The Internet TimeLine
Before 1969 U.S.S.R. launches Sputnik, first artificial earth satellite. In response, U.S. 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. J.C.R. Licklider publishes his landmark paper, “Man Computer Symbiosis” Leonard Kleinrock, MIT: “Information Flow in Large Communication Nets”. First paper on packet switching theory.
  J.C.R. Licklider & W. Clark, MIT: “On-Line Man Computer Communication”. Galactic Networks concept encompassing distributed social interactions.

Paul Baran, RAND: “On Distributed Communications Networks” Packet-switching networks; no single outage point.

Licklider funds Engelbarts new “Augmentation Research Center” at Stanford. Paul Baran gets funding from U.S. Air Force to experiment with a block switching network to protect communications during an nuclear war. However, he withdrew his proposal when the project was shifted to military managers.

ARPA sponsors study on “cooperative network of time-sharing computers” TX-2 at MIT Lincoln Lab and Q-32 at System Development Corporation (Santa Monica, CA) are directly linked (without packet switches)

ACM Symposium on Operating Principles Plan presented for a packet-switching network First design paper on ARPANET published by Lawrence G. Roberts
National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in Middlesex, England develops NPL Data Network under D.W. Davies ARPA mails out 140 Requests for Proposals to prospective contractors to build the first four IMPs.

1969-1979

ARPAnet commissioned by DoD for research into networking. First nodes were UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UCSB, and University of Utah. Use of Interface Message Processors (IMP) [Honeywell 516 mini computer with 12k of memory] developed by Bolt Beranek and Newman, Inc. (BBN)

First node-to-node message sent between UCLA and SRI-which was also the first ARPAnet crash

First Request for Comments (RFC): "Host Software" by Steve Crocker, written overnight in a bathroom so he wouldn't wake-up anyone.

ALOHAnet developed by Norm Abramson.

ARPANET hosts start using Network Control Protocol(NCP)

15 nodes (23 hosts): UCLA, SRI, UCSB, Univ of Utah, BBN, MIT, RAND, SDC, Harvard, Lincoln Lab, Stanford, UIU(C), CWRU, CMU, NASA/Ames. International Conference on Computer Communications with demonstration of ARPANET between 40 machines and the Terminal Interface Processor (TIP) organized by Bob Khan. (October)

InterNetworking Working Group (INWG) created to address need for establishing agreed upon protocols. Chairman: Vinton Cerf.

Telnet specification

First international connections to the ARPANET: University College of London(England) and Royal Radar Establishment (Norway)

Bob Metcalfe's Harvard PhD Thesis outlines idea for Ethernet.

Bob Khan poses Internet problem, starts internetting research program at ARPA. Vinton Cerf sketches gateway architecture in March on back of envelope in hotel loby in San Francisco.

Cerf and Kahn present basic Internet ideas at INWG in September at Univ of Susssex, Brighton, UK.

File Transfer Protocol specification (RFC 454)

Network Voice Control (NVP) specification (RFC 741) and implementation enabling conference calls over ARPAnet.

Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn publish "A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication" which specified in detail the design of Transmission Control Program (TCP). [IEEE Trans Comm]

Larry Roberts founds Telenet, the first commercial packet-switched data service

Operational management of Internet transferred to DCA (now DISA) Elizabeth II, Queen of the United Kingdom sends out an e-mail

UUCP (Unix-to-Unix CoPy) developed at AT&T Bell Labs and distributed with UNIX one year later.

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 and TELENET for access to server).

Mail specification (RFC 733)

First demonstration of ARPANET/Packet Radio Net/SATNET operation of Internet protocols with BBN-supplied gateways in July

Meeting between Univ of Wisconsin, DARPA, 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.*hierachy.

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.

1980-1989

BITNET, the "Because It's Time Network" started as a cooperative network at the City University of New York, with the first connection to Yale. 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. CSNET later becomes known as the Computer and Science Network.

