Special: 40th birthday Internet- 20 Milestones in the net's Development

The first message was sent across Arpanet exactly 40 years ago, on 29 October 1969. We look at a few of the milestones in its development. 

The Difference Engine, built to Charles Babbage's specifications at London's Science Museum in 1991 Photo: WIKIMEDIA COMMONS - GENI

The birthday is one of many that could have been picked
– the name “internet” is only 35 years old, for instance, while the first
email was sent 45 years ago.


But Arpanet, the defence computer network that grew accidentally into the
all-encompassing, era-defining, economy-changing,
amusing-pictures-of-cats-facilitating behemoth that is today’s internet,
  seems as good a place to start as any. 
We know, incidentally, that we have overlooked something fairly major – the 
role of pornography in driving the internet’s growth. That isn’t out of
prudery, it’s just that we couldn’t find a suitable “defining moment”.

That probably indicates that it’s just been there, all the time, since the
beginning. Well, maybe not on the Difference Engine.


1. The Difference Engine, 1822
 
Charles Babbage, a splendidly eccentric 19th-century mathematician and
inventor, is generally credited with designing the first programmable
computer.

His Difference Engine was intended to carry out complicated equations
mechanically, avoiding the need for error-prone human “computers”. He
proposed the design in 1822, but despite significant funding from the
British Government, it was not completed until the London Science Museum
made one to his specifications in 1991.

His assistant, Lord Byron’s daughter Ada Lovelace, has been hailed as the
first programmer. A gifted mathematician, she wrote the algorithms that
would have been processed by the engine had it ever been made, and may have
seen uses for the computer that Babbage never did.


2. Vannevar Bush describes the Memex, 1945
 
In his essay As We May Think, the American engineer Vannevar Bush laid down
some of the principles that underpin the modern internet. It suggested a
large desk containing microfilm documents, which could be navigated through
via keystrokes, not unlike modern hypertext.

Bush thought of this as a library that mimicked the form of human thought –
using keywords to follow a chain of thought from document to document,
without reference to a central authority.

It has been argued that he predicted Wikipedia - "Wholly new forms of
encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails
running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified."


3. The first email, 1965




Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology seem to have been
among the first to communicate via computer.

Only users on the same mainframe could type messages to each other – messages
between computers were not developed for some years.


4. The word ‘hypertext’ is coined, 1965
 
Ted Nelson first used the word “hyper-text”, as seen in a contemporary
student newspaper report on a lecture he gave. He envisaged a
'docuverse' in which all documents were linked to other documents and
navigated via links.

Nothing would ever be deleted and copyright problems would disappear as
copying would be replaced by referrals. His attempt to build the docuverse,
called Xanadu, was an earlier version of the work done by Tim Berners-Lee at
Cern.


5. The On-Line System, 1968
 
Is this the moment computing started to take its modern form? Douglas
Engelbart's demonstration of computer communication included the first
mouse, the first multiple “windows” like today’s operating systems, and the
first practical use of hypertext.

It also allowed users in several places to edit the same document – an early
forerunner of the modern wiki system.

As a bonus, viewers on a giant screen in Menlo Park, California, were able to
see Engelbart’s work on a computer at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI)
in San Francisco – the first video conference.


6. First message sent over Arpanet, 1969
 
This is the event, 40 years ago, that we are somewhat arbitrarily calling the
Birth of the Internet.

Arpanet, a linked network of computers created by the Advanced Research
Projects Agency for the US Department of Defense, was one of the first
networks to use “packet switching”, a system that allowed several machines
to communicate over a single circuit, instead of having a dedicated link
between two computers.

At 10:30pm on 29 October, this was demonstrated by sending a message from UCLA
in Los Angeles to SRI in San Francisco. The message was meant to be “login”,
but a system crash after two letters meant that it was, in fact, “lo”. The
full five-letter message was successfully sent an hour or so later.


7. First email over Arpanet, 1971
 
There is some debate over this – it is suggested that in fact email was first
sent within a few weeks of Arpanet’s development in 1969. However, the first
message is widely credited to Ray Tomlinson.

