| Year |
Event |
| 1960 |
AT&T introduced the dataphone and the first known MODEM. |
| 1961 |
Leonard Kleinrock published his first paper entitled "Information Flow in Large Communication Nets" was published on May 31, 1961. |
| 1962 |
Leonard Kleinrock released his paper talking about packetization. |
| 1962 |
Paul Baran suggested transmission of data using fixed size message blocks in 1962. |
| 1962 |
J.C.R. Licklider became the first Director of IPTO and gives his vision of a galactic network. |
| 1964 |
Baran published reports On Distributed Communications in 1964. |
| 1964 |
Leonard Kleinrock published his first book on packet nets entitled Communication Nets: Stochastic Message Flow and Design in 1964. |
| 1965 |
Lawrence G. Roberts with MIT performed the first long distant dial-up connection between a TX-2 computer in Massachusetts and Tom Marill with a Q-32 at SDC in California in 1965. |
| 1965 |
Donald Davies coined the word "Packet." |
| 1966 |
Lawrence G. Roberts and Tom Marill published a paper about their earlier success at connecting over dial-up in 1966. |
| 1966 |
Robert Taylor joined ARPA and brings Larry Roberts there to develop ARPANET in 1966. |
| 1967 |
Donald Davies created 1-node NPL packet net in 1967. |
| 1967 |
Wes Clark suggested the use of a minicomputer for network packet switch in 1967. |
| 1968 |
Doug Engelbart publicly demonstrated Hypertext on December 9, 1968. |
| 1968 |
The first NWG (Network Working Group) meeting was held in 1968. |
| 1968 |
Larry Roberts published ARPANET program plan on June 3, 1968. |
| 1968 |
First RFP for a network went out in 1968. |
| 1968 |
UCLA was selected to be the first node on the Internet as we know it today and served as the Network Msmnt Center in 1968. |
| 1969 |
Steve Crocker released RFC #1 on April 7, 1969, introducing the Host-to-Host and talking about the IMP software. |
| 1969 |
UCLA put out a press release introducing the public to the Internet on July 3, 1969. |
| 1969 |
On August 29, 1969, the first network switch and the first piece of network equipment (called "IMP," which was short for Interface Message Processor) was sent to UCLA. |
| 1969 |
On September 2, 1969, the first data moved from UCLA host to the IMP switch. |
| 1969 |
CompuServe, the first commercial online service, was established in 1969. |
| 1970 |
Steve Crocker and UCLA team released NCP in 1970. |
| 1971 |
Ray Tomlinson sent the first e-mail, the first messaging system to send messages across a network to other users in 1971. |
| 1972 |
First public demo of ARPANET in 1972. |
| 1972 |
Norm Abramson' Alohanet connected to ARPANET: packet radio nets in 1972. |
| 1973 |
Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn designed TCP during 1973 and later published it with the help of Yogen Dalal and Carl Sunshine in December 1974 in RFC 675. |
| 1973 |
ARPA deployed SATNET the first international connection in 1973. |
| 1973 |
Robert Metcalfe created the Ethernet at the Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). |
| 1973 |
The first VoIP call was made in 1973. |
| 1974 |
A commercial version of ARPANET, known as Telenet, was introduced and considered by many to be the first ISP (Internet service provider) in 1974. |
| 1978 |
TCP split into TCP/IP driven by Danny Cohen, David Reed, and John Shoch to support real-time traffic. The creation of TCP/IP also helps to create UDP in 1978. |
| 1978 |
John Shoch and Jon Hupp at Xerox PARC developed the first worm in 1978. |
| 1981 |
BITNET was founded in 1981. |
| 1983 |
ARPANET standardized TCP/IP in 1983. |
| 1983 |
The IAB (Internet Activities Board) was founded in 1983. |
| 1984 |
Paul Mockapetris and Jon Postel introduced DNS in 1984. |
| 1986 |
Eric Thomas developed the first Listserv in 1986. |
| 1986 |
NSFNET was created in 1986. |
| 1986 |
BITNET II was created in 1986. |
