History of the Internet

Foundation in which the global Internet was built by Dr. Van Houweling

Kilnam Chon, a Professor at Keio University in Japan, develops the first Internet connection in Asia, called SDN, and his pioneering work inspires others to promote the Internet’s regional growth.

Toru Takahashi helps bring the Internet to Japan and promotes it throughout Asia in the 1990s. He is key to the early commercial development of the Internet in the region

Mark Andreessen and Eric Bina create the Mosaic browser at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), which helps popularize the World Wide Web among the general public.

The advent of web publishing tools available to non-technical users spurs the rise of blogs.

Jimmy Wales launches Wikipedia. There are half a million Internet users.

Ermanno Pietrosemoli secures the world record for the longest WiFi connection at 382 km.

By 2010, there are over 450 million Chinese Internet users.

USSR launches Sputnik into space and, with it, global communications.

Bell Labs researchers invent the modem, which converts digital signals to electrical signals and back, enabling communication between computers.

The first universal standard for computers, ASCII is developed by a joint industry-government committee. ASCII permits machines from different manufacturers to exchange data.

Lawrence Roberts and Thomas Marill get an ARPA contract to create the first wide-area network connection via long distant dial-up between a TX-2 computer in Massachusetts and a Q-32 computer in California. The system confirms that packet switching offers the most promising model for communication between computers.

Robert Taylor initiates the ARPAnet project, the foundation for today’s Internet.

Danny Cohen develops the first real-time visual flight simulator on a general purpose computer and the first real-time radar simulator. His flight simulator work leads to the development of the Cohen-Sutherland computer graphics line clipping algorithms, created with Ivan Sutherland.

Robert Kahn demonstrates the ARPAnet to the public for the first time by connecting 20 different computers at the International Computer Communication Conference, and in doing so, imparts the importance of packet-switching technology.