1957

• ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) founded within Dept of Defense to catch USSR science and technology

1962

• RAND Corporation begins research. How can US authorities communicate after a nuclear attack?

1969

• ARPANET commissioned by DoD to research networking
• 4 nodes created....UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UCSB, U of Utah.

1971

• ARPANET reaches 15 nodes
• First e-mail protocol

1972

• NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) creates telnet

1973

• ARPANET establishes first international connection (England and Norway)
• Ethernet perceived

1979

• USENET established
• First MUD

1982

• TCP/IP established by DCA and ARPA
• the term Internet is used for the first time

1983

• First name server developed at U of Wisconsin
• First desktop computers appear

1984

• now up to 1,000 hosts

1986

• NFSNET created (backbone speed of 56K)
• First Freenet (Cleveland)

1987

• NSF inks agreement with Merit Network, Inc. to manage NSFNET. Merit in turn works with IBM and MCI
• UUNET is founded
• Exceeds 10,000 hosts

1988

• NSFNET backbone upgraded to a T1
• IRC developed
  
  

1989

• Exceeds 100,000 hosts
  
  

1990

• ARPANET dissolved
• Archie released
• The World becomes the first commercial ISP
• First remotely operated machine hooked up to the Internet (a toaster)

1991

• WAIS released
• Gopher released
• WWW released by CERN (European Lab for Particle Physics [Swiss])
• PGP released
• SFNET backbone upgraded to a T3

1992

• Exceeds 1,000,000 hosts
• Veronica released
• World Bank goes online

1993

• First browsers become available...NetScape and Mosiac
• InterNIC created by NSF..AT&T handles directories and databases, NSI (Network Solutions, Inc.) handles registration, and General Atomics/CERFnet handles information services
• White House goes on-line
• WWW Worms and crawlers created
• Internet Talk Radio begins
• UN goes on-line
• WWW traffic at a 341,634% annual growth rate, Gopher is at 997%

1994

• US Congress provides information servers
• Cyber Malls arrive
• Arizona law firm invents spam. Net users flame back!
• WWW sneaks past telnet to become 2nd most popular service (FTP was #1)
• First cyberbank on-line

1995

• Java released
• NSFNET reverts back to research network. Main US backbone goes commercial
• Real Audio released
• WWW surpasses FTP traffic to become #1 protocol
• Compuserve, AOL, Prodigy connect to internet
• NetScape goes public with the third largest ever NASDAQ IPO share value
• Registration of domain names no longer free
• First successful Internet wire tap by the Secret Service and DEA

1996

• Internet phones catch the attention of US telecommunication companies who ask the US Congress to ban the technology.
• The controversial US Communications Decency Act becomes law in the US in order to prohibit distribution of indecent materials over the Net.
• Microsoft makes a strong bid for control of the Internet market place with MS Explorer (a web browser that is still available for free.)
• 9,272 organizations find themselves unlisted after the InterNIC drops their name service as a result of not having paid their domain name fee.

1997

• American OnLine (AOL) suffers as they are unable to handle the growing number of users.