DCA and ARPA establish the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP), as the protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, for ARPANET. (:vgc:) This leads to one of the first definitions of an "internet" as a connected  set of networks, specifically those using TCP/IP internets. DoD declares TCP/IP suite to be standard for DoD (:vgc:) Name sever 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)

CSNET/ARPANET gateway put in place

ARPANET split into ARPANET and MILNET; the latter became integrated with the Defense Network created the previous year.

Desktop workstations come into being, many with Berkeley UNIX which includes IP networking software.

Berkeley releases 4.2BSD incorporating TCP/IP, with much of the programming done by Bill Joy

Domain Name System (DNS) introduced.

Number of hosts breaks 1,000

Moderated newsgroups introduced on USENET (mod.*)

George Orwell's prophesy of the universal loss of individual rights doesn't come true.

Whole Earth Electronic Link (WELL), operated by Stewart Brand on his houseboat, is open for calls.

On March 15th, Symbolics.com is assigned 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.

NSFNET created (backbone speed of 56kbps) NSF establishes 5 super-computing centers to provide high-computing power for all (JNVC@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

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

Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) designed to enhance Usenet news performance over TCP/IP.

Number of hosts breaks 10,000
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 as ANS.

UUNET is founded with Usenix funds to provide commercial UUCP and Usenet access. Originally an experiment by Rick Adams and Mike O'Dell

2 November-Internet worm burrows through the Net, affecting~6,000 of the 60,000 hosts on the 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 that the set of protocols to be supported by Government purchased products

NSFNET backbone upgraded to T1 (1.544Mbps)

CERFnet (California Education and Research Federation network) founded by Susan Estrada, named after Vint Cerf

Internet Relay Chat(IRC) developed by Jarkko Oikarinen

FidoNet gets connected to the Net, enabling the exchange of e- mail and news

Number of hosts breaks 100,000

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.

First Interop conference in San Jose, CA, created to promote the use of TCP/IP packet-switched networking

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)

1990-1998

ARPANET ceases to exit

Electronic Frontier Foundation(EEF) is founded by Mitch Kapor and Stewart Brand

Archie released by Peter Deutsch, Alan Emtage, and Bill Heelan at McGill

Hylelnet 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

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)

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

PGP(Pretty Good Privacy) released by Philip Zimmerman

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

Internet Society (ISOC) is chartered

Number of hosts breaks 1,000,000

Veronica, a gopherspace search tool, is released by Univ of Nevada

The term "Surfing the Internet" is coined by Jean Armour Polly

InterNIC created by NSF to provide specific Intenet services:
-directory and databases services(AT&T)
-registration services (Network Solutions Inc.)
-information services(General Atomics/CERFnet)

US National Information Infrastructure Act

Mosaic takes the Internet by storm; WWW proliferates at a 341,634% annual growth rate of service traffic.

Gopher's growth is 997%

ARPANET/Internet celebrates 25th anniversary

NSFNET traffic passes 10 trillion bytes/month

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

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 Services (v BNS) linking super-computing centers: NCAR, NCSA, SDSC, CTC, PSC

RealAudio, an audio streaming technology, lets the Net hear in near real-time

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

A number of net related companies go public, with Netscape leading the pack with the 3rd largest ever NASDA  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. NDF continues to pay for .edu registration, and on an interim basis for .gov

Internet phones catch the attention of US telecommunication companies who ask the US Congress to ban the technology (which has been around for years)

MCI upgrade 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 (g TLD): .firm,.store, .web, .arts, .rec, .info, .nom. The IAHC plan also calls for a competing group of domain registrars worldwide.

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.

2000th RFC: "Internet Official Protocol Standards"

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

Netscape releases the source code for its Netscape Navigator browser to the public domain.

Microsoft releases Windows 98. Months later the government orders Microsoft to change its Java virtual machine to pass Sun' s Java compatibility test.

Microsoft is taken to court for allegations of anti-trust violations.


This document's copyright belongs to PBS Online

Home


1