Published: Jun 12, 2023
23 min. read
Summarize in ChatGPT
The Internet has become a prominent part of every day life. From searching for recipes to make dinner to buying new products for your bedroom to watching your favorite shows, the Internet has become an integral part of our daily routines.
But it hasn’t always been as refined as it is today. The Internet timeline is an intricate and complex development that has led to the Internet as we know it today.
Keep reading to learn a brief history of the Internet. And don’t forget to subscribe to our newsleter for the latest information on all things digital marketing!
Arpanet was the first real network to run onpacket switching technology (new at the time).
On October 29, 1969, computers at Stanford and UCLA connected for the first time. In effect, they were the first hosts on what would one day become the Internet. The first message sent across the network was supposed to be “Login”, but reportedly, the link between the two colleges crashed on the letter “g”.
Another major milestone during the 60’s was the inception ofUnix: the operating system whose design heavily influenced that of Linux and FreeBSD (the operating systems most popular in today’s web servers/web hosting services).
An Arpanet network was established between Harvard, MIT, and BBN (the company that created the “interface message processor” computers used to connect to the network) in 1970.
Email was first developed in 1971 byRay Tomlinson, who also made the decision to use the “@” symbol to separate the user name from the computer name (which later on became the domain name).
One of the most impressive developments of 1971 was the start of Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg, for those unfamiliar with the site, is a global effort to make books and documents in the public domain available electronically–for free–in a variety of eBook and electronic formats.
It began whenMichael Hart gained access to a large block of computing time and came to the realization that the future of computers wasn’t in computing itself, but in the storage, retrieval and searching of information that, at the time, was only contained in libraries.
He manually typed (noOCR at the time) the “Declaration of Independence” and launched Project Gutenberg to make information contained in books widely available in electronic form. In effect, this was thebirth of the eBook.
France began its own Arpanet-like project in 1972, calledCYCLADES. While Cyclades was eventually shut down, it didpioneer a key idea: the host computer should be responsible for data transmission rather than the network itself.
Arpanet made its firsttrans-Atlantic connection in 1973, with the University College of London. During the same year,email accounted for 75% of all Arpanet network activity.
1974 was a breakthrough year. Aproposal was published to link Arpa-like networks together into a so-called “inter-network”, which would have no central control and would work around a transmission control protocol (which eventually becameTCP/IP).
With the popularity of emailing, the firstmodern email program was developed byJohn Vittal, a programmer at the University of Southern California in 1975. The biggest technological advance this program (called MSG) made was the addition of“Reply” and“Forward” functionality.
1977 was a big year for the development of the Internet as we know it today. It’s the year the firstPC modem, developed byDennis Hayes andDale Heatherington, was introduced and initiallysold to computer hobbyists.
The firstbulletin board system (BBS) was developed during a blizzard in Chicago in 1978.
1978 is also the year that brought the firstunsolicited commercial email message (later known asspam), sent out to 600 California Arpanet users by Gary Thuerk.
The precursor toWorld of Warcraft andSecond Life was developed in 1979, and was calledMUD (short for MultiUser Dungeon). MUDs were entirelytext-based virtual worlds, combining elements of role-playing games, interactive, fiction, andonline chat.
1979 also ushered into the scene:Usenet, created by two graduate students. Usenet was aninternet-based discussion system, allowing people from around the globe to converse about the same topics by posting public messages categorized by newsgroups.
The European Organization for Nuclear Research (better known asCERN) launchedENQUIRE (written byTim Berners-Lee), a hypertext program that allowed scientists at the particle physics lab to keep track of people, software, and projects using hypertext (hyperlinks).
While many people credit Kevin MacKenzie with the invention of theemoticon in 1979, it wasScott Fahlman in 1982 who proposed using 🙂 after a joke, rather than the original -) proposed by MacKenzie. Themodern emoticon was born.
January 1, 1983 was the deadline for Arpanet computers toswitch over to the TCP/IP protocols developed by Vinton Cerf. A few hundred computers were affected by the switch. The name server was also developed in ’83.
Thedomain name system was created in 1984 along with the first Domain Name Servers (DNS).
The domain name system was important in that it madeaddresses on the Internet more human-friendly compared to its numerical IP address counterparts. DNS servers allowed Internet users to type in an easy-to-remember domain name and then converted it to the IP address automatically.
