A Timeline History of the Internet

1958

• Researchers at the Bell labs invent the modem (modulator - demodulator). A modem converts digital signals to electrical (analog) signals and back. Thus enabling communication between computers.

1961

• Leonard Kleinrock, MIT: "Information Flow in Large Communication Nets" (May 31) First paper on packet-switching (PS) theory

1962

• RAND Paul Baran, of the RAND Corporation (a government agency), was commissioned by the U.S. Air Force to do a study on how it could maintain its command and control over its missiles and bombers, after a nuclear attack. This was to be a military research network that could survive a nuclear strike, decentralized so that if any locations (cities) in the U.S. were attacked, the military could still have control of nuclear arms for a counter-attack.
• Baran's finished document described several ways to accomplish this. His final proposal was a packet switched network.
• "Packet switching is the breaking down of data into datagrams or packets that are labeled to indicate the origin and the destination of the information and the forwarding of these packets from one computer to another computer until the information arrives at its final destination computer. This was crucial to the realization of a computer network. If packets are lost at any given point, the message can be resent by the originator."

1963

• J.C.R. Licklider & W. Clark, MIT: "On-Line Man Computer Communication" (August) Galactic Network concept encompassing distributed social interactions
• Backbones: None - Hosts: None

1964

• Paul Baran, RAND: "On Distributed Communications Networks" packet-switching networks; no single outage point

1965

• ARPA sponsors study on "cooperative network of time-sharing computers"
• TX-2 at MIT Lincoln Lab and AN/FSQ-32 at System Development Corporation (Santa Monica, CA) are directly linked (without packet switches) via a dedicated 1200bps phone line. Lawrence G. Roberts was the project leader. 
• Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) computer at ARPA later added to form "The Experimental Network"
• Ted Nelson coins the term: "hypertext" and "hyperlink" to refer to the structure of a computerized information system through which a user can navigate "non sequentially". Or without a pre-structured search path, ad libitum..

1966

• Lawrence G. Roberts, MIT: "Towards a Cooperative Network of Time-Shared Computers" (October) First ARPANET plan

1967

• ARPANET design discussions held by Larry Roberts at ARPA IPTO PI meeting in Ann Arbor, Michigan (April)
• ACM Symposium on Operating Principles in Gatlinburg, Tennessee (October)
• First design paper on ARPANET published by Larry Roberts: "Multiple Computer Networks and Intercomputer Communication
• First meeting of the three independent packet network teams (RAND, NPL, ARPA)
• National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in Middlesex, England develops NPL Data Network under Donald Watts Davies who coins the term packet. The NPL network, an experiment in packet-switching, used 768kbps lines
• Andries van Dam of Brown University develops the first operational hypertext system. It serves as an early model for other hypertext environments.

1968

• PS-network presented to the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA)
• Request for proposals for ARPANET sent out in August; responses received in September
• University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) awarded Network Measurement Center contract in October
• Bolt Beranek and Newman, Inc. (BBN) awarded Packet Switch contract to build Interface Message Processors (IMPs) BBN had selected a Honeywell minicomputer as the base on which they would build the switch. The physical network was constructed in 1969, linking four nodes: University of California at Los Angeles, SRI (in Stanford), University of California at Santa Barbara, and University of Utah. The network was wired together via 50 Kbps circuits.
• US Senator Edward Kennedy sends a congratulatory telegram to BBN for its million-dollar ARPA contract to build the "Interfaith" Message Processor, and thanking them for their ecumenical efforts
• Network Working Group (NWG), headed by Steve Crocker, loosely organized to develop host level protocols for communication over the ARPANET.
• Tymnet built as part of Tymshare service

1970

• First publication of the original ARPANET Host-Host protocol: C.S. Carr, S. Crocker, V.G. Cerf, "HOST-HOST Communication Protocol in the ARPA Network," in AFIPS Proceedings of SJCC (:vgc:)
• First report on ARPANET at AFIPS: "Computer Network Development to Achieve Resource Sharing" (March)
• ALOHAnet, the first packet radio network, developed by Norman Abramson, Univ of Hawaii, becomes operational (July) connected to the ARPANET in 1972
• ARPANET hosts start using Network Control Protocol (NCP), first host-to-host protocol
• First cross-country link installed by AT&T between UCLA and BBN at 56kbps. This line is later replaced by another between BBN and RAND. A second line is added between MIT and Utah

1972

• 15 nodes (23 hosts): UCLA, SRI, UCSB, Univ of Utah, BBN, MIT, RAND, SDC, Harvard, Lincoln Lab, Stanford, UIU(C), CWRU, CMU, NASA/Ames
• BBN starts building IMPs using the cheaper Honeywell 316. IMPs however are limited to 4 host connections, and so BBN develops a terminal IMP (TIP) that supports up to 64 terminals (September)
• Ray Tomlinson of BBN invents the email program to send messages across a distributed network. The original program was derived from two others: an intra-machine email program (SENDMSG) and an experimental file transfer program (CPYNET) Ray Tomlinson (BBN) modifies email program for ARPANET where it becomes a quick hit. The @ sign was chosen from the punctuation keys on Tomlinson's Model 33 Teletype for its "at" meaning (March)
• Larry Roberts writes first email management program (RD) to list, selectively read, file, forward, and respond to messages (July)
• International Conference on Computer Communications (ICCC) at the Washington D.C. Hilton with demonstration of ARPANET between 40 machines and the Terminal Interface Processor (TIP) organized by Bob Kahn. (October)
• First computer-to-computer chat takes place at UCLA, and is repeated during ICCC, as psychotic PARRY (at Stanford) discusses its problems with the Doctor (at BBN).
• International Network Working Group (INWG) formed in October as a result of a meeting at ICCC identifying the need for a combined effort in advancing networking technologies. Vint Cerf appointed first Chair. By 1974, INWG became IFIP WG 6.1 (:vgc:)
• Louis Pouzin leads the French effort to build its own ARPANET - CYCLADES
• RFC 318: Telnet specification

