India Broadband Forum

Rameshjeee

40 years of Internet

Few paid attention, on September 2, 1969, when about 20 people met at the laboratory of Kleinrock, in the University of California (USA), to attend two computers passing test data through a gray cable, whose length was of more or less 15 meters.

Entertaining videos were not in Len Kleinrock’s mind and his team from the University of California, when they began the tests of what, in four decades, it would become the internet. Either the social networks were thought, or most of other applications whose easy use attracts more than one billion people on-line.

The researchers tried to create an open net for the change of free information – an opening that, ultimately, it stimulated the innovation that later would create sites like YouTube and Facebook.

Key milestones in the development and growth of the internet, which turns 40 on Sept 2, 2009:

1969: On September 2, two computers at University of California, Los Angeles, exchange meaningless data in first test of Arpanet, an experimental military network. The first connection between two sites - UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California - takes place on October 29, though the network crashes after the first two letters of the word "logon." UC Santa Barbara and University of Utah later join.

1970: Arpanet gets first East Coast node, at Bolt, Beranek and Newman in Cambridge, Massachuesetts.

1972: Ray Tomlinson brings e-mail to the network, choosing "at" symbol as way to specify e-mail addresses belonging to other systems.

1973: Arpanet gets first international nodes, in England and Norway.

1974: Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn develop communications technique called TCP, allowing multiple networks to understand one another, creating a true internet. Concept later splits into TCP/IP before formal adoption on January 1, 1983.

1983: Domain name system is proposed. Creation of suffixes such as ".com," ".gov" and ".edu" comes a year later.

1988: One of the first internet worms, Morris, cripples thousands of computers.

1989: Quantum Computer Services, now AOL, introduces America Online service for Macintosh and Apple II computers, beginning an expansion that would connect nearly 27 million Americans online by 2002.

1990: Tim Berners-Lee creates the World Wide Web while developing ways to control computers remotely at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research.

1993: Marc Andreessen and colleagues at University of Illinois create Mosaic, the first Web browser to combine graphics and text on a single page, opening the web to the world with software that is easy to use.

1994: Andreessen and others on the Mosaic team form a company to develop the first commercial web browser, Netscape, piquing the interest of Microsoft and other developers who would tap the web's commerce potential. Two immigration lawyers introduce the world to spam, advertising their green card lottery services.

1995: Amazon.com opens its virtual doors.

1996: Passage of US law curbing pornography online. Although key provisions are later struck down as unconstitutional, one that remains protects online services from liability for their users' conduct, allowing information - and misinformation - to thrive.

1998:Google forms out of a project that began in Stanford dorm rooms. US government delegates oversight of domain name policies to Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN. Justice Department and 20 states sue Microsoft, accusing the maker of the ubiquitous Windows operating system of abusing its market power to thwart competition from Netscape and others.

1999: Napster popularises music file-sharing and spawns successors that have permanently changed the recording industry. World internet population surpasses 250 million.

2000: The dot-com boom of the 1990s becomes a bust as technology companies slide. Amazon.com, eBay and other sites are crippled in one of the first widespread uses of the denial-of-service attack, which floods a site with so much bogus traffic that legitimate users cannot visit.

2002:World internet population surpasses 500 million.

2004: Mark Zuckerberg starts Facebook as a sophomore at Harvard University.

2005: Launch of YouTube video-sharing site.

2006: World internet population surpasses 1 billion.

2007:Apple releases iPhone, introducing millions more to wireless internet access.

2008: World internet population surpasses 1.5 billion. China's internet population reaches 250 million, surpassing the United States as the world's largest. Netscape's developers pull the plug on the pioneer browser, though an offshoot, Firefox, remains strong. Major airlines intensify deployment of internet service on flights.

2009: The Seattle Post-Intelligencer becomes the first major daily newspaper to move entirely online. Google announces development of a free computer operating system designed for a user experience that primarily takes place on the web.

Source: 40 years of internet history

Rcom

kewl info man......

just4kix

Good info, Rameshjee.

mickey

somedays back while roaming through the net, i was hand-shaken by an weird info, that stated that, in 1989 the guys of Czechoslovakian univ created an internet research network, for their univ that had a 8bit/sec modem..

technology really changed for the computers..

i guess my children will access net at the speed of 100gbps or something like that and that would be all for free, while drinking water would be paid.

meetdilip

Good one ..........................

noserver

hmmm great info, i celebrate 12 years know internet since 1998 if iam not wrong

Luke Skywalker

Good info.
I know name of only one founder i.e. Larry Roberts.

mickey

i know about Internet from 1998 too

Punch Farce

I used it from 1989 ;-)

-F

mickey

how was Internet in those days farce??

Punch Farce

nothing much changed
there were crappy posts and posters even then.

the only thing was sms language was not there.

mickey

scrappy))

btw, i was asking how people managed to post crap those days??

deepmohan

40 ODD YEARS GONE still there are places in INDIA where internet is not there.

leave internet ELECTRICITY is not there.

mickey

sadly we lag behind even the most corrupt countries of Asia...

we cannot just abuse excuses that we are making from the times of Independence..
we are bad people, for a good nation!!!