1985 brought the development ofThe WELL (short for Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link), one of the oldest virtual communities still in operation.
It was developed by Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant in February of ’85. It started out as a community of the readers and writers of the Whole Earth Review and was an open but “remarkably literate and uninhibited intellectual gathering”.
Wired Magazine once called The Well “The most influential online community in the world.”
The so-called Protocol wars began in 1986. European countries at that time were pursuing theOpen Systems Interconnection (OSI), while the United States was using theInternet/Arpanet protocol, which eventually won out.
By 1987, there were nearly30,000 hosts on the Internet. The original Arpanet protocol had been limited to 1,000 hosts, but the adoption of the TCP/IP standard made larger numbers of hosts possible.
Also in 1988, Internet Relay Chat (IRC) was first deployed, paving the way forreal-time chat and the instant messaging programs we use today.
One of the first major Internet worms was released in 1988. Referred to as “The Morris Worm”, it was written by Robert Tappan Morris and causedmajor interruptions across large parts of the Internet.
When Apple pulled out of the AppleLink program in 1989, the project was renamed and America Online was born. AOL later made the Internetpopular amongst the average internet users.
1989 also brought about theproposal for the World Wide Web, written by Tim Berners-Lee.
It was originally published in the March issue of MacWorld, and then redistributed in May 1990. It was written to persuade CERN that a global hypertext system was in CERN’s best interest. It wasoriginally called “Mesh”; the term “World Wide Web” was coined while Berners-Lee was writing the code in 1990.
1990 also brought about the first commercial dial-up Internet provider,The World. The same year, Arpanet ceased to exist.
The code for the World Wide Web was written by Tim Berners-Lee, based on his proposal from the year before, along with the standards for HTML, HTTP, and URLs.
Also in 1990, Alan Emtage, a college student in Montreal, created the first search engine for a school project. The search engine was known as the Archie Index.
Remember Tim Berners-Lee? He’s making waves again, sharing the first photo on the Internet. It featured a group of singers known as Les Horribles Cernettes.
1991 brought some major innovations to the world of the Internet. Thefirst web page was created and, much like the first email explained what email was, its purpose was to explain what the World Wide Web was.
Also in the same year, the first search protocol that examined file contents instead of just file names was launched, calledGopher.
Also, theMP3 file format was accepted as a standard in 1991. MP3 files, being highly compressed, later become apopular file format to share songs and entire albums via the internet.
One of the more interesting developments of this era, though, was thefirst webcam. It was deployed at a Cambridge University computer lab, and its sole purpose was to monitor a particular coffee maker so that lab users could avoid wasted trips to an empty coffee pot.
The firstwidely downloaded Internet browser,Mosaic, was released in 1993. While Mosaic wasn’t the first web browser, it is considered the first browser to make the Internet easily accessible to non-techies.
In 1993, both the White House and the United Nations came online, marking the beginning of the.gov and.orgdomain names.
Mosaic’s first big competitor,Netscape Navigator, was released the year following (1994).
Where would the world be without ecommerce? We can trace secure online transactions back to 1994, when the first item was purchased securely online.
The item may have been a Sting CD, sold for $12.48 on Dan Kohn’s NetMarket. However, the Internet Shopping Network suggests they completed an online transaction for computer equipment a month prior to this CD purchase.
Following the first secure Internet transactions, 1995 is often considered the first year the web became commercialized.
While there were commercial enterprises online prior to ’95, there were a few key developments that happened that year. First,SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) encryption was developed by Netscape, making itsafer to conduct financial transactions (like credit card payments)online.
In addition, two major online businesses got their start the same year. The first sale on “Echo Bay” was made that year. Echo Bay later becameeBay.Amazon.com also started in 1995, though it didn’t turn a profit for six years, until 2001.
What better way to complement ecommerce than with the invention of cryptocurrency? David Chaum, a computer scientist and cryptographer, created DigiCash in 1995, which went on to pave the way for Bitcoin and other forms of digital money.
Other major developments that year included the launch ofGeocities (which officially closed down on October 26, 2009). TheVatican also went online for the first time.Java andJavaScript (originally called LiveScript by its creator,Brendan Eich, and deployed as part of the Netscape Navigator browser – see comments for explanation) was first introduced to the public in 1995.ActiveX was launched by Microsoft the following year.