1973

• The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was renamed The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (or DARPA)
• ARPANET was currently using the Network Control Protocol or NCP to transfer data. This allowed communications between hosts running on the same network.
• Development began on the protocol later to be called TCP/IP, it was developed by a group headed by Vinton Cerf from Stanford and Bob Kahn from DARPA. This new protocol was to allow diverse computer networks to interconnect and communicate with each other.
• First international connections to the ARPANET: University College of London (England) via NORSAR (Norway)
• Bob Metcalfe's Harvard PhD Thesis outlines idea for Ethernet. The concept was tested on Xerox PARC's Alto computers, and the first Ethernet network called the Alto Aloha System (May)
• Bob Kahn poses Internet problem, starts internetting research program at ARPA. Vinton Cerf sketches gateway architecture in March on back of envelope in a San Francisco hotel lobby
• Cerf and Kahn present basic Internet ideas at INWG in September at Univ of Sussex, Brighton, UK
• SRI (NIC) begins publishing ARPANET News in March; number of ARPANET users estimated at 2,000
• ARPA study shows email composing 75% of all ARPANET traffic
• Christmas Day Lockup - Harvard IMP hardware problem leads it to broadcast zero-length hops to any ARPANET destination, causing all other IMPs to send their traffic to Harvard (25 December)

1974

• Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn publish "A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection" which specified in detail the design of a Transmission Control Program (TCP). [IEEE Trans Comm]
• BBN opens Telenet, the first public packet data service (a commercial version of ARPANET)
• First Use of term Internet by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn in paper on Transmission Control Protocol.

1975

• Operational management of Internet transferred to DCA (now DISA)
• First ARPANET mailing list, MsgGroup, is created by Steve Walker. Einar Stefferud soon took over as moderator as the list was not automated at first. A science fiction list, SF-Lovers, was to become the most popular unofficial list in the early days
• John Vittal develops MSG, the first all-inclusive email program providing replying, forwarding, and filing capabilities.
• Satellite links cross two oceans (to Hawaii and UK) as the first TCP tests are run over them by Stanford, BBN, and UCL
• "Jargon File", by Raphael Finkel at SAIL, first released
• Shockwave Rider by John Brunner

1976

• Dr. Robert M. Metcalfe develops Ethernet, which allowed coaxial cable to move data extremely fast. This was a crucial component to the development of LANs.
• The packet satellite project went into practical use. SATNET, Atlantic packet Satellite network, was born. This network linked the United States with Europe. Surprisingly, it used INTELSAT satellites that were owned by a consortium of countries and not exclusively the United States government.
• UUCP (Unix-to-Unix CoPy) developed at AT&T Bell Labs and distributed with UNIX one year later.
• The Department of Defense began to experiment with the TCP/IP protocol and soon decided to require it for use on ARPANET.
• Elizabeth II, Queen of the United Kingdom sends out an e-mail on 26 March from the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment (RSRE) in Malvern
• UUCP (Unix-to-Unix Copy) developed at AT&T Bell Labs and distributed with UNIX one year later.
• Multiprocessing Pluribus IMPs are deployed

1977

• THEORYNET created by Larry Landweber at Univ of Wisconsin providing electronic mail to over 100 researchers in computer science (using a locally developed e-mail system over TELENET)
• Tymshare spins out Tymnet under pressure from TELENET. Both go on to develop X.25 protocol standard for virtual circuit style packet switching
• First demonstration of ARPANET/SF Bay Packet Radio Net/Atlantic SATNET operation of Internet protocols with BBN-supplied gateways in July 

1978

• TCP split into TCP and IP (March)

1979

• USENET (the decentralized news group network) was created by Steve Bellovin, graduate student, and Tom Truscott, Jim Ellis, programmers at University of North Carolina, and programmers. It was based on UUCP. First usenet message between Duke and UNC by and Steve Bellovin. All original groups were under net.* Hierarchy.
• The Creation of BITNET, by IBM, "Because its Time Network", introduced the "store and forward" network. It was used for e-mail and listservers
• Meeting between Univ. of Wisconsin, DARPA, National Science Foundation (NSF), and computer scientists from many universities to establish a Computer Science Department research computer network (organized by Larry Landweber).
• First MUD, MUD1, by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw at U of Essex
• ARPA establishes the Internet Configuration Control Board (ICCB)
• Packet Radio Network (PRNET) experiment starts with DARPA funding. Most communications take place between mobile vans. ARPANET connection via SRI.
• On April 12, Kevin MacKenzie e-mails the MsgGroup a suggestion of adding some emotion back into the dry text medium of e-mail, such as -) for indicating a sentence was tongue-in-cheek. Though flamed by many at the time, emoticons became widely used

1980

• ARPANET grinds to a complete halt on 27 October because of an accidentally-propagated status-message virus
• First C/30-based IMP at BBN

1981

• National Science Foundation created backbone called CSNET 56 Kbps network for institutions without access to ARPANET. Vinton Cerf proposed a plan for an inter-network connection between CSNET and the ARPANET.
• CSNET (Computer Science NETwork) built by a collaboration of computer scientists and Univ. of Delaware, Purdue Univ., Univ. of Wisconsin, RAND Corporation and BBN through seed money granted by NSF to provide networking services (especially e-mail) to university scientists with no access to ARPANET. CSNET later becomes known as the Computer and Science Network. 
• C/30 IMPs predominate the network; first C/30 TIP at SAC
• Minitel (Teletel) is deployed across France by France Telecom.
• True Names by Vernor Vinge

1982

• Norway leaves network to become an Internet connection via TCP/IP over SATNET; UCL does the same
• DCA and ARPA establish the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP), as the protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, for ARPANET.
• 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.
• DoD declares TCP/IP suite to be standard for DOD
• EUnet (European UNIX Network) is created by EUUG to provide e-mail and USENET services.
• Original connections between the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, and UK