Tomlinson’s was also the first message to use an @ symbol to distinguish
between the name of the user and the name of the machine.


8. The name Internet, 1974

By this time Arpanet was not the only packet-switching system – it was also
being used by the (British) Post Office, as well as commercial outfits like
Telenet, Datapac and Transpac.

The first suggestion that they could all be brought together into a single,
global network was made by Stanford University researchers Vinton Cerf,
Yogen Dalal and Carl Sunshine, in a December 1974 paper, which coined the
term “internet”.

It wasn’t until 1978 that the system, known in the UK as the International
Packet Switched Service, came into service.


9. World Wide Web, 1989

The web is, in fact, not the internet. This may come as a surprise to many
people. While the internet is the hardware, the computers and the phone
lines that link them, the web is the software.

The web was developed by Tim Berners-Lee, a
British scientist working at the Cern laboratories in Geneva. It allows the
network of documents, navigated via a browser, that we all know today.

The hypertext that had been hinted at by Vannevar Bush, named by Ted Nelson
and used primitively by Douglas Engelbart became, in the hands of Mr
Berners-Lee (now Sir Tim), the familiar highlighted words that users can
simply click on and navigate their way around the web with.


10. Mosaic, the first popular browser, 1993




Before Chrome, before Opera, before Firefox and Safari, before even the widely
loathed Internet Explorer 6, before – if you can believe it – the venerable
Netscape, there was Mosaic.

There had been earlier browsers – Berners-Lee’s own WorldWideWeb, for
instance, or Erwise, or ViolaWWW – but Mosaic is the one credited with
bringing the internet into the public sphere.

Mosaic 1.0 was released in April, with 2.0 following in December. However, its
dominance was brief – the first open-source, free-to-use browser, Netscape
Navigator, was released the following year, and it soon became the market
leader.

Netscape itself died after Microsoft started targeting the web, releasing
Internet Explorer v1.0 in 1995. It remains the dominant web browser, with 65
per cent of all usage, although that has dropped from a 2003 high of over 85
per cent.


11. DOOM, 1993




Not only one of the greatest and scariest
games ever made, DOOM was arguably the internet’s first killer app. id Software’s
bloody and brilliant (and hugely controversial) “first person shooter” was
released via shareware over the internet – meaning that the first seven of
the game’s 28 levels could be downloaded for free.

It is estimated that those seven levels were installed on more than 10 million
computers within two years. As well as being the first must-have game that
could be downloaded from the internet, it was a fantastic advert for what
networked gaming could be.

It could be played by up to four people via a local area network or a modem,
and introduced the term “deathmatch” into the language.


12. Electronic Telegraph, 1994
 



Without the slightest doubt, the single most important development in the
history of the internet.

Ahem.

The Telegraph went online in November 1994, described as the Electronic
Telegraph. At first it only carried the main stories from the
day’s paper, but as it has developed it has gone on to carry much more –
including picture galleries, online video, and, of course, comprehensive
lists about the history of the internet.


13. Amazon and eBay, 1995 and 1996



Nowadays, we buy things over the internet all the time, spending anything from
a few quid on the weekly groceries to thousands on a new car or computer.
But while it wasn’t unheard of before the launch of Amazon.com
in 1995, it was distinctly niche.

Amazon changed all that. Originally a bookshop, it has expanded to sell
computer games, videos, music, clothes, food, toys, furniture and more. eBay,
launched the following year, pioneered the peer-to-peer model of allowing
web users to buy and sell from each other.

Amazon in particular paved the way for the dotcom boom of the next few years;
its business model did not expect to show a profit for the first four to
five years, relying instead on investor backing. It was not until 2001 that
the company made money, but now turns over more than $19 billion (£11.5
billion) a year, with profits of $645 million (£390 million).

eBay’s first sale, incidentally, was of a broken laser pointer, for $14.83.
The buyer explained: "I'm a collector of broken laser pointers."


14. Wireless Application Protocol, 1997

The first, clunky, slow, borderline useless system for making the internet
available on mobile phones.

It might have taken half an hour to get cinema listings or football results
via its creaking servers, but it paved the way for the iPhone and the Google
Android. Now, with Wikipedia (item 17) available over our mobiles, we hardly
need to actually know anything any more – we can just look it up.