In 1996,HoTMaiL (thecapitalized letters are an homage to HTML), the first webmail service, was launched.
Beyond webmail, the Internet also gets more social in 1996 with the creation of the first social media platform. Andrew Weinreich created Six Degrees, which features all our favorite social media hallmarks, including individual profiles and connections with friends.
Today, Wi-Fi is almost synonymous with the Internet, and we can trace its official creation back to 1997. In this year, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) approved the 802.11 standard for Wi-Fi.
This “official” onset came after several foundational developments, leading back to the 1940s, when actress Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil developed a “frequency hopping” system.
The system paved the way for a team at CSIRO to invent the Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) in the 1990s. The WLAN allowed devices to connect to a network through radio waves.
While the first blogs had been around for a few years in one form or another, 1997 was the first year the term “weblog” was used.
In 1998, the first major news story to be broken online was theBill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal (also referred to as “Monicagate” among other nicknames), which was posted onThe Drudge Reportafter Newsweek killed the story.
Google went live in 1998, revolutionizing the way in which people find information online.
In 1998 as well,Napster launched, opening up the gates to mainstream file-sharing of audio files over the internet.
1999 is the year when one of the more interesting projects ever brought online: theSETI@home project, launched. The project has created the equivalent of a giant supercomputer by harnessing the computing power of more than 3 million computers worldwide, using their processors whenever the screensaver comes on, indicating that the computer is idle.
The program analyzes radio telescope data to look forsigns of extraterrestrial intelligence.
2000 was the year of thedotcom collapse, resulting in huge losses for legions of investors.
Hundreds of companies closed, some of which had never turned a profit for their investors. The NASDAQ, which listed a large number of tech companies affected by the bubble, peaked at over 5,000, then lost 10% of its value in a single day, and finally hit bottom in October of 2002.
With the dotcom collapse still going strong,Wikipedia launched in 2001, one of the websites that paved the way forcollective web content generation/social media.
In 2003:Skype is released to the public, giving a user-friendly interface to Voice over IP calling.
Also in 2003, MySpace opens up its doors. It later grew to be themost popular social network at one time (though it has since been overtaken by Facebook).
Another major advance in 2003 was the signing of the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003, better known as theCAN-SPAM Act.
Though coined in 1999 by Darcy DiNucci, the term “Web 2.0”, referring to websites and Rich Internet Applications (RIA) that arehighly interactive anduser-driven became popular around 2004.
During the first Web 2.0 conference, John Batelle and Tim O’Reilly described the concept of “the Web as a Platform“: software applications built to take advantage of internet connectivity, moving away from the desktop (which has downsides such as operating system dependency and lack of interoperability).
The term “social media”, believed to be first used by Chris Sharpley, was coined in the same year that “Web 2.0” became a mainstream concept.
Social media–sites and web applications that allow its users to create and share content and to connect with one another–started around this period. People loved the idea of being able to travel through their friends and families pictures and adventures, despite not being physically present.
Digg, asocial news site, launched on November of 2004, paving the way for sites such asReddit, Mixx, and Yahoo! Buzz. Digg revolutionized traditional means of generating and finding web content, democratically promoting news and web links that are reviewed and voted on by a community.
Facebook launched in 2004, though at the time it wasonly open to college students and was called “The Facebook”; later on, “The” was dropped from the name, though the URLhttp://www.thefacebook.com still works.
YouTube launched in 2005, bringing free online video hosting and sharing to the masses.
Twitter launched in 2006. It was originally going to be calledtwittr (inspired by Flickr); the first Twitter message was “just setting up my twttr”.
Hulu was first launched in 2007, a joint venture between ABC, NBC, and Fox to make popular TV shows available to watch online.
The biggest innovation of 2007 was almost certainly theiPhone, which was almost wholly responsible for renewed interest inmobile web applications and design.
The first “Internet election” took place in 2008 with the U.S. Presidential election. It was the first year that national candidates took full advantage of all the Internet had to offer. Hillary Clinton jumped on board early withYouTube campaign videos. Virtually every candidate had a Facebook page or a Twitter feed, or both.
Ron Paul set anew fundraising record by raising $4.3 million in a single day through online donations, and thenbeat his own record only weeks later by raising $4.4 million in a single day. The 2008 elections placed the Internet squarely at the forefront of politics and campaigning, a trend that is unlikely to change any time in the near future.