1983

• On January 1st, every machine connected to ARPANET had to use TCP/IP. TCP/IP became the core Internet protocol and replaced NCP entirely.
• The University of Wisconsin created Domain Name System (DNS).(7) This allowed packets to be directed to a domain name, which would be translated by the server database into the corresponding IP number. This made it much easier for people to access other servers, because they no longer had to remember numbers.
• No more Honeywell or Pluribus IMPs; TIPs replaced by TACs (terminal access controller)
• Stuttgart and Korea get connected
• Movement Information Net (MINET) started early in the year in Europe, connected to Internet in Sept
• CSNET / ARPANET gateway put in place
• ARPANET split into ARPANET and MILNET; the latter became integrated with the Defense Data Network created the previous year. 68 of the 113 existing nodes went to MILNET
• Desktop workstations come into being, many with Berkeley UNIX (4.2 BSD) which includes IP networking software (:mpc:)
• Networking needs switch from having a single, large time sharing computer connected to the Internet at each site, to instead connecting entire local networks
• EARN (European Academic and Research Network) established. Very similar to the way BITNET works with a gateway funded by IBM
• FidoNet developed by Tom Jennings

1984

• The ARPANET was divided into two networks: MILNET and ARPANET. MILNET was to serve the needs of the military and ARPANET to support the advanced research component, Department of Defense continued to support both networks.
• Upgrade to CSNET was contracted to MCI. New circuits would be T1 lines,1.5 Mbps which is twenty-five times faster than the old 56 Kbps lines. IBM would provide advanced routers and Merit would manage the network. New network was to be called NSFNET (National Science Foundation Network), and old lines were to remain called CSNET.
• JUNET (Japan Unix Network) established using UUCP
• JANET (Joint Academic Network) established in the UK using the Colored Book protocols; previously SERCnet
• Moderated newsgroups introduced on USENET (mod.*)
• Neuromancer by William Gibson
• Canada begins a one-year effort to network its universities. The NetNorth Network is connected to BITNET in Ithaca from Toronto (:kf1:)
• Kremvax message announcing USSR connectivity to USENET

1985

• The National Science Foundation began deploying its new T1 lines, which would be finished by 1988.

1986

• The Internet Engineering Task Force or IETF was created to serve as a forum for technical coordination by contractors for DARPA working on ARPANET, US Defense Data Network (DDN), and the Internet core gateway system.NSFNET created (backbone speed of 56Kbps)
• NSF establishes 5 super-computing centers to provide high-computing power for all (JVNC@Princeton, PSC@Pittsburgh, SDSC@UCSD, NCSA@UIUC, Theory Center@Cornell).
• This allows an explosion of connections, especially from universities.
• Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) comes into existence under the IAB. First IETF meeting held in January at Linkabit in San Diego
• The first Freenet (Cleveland) comes on-line 16 July under the auspices of the Society for Public Access Computing (SoPAC). Later Freenet program management assumed by the National Public Telecomputing Network (NPTN) in 1989 (:sk2,rab:)
• Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) designed to enhance Usenet news performance over TCP/IP.
• Mail Exchanger (MX) records developed by Craig Partridge allow non-IP network hosts to have domain addresses.
• The great USENET name change; moderated newsgroups changed in 1987.
• BARRNET (Bay Area Regional Research Network) established using high speed links. Operational in 1987.
• New England gets cut off from the Net as AT&T suffers a fiber optics cable break between Newark/NJ and White Plains/NY. Yes, all seven New England ARPANET trunk lines were in the one severed cable. Outage took place between 1:11 and 12:11 EST on 12 Decembe

1987

• BITNET and CSNET merged to form the Corporation for Research and Educational Networking (CREN), another work of the National Science Foundation.
• NSF signs a cooperative agreement to manage the NSFNET backbone with Merit Network, Inc. (IBM and MCI involvement was through an agreement with Merit). Merit, IBM, and MCI later founded ANS.
• UUNET is founded with Usenix funds to provide commercial UUCP and Usenet access. Originally an experiment by Rick Adams and Mike O'Dell
• First TCP/IP Interpretability Conference (March), name changed in 1988 to INTROP
• E-mail link established between Germany and China using CSNET protocols, with the first message from China sent on 20 September. (:wz1:)
• Number of BITNET hosts breaks 1,000

1988

• Soon after the completion of the T1 NSFNET backbone, traffic increased so quickly that plans immediately began on upgrading the network again.
• Merit and its partners formed a not for profit corporation called ANS, Advanced Network Systems, which was to conduct research into high speed networking. It soon came up with the concept of the T3, a 45 Mbps line. NSF quickly adopted the new network and by the end of 1991 all of its sites were connected by this new backbone.
• 2 November - Internet worm burrows through the Net, affecting ~6,000 of the 60,000 hosts on the Internet (:ph1:)
• CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) formed by DARPA in response to the needs exhibited during the Morris worm incident. The worm is the only advisory issued this year.
• 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:)
• Los Nettos network created with no federal funding, instead supported by regional members (founding: Caltech, TIS, UCLA, USC, ISI).
• NSFNET backbone upgraded to T1 (1.544Mbps)
• CERFnet (California Education and Research Federation network) founded by Susan Estrada.
• Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) established in December with Jon Postel as its Director. Postel was also the RFC Editor and US Domain registrar for many years.
• Internet Relay Chat (IRC) developed by Jarkko Oikarinen (:zby:)
• First Canadian regionals join NSFNET: ONet via Cornell, RISQ via Princeton, BCnet via Univ of Washington (:ec1:)
• FidoNet gets connected to the Net, enabling the exchange of email and news (:tp1:)
• The first multicast tunnel is established between Stanford and BBN in the Summer of 1988.
• Countries connecting to NSFNET: Canada (CA), Denmark (DK), Finland (FI), France (FR), Iceland (IS), Norway (NO), Sweden (SE)Backbones: 50Kbps ARPANET, 56Kbps CSNET, 1.544Mbps (T1) NSFNET, plus satellite and radio connections - Hosts: 56,000

