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Highlights from:
Hobbes' Internet Timeline
Copyright ©1993-8
by Robert H Zakon. |
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Permission is granted for use of this document in whole or in part for non commercial purposes as long as appropriate credit is given to the author/maintainer. A copy of the material the Timeline appears in is appreciated. For commercial uses, please contact the author first. The author wishes to acknowledge the Internet Society for hosting this document, and the many Net folks who have contributed suggestions and helped with the author's genealogy search. |
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1950s |
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1957 |
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USSR launches Sputnik, first artificial earth satellite. In response, US forms the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) within the Department of Defense (DoD) to establish US lead in science and technology applicable to the military (:amk:) |
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1960s |
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1962 |
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Paul Baran, RAND: "On Distributed Communications Networks" |
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• Packet-switching (PS) networks; no single outage point |
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1965 |
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ARPA sponsors study on "cooperative network of time-sharing computers" |
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1967 |
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ACM Symposium on Operating Principles |
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• First design paper on ARPANET published by Lawrence G. Roberts |
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• Plan presented for a packet-switching network |
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1969 |
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ARPANET commissioned by DoD for research into networking |
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First Request for Comment (RFC): "Host Software" by Steve Crocker |
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1970s |
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1970 |
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ALOHAnet developed by Norman Abrahamson, U of Hawaii (:sk2:) |
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ARPANET hosts start using Network Control Protocol (NCP). |
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1971 |
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15 nodes (23 hosts): UCLA, SRI, UCSB, U of Utah, BBN, MIT, RAND, SDC, Harvard, Lincoln Lab, Stanford, UIU(C), CWRU, CMU, NASA/Ames |
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1972 |
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ALOHAnet connected to the ARPANET |
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InterNetworking Working Group (INWG) created to address need for establishing agreed upon protocols. Chairman: Vinton Cerf. |
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Ray Tomlinson of BBN invents email program to send messages across a distributed network. (:amk:) |
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Telnet specification (RFC 318) |
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1973 |
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First international connections to the ARPANET: University College of London (England) and Royal Radar Establishment (Norway) |
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Bob Metcalfe's Harvard PhD Thesis outlines idea for Ethernet (:amk:) |
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Bob Kahn poses Internet problem, starts internetting research program at ARPA. Vinton Cerf sketches gateway architecture in March on back of envelope in hotel lobby in San Francisco (:vgc:) |
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File Transfer specification (RFC 454) |
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1974 |
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Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn publish "A Protocol for Packet Network Internetworking" which specified in detail the design of a Transmission Control Program (TCP). (:amk:) |
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1976 |
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Elizabeth, Queen of the United Kingdom sends out an e-mail (various Net folks have e-mailed dates ranging from 1971 to 1978; 1976 was the most submitted and the only found in print) |
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UUCP (Unix-to-Unix CoPy) developed at AT&T Bell Labs and distributed with UNIX one year later. |
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1977 |
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Mail specification (RFC 733) |
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1980s |
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1982 |
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DCA and ARPA establishes the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP), as the protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, for ARPANET. (:vgc:) |
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• This leads to one of the first definitions of an "internet" as a connected set of networks, specifically those using TCP/IP, and "Internet" as connected TCP/IP internets. |
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• DoD declares TCP/IP suite to be standard for DoD (:vgc:) |
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External Gateway Protocol (RFC 827) specification. EGP is used for gateways between networks. |
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1983 |
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Name server developed at U of Wisconsin, no longer requiring users to know the exact path to other systems. |
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Cutover from NCP to TCP/IP (1 January) |
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ARPANET split into ARPANET and MILNET; the latter became integrated with the Defense Data Network created the previous year. |
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Desktop workstations come into being, many with Berkeley UNIX which includes IP networking software. |
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Internet Activities Board (IAB) established, replacing ICCB |
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Berkeley releases 4.2BSD incorporating TCP/IP (:mpc:) |
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1984 |
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Domain Name Server (DNS) introduced. |
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# of hosts breaks 1,000 |
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1986 |
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NSFNET created (backbone speed of 56Kbps) |
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• NSF establishes 5 super-computing centers to provide high-computing power for all (JVNC@Princeton, PSC@Pittsburgh, SDSC@UCSD, NCSA@UIUC, Theory Center@Cornell). |
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1987 |
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1000th RFC: "Request For Comments reference guide" |
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# of hosts breaks 10,000 # of BITNET hosts breaks 1,000 |
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1988 |
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1 November - Internet worm burrows through the Net, affecting ~6,000 of the 60,000 hosts on the Internet (:ph1:) |
