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Internet HistoryInternet History

In 1957, the Soviet Union launched the first satellite, Sputnik I, triggering US President Dwight Eisenhower to create the ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) to regain the technological lead in the arms race.

The Internet began in 1969 as an experiment funded by the United States Department of Defense through ARPA to promote networking research. Called the ARPANET, it originally connected the Stanford Research Institute, UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah. Scientists immediately found the connectivity extremely useful in collaborating via email, and other universities and government research centers were soon connected. At this stage in the Internet's development, access was only available for private citizens as students or faculty at these schools. Though it has been widely believed that the goal was to develop a network architecture for military command-and-control that could survive disruptions up to and including nuclear war, this is a myth; in fact, ARPANET was conceived from the start as a way to get most economical use out of then-scarce large-computer resources. As originally imagined, Arpanet's major use would have been to support what is now called remote login and more sophisticated forms of distributed computing, but the infant technology of electronic mail quickly grew to dominate actual usage. Universities, research labs and defense contractors early discovered the Internet's potential as a medium of communication between humans and linked up in steadily increasing numbers, connecting together a quirky mix of academics, techies, hippies, SF fans, hackers, and anarchists.

ARPANET

1969 CompuServe

• CompuServe is an internet service provider (ISP) that was founded in 1969 as a computer time-sharing service, originally as a way to use the mainframe computers of H&R Block outside business hours. The Columbus, Ohio-based CompuServe drove the initial emergence of the online service industry. In 1979, CompuServe became the first service to offer electronic mail capabilities and technical support to personal computer users. The company broke new ground again in 1980 as the first online service to offer real-time chat.

E MAIL

Email had existed as a message exchanging service on early time sharing mainframe computers connected to a number of terminals. In about 1971 it developed into the first system of exchanging addressed messages between different, networked computers; in 1972 Ray Tomlinson introduced the "name@computer" notation that is still used today. E-mail turned into the internet "killer application" of the 1980s.

Ray Tomlinson

Timeline

• 1971: ARPANET now connects 23 universities and government research center hosts in the United States

• 1976: Queen Elizabeth sends the first royal email message 

• 1979: The first USENET newsgroups are established and people around the world are soon discussing the thousands subjects electronically. CompuServe becomes the first service to offer electronic mail capabilities to personal computer users

• 1982: The term "Internet" is coined

• 1989: AOL service launched for Macintosh and Apple II

• 1991: At the University of Minnesota, a team led by computer programmer Mark MaCahill releases "gopher," the first point-and-click way of navigating the files of the Internet. Originally designed to ease campus communications, gopher is freely distributed on the Internet.

Timeline

• 1993: The large network service providers America Online and Delphi started to connect their proprietary email systems to the Internet, beginning the large-scale adoption of Internet email as a global standard

 • 1994: Pizza Hut makes it possible to order pizza online

• 1994: Prodigy Communications Corporation became the first of the early-generation dialup services to offer access to the World Wide Web and to offer Web page hosting to its members. Prodigy was one of the first to offer a user-friendly graphical user interface.

• 1994: The first Web search engine was Lycos which started at Carnegie Mellon University as a research project.

• 1995: With the explosion of the Internet in the early 1990’s, the US Government transfers management of the Internet from ARPA to independent organizations.

• 1995: AOL service passes 2 million members

AOL

America Online is perhaps best known for "AOL Instant Messenger" (AIM) a free instant messaging computer program.

In the early 1990s, AOL was among the first service providers to give customers from outside academia and the military access to the Internet. They also emphasized a relatively user-friendly, graphics-heavy interface. As such, they were primarily associated with the influx of new users.

AOL has long maintained a massive marketing push, mailing sign-up diskettes and CD-ROMs to over 100 million households, which fueled a massive growth and helped them dominate the online field

After a decade of hyper-growth, AOL merged with media giant Time Warner. The $106 billion merger was completed in January, 2001

MSN

MSN (or Microsoft Network) is an internet service provider and web portal created by Microsoft on August 24, 1995, coinciding with the release of Windows 95.

The MSN moniker has since been extended to Microsoft's Hotmail webmail service and the MSN Messenger instant messaging client, as well as other Microsoft-branded websites.

Yahoo

• Yahoo! is a popular Internet portal and Web directory. It was founded by Stanford graduate students David Filo and Jerry Yang in January 1994

• The Web site started out as "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" but eventually received a new moniker with the help of a dictionary. The name Yahoo! is an acronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle," but Filo and Yang insist they selected the name because they liked the general definition of a yahoo, as in Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift: "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth.

Google

• In around 2001, the Google search engine rose to prominence. Its success was based in part on the concept of link popularity and Page Rank. Each page is ranked by how many pages link to it, on the premise that good or desirable pages are linked to more than others. This makes it possible for Google to first present pages that are highly linked to by quality websites. Another great factor in Google’s success, and one aspect which spawned many offspring, is the simplicity of its user interface.

Current world stats:

http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

1,086 Million Internet Users as of September, 2006

229,138,706  people in North America  or 69% of the population.

It's a 112.0 % growth rate from 2000-2006

Updated April 2006