1989

• RIPE (Reseaux IP Europeens) formed (by European service providers) to ensure the necessary administrative and technical coordination to allow the operation of the pan-European IP Network. 
• First relays between a commercial electronic mail carrier and the Internet: MCI Mail through the Corporation for the National Research Initiative (CNRI), and Compuserve through Ohio State Univ 
• Corporation for Research and Education Networking (CREN) is formed by merging CSNET into BITNET (August)
• AARNET - Australian Academic Research Network - set up by AVCC and CSIRO; introduced into service the following year 
• First link between Australia and NSFNET via Hawaii on 23 June
• Cuckoo's Egg by Clifford Stoll tells the real-life tale of a German cracker group who infiltrated numerous US facilities
• UCLA sponsors the Act One symposium to celebrate ARPANET's 20th anniversary and its decomissioning (August)
• Countries connecting to NSFNET: Australia (AU), Germany (DE), Israel (IL), Italy (IT), Japan (JP), Mexico (MX), Netherlands (NL), New Zealand (NZ), Puerto Rico (PR), United Kingdom (UK)
• Number of hosts breaks 100,000

1990

• While the T3 lines were being constructed, the Department of Defense disbanded the ARPANET and it was replaced by the NSFNET backbone. The original 50Kbs lines of ARPANET were taken out of service.
• Tim Berners-Lee and CERN in Geneva implements a hypertext system to provide efficient information access to the members of the international high-energy physics community.
• Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is founded by Mitch Kapor
• Archie released by Peter Deutsch, Alan Emtage, and Bill Heelan at McGill
• Hytelnet released by Peter Scott (Univ of Saskatchewan)
• The World comes on-line (world.std.com), becoming the first commercial provider of Internet dial-up access
• ISO Development Environment (ISODE) developed to provide an approach for OSI migration for the DoD. ISODE software allows OSI application to operate over TCP/IP (:gck:)
• CA*net formed by 10 regional networks as national Canadian backbone with direct connection to NSFNET (:ec1:)
• The first remotely operated machine to be hooked up to the Internet, the Internet Toaster by John Romkey, (controlled via SNMP) makes its debut at Interop. Pictures: Internode, Invisible
• Countries connecting to NSFNET: Argentina (AR), Austria (AT), Belgium (BE), Brazil (BR), Chile (CL), Greece (GR), India (IN), Ireland (IE), Korea (KR), Spain (ES), Switzerland (CH)
• Backbones: 56Kbps CSNET, 1.544Mbps (T1) NSFNET, plus satellite and radio connections - Hosts: 313,000

1991

• CSNET (which consisted of 56Kbps lines) is discontinued having fulfilled its important early role in the provision of academic networking service. A key feature of CREN is that its operational costs are fully met through dues paid by its member organizations.
• The NSF established a new network, named NREN, the National Research and Education Network. The purpose of this network is to conduct high speed networking research. It was not to be used as a commercial network, nor was it to be used to send a lot of the data that the Internet now transfers.
• First connection takes place between Brazil, by Fapesp, and the Internet at 9600 baud.
• Commercial Internet eXchange (CIX) Association, Inc. formed by General Atomics (CERFnet), Performance Systems International, Inc. (PSInet), and UUNET Technologies, Inc. (AlterNet), after NSF lifts restrictions on the commercial use of the Net (March) (:glg:)
• Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS), invented by Brewster Kahle, released by Thinking Machines Corporation
• Gopher released by Paul Lindner and Mark P. McCahill from the Univ of Minnesota
• World-Wide Web (WWW) released by CERN; Tim Berners-Lee developer (:pb1:)
• PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) released by Philip Zimmerman (:ad1:)
• US High Performance Computing Act (Gore 1) establishes the National Research and Education Network (NREN)
• NSFNET backbone upgraded to T3 (44.736Mbps)
• NSFNET traffic passes 1 trillion bytes/month and 10 billion packets/month
• Defense Data Network NIC contract awarded by DISA to Government Systems Inc. who takes over from SRI in May
• Start of JANET IP Service (JIPS) which signalled the changeover from Coloured Book software to TCP/IP within the UK academic network. IP was initially 'tunneled' within X.25. (:gst:)
• Countries connecting to NSFNET: Croatia (HR), Czech Republic (CZ), Hong Kong (HK), Hungary (HU), Poland (PL), Portugal (PT), Singapore (SG), South Africa (ZA), Taiwan (TW), Tunisia (TN)
• Backbones: Partial 45Mbps (T3) NSFNET, a few private backbones, plus satellite and radio connections - Hosts: 617,000

1992

• Internet Society is chartered in January.
• World-Wide Web released by CERN.
• NSFNET backbone upgraded to T3 44.736Mbps
• IAB reconstituted as the Internet Architecture Board and becomes part of the Internet Society
• Number of hosts breaks 1,000,000
• First MBONE audio multicast (March) and video multicast (November)
• RIPE Network Coordination Center (NCC) created in April to provide address registration and coordination services to the European Internet community
• Veronica, a gopherspace search tool, is released by Univ of Nevada
• World Bank comes on-line
• The term "surfing the Internet" is coined by Jean Armour Polly 
• Zen and the Art of the Internet is published by Brendan Kehoe
• Internet Hunt started by Rick Gates
• Countries connecting to NSFNET: Antarctica (AQ), Cameroon (CM), Cyprus (CY), Ecuador (EC), Estonia (EE), Kuwait (KW), Latvia (LV), Luxembourg (LU), Malaysia (MY), Slovakia (SK), Slovenia (SI), Thailand (TH), Venezuela (VE)

