Internet History

Reference Issue / Question CH001016 Who invented the Internet? Year Event 1961 Leonard Kleinrock publishes his first paper entitled "Information Flow in Large Communication Nets" is published May 31, 1961. 1962 Leonard Kleinrock releases his paper talking about packetization. 1962 Paul Baran suggests transmission of data using fixed size message blocks. 1962 J.C.R. Licklider becomes the first Director of IPTO and gives his vision of a galactic network. 1964 Baran publishes reports "On Distributed Communications." 1964 Leonard Kleinrock publishes his first book on packet nets entitled Communication Nets: Stochastic Message Flow and Design. 1965 Lawrence G. Roberts with MIT performs the first long distant dial-up connection between a TX-2 computer in Massachusetts and Tom Marill with a Q-32 at SDC in California. 1965 Donald Davies coins the word "Packet." 1966 Lawrence G. Roberts and Tom Marill publish a paper about their earlier success at connecting over dial-up. 1966 Robert Taylor joins ARPA and brings Larry Roberts there to develop ARPANET. 1967 Donald Davies creates 1-node NPL packet net. 1967 Wes Clark suggests use of a minicomputer for network packet switch. 1968 Doug Englebart publicly demonstrates Hypertext on December 9, 1968. 1968 The first Network Working Group (NWG) meeting is held. 1968 Larry Roberts publishes ARPANET program plan on June 3, 1968. 1968 First RFP for a network goes out. 1968 UCLA is selected to be the first node on the Internet as we know it today and serve as the Network Msmnt Center. 1969 Steve Crocker releases RFC #1 on April 7, 1979 introducing the Host-to-Host and talking about the IMP software. 1969 UCLA puts out a press release introducing the public to the Internet on July 3, 1969. 1969 On August 29, 1969 the first network switch and the first piece of network equipment (called "IMP", which is short for Interface Message Processor) is sent to UCLA. 1969 On September 2, 1969 the first data moves from UCLA host to the IMP switch. 1969 CompuServe, the first commercial online service, is established. 1970 Steve Crocker and UCLA team releases NCP. 1972 Ray Tomlinson introduces network e-mail, the first messaging system to send messages across a network to other users. 1972 First public demo of ARPANET. 1972 Norm Abramson' Alohanet connected to ARPANET: packet radio nets. 1973 Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn design TCP during 1973 and later publish it with the help of Yogen Dalal and Carl Sunshine in December of 1974 in RFC 675. 1973 ARPA deploys SATNET the first international connection. 1973 Robert Metcalfe creates the Ethernet at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). 1973 The first VoIP call is made. 1978 TCP splits into TCP/IP driven by Danny Cohen, David Reed, and John Shoch to support real-time traffic. This allows the creation of UDP. 1978 John Shoch and Jon Hupp at Xerox PARC develop the first worm. 1981 BITNET is founded. 1983 ARPANET standardizes TCP/IP. 1984 Paul Mockapetris and Jon Postel introduce DNS. 1986 Eric Thomas develops the first Listserv. 1986 NSFNET is created. 1986 BITNET II is created. 1988 First T-1 backbone is added to ARPANET. 1988 Bitnet and CSNET merge to create CREN. 1990 ARPANET replaced by NSFNET. 1990 The first search engine Archie, written by Alan Emtage, Bill Heelan, and Mike Parker at McGill University in Montreal Canada is released on September 10, 1990 1991 Tim Berners-Lee introduces WWW to the public on August 6, 1991. 1991 NSF opens the Internet to commercial use. 1992 Internet Society formed. 1992 NSFNET upgraded to T-3 backbone. 1993 The NCSA releases the Mosaic browser. 1995 The dot-com boom starts. 1995 The first VoIP software (Vocaltec) is released allowing end users to make voice calls over the Internet. 1996 Telecom Act deregulates data networks. 1996 More e-mail is sent than postal mail in USA. 1996 CREN ended its support and since then the network has cease to exist. 1997 Internet2 consortium is established. 1997 IEEE releases 802.11 (WiFi) standard. 1998 Internet weblogs begin to appear. 1999 Napster starts sharing files in September of 1999. 2000 The dot-com bubble starts to burst. 2003 January 7, 2003 CREN's members decided to dissolve the organization.