Thirty years ago the world as we know it changed. Simon Jeffery looks at the communication revolution that became the Internet
1958: Dwight D Eisenhower creates the Advanced Research Projects Agency (Arpa) to further American military science after the Soviet Union launches Sputnik.
1962: Arpa works on computer technology. Head scientist Dr JCR Licklider sees the potential of interactive computers and moves Arpa’s contracts from the private sector to universities.
1968: Licklider and associate Robert W Taylor argue that remote communication allows individuals to fulfil their intellectual potential in the April edition of Science and Technology. They say that the most creative member of a group will not be shouted down by the loudest if he is emperor of his own domain.
“There has to be some way of facilitating communicantion among people without bringing them together in one place,” they add.
The early networks
1969: A network is established between universties in Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and Stanford, near San Francisco. Professor Leonard Kleinrock in Los Angeles decides he will log on to the Stanford machine so the two computers can “talk”. The other two sites watch as an “L” appears on the screen, followed by an “O” and then a “G”. The system crashes. The Internet is born.
1972: Larry Roberts at Arpa decides the network (originally called the Arpanet) needs some encouragement and arranges a public demonstration of a machine in the basement of the Washington Hilton hotel running applications and e-mail in 23 sites across the United States.
1973: Trekkies go online. A weekly Star Trek text game becomes popular with graduate students on Friday nights.
1974: University College, London, becomes the first site in Britain online. A commercial e-mail network, Telenet, is established.
1976: Queen Elizabeth sends the first royal e-mail.
1977: The network has 100 hosts. (Today it has 60-million.)
1979: Graduate students at Duke University and the University of North Carolina in the US establish the first newsgroups.
1981: The network now has 213 hosts. In this period of rapid growth it adds another every 20 days.
1982: The term “Internet” is used for the first time.
The first boom
1984: William Gibson writes about “cyberspace” in his novel Neuromancer.
1985: Internet e-mail becomes part of life on US university campuses.
1988: An early virus, Internet Worm, disables 6 000 of the world’s 60 000 hosts as the digital community creates its first hackers.
1989: There are now 100 000 hosts.
1990: Now 300 000.
1992: Now one million.
World Wide Web
1993: Mosiac, the first graphics-based Web browser, becomes available and Internet traffic grows by 300 000%.
1994: Japan’s prime minister goes online, Marc Andreesen and Jim Clark form Netscape Communications Corp, the Rolling Stones broadcast their Voodoo Lounge tour on the Net and Pizza Hut sells the first pizza on the Web.
1995: Amazon.com is launched.
1996: 10-million hosts connect 40-million people.
1997: Internet use takes off in the United Kingdom. In the US Web journalist Matt Drudge publishes the first stories about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky that would lead the following year to the Starr Report.
1998: Internet companies drive a US stock market boom.
1999: 60-million hosts connect 200-milllion people.