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Pascual, Athessza Angel Ashlyn

The program crashed almost the entire internet in less than 15 hours.

https://www.radware.com/security/ddos-knowledge-center/ddospedia/morris-worm/

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The Morris Worm was a self-replicating computer program (worm) written by Robert Tappan Morris, a student at Cornell University.

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Alaasdi, Fatima
https://blog.internode.on.net/2021/01/21/15-moments-that-shaped-the-internet/

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The internet turns 52 this year with no grey hairs in sight. Talk about ageing well!

It's given us half a century of delight and distraction with online shopping, instant communication, viral dance moves, memes, and more - forever changing the way we live, work, and play.

So, in celebration of the invisible information superhighway, we've picked out a list of its pivotal moments. Follow along on our nostalgic stroll through the internet's history and, in the comments below, let us know which events you think we've missed.
1936: H.G Wells predicts the 'World Brain'
Perhaps best known as the author of 'The War of the Worlds', futurist H.G Wells foresaw the advent of the internet in a 1936 collection of essays: " The time is close at hand when any student, in any part of the world, will be able to sit with his projector in his own study at his or her own convenience to examine any book, any document, in an exact replica."

And that wasn't the only prediction of Wells that came true - he also anticipated genetic engineering, lasers, and Meryl Streep as the next James Bond. Okay, maybe not that last one.
1969: ARPANET is switched on
In an event that is widely regarded as the web's 'first breath', Leonard Kleinrock and his team succeeded in sending the first computer to computer message from UCLA to Stanford on September 2, 1969. The intended message was the word "login" but only the first two letters made it through before the system crashed.
1971: Birth of the computer virus
Written by Bob Thomas of BBN Technologies, Creeper was a self-replicating program that copied itself to computers connected to the ARPANET to display the message: "I'm the creeper, catch me if you can!". It was eventually caught by Reaper - the first antivirus program.
1985: The first domain name
Symbolics.com was registered on March 15, 1985. Since then, over 359.8 million domain names have been registered - including Voice.com, which was sold for a record-breaking $30 million in 2019.
1991: The World Wide Web begins
Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist working at CERN, invents the "World Wide Web" as an easy way to share information. Though we often use the "Internet" and the "Web" interchangeably, they don't actually refer to the same thing. The Internet hosts the Web, which was Berners-Lee's breakthrough.
1990: Online searching gets easier
While many of us spent our days at university avoiding lectures and frequenting the pub, Alan Emtage developed a software called Archie, which was the world's first search engine. Clearly the guy you wish you had for your final group project.
1992: "Surfing The Internet" is invented
Jean Armour Polly coined the phrase in an article for the Wilson Library Bulletin, a monthly magazine for professional librarians. You can still read the original online here.
1994: First Online Order
A large pepperoni, mushroom, and extra cheese pizza from Pizza Hut is ordered online, becoming the first transaction on the Web. No word on how many have been ordered since (but we think it's at least 5).
2001: Wikipedia opens to the world
The beginning of the end for encyclopedia salesmen. Wikipedia launched with its first edit on January 15, 2001, and fast became the go-to source of information. By 2006, the site had published over 1 million articles.
2004: Facebook makes (a lot) of friends
Before it became a platform for your distant family members to comment on your profile picture, Facebook began as a way for college students to connect with people at the same school. It went live on February 4, 2004 and gained 1,000 registered users in its first night.
2007: Apple reinvents the phone
With 91% of internet use conducted through mobile, we couldn't have a greatest hits list without mentioning smartphones. The birth of the modern smartphone began in 2007 on a stage in California as Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone. It was a revolutionary design, swapping a stylus and keypad with a touchscreen.
2009: The Labor Government announces the NBN
The aim was to replace the nation's ageing copper network with optic fibre to give Australian's everywhere a fast, future-proof connection. Here at Internode, we're proud to offer a wide range of great-value NBN plans for all needs.
2014: The ALS ice bucket challenge
The ice bucket challenge was a phenomenon in the summer of 2014 in which people filmed themselves dumping a bucket of iced water over their heads in order to promote awareness for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). More than 17 million people posted photos online and over $100m was raised worldwide in a 30-day period. A great example of the internet as a force for good.
2019: 'Influencer' joins the dictionary
The internet has even changed the way we speak. 'Influencer' is a term used to describe individuals with a large following on social media. Other words in the dictionary that originated online include 'selfie', 'srsly', 'LOL', and 'OMG'.
Today:
As of November 2020, there were 4.66 billion active internet users worldwide - almost 59 percent of the global population. Ask any of them what life would be like without the net and the answer will likely be either 'unimaginable' or 'very, very boring'. We think both apply.

