internet timeline

In 1969, Arpa built a computer network called Arpanet, which linked mainframes at universities, government agencies, and defense contractors around the country.

Bob Taylor convinced ARPA's Director Charles M. Herzfeld to fund a network project in February 1966, and Herzfeld transferred a million dollars from a ballistic missile defense program to Taylor's budget.

The first universal standard for computers, ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Exchange) is developed by a joint industry-government committee. ASCII permits machines from different to exchange data.

Global networking becomes a reality as the University College of London (England) and Royal Radar Establishmen (Norway) connect to ARPANET. The term Internet is born.

The first Internet Service Provider (ISP) is born with the introduction of a commercial version of ARPANET, known as Telenet.

Queen Elizabeth II hits the “send button” on her first email.

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.

Netscape Communications is born. Microsoft creates a Web browser for Windows 95.

- 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.

The first online dating site, Match.com, launches.

The Google search engine is born, changing the way users engage with the Internet.

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.

Facebook goes online and the era of social networking begins. Mozilla unveils the Mozilla Firefox browser.

YouTube.com launches. The social news site Reddit is also founded.

The blog publishing platform WordPress is launched.

Web sites 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

Twitter launches. The company's founder, Jack Dorsey, sends out the very first tweet: "just setting up my twttr."

The social media sites Pinterest and Instagram are launched.

Twitter and Facebook play a large role in the Middle East revolts.

Fifty-one percent of U.S. adults report that they bank online, according to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center.

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.

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.