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DoD chooses to adopt OSI and sees use of TCP/IP as an interim. US Government OSI Profile (GOSIP) defines the set of protocols to be supported by Government purchased products (:gck:) |
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NSFNET backbone upgraded to T1 (1.544Mbps) CERFnet (California Education and Research Federation network) founded by Susan Estrada. |
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Countries connecting to NSFNET: Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Norway, Sweden |
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1989 |
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# of hosts breaks 100,000 |
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Cuckoo's Egg written by Clifford Stoll tells the real-life tale of a German cracker group who infiltrated numerous US facilities |
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Countries connecting to NSFNET: Australia, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Puerto Rico, UK |
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1990s |
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1990 |
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ARPANET ceases to exist |
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Archie released by Peter Deutsch, Alan Emtage, and Bill Heelan at McGill |
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The World comes on-line (world.std.com), becoming the first commercial provider of Internet dial-up access |
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Countries connecting to NSFNET: Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Chile, Greece, India, Ireland, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland |
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1991 |
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Gopher released by Paul Lindner and Mark P. McCahill from the U of Minn |
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Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS), invented by Brewster Kahle, released by Thinking Machines Corporation |
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PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) released by Philip Zimmerman (:ad1:) |
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US High Performance Computing Act (Gore 1) establishes the National Research and Education Network (NREN) NSFNET backbone upgraded to T3 (44.736Mbps) |
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NSFNET traffic passes 1 trillion bytes/month and 10 billion packets/month |
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Countries connecting to NSFNET: Croatia, Czech Repulic, Hong Kong, Hungary, Poland, Portugal, Singapore, South Africa, Taiwan, Tunisia |
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1992 |
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Internet Society (ISOC) is chartered |
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World-Wide Web (WWW) released by CERN; Tim Berners-Lee developer |
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# of hosts breaks 1,000,000 |
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IAB reconstituted as the Internet Architecture Board and becomes part of the Internet Society |
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Veronica, a gopherspace search tool, is released by UofNevada |
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Countries connecting to NSFNET: Cameroon, Cyprus, Ecuador, Estonia, Kuwait, Latvia, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Thailand, Venezuela |
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1993 |
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InterNIC created by NSF to provide specific Internet services: (:sc1:) |
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• directory and database services (AT&T) |
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• registration services (Network Solutions Inc.) |
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• information services (General Atomics/CERFnet) |
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US White House comes on-line (http://www.whitehouse.gov/): |
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• President Bill Clinton: [EMAIL PROTECTED] |
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• Vice-President Al Gore: [EMAIL PROTECTED] |
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US National Information Infrastructure Act |
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Mosaic takes the Internet by storm; WWW proliferates at a 341,634% annual growth rate of service traffic. |
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Gopher's growth is 997%. |
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Countries connecting to NSFNET: Bulgaria, Costa Rica, Egypt, Fiji, Ghana, Guam, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Liechtenstein, Peru, Romania, Russian Federation, Turkey, Ukrayne, UAE, Virgin Islands |
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1994 |
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ARPANET/Internet celebrates 25th anniversary |
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Arizona law firm of Canter & Siegel "spams" the Internet with email advertising green card lottery services; Net citizens flame back |
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NSFNET traffic passes 10 trillion bytes/month |
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WWW edges out telnet to become 2nd most popular service on the Net (behind ftp-data) based on % of packets and bytes traffic distribution on NSFNET |
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Countries connecting to NSFNET: Algeria, Armenia, Bermuda, Burkina Faso, China, Colombia, French Polynesia, Jamaica, Lebanon, Lithuania, Macau, Morocco, New Caledonia, Nicaragua, Niger, Panama, Philippines, Senegal, Sri Lanka, Swaziland, Uruguay, Uzbekistan |
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1995 |
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WWW surpasses ftp-data in March as the service with greatest traffic on NSFNet based on packet count, and in April based on byte count |
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NSFNET reverts back to a research network. |
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Traditional online dial-up systems (Compuserve, American Online, Prodigy ) begin to provide Internet access |
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Registration of domain names is no longer free. Beginning 14 September, a $50 annual fee has been imposed, which up until now was subsidized by NSF. |
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• NSF continues to pay for .edu registration, and on an interim basis for .gov " |
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Addendum, (R Craig Collins) |
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1996 |
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Number of .com sites surpasses .edu sites |
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Microsoft goes from desktop computing giant to Internet giant wannabe, refocuses entire line to the Internet |
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Java programming language released |
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• Potential for universal programming language for all platforms using Java Virtual machines |
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1997 |
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Browsing, Java, and TCP/IP embedded in Internet Explorer 4.0 for Windows 95 and Windows NT |
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1998 |
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Release of Windows 98, and built in Internet connectivity |
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