Say the word “Internet” and even people who don’t use it know in general terms what it is. But where did it come from? How did it get started? What were some of the milestones along the way? Here’s a brief history of the Internet, easy on the techno-jargon and with some human-interest tidbits thrown in for seasoning.
In a real sense, the Internet owes its existence to a small metallic globe launched into space by Russia in 1957. Sputnik galvanized the American government into action, and in 1958 the Department of Defense created the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), later renamed the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), with the goal of reestablishing U.S. dominance in science and technology. The idea of connecting computers--which were still huge machines that took entire rooms to house--was set forth in the early 1960s, and in 1969 ARPANET came on line. It was the first “inter(connecting)net(work)” and consisted of four hosts, located at Stanford University, UCLA, UC Santa Barbara and the University of Utah. The server computers, called “Interface Message Processors”, were Honeywell DDP-516 models, with 32K of RAM and a hard disk drive the size of a refrigerator--literally.
The ARPANET grew slowly over the next several years. In 1970 a host was added on the East Coast; by 1971 there were 23 hosts. It was also in 1971 that the first email software was created. In 1972 the capabilities of ARPANET were demonstrated publicly at the International Conference on Computer Communications at the Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C. In 1973 the first international connections to ARPANET were established at University College of London, England and in Norway. Also in 1973, the idea of the Internet--a global computer network--was first put forth by Bob Kahn, and the basic gateway architecture was designed by Vinton Cerf on the back of an envelope in a San Francisco hotel lobby.
In 1974 the first commercial version of ARPANET, called Telenet, was created by Bolt, Beranek and Newman, the consulting firm which had been awarded the original contract to create the ARPANET network. In 1976 Queen Elizabeth II leads the way for future generations of women on the Internet by sending out an email on March 26 announcing that the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment in Malvern was active on ARPANET. In 1979, Usenet newsgroups were created by three graduate students at Duke University and the University of North Carolina. On April 12, 1979, the first use of emoticons in message groups was suggested. The idea was initially flamed mightily.
By 1980, ARPANET consisted of a whopping 213 hosts, with a new host being added approximately every 20 days. By 1982, the use of emoticons was beginning to gain wide acceptance in message groups and email. In 1983 Time Magazine named “the computer” as their “Man of the Year”, as personal computers begin to appear in homes across America. In 1984 the domain name system was created, giving us the original six domain extensions: .com (commercial), .edu (education), .gov (government), .mil (military), .org (organization), and .net (network). The first registered domain name was Symbolics.com on March 15, 1985. Also in 1985, the first electronic bulletin boards came online. By 1987, the number of ARPANET hosts had reached 10,000--an increase of nearly 4600% in seven years.
In 1988, the son of a computer security expert for the National Security Agency sent the first computer worm through ARPANET, affecting 10% of its hosts, now numbering 60,000. Also in 1988, Internet Relay Chat (IRC) was developed. In 1989, the number of hosts reached 100,000. Also in 1989, the “big three” commercial online services--CompuServe, Prodigy and AOL--began operating on a limited basis. It was also in 1989 that Elwood Edwards recorded, “Welcome”, “You've got mail”, “File's done”, and “Goodbye”, certainly some of the most frequently heard audio recordings of all time.
In 1990, ARPANET, the forerunner of today’s Internet, was formally decommissioned. By that time the worldwide network of computers had long since outgrown the original purpose of ARPANET, which was to help the United States beat the Russians in science and technology. The following year, 1991, marks the beginning of the “modern” Internet, as the World Wide Web was introduced and hyper text markup language, HTML, was created as a way to create and identify sites on the Web. Prior to this, most files on the Internet were stored and accessed on FTP sites.
In 1992, the number of host computers on the Internet reached 1,000,000. The term “surfing the Internet” was popularized by Jean Armour Polly, another female Internet trailblazer. In 1993, the White House went online, but of much more significance to the history of the Internet, the first graphical web browser was introduced, called Mosaic. The increase in web traffic that year was a staggering 341,634%. Needless to say, business and commerce began to take notice of the Internet, and in 1994 the first online shopping malls appeared. Also in 1994, the Arizona law firm of Canter & Siegel introduced netizens to spam as they flooded the Internet with email advertisements for green card lottery services. Then, as now, Internet dwellers reacted with disdain, but the genie was out of the bottle. It was also in 1994 that Jerry Yang and David Filo, two PhD students from Stanford University, founded “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle”, also known as Yahoo! In 1994 pizza lovers were first able to order pies from Pizza Hut online, and the first banner ads for Zima and AT&T appeared on Hotwired.com. Before the end of the year, Netscape 1.0 was introduced.
In 1995, Java and RealAudio were born. Also that year, CompuServe, Prodigy and America Online began mass-marketing dial-up Internet service. Internet Explorer 1.0 was released in August, followed by version 2.0 in November; Netscape was still the clear market leader. Amazon.com burst onto the scene in 1995, changing forever the way the world buys books (and a lot of other things). It was also in 1995 that a couple of guys in San Jose started an Internet venture called eBay, operating out of a living room; within five years one out of every ten packages being shipped by express delivery services contained merchandise that had been bought or sold on eBay. By the end of 1995, the number of hosts on the Internet had reached 14,000,000.
In 1996, an Indian native named Sabeer Bhatia, who had arrived in Los Angeles eight years earlier at the age of 19 with $250 in his pocket, started an Internet venture he called Hotmail with $300,000 of venture capital; he later sold the company to Microsoft for $400 million. In 1997, in an investment to put Hillary Clinton and Martha Stewart to shame, the domain name Business.com was sold for $150,000; the same domain name would be resold two years later for $7.5 million. On May 4, 1998, the number of registered domain names reached 2,000,000. Also in 1998, a little company called Google, Inc. opened for business in a garage in Menlo Park, California. By the end of 1998, the number of hosts on the Internet had eclipsed 40 million. By the end of 1999, the 30th anniversary of the Internet, the number of host computers had reached 70 million. In January 2003 the number of hosts on the Internet had risen to 172 million.
It’s amazing to look back and realize that the Internet as we know it has developed within the past dozen years. Within that span of time, email addresses and web sites have become as important in many of our lives as telephone numbers and street addresses, and home computers are now as common in many homes as television sets (in my home there are four of each). In my next article, I’ll be giving a brief history of the personal computer, and in future articles I’ll be tracing the development of the online medical transcription community.
Any personal stories of how you became involved in the Internet in general and the online MT world in particular are welcomed; please email them to me at jay@mtboard.com.