Unless we’re on the Tube, of course. Then we're on our own.


15. Google launched, 1998


There were search engines before Google,
which became necessary after the list of all available web servers became
impossibly long: Gopher, Veronica, the World Wide Web Wanderer, WebCrawler,
Magellan, Excite, Infoseek, Inktomi, Northern Light, AltaVista.

But Google, as well as being groundbreaking in how it searched and how it
ranked the results, was the first to enter the English language as a verb.
In the same way as one hoovers, rather than vacuums, or uses a biro instead
of a ballpoint pen, one tends to Google, rather than “run a web search”.


16. DotCom bubble bursts, 2000

The exciting new possibilities of web businesses began what was called the
“internet gold rush”. From around 1998, investors fell over each other to
throw money at any business with a .com at the end.

Unfortunately, not all of those .com suffixes followed a Google, Amazon or
eBay. Altogether too many followed a Boo or an eToys.

The bubble reached its peak in March 2000, and promptly burst. $5 trillion was
wiped off the value of technology firms in the following 18 months.


17. Wikipedia launched, 2001
 


According to its
Wikipedia page, “Wikipedia (WI-ki-PEE-dee-ə) is a free, web-based,
collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit
Wikimedia Foundation.

“Its name is a portmanteau of the words wiki (a technology for creating
collaborative websites, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning "quick")
and encyclopedia. Wikipedia's 13 million articles (three million in the
English Wikipedia) have been written collaboratively by volunteers around
the world, and almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with
access to the site.

“Launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, it is currently the largest
and most popular general reference work on the Internet.”

It has been accused of bias (the thinking behind its unintentionally hilarious
counterpart “Conservapedia”), dismissed for being too weighted towards pop
culture, and criticised for inaccuracy. It is famously vulnerable to
vandalism.

However, it was found by the journal Nature to “[come] close to Britannica in
terms of the accuracy of its science entries”, and has transformed the way
we find things out. Don’t know something? Look it up on Wikipedia. It might
not be 100 per cent reliable, but it is at your fingertips.


18. LOLcats, 2005




We could have picked any one of a thousand memes here – All Your Base Are
Belong To Us, if we were feeling nostalgic, or FAILblog.org
if we wanted to see people fall off things. But we’ve picked LOLcats.
The power of the internet to distract from work is breathtaking, whether via
Twitter, Facebook, or other (the author, for what it’s worth, frequently
wastes time at twitter.com/tomchivers).
For the last four years, one of its favourite sources for amusing
round-robin emails is pictures of cats in strange situations, with misspelt
captions in a san serif font. Naturally.


19. China’s number of internet users overtakes Americans, 2008

In December last year, stats suggested that the number of people who had
logged on to the internet that month had risen above
one billion for the first time, according to Comscore, a company
that tracks internet usage.

Pretty amazing – and in fact, that number might be even greater, as the survey
didn’t include the under-15s or people using public computers. Estimates
rise as high as 1.6 billion now.

But equally significantly, the number of those users who were Chinese overtook
the number who were American for the first time – 178 million to 163
million.

The news that internet addresses could be written in
non-Latin alphabets also points to a future where English is not
the automatic lingua franca of the web.


20. Cloud computing goes mainstream, 2009




The future of the internet and computing in
general?

The idea of dispersed storage of files has been around for a while – Hotmail
could store your documents way back in 2000 – but true cloud computing,
which takes the actual processing away from the grey box on your desk and
does it in a formless ‘cloud’ of web connections, is pretty new.

That said, a sort of mirror image of it has been going on for years. Seti@home
and Folding@home both use the computing power of millions of home processors
– in computers and game consoles, respectively – to power major computer
systems; Seti in the search for extraterrestrial life, Folding in medical
research.

But this is the other way around – there will be no home computers. Instead,
huge servers scattered around the web will carry out all the processing
functions. Your computer will essentially be a screen, a mouse and a
keyboard, plugged into the web. Software will not be bought, but paid for
  with your attention in the form of advertising.  

Source: telegraph.co.uk