1993

• InterNIC created by NSF to provide specific Internet services: directory and database services (by AT&T), registration services (by Network Solutions Inc.), and information services (by General Atomics/CERFnet).
• directory and database services (AT&T)
• registration services (Network Solutions Inc.)
• information services (General Atomics/CERFnet)
• Marc Andreessen and NCSA and the University of Illinois develops a graphical user interface to the WWW, called "Mosaic for X".
• US White House comes on-line (http://www.whitehouse.gov/):
• President Bill Clinton: president@whitehouse.gov
• Vice-President Al Gore: vice-president@whitehouse.gov
• Worms of a new kind find their way around the Net - WWW Worms (W4), joined by Spiders, Wanderers, Crawlers, and Snakes ...
• Internet Talk Radio begins broadcasting
• United Nations (UN) comes on-line
• US National Information Infrastructure Act
• Businesses and media begin taking notice of the Internet
• InterCon International KK (IIKK) provides Japan's first commercial Internet connection in September. TWICS, though an IIKK leased line, begins offering dial-up accounts the following month (:tb1:)
• Mosaic takes the Internet by storm; WWW proliferates at a 341,634% annual growth rate of service traffic. Gopher's growth is 997%.
• Countries connecting to NSFNET: Bulgaria (BG), Costa Rica (CR), Egypt (EG), Fiji (FJ), Ghana (GH), Guam (GU), Indonesia (ID), Kazakhstan (KZ), Kenya (KE), Liechtenstein (LI), Peru (PE), Romania (RO), Russian Federation (RU), Turkey (TR), Ukraine (UA), UAE (AE), US Virgin Islands (VI)

1994

• No major changes were made to the physical network. The most significant thing that happened was the growth. Many new networks were added to the NSF backbone. Hundreds of thousands of new hosts were added to the INTERNET during this time period.
• Pizza Hut offers pizza ordering on its Web page.
• First Virtual, the first cyberbank, opens.
• ATM (Asynchronous Transmission Mode, 145Mbps) backbone is installed on NSFNET.
• ARPANET/Internet celebrates 25th anniversary
• Communities begin to be wired up directly to the Internet (Lexington and Cambridge, Mass., USA)
• US Senate and House provide information servers
• Shopping malls arrive on the Internet
• First cyberstation, RT-FM, broadcasts from Interop in Las Vegas
• The National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) suggests that GOSIP should incorporate TCP/IP and drop the "OSI-only" requirement
• Arizona law firm of Canter & Siegel "spams" the Internet with email advertising green card lottery services; Net citizens flame back
• NSFNET traffic passes 10 trillion bytes/month
• Yes, it's true - you can now order pizza from the Hut online
• 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
• Japanese Prime Minister on-line (http://www.kantei.go.jp/)
• UK's HM Treasury on-line (http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/)
• New Zealand's Info Tech Prime Minister on-line (http://www.govt.nz/)
• First Virtual, the first cyberbank, open up for business
• Radio stations start rockin' (rebroadcasting) round the clock on the Net: WXYC at Univ of NC, KJHK at Univ of KS-Lawrence, KUGS at Western WA Univ
• IPng recommended by IETF at its Toronto meeting (July) and approved by IESG in November. Later documented as RFC 1752
• The first banner ads appear on hotwired.com in October. They were for Zima (a beverage) and AT&T
• Trans-European Research and Education Network Association (TERENA) is formed by the merger of RARE and EARN, with representatives from 38 countries as well as CERN and ECMWF. TERENA's aim is to "promote and participate in the development of a high quality international information and telecommunications infrastructure for the benefit of research and education" (October)
• After noticing that many network software vendors used domain.com in their documentation examples, Bill Woodcock and Jon Postel register the domain. Sure enough, after looking at the domain access logs, it was evident that many users were using the example domain in configuring their applications.
• Countries connecting to NSFNET: Algeria (DZ), Armenia (AM), Bermuda (BM), Burkina Faso (BF), China (CN), Colombia (CO), Jamaica (JM), Jordan (JO), Lebanon (LB), Lithuania (LT), Macao (MO), Morocco (MA), New Caledonia (NC), Nicaragua (NI), Niger (NE), Panama (PA), Philippines (PH), Senegal (SN), Sri Lanka (LK), Swaziland (SZ), Uruguay (UY), Uzbekistan (UZ)
• Top 10 Domains by Host #: com, edu, uk, gov, de, ca, mil, au, org, net

1995

• The National Science Foundation announced that as of April 30, 1995 it would no longer allow direct access to the NSF backbone. The National Science Foundation contracted with four companies that would be providers of access to the NSF backbone (Merit). These companies would then sell connections to groups, organizations, and companies.
• $50 annual fee is imposed on domains, excluding .edu and .gov domains which are still funded by the National Science Foundation.
• NSFNET reverts back to a research network. Main US backbone traffic now routed through interconnected network providers
• The new NSFNET is born as NSF establishes the very high speed Backbone Network Service (vBNS) linking super-computing centers: NCAR, NCSA, SDSC, CTC, PSC
• Neda Rayaneh Institute (NRI), Iran's first commercial provider, comes online, connecting via satellite to Cadvision, a Canadian provider (:rm1:)
• Hong Kong police disconnect all but 1 of the colony's Internet providers in search of a hacker. 10,000 people are left without Net access. (:api:)
• Sun launches JAVA on May 23
• RealAudio, an audio streaming technology, lets the Net hear in near real-time
• Radio HK, the first commercial 24 hr., Internet-only radio station starts broadcasting
• 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
• Traditional online dial-up systems (Compuserve, America Online, Prodigy) begin to provide Internet access
• Thousands in Minneapolis-St. Paul (USA) lose Net access after transients start a bonfire under a bridge at the Univ of MN causing fiber-optic cables to melt (30 July)
• A number of Net related companies go public, with Netscape leading the pack with the 3rd largest ever NASDAQ IPO share value (9 August)
• 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. NSF continues to pay for .edu registration, and on an interim basis for .gov
• The Vatican comes on-line (http://www.vatican.va/)
• The Canadian Government comes on-line (http://canada.gc.ca/)
• The first official Internet wiretap was successful in helping the Secret Service and Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) apprehend three individuals who were illegally manufacturing and selling cell phone cloning equipment and electronic devices
• Operation Home Front connects, for the first time, soldiers in the field with their families back home via the Internet.
• Richard White becomes the first person to be declared a munition, under the USA's arms export control laws, because of an RSA file security encryption program tattooed on his arm (:wired496:)
• Country domains registered: Ethiopia (ET), Cote d'Ivoire (CI), Cook Islands (CK) Cayman Islands (KY), Anguilla (AI), Gibraltar (GI), Vatican (VA), Kiribati (KI), Kyrgyzstan (KG), Madagascar (MG), Mauritius (MU), Micronesia (FM), Monaco (MC), Mongolia (MN), Nepal (NP), Nigeria (NG), Western Samoa (WS), San Marino (SM), Tanzania (TZ), Tonga (TO), Uganda (UG), Vanuatu (VU)
• Top 10 Domains by Host #: com, edu, net, gov, mil, org, de, uk, ca, au
• Technologies of the Year: WWW, Search engines
• Emerging Technologies: Mobile code (JAVA, JAVAscript), Virtual environments (VRML), Collaborative tools
• Hacks of the Year: The Spot (Jun 12), Hackers Movie Page (12 Aug)

