On October 29, 1969, the world was humbly changed forever.
At 10:30 PM, a student programmer at UCLA named Charley Kline sent the letter “l” and the letter “o” electronically more than 350 miles to a Stanford Research Institute computer in Menlo Park, California. The letters stood for “login,” and the effort led to a system crash immediately afterward. But a technological revolution had begun.
The computer scientists at BBN Technologies who created ARPANET, which eventually developed into the Internet we know today.
That first unassuming message was the first flicker of what we now know as the Internet, but was then called ARPANET. Like many expensive, revolutionary technologies, ARPANET was funded by the U.S. military. In particular, the U.S. Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency Network–hence the abbreviation to ARPANET.
The Cold War had the country in fear of a nuclear apocalypse, and the military needed a way to command and control their computers remotely in the case of an attack.
A working computer with ARPANET connectivity, circa 1970.
At the same time, the computer scientists who developed ARPANET had their own motivations. In 1969, being a computer scientist was time consuming; if they wanted computer access; they were required to schedule time on one of the few computers around the country. Scientists wanted to be able to access the information on a certain computer from where they were seated rather than travel large distances. Electronic messages were the answer.
A written record of the first message sent over ARPANET.
In just 45 years since that fateful first message, the Internet has changed the world irrevocably. Those born after the late 1980s have never even seen a world without a commercialized World Wide Web. The tail end of the millennial generation has only heard the dial-up sound used ironically. With the Internet settling into middle age, here are some of the early, staggering breakthroughs that brought us the Internet we know today.
1969: ARPANET is born
A map of the four connected computers when the first ARPANET message was sent.
Four university computers– at UCLA’s Network Measurement Center, Stanford Research Institute, University of California, Santa Barbara, and The University of Utah–are connected via nodes that allow electronic communication. UCLA sends off the first message, “lo,” to Standford on October 29.
1972: The first form of email is created
Ray Tomlinson creates email as an engineer at the tech firm Bolt, Beranek and Newman. He says he was inspired by colleagues who didn’t answer their phones. He also was the first person to use the @ sign to signal the name of senders and recipients. Unfortunately, Tomlinson doesn’t remember what the first email said, so there will never be an email equivalent of Alexander Graham Bell’s “Mr. Watson-come here-I want to see you.”
1974: ARPANET goes commercial
Telenet becomes the first commercial version of ARPANET. The term “Internet” was created as shorthand for internetworking the year before, and Telenet uses the term when it creates the first Internet Service Provider (ISP).
1983: Website addresses become much easier to remember
The Domain Name System (DNS) creates .edu, .gov, .com, .mil, .org, .net, and .int for naming websites. Before that, websites were identified with numbers (123.456.789.10 for example).
1989: Commercial dial-up is introduced
The World becomes the first commercial ISP. The World is still a website today, and it looks as old as it is.
1991: The first live webcam feed
The Trojan Room Coffee Pot, AKA the first live webcam. Image Source: Digital Archaeology
Webcams have since taken over the Internet for many different reasons, but the first webcam was pure utility. Dubbed the “Trojan Room Coffee Pot,” the video feed solely featured the coffee pot in University of Cambridge’s coffee room. The only goal was to prevent the university’s computer scientists from going to get coffee only to find out that the pot was empty.
1993: The Internet becomes browsable
Mosaic: the first widespread Internet browser. Image Source: Six Revisions
Mosaic becomes the first well-known web browser, opening up the technology to people unfamiliar with computer programming.
1998: Google begins world domination
The first beta version of Google, 1998.
In internet history, credit for the initial concept that developed into the World Wide Web is typically given to Leonard Kleinrock. In 1961, he wrote about ARPANET, the predecessor of the internet, in a paper entitled "Information Flow in Large Communication Nets."
According to the journal Management and Business Review (opens in new tab) (MBR), Kleinrock, along with other innovators such as J.C.R. Licklider, the first director of the Information Processing Technology Office (IPTO), provided the backbone for the ubiquitous stream of emails, media, Facebook postings and tweets that are now shared online every day.
