Nowadays, we can start an Internet company in the course of a couple of days, and grow it to a global community in the course of a couple of months. But we forget that we are all standing on the shoulders of giants. Here’s a quick recap of everything that’s happened until now.

1962: J.C.R. Licklider of MIT envisions a “Galactic Network,” a ‘globally interconnected set of computers through which everyone could quickly access data and programs from any site.’ Unsurprisingly, given his ability to see the future, he was appointed head of DARPA two months later.

1965: Lawrence G. Roberts and Thomas Merrill connect the TX-2 computer in Massachussetts with the Q-32 computer in California via a low-speed dial-up telephone line. The first wide-area computer network is born.

1969: The first host computer is connected to ARPANET, at UCLA, in September. An early Internet bubble ensues—albeit one that proves to be sustainable—with 300% growth in the number of host machines hooked into the network in the first three months of its existence (for a total of four hosts).

1972: Email is born.

Sometime in the late ’70s/early ’80s: William von Meister’s idea for selling music on demand is rejected by Warner Brothers. More than 20 years later, WB still doesn’t get it.

1983: The Domain Name System (DNS) is created.

1990: Tim Berners-Lee hooks up a NeXTcube as the world’s first web server. He also writes the first web browser.

1991: The Internet Society is formed under the leadership of Vint Cerf. That same year, Al Gore’s bill, the High Performance Computing and Communications Act, is passed.

1995: The Federal Networking Council passes a resolution defining the term ‘Internet’ as “the global information system that — (i) is logically linked together by a globally unique address space based on the Internet Protocol (IP) or its subsequent extensions/follow-ons; (ii) is able to support communications using the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) suite or its subsequent extensions/follow-ons, and/or other IP-compatible protocols; and (iii) provides, uses or makes accessible, either publicly or privately, high level services layered on the communications and related infrastructure described herein.”

2000: The first dot-com bubble bursts.

2006: VortexDNA releases the mywebDNA Firefox plug-in (had to get that in there!).

2007: There is no second dot-com bubble.

Thanks to the Internet Society Brief History of the Internet, as well as Wikipedia on DNS and WWW for the info in this piece!

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