1996

• Most Internet traffic is carried by backbones of independent ISPs, including MCI, AT&T, Sprint, UUnet, BBN planet, ANS, and more.
• Currently the Internet Society, the group that controls the INTERNET, is trying to figure out new TCP/IP to be able to have billions of addresses, rather than the limited system of today. The problem that has arisen is that it is not known how both the old and the new addressing systems will be able to work at the same time during a transition period.
• Internet phones catch the attention of US telecommunication companies who ask the US Congress to ban the technology (which has been around for years)
• Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, PLO Leader Yasser Arafat, and Phillipine President Fidel Ramos meet for ten minutes in an online interactive chat session on 17 January.
• The controversial US Communications Decency Act (CDA) becomes law in the US in order to prohibit distribution of indecent materials over the Net. A few months later a three-judge panel imposes an injunction against its enforcement. Supreme Court unanimously rules most of it unconstitutional in 1997.
• 9,272 organizations find themselves unlisted after the InterNIC drops their name service as a result of not having paid their domain name fee
• Various ISPs suffer extended service outages, bringing into question whether they will be able to handle the growing number of users. AOL (19 hours), Netcom (13 hours), AT&T WorldNet (28 hours - email only)
• Domain name tv.com sold to CNET for US$15,000
• New York's Public Access Networks Corp (PANIX) is shut down after repeated SYN attacks by a cracker using methods outlined in a hacker magazine (2600)
• MCI upgrades Internet backbone adding ~13,000 ports, bringing the effective speed from 155Mbps to 622Mbps.
• The Internet Ad Hoc Committee announces plans to add 7 new generic Top Level Domains (gTLD): .firm, .store, .web, .arts, .rec, .info, .nom. The IAHC plan also calls for a competing group of domain registrars worldwide.
• A malicious cancelbot is released on USENET wiping out more than 25,000 messages
• The WWW browser war, fought primarily between Netscape and Microsoft, has rushed in a new age in software development, whereby new releases are made quarterly with the help of Internet users eager to test upcoming (beta) versions.
• Restrictions on Internet use around the world:
• China: requires users and ISPs to register with the police
• Germany: cuts off access to some newsgroups carried on Compuserve
• Saudi Arabia: confines Internet access to universities and hospitals
• Singapore: requires political and religious content providers to register with the state
• New Zealand: classifies computer disks as "publications" that can be censored and seized
• source: Human Rights Watch
• Country domains registered: Qatar (QA), Central frican Republic (CF), Oman (OM), Norfolk Island (NF), Tuvalu (TV), French Polynesia (PF), Syria (SY), Aruba (AW), Cambodia (KH), French Guiana (GF), Eritrea (ER), Cape Verde (CV), Burundi (BI), Benin (BJ) Bosnia-Herzegovina (BA), Andorra (AD), Guadeloupe (GP), Guernsey (GG), Isle of Man (IM), Jersey (JE), Lao (LA), Maldives (MV), Marshall Islands (MH), Mauritania (MR), Northern Mariana Islands (MP), Rwanda (RW), Togo (TG), Yemen (YE), Zaire (ZR)
• Top 10 Domains by Host #: com, edu, net, uk, de, jp, us, mil, ca, au
• One of the largest action sites is founded: eBay
• Moni Naor from the Weizmann Institute of Science, produces a report entitled "Verification of a human in the loop, or Identification via the Turing Test".
• Search robots are specifically created to add url's to their search engines for the purpose of spamming. To prevent this it is thought to devise a test to distinguish humans from computers, it also protect against non human access to web services. No actual CAPTCHA is created and the term is not yet coined. See below for an example.
• Hacks of the Year: US Dept of Justice (17 Aug), CIA (19 Sep), Air Force (29 Dec), UK Labour Party (6 Dec), NASA DDCSOL - USAFE - US Air Force (30 Dec)
• Technologies of the Year: Search engines, JAVA, Internet Phone
• Emerging Technologies: Virtual environments (VRML), Collaborative tools, Internet appliance (Network Computer

