Hobbes' Internet Timeline Copyright (c)1993-9 by Robert H Zakon. Permission is granted for use of this document in whole or in part for
non-commercial purposes as long as this Copyright notice and a link to this
document, at the archive listed at the end, is included. A copy of the material
the Timeline appears in is requested. For commercial uses, please contact the
author first. Links to this document are welcome after e-mailing the author
with the document URL where the link will appear.
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.
1836 -- Telegraph.
Cooke and Wheatstone patent it.
Revolutionised human (tele)communications.
Morse Code a series of dots
and dashes used to communicate between humans. This is not a million miles away
from how computers communicate via (binary 0/1) data today. Although it is much
slower!
1858-1866 --
The Atlantic cable of 1858
was established to carry instantaneous communications across the ocean for the
first time: it was a technical failure. It only remained in service a few days.
Subsequent cables laid in 1866 were
completely successful and compare to events like the moon landing of a century later. ... the
cable ... remained in use for almost 100 years. Transatlantic cable. Allowed direct instantaneous
communication across the atlantic.
Today, cables connect all continents and are still a main hub of
telecommunications.
1876 -- Telephone. Alexander Graham Bell Exhibits.
Telephones exchanges provide the
backbone of Internet connections today.
Modems provide Digital to Audio conversions to allow computers to connect over
the telephone network.
1950s
1950
Scientist Herb Grosch
(the author of Grosch’s law) postulated that the
entire world would operate on dumb terminals powered by about 15 large data
centers.[A]
1957
USSR launches Sputnik, first artificial earth satellite. In response, US (Eisenhower) 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:)
The organization united some of America's most
brilliant people, who developed the United States' first successful satellite
in 18 months. Several years later ARPA began to focus on computer networking
and communications technology.
1960s
1960
John McCarthy opined that “computation may
someday be organised as a public utility”[A]
1961
Leonard Kleinrock, MIT:
"Information Flow in Large Communication Nets" (July)
First paper on packet-switching (PS)
theory
Packet-switching (PS) networks developed; Why is
this relevant?
As we will
see later the Internet relies on packets to transfer data. The origin is military : for utmost security in transferring info of
networks (no single outage point). Data is split
into tiny packets that may take different routes to dest. Hard to eavesdrop on
messages.More than one route available -- if one route goes down another may be
followed. Networks can
withstand large scale destruction (Nuclear attack - This was the
time of the Cold War).
1962
J.C.R. Licklider & W.
Clark, MIT: "On-Line Man Computer Communication" (August)
Galactic Network concept encompassing distributed social
interactions
Dr. J.C.R. Licklider was chosen to head ARPA's
research in improving the military's use of computer technology. Licklider was a visionary who sought to make the
government's use of computers more interactive. To quickly expand technology, Licklider saw the need to move ARPA's contracts from the
private sector to universities and laid the foundations for what would become
the ARPANET.
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; Digital Equipment
Corporation (DEC) computer at ARPA later added to form "The
Experimental Network"
1966
Lawrence G. Roberts, MIT: "Towards a Cooperative
Network of Time-Shared Computers" (October)
First ARPANET plan
Douglas Parkhill’s
book, “The Challenge of the Computer Utility” explained all the modern-day characteristics
of cloud computing [A]
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 (Oct.)
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
It happened that the work at MIT
(1961-1967), at RAND (1962-1965), and at NPL (1964-1967) had all proceeded in
parallel without any of the researchers knowing about the other work.
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)
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.
First packets sent by Charley Kline at UCLA as he
tried logging into SRI. The first attempt resulted in the system crashing as
the letter G of LOGIN was entered. (October 20 or 29 - being verified)
Univ of Michigan, Michigan State and Wayne State Univ establish X.25-based Merit network for students,
faculty, alumni (:sw1:)
1969: The first LOGs: UCLA -- Stanford
The plan was unprecedented: Kleinrock,
a pioneering computer science professor at UCLA, and his small group of
graduate students hoped to log onto the Stanford computer and try to send it
some data. They would start by typing "login," and seeing if the
letters appeared on the far-off monitor.
We set
up a telephone connection between us and the guys at
SRI...," Kleinrock ... said in an interview: "We typed the L and
we asked on the phone,
"Do
you see the L?"
"Yes, we see the L," came the response.
"We typed the O, and we asked,
"Do you see the O."
"Yes, we see the O."
"Then we typed the G, and the system crashed"...
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
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 hosts (September)
Ray Tomlinson of BBN invents 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) (:amk:irh:)
1972
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 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
First international connections to the
ARPANET: University College of London (England) and 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) (:amk:)
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 (:vgc:)
Cerf and Kahn present basic Internet ideas at INWG in
Sept at Univ of Sussex, Brighton, UK (:vgc:)
Network Voice Protocol (NVP) specification
(RFC 741) and implementation enabling conference calls over ARPAnet. (:bb1:)
SRI (NIC) begins publishing ARPANET News in March; #
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)
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)
1975
Operational management of Internet transferred to DCA
(now DISA)
First ARPANET mailing list, MsgGroup, is
created by Steve Walker.
EinarStefferud 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
Elizabeth II, Queen of the United Kingdom sends out an
email in February 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 email
system over TELENET)
Meeting between U. 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).
USENET established using UUCP between Duke and UNC by
Tom Truscott, Jim Ellis, and Steve Bellovin. All
original groups were under net.* hierarchy.