| 1988 |
First T1 backbone was added to ARPANET in 1988. |
| 1988 |
Bitnet and CSNET merged to create CREN in 1988. |
| 1989 |
On March 12, 1989, Tim Berners-Lee submitted a proposal for a distributed system at CERN, which would later become the WWW. |
| 1990 |
ARPANET replaced by NSFNET in 1990. |
| 1990 |
The first search engine Archie, written by Alan Emtage, Bill Heelan, and Mike Parker at McGill University in Montreal Canada was released on September 10, 1990. |
| 1991 |
Tim Berners-Lee introduced WWW, the first web page, and website to the public on August 6, 1991. |
| 1991 |
NSF opened the Internet to commercial use in 1991. |
| 1991 |
On December 1, 1991, the first web server outside of Europe came online. |
| 1992 |
Internet Society formed in 1992. |
| 1992 |
NSFNET upgraded to a T3 backbone in 1992. |
| 1993 |
On April 30, 1993, CERN released the Web source code and made it public domain. The effect had an immediate effect as the Web experiences massive growth. |
| 1993 |
The White House and the United Nations came online in 1993 and helped start the .gov and .org top-level domains. |
| 1993 |
The NCSA released the Mosaic browser in 1993. |
| 1994 |
Netscape (Mosaic Communications Corporation) was founded by Marc Andreessen and James H. Clark on April 4, 1994. |
| 1994 |
Mosaic Netscape 0.9, the first Netscape browser, was officially released on October 13, 1994. This browser also introduces the Internet to cookies. |
| 1994 |
WXYC (89.3 FM Chapel Hill, NC USA) became the first traditional radio station to announce broadcasting on the Internet on November 7, 1994. |
| 1994 |
Tim Berners-Lee established and heads the W3C in October 1994. |
| 1995 |
The dot-com boom started in 1995. |
| 1995 |
The SSL protocol was developed and introduced by Netscape in February 1995. |
| 1995 |
On April 1, 1995, the Opera browser was released. |
| 1995 |
The first VoIP software (Vocaltec) was released allowing end users to make voice calls over the Internet. |
| 1995 |
On August 16, 1995, Microsoft introduced and released Microsoft Internet Explorer. |
| 1995 |
On November 24, 1995, HTML 2.0 was introduced in RFC 1866. |
| 1995 |
On December 4, 1995, Sun Microsystems announced JavaScript and first released it in Netscape 2.0B3. In the same year, they also introduced Java. |
| 1996 |
Telecom Act deregulated data networks in 1996. |
| 1996 |
Now known as Adobe Flash, Macromedia Flash was introduced in 1996. |
| 1996 |
The first CSS specification, CSS 1, was published by the W3C in December 1996. |
| 1996 |
More e-mail was sent than postal mail in the USA in 1996. |
| 1996 |
CREN ended its support, and since then, the network has ceased to exist. |
| 1997 |
Internet2 consortium was established in 1997. |
| 1997 |
IEEE released 802.11 (Wi-Fi) standard in 1997. |
| 1998 |
Internet weblogs began to appear in 1998. |
| 1998 |
XML became a W3C recommendation on February 10, 1998. |
| 1999 |
Napster started sharing files in September 1999. |
| 1999 |
On December 1, 1999, the most expensive Internet domain name, business.com, was sold by Marc Ostrofsky for $7.5 million. The domain was later sold on July 26, 2007, to R.H. Donnelley for $345 million. |
| 2000 |
The dot-com bubble started to burst in 2000. |
| 2003 |
January 7, 2003, CREN's members decided to dissolve the organization. |
| 2003 |
On June 30, 2003, the Safari browser was released. |
| 2004 |
On November 9, 2004, Mozilla released the Mozilla Firefox browser. |
| 2008 |
AOL ended support for the Netscape Internet browser on March 1, 2008. |
| 2008 |
On December 11, 2008, Google released the Chrome browser. |
| 2009 |
A person under the fake name of Satoshi Nakamoto introduced the Internet currency Bitcoin on January 3, 2009. |
| 2014 |
The HTML5 programming language was recommended and released to the public on October 28, 2014, by W3C. |