1997

• 71,618 mailing lists registered at Liszt, a mailing list directory
• The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) is established to handle administration and registration of IP numbers to the geographical areas currently handled by Network Solutions (InterNIC), starting March 1998.
• CA*net II launched in June to provide Canada's next generation Internet using ATM/SONET
• In protest of the DNS monopoly, AlterNIC's owner, Eugene Kashpureff, hacks DNS so users going to www.internic.net end up at www.alternic.net
• Domain name business.com sold for US$150,000
• Early in the morning of 17 July, human error at Network Solutions causes the DNS table for .com and .net domains to become corrupted, making millions of systems unreachable.
• Longest hostname registered with InterNIC: CHALLENGER.MED.SYNAPSE.UAH.UALBERTA.CA
• 101,803 Name Servers in whois database
• Country domains registered: Falkland Islands (FK), East Timor (TP), R of Congo (CG), Christmas Island (CX), Gambia (GM), Guinea-Bissau (GW), Haiti (HT), Iraq (IQ), Libya (LY), Malawi (MW), Martinique (MQ), Montserrat (MS), Myanmar (MM), French Reunion Island (RE), Seychelles (SC), Sierra Leone (SL), Somalia (SO), Sudan (SD), Tajikistan (TJ), Turkmenistan (TM), Turks and Caicos Islands (TC), British Virgin Islands (VG), Heard and McDonald Islands (HM), French Southern Territories (TF), British Indian Ocean Territory (IO), Svalbard and Jan Mayen Islands (SJ), St Pierre and Miquelon (PM), St Helena (SH), South Georgia/Sandwich Islands (GS), Sao Tome and Principe (ST), Ascension Island (AC), US Minor Outlying Islands (UM), Mayotte (YT), Wallis and Futuna Islands (WF), Tokelau Islands (TK), Chad Republic (TD), Afghanistan (AF), Cocos Island (CC), Bouvet Island (BV), Liberia (LR), American Samoa (AS), Niue (NU), Equatorial New Guinea (GQ), Bhutan (BT), Pitcairn Island (PN), Palau (PW), DR of Congo (CD)
• Top 10 Domains by Host #: com, edu, net, jp, uk, de, us, au, ca, mil
• At AltaVista Andrei Broder and his colleagues are using CAPTCHA's to prevent bots from adding URLs to their search engine.
• Looking for a way to make their images resistant to OCR (Optical Character Recognition) attack, the team looks at the manual to their scanner, which had recommendations for improving OCR results (similar typefaces, plain backgrounds, etc.). The team created puzzles by attempting to simulate what the manual claimed would cause bad OCR.
• Hacks of the Year: Indonesian Govt (19 Jan, 10 Feb, 24 Apr, 30 Jun, 22 Nov), NASA (5 Mar), UK Conservative Party (27 Apr), Spice Girls (14 Nov)
• Technologies of the Year: Push, Multicasting
• Emerging Technologies: Push, Streaming Media

1998

• Hobbes' Internet Timeline is released as RFC 2235 & FYI 32
• US Depart of Commerce (DoC) releases the Green Paper outlining its plan to privatize DNS on 30 January. This is followed up by a White Paper on June 5
• La Fête de l'Internet, a country-wide Internet fest, is held in France 20-21 March
• Web size estimates range between 275 (Digital) and 320 (NEC) million pages for 1Q
• Companies flock to the Turkmenistan NIC in order to register their name under the .tm domain, the English abbreviation for trademark
• Internet users get to be judges in a performance by 12 world champion ice skaters on 27 March, marking the first time a television sport show's outcome is determined by its viewers.
• Network Solutions registers its 2 millionth domain on 4 May
• Electronic postal stamps become a reality, with the US Postal Service allowing stamps to be purchased and downloaded for printing from the Web.
• Canada kicks off CA*net 3, the first national optical internet
• Compaq pays US$3.3million for altavista.com
• CDA II and a ban on Net taxes are signed into US law (21 October)
• ABCNews.com accidentally posts test US election returns one day early (2 November)
• Indian ISP market is deregulated in November causing a rush for ISP operation licenses
• US DoC enters into an agreement with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Numbers (ICANN) to establish a process for transitioning DNS from US Government management to industry (25 November)
• San Francisco sites without off-city mirrors go offline as the city blacks out on 8 December
• Chinese government puts Lin Hai on trial for "inciting the overthrow of state power" for providing 30,000 email addresses to a US Internet magazine (December) [ He is later sentenced to two years in jail ]
• French Internet users give up their access on 13 December to boycott France Telecom's local phone charges (which are in addition to the ISP charge)
• Open source software comes of age
• Country domains registered: Nauru (NR), Comoros (KM)
• Bandwidth Generators: Winter Olympics (Feb), World Cup (Jun-Jul), Starr Report (11 Sep), Glenn space launch
• Top 10 Domains by Host #: com, net, edu, mil, jp, us, uk ,de, ca, au
• Hacks of the Year: US Dept of Commerce (20 Feb), New York Times (13 Sep), China Society for Human Rights Studies (26 Oct), UNICEF (7 Jan)
• Technologies of the Year: E-Commerce, E-Auctions, Portals
• Emerging Technologies: E-Trade, XML, Intrusion Detection

1999

• Internet access becomes available to the Saudi Arabian (.sa) public in January
• vBNS sets up an OC48 link between CalREN South and North using Juniper M40 routers
• First Internet Bank of Indiana, the first full-service bank available only on the Net, opens for business on 22 February
• IBM becomes the first Corporate partner to be approved for Internet2 access
• European Parliament proposes banning the caching of Web pages by ISPs
• The Internet Fiesta kicks off in March across Europe, building on the success of La Fête de l'Internet held in 1998
• US State Court rules that domain names are property that may be garnished
• MCI/Worldcom, the vBNS provider for NSF, begins upgrading the US backbone to 2.5GBps
• A forged Web page made to look like a Bloomberg financial news story raised shares of a small technology company by 31% on 7 April.
• ICANN announces the five testbed registrars for the competitive Shared Registry System on 21 April. They are AOL, CORE, France Telecom/Oléane, Melbourne IT, Register.com. 29 additional post-testbed registrars are also selected on 21 April, followed by 8 on 25 May, 15 on 6 July, and so on for a total of 98 by year's end. The testbed, originally scheduled to last until 24 June, is extended until 10 September, and then 30 November. The first registrar to come online is Register.com on 7 June
• First large-scale Cyberwar takes place simultaneously with the war in Serbia/Kosovo
• Abilene, the Internet2 network, reaches across the Atlantic and connects to NORDUnet and SURFnet
• The Web becomes the focal point of British politics as a list of MI6 agents is released on a UK Web site. Though forced to remove the list from the site, it was too late as the list had already been replicated across the Net. (15 May)
• Activists Net-wide target the world's financial centers on 18 June, timed to coincide with the G8 Summit. Little actual impact is reported.
• MCI/Worldcom launches vBNS+, a commercialized version of vBNS targeted at smaller educational and research institutions
• Somalia gets its first ISP - Olympic Computer (Sep)
• ISOC approves the formation of the Internet Societal Task Force (ISTF). Vint Cerf serves as first chair
• Free computers are all the rage (as long as you sign a long term contract for Net service)
• .ps is registered to Palestine (11 Oct)
• vBNS reaches 101 connections
• business.com is sold for US$7.5million (it was purchased in 1997 for US$150,000 (30 Nov)
• Top 10 TLDs by Host #: com, net, edu, jp, uk, mil, us, de, ca, au
• Hacks of the Year: Star Wars (8 Jan), .tp (Jan), USIA (23 Jan), E-Bay (13 Mar), US Senate (27 May), NSI (2 Jul), Paraguay Gov't (20 Jul), AntiOnline (5 Aug), Microsoft (26 Oct), UK Railtrack (31 Dec)
• Technologies of the Year: E-Trade, Online Banking, MP3
• Emerging Technologies: Net-Cell Phones, Thin Computing, Embedded Computing
• Viruses of the Year: Melissa (March), ExploreZip (June)