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Internode Blog " 15 moments that shaped the internet

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The internet turns 52 this year with no grey hairs in sight. Talk about ageing well! It's given us half a century of delight and distraction with online shopping, instant communication, viral dance moves, memes, and more - forever changing the way we live, work, and play.

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When Wi-Fi first became commercially available to consumers in 1997, it gave people a look at a world without pesky cables tethering them to their modems whenever they wanted to browse the web. Simply put, the technology allows digital devices to exchange data via radio waves, according to Scientific American, and it's now a standard feature on everything from tablets and phones to video game consoles and robot vacuums. Unsurprisingly, it was Apple that really catapulted Wi-Fi into the public consciousness by using it in their 1999 iBook laptops. (To get a sense of how big this tech was, just listen to the applause Steve Jobs got when he demonstrated wireless internet browsing to a crowd in 1999.)

source: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/652246/most-important-moments-internet-history

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The internet is a wonderful thing, isn't it? Believe it or not, it's been around in the form that we now take for granted since the mid-1980s, and more primitive versions existed for two decades before that. All of which is to say, its evolution, and its ups and downs, are full of some fascinating details, detours, and events. Check out this list of the 20 most important moments in internet history.

The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network ( ARPANET) was a precursor to the internet that allowed computers across the country to interact with each other and share information on a single network via telephone lines. It was funded by the U.S. Department of Defense early on, according to History, and was mainly intended for communication within government agencies and universities. On October 29, 1969, the first ARPANET message was sent from a computer at UCLA to one located at Stanford University-well, part of a message, anyway. The computer at UCLA managed to get an "L" and an "O" to Stanford before a bug crashed the network-in a more perfect world, the first message from ARPANET would have been "LOGIN." Though comparatively simple compared to today's tech, ARPANET served a purpose until 1990, when it was officially decommissioned.

On March 15, 1985, the first .com domain name was registered to a computer company out of Massachusetts named Symbolics. As Venture Beat points out, Symbolics.com planted its flag in the ground a year before HP and IBM and two years before Apple decided to take the .com plunge for themselves. Today, there are well over 150 million .coms registered online. Symbolics went out of business in 1993, but its historic domain has since been purchased and now acts as a quaint online museum dedicated to the history of the internet.

First proposed by British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 to find a better way for scientists to share data, the World Wide Web is a collection of web pages that are accessible through the network of computers called the internet ( World Wide Web and internet aren't interchangeable terms). To achieve it, Berners-Lee wrote three technologies-URL, HTML, and HTTP-that would help create a user-friendly interface for the internet that allowed it to enter everyday use within two or three years. In 1991, Berners-Lee published the first-ever webpage, which was basically just filled with instructions on how to actually use the World Wide Web. You can still view it here.

In 1991, when a group of researchers working in the computer lab at the University of Cambridge wanted a hands-off way to keep track of whether or not the community coffeepot was full, they rigged up a camera to monitor it for them. The rudimentary webcam-along with some programming wizardry-would take three live images of the pot every minute and send the 128x128 grayscale pics to a shared server that all the researchers could access from their computer network. By 1993, as the World Wide Web was beginning to connect the globe, the live coffee pot feed gained its own website, and by 1998, more than 2 million people had visited to see if the researchers were being properly caffeinated. When the live stream was shut down in 2001, it was featured on the front page of The Washington Post. As for the coffee pot itself, it was sold at auction that same year for £3350, or about $4700.

