A Short History of the

Internet and Web

(Narrated)

Frank McCown
COMP 250 – Internet Development
Harding University

Photos were obtained from the Web, and copyright is held by the respective owners.
Short History of Computing by Frank McCown is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License
“We've all heard that a million
monkeys banging on a million
typewriters will eventually reproduce
the entire works of Shakespeare.
Now, thanks to the Internet, we
know this is not true.”

- Robert Wilensky
• 1945 – Vannevar Bush writes about
“memex”, a futuristic, automatic, personal
library system

• 1960s – Advanced Research Projects Agency

(ARPA) does research on “internetwork”,
connecting small and large networks
• 1968 – Doug Engelbart demonstrates
NLS, a hypertext system that uses a
“mouse”

“The Demo”
http://technologyyz.blogspot.com/2012/12/engelbart-mouse.html
• 1969 – ARPANET goes online with 4
nodes
Dec 1969 June 1970

Dec 1970 Sept 1971

Aug 1972 June 1975

http://www.mappingcyberspace.com/gallery/figure1_2.html
• 1969 – Request for Comments (RFC) created
for quickly disseminating ideas with other
network researchers

Telnet allows user to login to a remote computer

(RFC 15)

• 1971 – Ray Tomlinson sends first e-mail (sent

to himself and probably read “QWERTYUIOP”)

FTP (File Transfer Protocol) allows files to be

transferred between computers (RFC 114)
• 1981 – ARPANET (Internet) has 200 nodes

• 1982 – ARPANET standardizes its use of TCP/IP

(Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol)
to send data packets across the network

• 1983 – Domain Name System (DNS) developed

• 1985 – NSFNET established, would later become

major part of the Internet backbone

• 1986 – Over 10,000 nodes on ARPANET. US

military portion of ARPANET splits off into MILNET
(military-only network)
• 1988 – Over 100,000 nodes on Internet

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Internet_host_count_1988-2012_log_scale.png
• 1988 – First Internet
worm by Robert Tappan
Morris crashes 6% of
servers on Internet

IANA established to
oversee global IP address
allocation (and other)

Images:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Tappan_Morris
• 1990 – Tim Berners-Lee and others at CERN
develop the WorldWideWeb (WWW), HTML
documents transmitted over the Internet by a
web server to web browsers using URIs and
HTTP (1st web page online on Aug 6, 1991)

Images: http://www.radford.edu/sjennings15/text.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee
• 1992 – ViolaWWW browser for UNIX

50 web servers

• 1993 – 500 web servers

Mosaic web browser –

multi-platform and
1st browser to display
inline images, written
by Marc Andreesen

Image: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NCSAMosaic1.0Mac.png
• 1994 – 2,500 web servers

WWW Consortium (W3C) began

Netscape 1.0

Yahoo! Web directory started by Jerry

Yang and David Filo
• 1995 – Netscape 2.0 – Supported plug-ins, frames, Java
applets, JavaScript

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/archive/2/2d/20130405022914!Netscape_2.02.png
• 1995 - Internet Explorer 1.0 released by
Microsoft

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Internet_Explorer_1.0.png
• 1996 – Macromedia Flash 1.0 (previously
called FutureSplash Animator)

Internet Archive begins archiving the Web

• 1997 – HTML 4.0 de facto standard

Browser Wars I:
Netscape vs. IE

“Netscape 72,
Microsoft 18”

Image: http://home.snafu.de/tilman/mozilla/stomps.html
• 1998 – Network Solutions registers 2
millionth domain name

Emergence of <XML>

ICANN created to manage IP

address space and DNS root
zone
• 1998 – Google founded by Larry Page
and Sergey Brin
• 2000 – Napster sued over
music sharing

Web size estimates by NEC-RI and

Inktomi surpass 1 billion indexable
pages.

XHTML 1.0 recommended by W3C

• 2001 – Wikipedia: encyclopedia
that can be edited by anyone

• 2002 – Blogs become popular

The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. Election by Adamic & Glance
• 2003 – iTunes.com and other legal
Internet music downloading services
appear. iTunes.com registers 25th million
song download in Dec (“Let It Snow! Let It
Snow! Let It Snow!” by Frank Sinatra).

Image: http://www.engadget.com/2007/10/16/apple-officially-cuts-drm-free-track-prices-to-99/
• 2003 – Security problems
– SQL Slammer worm - largest and
fastest spreading distributed denial of
service (DDoS) attacks ever
– Sobig.F virus - the fastest spreading virus
ever
– Blaster (MSBlast) worm – one of the most
damaging worms ever

Image: http://www.lbl.gov/ITSD/CIS/compnews/2003/August/01-Sobig-worm.html
• 2004 – MySpace and Facebook
popularize online social networks
• 2005 – YouTube founded by three former
PayPal employees and sold to Google the
next year for $1.65B

Image: http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2006-10-11-youtube-karim_x.htm
• 2006 – Twitter
launches 140
character limit micro-
blogging service

Time Magazine’s
person of the year:
You. Acknowledges
significance of user-
generated content
(Web 2.0)
• 2007 – One of the first massive cyber
attacks: Estonian websites attacked by
Russian hackers after relocating the Bronze
Solider of Tallinn monument

Image: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tallinn_Bronze_Soldier_-_May_2006_-_029.jpg
• 2008 – Firefox 3 sets Guinness World
Record for the “largest number of software
downloads in 24 hours.” (8M downloads)

Image: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Browser_Wars.svg
• 2008 – Google releases the Chrome web
browser

Image: http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/big_04.html
• 2008 – W3C releases First Public
Working Draft of HTML5 spec

• 2012 – ICANN reveals 1,410 new generic

top-level domains (gTLDs) like .apple,
.catholic, and .dad

• 2013 – Mobile devices account for 18%

of all web page views (StatCounter)