Remember the invention of cryptocurrency back in 1995? Fast forward to 2008, and you see the beginning of Bitcoin — specifically, the domain name bitcoin.org.
After this domain appeared online, someone — or a group of people — using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto sent out a whitepaper on Bitcoin to a cryptography mailing list.
2009 brought about one of the biggest changes to come to the Internet in a long time when the U.S.relaxed its control over ICANN, the official naming body of the Internet (they’re the organization in charge of registering domain names).
Two years after the beginning of Bitcoin, the first commercial transaction was made with the cryptocurrency. The transaction, which occurred in Florida, was for two Papa John’s pizzas costing 10,000 BTC (Bitcoins).
With social media continuing to rise in popularity, more platforms popped up on the Internet. In 2010, the photo-sharing platformInstagram came on to the scene.
The 2000s were an increasingly popular time to launchsocial media platforms. Along with Instagram, Pinterest launched in 2010 to get people pinning and sharing recipes, crafts, and more.
With platforms like Netflix and Hulu seeing success with streaming content online, HBO began to shift their content distribution online. In 2010, HBO launched HBO Go as their online streaming service.
The average attention span has dropped by 4 seconds since 2000 (it’s now8.25 seconds).Snapchat, with it’s 10-second snaps, became an appealing social platform for people with shortening attention spans.
In 2011, Microsoft purchased Skype, the online video chatting platform that enables people to video chat online.
In 2011, the Adobe Creative Cloud was introduced. This took their disk-based software and put it online, allowing them to continually update and improve their software.
With more people consuming video content, Twitter took advantage of the interest in this popular format. Twitter created Vine, the six-second video platform.
In 2013, more people started banking online. Ten years later,78% of Americans prefer to bank online.
With Facebook continuing to experience success, they purchased the messaging app WhatsApp to help expand their global communication efforts.
In 2015, the FCC ruled in favor of net neutrality to keep the Internet free and open for everyone. The ruling was upheld by a federal court of appeals in 2016.
With video becoming an increasingly popular way to consume content, live streaming was created. In 2015, Facebook launched Facebook Live and Twitter purchased Periscope, a live streaming app.
TikTok came to the scene in 2016, capturing attention of users across the globe. This platform became a hub for creating video content to share with others.
With technology continuing to develop, more companies turned to voice assistive devices to create a better online experience. In 2016, Google launched their voice assistant through their Google Nest device and their Apollo app.
In 2016, Pokemon Go became a global phenomenon that took the Internet by storm. It broughtaugmented reality (AR) to the forefront.
With increased concerns over data privacy, some countries started to focus on protecting user data. In 2018, the EU solidified data protection with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
As the Internet continued to develop, companies focused on delivering better Internet services. By 2019, 5G rolled out to the public as a new way to connect online.
With the COVID-19 pandemic, people shifted to working from home, which meant working online. As a result, things like video chatting software, productivity management programs, and online collaboration spaces grew in popularity.
In 2021, Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) became a popular way for people to buy and sell digital art and collectibles.
In 2022, ChatGPT officially launched. Thisartificial intelligence (AI) platform helps people generate texts, gather information, and more.
There’s no doubt that the Internet will continue to envolve as time goes on. So, what will happen next? With technologies like AI and voice search devices continuing to rise in popularity, this technology will continue to develop and become more integral.
As for what else we’ll see in the future, only time will tell.
ARPANET launched in 1969 with the first UCLA–Stanford connection using packet switching, and Unix emerged the same year, influencing future server operating systems.
A 1974 proposal led to TCP/IP, and on January 1, 1983, ARPANET hosts switched to TCP/IP, enabling interoperable, scalable networking across independent networks.
The Domain Name System (DNS) debuted in 1984, letting users enter readable domain names that servers translate into numerical IP addresses.
Email (1971) surged in use; BBS (1978), Usenet (1979), MUDs (1979), The WELL (1985), and IRC (1988) enabled discussion, gaming, and real-time chat.
The creation of the World Wide Web, the rise of social media platforms, and the 2007 launch of the iPhone expanded access, scaled content sharing, and pushed the Internet into daily life.
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Ever wonder how much is going on at once on the Internet? It can be tough to wrap your mind around it, but we’ve put together a nice visual that’ll help! The numbers show no sign of slowing down either.
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