The precursor to the internet was jumpstarted in the early days of the history of computers , in 1969 with the U.S. Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), according to the journal American Scientist (opens in new tab). ARPA-funded researchers developed many of the protocols used for internet communication today. This timeline offers a brief history of the internet’s evolution:
Internet timeline: 1960s
1965: Two computers at MIT Lincoln Lab communicate with one another using packet-switching technology.
1968: Beranek and Newman, Inc. (BBN) unveils the final version of the Interface Message Processor (IMP) specifications. BBN wins ARPANET contract.
1969: On Oct. 29, UCLA’s Network Measurement Center, Stanford Research Institute (SRI), University of California-Santa Barbara and University of Utah install nodes. The first message is "LO," which was an attempt by student Charles Kline to "LOGIN" to the SRI computer from the university. However, the message was unable to be completed because the SRI system crashed.
1970–1980
1972: BBN’s Ray Tomlinson introduces network email. The Internet Working Group (INWG) forms to address need for establishing standard protocols.
1973: Global networking becomes a reality as the University College of London (England) and Royal Radar Establishment (Norway) connect to ARPANET. The term internet is born.
1974: The first Internet Service Provider (ISP) is born with the introduction of a commercial version of ARPANET, known as Telenet.
1974: Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn (the duo said by many to be the Fathers of the Internet) publish "A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection," which details the design of TCP.
1976: Queen Elizabeth II hits the “send button” on her first email.
1979: USENET forms to host news and discussion groups.
1980–1990
1981: The National Science Foundation (NSF) provided a grant to establish the Computer Science Network (CSNET) to provide networking services to university computer scientists.
1982: Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP), as the protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, emerge as the protocol for ARPANET. This results in the fledgling definition of the internet as connected TCP/IP internets. TCP/IP remains the standard protocol for the internet.
1983: The Domain Name System (DNS) establishes the familiar .edu, .gov, .com, .mil, .org, .net, and .int system for naming websites. This is easier to remember than the previous designation for websites, such as 123.456.789.10.
1984: William Gibson, author of "Neuromancer," is the first to use the term "cyberspace."
1985: Symbolics.com, the website for Symbolics Computer Corp. in Massachusetts, becomes the first registered domain.
1986: The National Science Foundation’s NSFNET goes online to connected supercomputer centers at 56,000 bits per second — the speed of a typical dial-up computer modem. Over time the network speeds up and regional research and education networks, supported in part by NSF, are connected to the NSFNET backbone — effectively expanding the Internet throughout the United States. The NSFNET was essentially a network of networks that connected academic users along with the ARPANET.
1987: The number of hosts on the internet exceeds 20,000. Cisco ships its first router.
1989: World.std.com becomes the first commercial provider of dial-up access to the internet.
1990–2000
1990: Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, develops HyperText Markup Language (HTML). This technology continues to have a large impact on how we navigate and view the internet today.
1991: CERN introduces the World Wide Web to the public.
1992: The first audio and video are distributed over the internet. The phrase "surfing the internet" is popularized.
1993: The number of websites reaches 600 and the White House and United Nations go online. Marc Andreesen develops the Mosaic Web browser at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. The number of computers connected to NSFNET grows from 2,000 in 1985 to more than 2 million in 1993. The National Science Foundation leads an effort to outline a new internet architecture that would support the burgeoning commercial use of the network.
1994: Netscape Communications is born. Microsoft creates a Web browser for Windows 95.
1994: Yahoo! is created by Jerry Yang and David Filo, two electrical engineering graduate students at Stanford University. The site was originally called "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web." The company was later incorporated in March 1995.
1995: Compuserve, America Online and Prodigy begin to provide internet access. Amazon.com, Craigslist and eBay go live. The original NSFNET backbone is decommissioned as the internet’s transformation to a commercial enterprise is largely completed.