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
emails the MsgGroup a suggestion of adding some
emotion back into the dry text medium of email, such as -) for indicating a
sentence was tongue-in-cheek. Though flamed by many at the time, emoticons became widely used
1980s
1980
ARPANET grinds to a complete halt on 27 October
because of an accidentally-propagated status-message virus
Started as a cooperative network at the City
University of New York, with the first connection to Yale
Original acronym stood for 'There' instead of
'Time' in reference to the free NJE protocols provided with the IBM
systems
Provides electronic mail and listserv servers to
distribute information, as well as file transfers
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 email) to university scientists with no
access to ARPANET.
Norway leaves network to become an Internet connection
via TCP/IP over SATNET; UCL follows suit
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 email and USENET services.
·original
connections between the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, and UK
Exterior Gateway Protocol (RFC 827)
specification. EGP is
used for gateways between networks.
1983
Name server developed at Univ
of Wisconsin, no longer requiring users to know the exact path to other systems
Cutover from NCP to TCP/IP (1 January)
***No more Honeywell or Pluribus IMPs; TIPs replaced
by TACs (terminal access controller)
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
Networking needs switch from having a single, large
time sharing computer connected to the Internet at each site, to instead
connecting entire local networks
JANET (Joint Academic
Network) established in the UK using the Coloured
Book protocols; previously SERCnet
Moderated newsgroups introduced on USENET (mod.*)
Canada begins a one-year effort to network its
universities. The NetNorth Network is connected to
BITNET in Ithaca from Toronto
Kremvax message
announcing USSR connectivity to USENET
In 1984 Berners-Lee returned to
CERN, and considered its problems of information presentation: physicists from
around the world needed to share data, and with no common machines and no
common presentation software.
He wrote a proposal in March 1989 for "a large hypertext
database with typed links", but it generated
little interest. His boss, Mike Sendall, encouraged
Berners-Lee to begin implementing his system on a newly acquiredNeXTworkstation.[4]
He considered several names, includingInformation
Mesh,[5]The Information Mine(turned down as it
abbreviates to TIM, the WWW's creator's name) orMine of Information(turned
down because it abbreviates to MOI which is "Me" in French), but
settled onWorld Wide Web.[6]
1985
Information Sciences Institute (ISI) at USC is given
responsibility for DNS root management by DCA, and SRI
for DNS NIC registrations
Symbolics.com is assigned on 15 March to become the first registered domain. Other firsts: cmu.edu,
purdue.edu, rice.edu, ucla.edu (April); css.gov (June); mitre.org, .uk (July)
100 years to the day of the last spike being driven on
the cross-Canada railroad, the last Canadian university is connected to NetNorth in a one year effort to have coast-to-coast
connectivity. (:kf1:)
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.
NSF-funded SDSCNET, JVNCNET, SURANET, and NYSERNET
operational (:sw1:)
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 December
1987
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
Email link established between Germany and China using
CSNET protocols, with the first message from China sent on 20 September.
2 November - Internet worm
burrows through the Net, affecting ~6,000 of the 60,000 hosts on Internet
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
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 JarkkoOikarinen
First Canadian regionals join NSFNET: ONet via Cornell, RISQ via Princeton, BCnet via Univ of
Washington
FidoNetgets connected to the Net,
enabling the exchange of email and news
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)
1989
Number of hosts breaks 100,000
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 U.
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
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)
1990s
1990
ARPANET ceases to exist
Archie released by Peter Deutsch, Alan Emtage,
and Bill Heelan at McGill
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
CA*net formed by 10 regional networks as national
Canadian backbone with direct connection to NSFNET
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)
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)
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 Minnessota
PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) released by Philip Zimmerman
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)
whichsignalled 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)
On August
6, 1991,[9]Berners-Lee posted a short summary of
the World Wide Web project on the alt.hypertext
newsgroup.[10]This date also marked the debut of the
Web as a publicly available service on the Internet.
"The WorldWideWeb
(WWW) project aims to allow all links to be made to any information anywhere.
[...] The WWW project was started to allow high energy
physicists to share data, news, and documentation. We are very interested in
spreading the web to other areas, and having gateway servers for other data.
Collaborators welcome!" —from Tim Berners-Lee's first message
1992
Internet Society (ISOC) is chartered (January)
IAB reconstituted as the Internet Architecture Board,
becomes part of 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 (:dk1:)
Veronica, a gopherspace
search tool, is released by Univ of Nevada
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)
Early websites intermingled links for both theHTTPweb protocol and
the then-popularGopher
protocol, which provided access to content throughhypertextmenus presented
as afile
systemrather than throughHTML
Theturning pointfor the World Wide Web was the
introduction[13]of theMosaicweb browser[14]in 1993, a graphical browser
developed by a team at theNational Center for
Supercomputing Applications(NCSA) at theUniversity of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign(UIUC),
led byMarc Andreessen.
Funding for Mosaic came from theHigh-Performance Computing and Communications Initiative, a funding program
initiated by then-SenatorAl Gore'sHigh Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991also known as theGore Bill.[15]
After
graduation from UIUC, Andreessen andJames H. Clark, former CEO ofSilicon Graphics, met and formedMosaic Communications
Corporationto
develop the Mosaic browser commercially. The company changed its name toNetscapein April 1994, and the browser was developed further asNetscape Navigator.
But it wasn't until
2008, whenGoogleandMicrosoftentered the playing field, that cloud
use really became a widespread effort to bring the technology mainstream.