To get the country hooked on the internet for life, executives at AOL knew they first had to offer a taste to let people know what they were missing. That's exactly why the company printed untold millions of internet trial CDs starting in 1993, allowing people to go online for hundreds or thousands of hours, free of charge. It was an absolutely massive undertaking by the company-CDs were mailed to homes, included with purchases at Barnes & Noble and Best Buy, and even stuffed into cereal boxes. But despite many of these disks winding up as coasters, Frisbees, or landfill fodder, the campaign helped AOL turn into a $150 billion company with more than 25 million users within a decade.

Electrical engineering students Jerry Yang and David Filo created a human-edited web directory they initially dubbed "Jerry and David's guide to the World Wide Web" in January 1994. Two months later, they shrewdly renamed it "Yahoo," an abbreviation of "Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle," and a new way to browse the web was born. Yahoo's directory offered a hand-chosen list of sites for users to head to, broken down by categories like sports, art, news, and more. In the days when people were feeling their way around the web, Yahoo's personal touch was invaluable. Though Google firmly rules the roost now, back in 1998, Yahoo's sites were getting nearly 100 million hits per day as users decided which virtual destinations they wanted to head to next.

Billed as one of the world's first free web-based email providers back in 1996, Hotmail gave users an opportunity to access their inbox anywhere in the world. It wouldn't be long before Microsoft acquired the company in December 1997 for $400 million-and by 1999, the service registered more than 30 million active members. The brand itself was on borrowed time after the sale, though: By the early 2010s, Hotmail was rebranded as Outlook.com, which now boasts more than 400 million users.

When Wi-Fi first became commercially available to consumers in 1997, it gave people a look at a world without pesky cables tethering them to their modems whenever they wanted to browse the web. Simply put, the technology allows digital devices to exchange data via radio waves, according to Scientific American, and it's now a standard feature on everything from tablets and phones to video game consoles and robot vacuums. Unsurprisingly, it was Apple that really catapulted Wi-Fi into the public consciousness by using it in their 1999 iBook laptops. (To get a sense of how big this tech was, just listen to the applause Steve Jobs got when he demonstrated wireless internet browsing to a crowd in 1999.)

The music industry would never again be the same after Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker created Napster, the peer-to-peer internet software that allowed users to share digital audio files for free. Although the company was eventually done in by a plethora of lawsuits over copyright issues, millions of consumers flocked to the service, fundamentally changing the way people valued their favorite music. Physical record sales were forever impacted by the program, but Napster did offer an early blueprint for (legal) digital storefronts like iTunes and Google Music.

On January 15, 2001, Wikipedia began as a free online encyclopedia for people looking to research new topics, cram before a big test, or just settle a bar bet. But the very same open-platform nature that allows the information to be accessible for all also means people can add their own revisions and edits to pages, without the rigorous fact-checking you get from a traditional encyclopedia. While it's credited with helping democratize knowledge, getting a second source for all of that newfound trivia can't hurt, either.

On February 4, 2004, Facebook debuted as Thefacebook, an online directory created by Mark Zuckerberg strictly for Harvard students that became the most powerful social network in the world. Not only has it connected people across the globe and, more importantly, reunited high school friends who share a love for cat videos, but it precipitated an ongoing reckoning about the harmful effects of social media on individuals, politics, and societies around the globe.

Though other search engines beat it to market, Google has outlasted pretty much all of them, (sorry, Ask Jeeves) and has since morphed into an all-encompassing tech company that includes mapping technology, email systems, a music service, a streaming video game platform, and almost anything else you can imagine. And much of this success can be traced back to the company's decision to go public on August 19, 2004. Back then, The New York Times wrote that Google was valued at $27 billion-today, the conglomerate (now technically known as Alphabet, Inc.) has a market cap of more than $2 trillion.