1995: The first online dating site, Match.com, launches.
1996: The browser war, primarily between the two major players Microsoft and Netscape, heats up. CNET buys tv.com for $15,000.
1996: A 3D animation dubbed "The Dancing Baby (opens in new tab)" becomes one of the first viral videos.
1997: Netflix is founded by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph as a company that sends users DVDs by mail.
1997: PC makers can remove or hide Microsoft’s internet software on new versions of Windows 95, thanks to a settlement with the Justice Department. Netscape announces that its browser will be free.
1998: The Google search engine is born, changing the way users engage with the internet.
1998: The Internet Protocol version 6 introduced, to allow for future growth of Internet Addresses. The current most widely used protocol is version 4. IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses allowing for 4.3 billion unique addresses; IPv6, with 128-bit addresses, will allow 3.4 x 1038 unique addresses, or 340 trillion trillion trillion.
1999: AOL buys Netscape. Peer-to-peer file sharing becomes a reality as Napster arrives on the Internet, much to the displeasure of the music industry.
2000–2010
2000: The dot-com bubble bursts. Websites such as Yahoo! and eBay are hit by a large-scale denial of service attack, highlighting the vulnerability of the Internet. AOL merges with Time Warner
2001: A federal judge shuts down Napster, ruling that it must find a way to stop users from sharing copyrighted material before it can go back online.
2003: The SQL Slammer worm spread worldwide in just 10 minutes. Myspace, Skype and the Safari Web browser debut.
2003: The blog publishing platform WordPress is launched.
2004: Facebook goes online and the era of social networking begins. Mozilla unveils the Mozilla Firefox browser.
2005: YouTube.com launches. The social news site Reddit is also founded.
2006: AOL changes its business model, offering most services for free and relying on advertising to generate revenue. The Internet Governance Forum meets for the first time.
2006: Twitter launches. The company's founder, Jack Dorsey, sends out the very first tweet: "just setting up my twttr."
2009: The internet marks its 40th anniversary.
2010–2020
2010: Facebook reaches 400 million active users.
2010: The social media sites Pinterest and Instagram are launched.
2011: Twitter and Facebook play a large role in the Middle East revolts.
2012: President Barack Obama's administration announces its opposition to major parts of the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act, which would have enacted broad new rules requiring internet service providers to police copyrighted content. The successful push to stop the bill, involving technology companies such as Google and nonprofit organizations including Wikipedia and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is considered a victory for sites such as YouTube that depend on user-generated content, as well as "fair use" on the internet.
2013: Edward Snowden, a former CIA employee and National Security Agency (NSA) contractor, reveals that the NSA had in place a monitoring program capable of tapping the communications of thousands of people, including U.S. citizens.
2013: Fifty-one percent of U.S. adults report that they bank online, according to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center.
2015: Instagram, the photo-sharing site, reaches 400 million users, outpacing Twitter, which would go on to reach 316 million users by the middle of the same year.
2016: Google unveils Google Assistant, a voice-activated personal assistant program, marking the entry of the internet giant into the "smart" computerized assistant marketplace. Google joins Amazon's Alexa, Siri from Apple, and Cortana from Microsoft.
2018: There is a significant rise in internet-enabled devices. An increase in the Internet of Things (IoT) sees around seven billion devices by the end of the year.
2019: Fifth–generation (5G) networks are launched, enabling speedier internet connection on some wireless devices.
2020–2022
2021: By January 2021, there are 4.66 billion people connected to the internet. This is more than half of the global population.
2022: Low–Earth orbit satellite internet is closer to reality. By early January 2022, SpaceX launches more than 1,900 Starlink satellites overall. The constellation is now providing broadband service in select areas around the world.
Additional resources
To find out more about the SpaceX satellite internet project, you can watch this video (opens in new tab) about the mission. Additionally, to read an interview with Leonard Kleinrock, visit the Communications of the ACM website (opens in new tab).