972 - first email, public demonstration of ARPANET

1973 - Ethernet technology developed by Bob Metcalfe at Xerox PARC.  The original paper by Cerf & Kahn described one protocol, called TCP.  David Clark and his research group at MIT set out to show that a compact and simple implementation of TCP was possible.

1976 - Kleinrock published the first book on the ARPANET, which described different protocols

1977 - 100 Hosts.

1980 - TCP/IP was adopted as a defense standard, Internet has ~ 20 networks

1981 - BITNET, which linked academic mainframe computers in an "email as card images" paradigm.

1982 - DCA and ARPA adopts TCP/IP

1983 - transition of the ARPANET host protocol from NCP to TCP/IP.

1984 - 1,000 Hosts, DNS is introduced.

1985 - internet has ~300 networks

1986 - 5, 000 Hosts. 241 News groups.

1986-88 - scientific organizations (NSF, universities) adopt DARPA's existing Internet organizational infrastructure, Federal agencies shared the cost of common infrastructure, such as trans-oceanic circuits, Federal Networking Council was formed.

1987 - 28,000 hosts.

1988 - a National Research Council committee, chaired by Kleinrock and with Kahn and Clark as members, produced a report commissioned by NSF titled "Towards a National Research Network,

1989 - 100,000 Hosts. Tim Berners-Lee (CERN) writes an "Information Management: A Proposal".

1990 - 300,000 Hosts, 1,000 News groups. Tim Berners-Lee (CERN) starts to work on a hypertext GUI browser+editor using the NeXTStep development environment. He makes up "WorldWideWeb" as a name for the program. Robert Cailliau is co-author of new version. Original version was written on NeXT cube computer.

1992 - Number of hosts breaks 1 Million. News groups 4,000. Line-mode browser, GUI client for X-windows

1993 - 2 Million Hosts, 600 WWW sites. Internet has ~20,000 networks. The first browsers, Viola and Midas, were released in January 1993 for the X - Window system (Unix).  NCSA Mosaic browser released.  Declaration by CERN's directors that WWW technology would be freely usable by anyone, with no fees being payable to CERN. By the end of the year network has 200 web (http) servers.

1994 - 3 Million Hosts, 10,000 WWW sites. 10,000 News groups.  A National Research Council report, again chaired by Kleinrock (and with Kahn and Clark as members again), Entitled "Realizing The Information Future: The Internet and Beyond". It anticipated the critical issues of intellectual property rights, ethics, pricing, education, architecture and regulation for the Internet.  ~1500 web servers.  Marc Andressen and Jim Clark form Mosaic Communications Corp. (future Netscape Communications).

1995 - 6.5 Million Hosts, 100,000 WWW Sites. NSF's privatization policy culminated in April, 1995, with the defunding of the NSFNET Backbone.

1996 - 12.8 Million Hosts, 0.5 Million WWW Sites. Microsoft enters.

1997 - 19.5 Million Hosts, 1 Million WWW sites, 71,618 Newsgroups.

2000 - 100 Million Hosts, 25 Million WWW sites.

2009 - 25 billion pages, more than 110 million web sites (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web), ~1.7 billion users worldwide (http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm)
 
more on Internet history home - top of the page -

- Hobbes' Internet Timeline - starting in 1950, tracing the events that lead to the Internet of today.
- Brief History of the Internet - from the Internet Society.
- Internet Archive - building a digital library for the future.
- NetHistory - A page dedicated to the preservation of Internet and BITNET history. Lots of online magazines, documentation, stories.
- Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the Internet
- http://www.internetworldstats.com/



<w3history> - an open project and work in progress to create a comprehensive history of the Internet and the WWW from 1989 to the present day.
ARPANET (5)
Brief History of the Internet - from the Internet Society.
Community Memory - discussion list on the history of cyberspace.
Definition of "Internet"
Delphi's Brief History of the Internet
History of the Internet - timeline of the development of the Internet.
History of the Internet and the WWW - features the history of both internet and WWW, also has sections about html and browsers.
History of the Internet and Web - in timeline format, with emphasis on the many creators and their contributions.
History of the Internet and WorldWideWeb - list of links to the best of the web sites about Internet and WWW history and statistics.
Hobbes' Internet Timeline - starting in 1950, tracing the events that lead to the Internet of today.
International Internet Day - on October 1st, 1999 the Internet turns thirty. Directory of celebrations around the globe, and a giant online birthday card.
Internet - History - very brief overview.
Internet Archive - building a digital library for the future.
Internet Historical Society - where long-time netizens can post short essays about how things were on the net in the "old days."
Internet History & WWW Links - gives a brief history of the Internet with links to original sources.
Keith Lynch's timeline of net related terms and concepts
LivingInternet.com - source of information about the Internet covering the history of email, usenet, IRC, MUDs, mailing lists, the Web, and more.
MIT Sloan's Digital Time Capsule - contains digitized representations of the people, places, products, events, trends, and news shaping business and the Internet in early 1999. The capsule was sealed on February 4, 1999 and will be reopened in 2004.
MUDdex - the history of MUDs.
Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the Internet
Net Hype - a brief history of the Net.
NetHistory - A page dedicated to the preservation of Internet and BITNET history. Lots of online magazines, documentation, stories.
Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet
RFC 2555 - commemorating and recollecting 30 years of RFCs, as a tribute to the late Jon Postel, RFC archivist.
Roads and Crossroads of Internet's History
USENIX ;login: - the first isp - first-person account of building the first commercial ISP in 1989, before the Web was born. By Spike Ilacqua.