If not for the Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake Super Bowl halftime show that culminated in an infamous wardrobe malfunction, we might not have YouTube today. In an interview with , company co-founder Jawed Karim revealed that this event is partly what spurred a group of ex-Paypal employees to create the video-streaming platform in 2005. Their goal was to allow people to capture and upload moments like that-we'd later call them "viral moments"-and spread them across the web for people to watch without needing a TV. The platform has attracted viewers by the billions in the years since, not just to watch existing content but to create and share their own, eventually prompting an entire generation to turn to their computers instead of other technologies for entertainment, news, and more.

It's hard to pinpoint the first viral video, but one possibility that gets thrown around is 2006's comedy sketch "Shoes" by Liam Kyle Sullivan, about a disappointed young woman and her search for footwear. Though it seems almost quaint in comparison to the stuff that gets sent around now, it racked up more than 68 million views on its official channel alone, offering the world a glimpse into the future of overnight viral sensations.

Uniquely engineered for engagement and use on the go (at least in comparison to Facebook and its predecessor, MySpace), Twitter would change the way we react to world events, both large and small, by enabling us to comment in real-time and eliminating our collective need to "think before we speak." It simultaneously elevated meme creation to an art form and created a platform to validate everyone's voice equally, from marginalized communities to hate groups. But before it went on to impact the globe, Twitter-originally known as Twttr-was just in the prototype stage in March 2006 when creator Jack Dorsey sent out the first published tweet, which read: "just setting up my twttr." A few months later, Twitter launched to the public.

In early 2007, Netflix started offering a small selection of TV shows and movies online for its users to stream straight from their devices, in addition to the DVDs-by-mail rental service that first put the company on the map. Today, Netflix is a full-fledged TV and movie studio with a $300 billion market cap that pumps out original dramas, blockbuster movies, and addictive documentaries that regularly earn critical acclaim and viral clout across social media. The company's success hasn't just changed the way we all consume content-it's altered the direction of studios like Warner Bros., Paramount, and Disney, leading to an influx of competing streaming platforms like HBO Max and Disney+.

Apple's release of the first iPhone on June 29, 2007, more or less transformed the way we engage with the internet-and everyone else-overnight. Its sleek portability and continuously expanding list of features made it possible to talk, work, shop, and do just about everything else with a swipe of the finger. The iPhone has continued to advance its capabilities with each new iteration, further making the internet something that dominates our moment-to-moment existence.

By 2010, the social media world had migrated from Friendster to MySpace to Twitter, so Instagram-a new image-based platform co-founded by former Google employee Kevin Systrom-felt like a reduction in services when it launched on October 6, 2010. But in its infancy, Instagram allowed people to share photos (mostly of food and cats) without all of the more detailed interactions of those other platforms, which is probably why it has become one of the most popular social media apps of all time, leading to its $1 billion sale to Facebook in 2012.

Over the course of two or three days in February 2015, everyone on social media, and then everyone on the planet, saw a photo of a dress that either looked black and blue or white and gold, based on some viral-friendly physiological phenomenon. According to The Guardian, the photo began its life as a simple social post about a dress that a woman in Lancashire, UK, was planning to wear to her daughter's wedding. Arguments about the color broke out on the wedding participants' private pages, and the photo soon found its way onto Buzzfeed's Tumblr page, where more than 25 million people viewed it within 24 hours. And it only got bigger from there. There actually is an explanation behind the color confusion that's too long to go into here, but the bottom line is that half of the world thought that dress was white and gold, and those people were wrong.

