ComputerVitals - The Internet Turns 40 Sept, 2, 2009

INTERNET TURNS 40 Sept.2nd,2009

Here are some key milestones in the development of the internet.

Sept. 2 1969: On this date 2 computers at the university of California, Los Angeles exchange meaningless data in the first test of Arpanet. An experimental military network. The first connection between 2 sites. UCLA and Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, Calif. takes place on Oct. 29. The network crashes after the first two letters of the word "logon." UC Santa Barbara and University of Utah join later

1970: Arpanet gets first east coast node at Bolt, Beranek and Newman in Cambridge, Ma.

1972:Ray Tomlinson brings e-mail to the network choosing @ (the at symbol) as a way to specify e-mail addresses belonging to other systems.

1973: Arpanet gets first international nodes in England and Norway.

1974: Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn develop communications technique called TCP. allowing multiple networks to understand one another creating a true internet.
The concept later splits into TCP/IP before its formal adoption on Jan. 1 1983.

1983: Domain name system is proposed. The creations of suffixes such as ".com " - ".gov" and ".edu" comes a year later.

1988: One of the first internet worms, 'Morris' cripples thousands of computers.

1989: Quantum Computer Services. Now AOL, introduces America Online service for McIntosh and AppleII computers.

1990: Tim Bemers-Lee creates the World Wide Web while developing ways to control computers remotely at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

1993: Marc Andreessen and colleagues at University of Illinois create Mosaic. The first web browser to combine graphics and text on a single page. Opening the Web to the world with software that is easy to use.

1994: Andreessen and others on the Mosaic team form a company to develop the first Web browser. Netscape arousing the intrest of Microsoft Corp. and other developers who would tap the Web's commerce potential.
Two immigration lawyers introduce the world to SPAM, advertising their green card lottery services

1995: Amazon.com Inc. opens its virtual doors.

1996: Passage of U.S. law curbing pornography online. Although key provisions are later struck down as unconstitutional. One that remains protects online services from liability for their users conduct, allowing information and misinformation to thrive.

1998: Google Inc. forms out of a project that began in Stanford dorm rooms.
Us government delegates oversight of domain name policies to Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN.
Justice Dept and 20 states sue Microsoft, accusing the maker of the ubiquitous (being everywhere) Windows Operating System of abusing its market power to thwart competition from Netscape and others.

1999: Napster popularizes music file sharing and spawns successors that have permenantly changed the recording industry.
World Internet population surpasses 250 million.

2000: The dot-com boom of the 1990s becomes a bust as technology companies slide. Amazon.com.
Ebay and other sites are crippled in one of the first wide spread uses of the Denial Of Service attack. Which floods the site with so much bogus traffic that legitimate users cannot visit.

2004: Mark Zuckerberg starts Facebook while a sophmore at Harvard University.

2005: YouTube launches its video sharing site.

2007: Apple Inc. releases iPhone introducing millions more to wireless internet access.

2008: World Internet population surpasses 1.5 billion.
Chinas Internet population reaches 250 million surpassing the United States as the worlds largest.
Netscape's developers pull the plug on the pioneer browser though an offshoot, Firefox remains strong.
Major airlines intensify deployment of Internet service on flights.

2009: The Seattle Post Intelligencer becomes the first major daily newspaper to move entirely on line.
Google announces development of a free computer operating system designed for a user experience that primarily takes place on the web.

2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, and it will go on and on at a pace that one day the computer will surpass the functions of the human brain. Maybe to the point of surpassing even the mechanical abillities of the human body.

And to think there were once dinosaurs that roamed where we now are.