The journey of the internet as it turns 40

1969

On September 2, two computers at University of California, Los Angeles, exchange meaningless data in first test of Arpanet, an experimental military network. 1972 Ray Tomlinson brings email to the network, choosing @ as a way to specify email 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. 1983 Domain name system is proposed. Creation of suffixes such as '.com' , '.gov' and '.edu' comes a year later. 1988 One of the first internet worms, Morris, cripples thousands of computers. 1990 Tim Berners- Lee creates the World Wide Web while developing ways to control computers remotely. 1993 Marc Andreessen and colleagues at University of Illinois create Mosaic, the first web browser to combine graphics and text on a single page. 1994 Andreessen and others on the Mosaic team form a company to develop the first commercial web browser, Netscape. Two immigration lawyers introduce the world to spam, advertising their green card lottery services. 1998 Google 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. 1999 Napster popularizes music file-sharing and spawns successors that have permanently changed the recording industry. 2000 The dot-com boom of the 1990s becomes a bust as technology companies slide. 2004 Mark Zuckerberg starts Facebook at Harvard University. 2005 Launch of YouTube video-sharing site. 2007 Apple releases iPhone, introducing millions more to wireless internet access. 19