INDEX
- Chapter 1) In the Beginning and Wiring the Web
- Chapter 2) All About Email and Welcome to the Social
- Chapter 3) Online Media and Web Property
- Chapter 4) Web 1.0 and Web 2.0
- Chapter 5) Law and Order and Most Epic Fails
- Chapter 6) Notable Mentions
We take you through 50 defining moments of the internet.
Back in 1995, Time magazine published a cover story called "On A Screen Near You". It highlighted the results of an 18-month Carnegie Mellon University study (with the dated title "Marketing Pornography on the Information Superhighway") that looked at how much porn there was on the Net. And as demonstrated by the magazine's cover image of a shocked little boy in front of a computer, the internet was overrun with porn and perverts, and the kids weren't safe any more.
But it was the nature of the article itself that was interesting. It focused on bulletin board systems and newsgroups, dial-up modems, and terms like "Information Superhighway", "cyberporn", and "phone bill". Times have changed. But even in 1995, the internet — as opposed to the Web — had seen a couple of decades of development. And it's now had over a decade more. It's given us hundreds and hundreds of milestones; thousands of defining moments.
We decided to plough the history of the entire internet, from the roots of its underlying technology, to the Web properties that helped it explode, the litigation it endured on the way and disasters companies have suffered as a result of the Net's popularity. We've picked 50 of what we think are the most significant moments, in 10 categories spanning almost 40 years of internet history:
So, without further ado, we'll begin over the page with some of the earliest days of the internet as we know it, in 1974.
ARPANET, as it would become, was not in fact a Command and Control System that would survive a nuclear attack, but simply a military computer network for sharing data across long distances. It influenced the creation of the internet, and was initially instigated by a $1m funding by then-ARPA director Charlie Herzfeld, to then-IPTO director Bob Taylor, a Texan.
A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection was a paper published in 1974 by Vinton G Cerf and Robert E Kahn. It detailed what would eventually be called TCP/IP — the packet-switching technology that makes the entire internet possible. It's what gets your data from A to Z, even if most of the internet implodes, and is possibly the most significant development in Net history.
Described as "administrative entities", internet pioneer Dr Jon Postel introduces the top-level domains .com, .org, .gov, .edu and .mil in one of a series of documents called Request For Comments, which were papers published by the Internet Engineering Task Force. Postel also ran and managed the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, which was set up to coincide with the introduction of the domains.
After reading in a 1984 magazine article about an efficient lossless compression algorithm called LMZ, CompuServe developers released the GIF image, not knowing the algorithm had a patent pending. The Graphics Interchange Format became insanely popular for its efficiency, and years later transformed the Web into full colour. In 1986, Unisys successfully patented the LZW algorithm, but did nothing to stop CompuServe. A few years later, the two companies banded together and decreed developers must pay to use the format. Unhappy developers revolted.
British CERN employee Tim Berners-Lee saw that the European Organisation for Nuclear Research needed a more efficient way for scientists to share information, much like ARPA. And just like that, the World Wide Web began as a rudimentary experiment with hypertext. The final project proposal to CERN in 1990, entitled WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a HyperText Project, was Berners-Lee's way of saying, "Hello. I'd like to invent the Web."
In 1992, long before Firefox and Internet Explorer, there were a few browsers knocking about, including Erwise, Viola and Arena. But the first Web browser to really take off was called Mosaic. Developed by Marc Andreessen, a student at Illinois University, it ignited the explosive growth of the WWW and interest in websites and was eventually ported to the Macintosh OS by Aleks Totic, a Yugoslav. The 1.0 release was made available in April 1993.
After the success of Mosaic, Andreessen founded Netscape, in April 1994. It then released in beta the follow-up to Mosaic — a browser called Mozilla, later released as Netscape Navigator in December. But before that, in October, Andreesson set his company to work on making sure sensitive data transmitted over the Web was encrypted for security. The answer was SSL, or Secure Socket Layer, and it's still the industry standard in use today.
Half of the websites in existence use servers running Apache. It's completely free, open-source HTTP server software, responsible for dishing out Web pages, and succeeded the HTTP daemon developed by Rob McCool in the 70s. Apache fuelled an explosive growth of the Web, and up until around 2000, even Microsoft's Hotmail ran on Apache.
Macromedia Flash started out life around 1995 as pen-and-tablet computer drawing software SmartSketch, developed by FutureWave Software. Its name eventually changed to FutureSplash Animator and was then sold, in December 1996, as animation software to Macromedia, and became Macromedia Flash 1.0. Now owned by Adobe, Flash is installed on over 95 per cent of the world's PCs, mainly to let people waste time at work.
RSS feeds are based on the XML language and lets users subscribe to a website's content using an RSS feed reader. They first surfaced as the scriptingNews format, developed by Dave Winer in 1997. In 1999, Netscape developed RSS 0.90 — a similar XML-based format, but Netscape abandoned the development of the format around the turn of the Millennium. Not only did RSS lead to the accessibility of blogs, but podcasting is by definition reliant on RSS.
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