Internet Timeline
| 1969: First node of the Internet connected at UCLA
on September 2 under the direction of Leonard Kleinrock. A month later a second node was
added at Stanford Research Institute and the first host-host message was launched form
UCLA. More on the first IMP (Interface Message Processor) 1970: Nodes are added to the ARPANET at the rate of one per month. The network Working Group (NWG) led by Steve Crocker finishes the initial ARPANET Host-to-Host protocol, called the Network Control Protocol (NCP). 1972: At BBN, Ray Tomlinson writes an ARPANET email program with the 'user@host' convention. 1974: DARPA funds three contracts, at Stanford,
BBN, and University College London, to develop and implement the Kahn-Cerf TCP protocol. |
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| 1977: Vint
Cerf and Bob Kahn mount a
major demonstration, 'internetting' among the Packet Radio net, SATNET, and the ARPANET. |
| 1979: Larry Landwever at
Wisconsin holds a meeting with six other universities that outlines a Computer Science
Research Network called CSNET. 1980: A revised proposal of CSNET includes three tiers; ARPANET, a TELENET-based system, and an e-mail only service called PhoneNet. The cost of a site is within the reach of the smallest universities, and the National Science Board approves the new plan. 1983: The ARPANET standardizes on the TCP/IP protocols. The Defense Communications Agency decides to split the network into a public 'ARPANET' and a classified 'MILNET.' 1984: The newly developed DNS is introduced across the Internet, with the now familiar domains of .gov, .mil, .edu, .org, .net, and .com. |
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| 1985: NSF announces the award of five supercomputing center contracts. By the
end of '85, the number of hosts on the Internet has reached 2000. 1986: The 56Kbps backbones
between the NSF centers leads to the creation of a number of regionals as feeder networks
that start to build a hub and spoke infrastructure. Between the beginning of 1986 and the
end of 1987 the number of networks grows from 2000 to nearly 30,000. ICP/IP is available
on workstations and PC's. Ethernet is becoming accepted for wiring inside buildings and
across campuses. |
| 1988: The upgrade of the
NSNET backbone to T1 is completed, and the Internet becomes more international. 1989: Bernes-Lee proposes 'Hypertext,' that will run across distributed systems on different operating systems - the seed of the World Wide Web! 1990: ARPANET formally shuts down. Several search tools, such as ARCHIE, Gopher, and WAIS start to appear. 1991: NSSF lifts all restrictions on commercial use of the net. The NSFNET backbone upgrades to T3. Total traffic exceeds 1 trillion bytes, or 10 billion packets per month. Over 100 countries are now connected with over 600,000 hosts and nearly 5,000 separate networks. 1992: The Internet Society (ISOC) is formed, with Cerf and Kahn among its founders. Students at NCSA modify Tim Berners-Lee's hypertext proposal. In a few weeks, MOSAIC is born on the Illinois campus. Larry Smarr shows it to Jim Clark who founds Netscape as a result. |
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