2000

• The US timekeeper (USNO) and a few other time services around the world report the new year as 19100 on 1 Jan
• A massive denial of service attack is launched against major web sites, including Yahoo, Amazon, and eBay in early February
• Web size estimates by NEC-RI and Inktomi surpass 1 billion indexable pages
• ICANN redelegates the .pn domain, returning it to the Pitcairn Island community (February)
• Various domain name hijackings took place in late May and early June, including internet.com, bali.com, and web.net
• A testbed allowing the registration of domain names in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean begins operation on 9 November. This testbed only allows the second-level domain to be non-English, still forcing use of .com, .net, .org. The Chinese government blocks internal registrations, stating that registrations in Chinese are its sovereignty right
• ICANN selects new TLDs: .aero, .biz, .coop, .info, .museum, .name, .pro (16 Nov)
• These domains will not be available until sometime in 2001 after contract negotiation and US Dept of Commerce approval
• Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas J. Hopper (all of Carnegie Mellon University), and John Langford (of IBM). develop and publicize the notion of a CAPTCHA:
• "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart"
• This includes any program that can distinguish humans from computers. This requires that the user type the letters of a distorted image, sometimes with the addition of an obscured sequence of letters or digits that appears on the screen. The first CAPTCHAs are widely used at Yahoo!.
• Hacks of the Year: RSA Security (Feb), Apache (May), Western Union (Sep), Microsoft (Oct)
• Technologies of the Year: ASP, Napster
• Emerging Technologies: Wireless devices, IPv6
• Viruses of the Year: Love Letter (May)
• Lawsuits of the Year: Napster, DeCSS

2002

• The number of Chinese Internet users has risen to 25.4 million from 8.9 in 1999. 
• August 1 The government of China appeares to be unsure about letting her citizens freely roam the Internet and shuts down those internet shops and cafes that had no official license. In September this year the authorities also closes down the non Chinese search engines. What was left accessible for the Chinese citizens was censored by cybercops. China also asked foreign web sites to refrain from contents that would be regarded as being subversive.
• A few days later Google is on line again. But then user's screens remained blank when requesting certain pages with political content.
• This is the first relatively successful time that a government tries to impose total control on the contents of the Internet for its citizens. In the past there have been (partial) attempts to do that by other governments but all failed. In the past the means, technology or infrastructure would not allow to have total control and only the big holes could be plugged to bar free access to the Internet. The government of China seemed to think differently. However this action certainly gave other governments some new ideas.
• In the latter months of this year the rules to use the Internet for Chinese citizens were tightened and more stringently imposed with all possible means.

2003

• The World Wide Web Consortium announced its formal policy for ensuring that key Web technologies, even if patented, are made available on a royalty-free basis.
• In a statement, the consortium said that the W3C Patent Policy is designed to reduce the threat that key components of Web infrastructure may be covered by patents which block further development.
• Spam is e-mail that is not wanted, is one of the shortest definitions.
• In this year Spam has become a serious nuisance and takes up more and more of the internet resources. So much so that universities are creating a new, and more important, faster internet to get rid of this: Internet 2. This network will not be open to the public.
• Up to 3 out of 10 emails of an average e-mail user is spam. For heavy users who have at least one reference to their e-mail address on one or more web sites receive 60-90% Spam in their mail box. Leaving one's true e-mail address on a newsgroup or forum assures you to even more Spam. Some times to almost 95-99% Spam, thus 1 out of 100 e-mails in your in-box is unsolicited e-mail.
• The industry fights back in setting up anti Spam sites which are using Spam filters, setting up black lists of spam senders, servers, or proxies. And so on. The Spam filtering techniques are getting better but the Spammers too. A war is waging on the e-mail front!

2004

• 250,000 computers infested by Mydoom (1 Feb. 2004)
• SCO took down its web site to prevent the attack from hurting its Internet service provider and slowing the Internet, Mr. Stowell said, rather than setting up an alternate web site. SCO Group is offering $US250,000 for information leading to the capture and conviction of the virus' author. Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft is also offering a $US 250,000 reward.
• Mydoom is spreading faster than last year's SoBig virus, which set up programs on infected computers in August to send mass mailings of unsolicited e-mail. A similar virus, the Blaster worm, targeted Microsoft's software-download site in August. That attack was averted when Microsoft took down the site. 
• Like MS explorer Google dominated the web in searching. The noun 'to Google' has become an accepted term.
• Over the years development of searchengines leaped ahead. As AltaVista seemed to be the most important one in the late nine-ties Google has now a comfortable hegemony on the market.
• Spam takes up more than 33% of e-mail traffic and this number is growing fast. Also rising is the general concern that spam will kill e-mail as it is used in this year: free to use without practical limitations.
• Yahoo starts operations in China under a different name: Yisou.
• A search engine made by a company called "3721 Network Software" from Hongkong that was bought in 2003 by Yahoo for USD 120 million. According to Yahoo this software is tailored to the needs of Chinese users by implementing the technology from 3721 Network Software. This is presumed to be a reaction to the announcement from Google to invest in Baidu.com which is the most popular Chinese language search engine in China at the moment.