Building on the premise of the long-running animated series, gaming company Niantic created using augmented reality that placed the iconic Pokémon into the real world (viewed through a smartphone) for players to capture as they went about their daily business. Faster than you can say "Pac Man fever," this became everyone's obsession, whether they were taking the dog for a walk or coming home from work. Within a month of its July 6, 2016, release, the app had been downloaded 100 million times, on its way to grossing around $950 million in revenue by year's end. It also became a shared experience, with fans taking to social media to share Pokémon gym locations and organize meet-ups for in-game events (though there are some places you definitely shouldn't play it).

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20 of the Most Important Moments in Internet History

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From its first steps out of the primordial sludge of the ARPANET days to its current role as a vessel for cat videos and Netflix, we're taking a look at just some of the most important moments in internet history.

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The invention of youtube (February 14, 2005), but was officially launched on December 15, 2005.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/YouTube

-Kaira Salcedo

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YouTube, social media platform and website for sharing videos. It was registered on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim, three former employees of the American e-commerce company PayPal. They had the idea that ordinary people would enjoy sharing their "home videos." The company is headquartered in San Bruno, California.

Shortly after the site opened on a limited ("beta") basis in May 2005, it was attracting some 30,000 visitors per day. By the time YouTube was officially launched on December 15, 2005, it was serving more than two million video views each day. By January 2006 that number had increased to more than 25 million views. The number of videos available at the site surpassed 25 million in March 2006, with more than 20,000 new videos uploaded on a daily basis. By the summer of 2006, YouTube was serving more than 100 million videos per day, and the number of videos being uploaded to the site showed no sign of slowing down.

The immense growth in traffic at YouTube created its own set of problems. The company continually had to purchase more computer equipment and more broadband connections to the Internet. In addition, YouTube was forced to allocate more financial resources for potential litigation, as many media companies discovered that some of the videos uploaded to YouTube contained copyrighted material. With limited success in commercializing its Web site or containing its growing costs, YouTube began looking for a buyer.

In 2005 the American search engine company Google Inc. had launched a video service, Google Video, but it failed to generate much traffic, and Google was prompted to purchase YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock in November 2006. Rather than merging the Web sites, however, Google continued YouTube's operation as before. To reduce the risk of copyright-infringement lawsuits, Google negotiated deals with a number of entertainment companies that would allow copyrighted video material to appear on YouTube and would give YouTube users the right to include certain copyrighted songs in their videos. It also agreed to remove tens of thousands of copyrighted video files from YouTube. In November 2008 Google reached an agreement with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Inc. (MGM), to show some of the studio's full-length movies and television shows, the broadcasts being free to watch, with advertisements running alongside the programs.

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YouTube, Web site for sharing videos. It was registered on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim, three former employees of the American e-commerce company PayPal. They had the idea that ordinary people would enjoy sharing their 'home videos.'

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The world's first spam mail was sent in May 1978 by Gary Thuerk, who sent a message to hundreds of ARPA users. "I thought of it as e-marketing," Thuerk has said of his mass unsolicited email promoting a new product rollout.

- Ayra Salapuddin

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The 50 Greatest Moments in Internet History

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From llamas on the loose to the colors of a dress that nobody could agree on, here are the most memorable moments since the inception of the Internet.

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The World Wide Web begins

Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist working at CERN, invents the “World Wide Web” as an easy way to share information. Though we often use the “Internet” and the “Web” interchangeably, they don’t actually refer to the same thing. The Internet hosts the Web, which was Berners-Lee’s breakthrough.

source: https://blog.internode.on.net/2021/01/21/15-moments-that-shaped-the-internet/

- Summer Soon

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The internet turns 52 this year with no grey hairs in sight. Talk about ageing well!

It's given us half a century of delight and distraction with online shopping, instant communication, viral dance moves, memes, and more - forever changing the way we live, work, and play.

So, in celebration of the invisible information superhighway, we've picked out a list of its pivotal moments. Follow along on our nostalgic stroll through the internet's history and, in the comments below, let us know which events you think we've missed.
1936: H.G Wells predicts the 'World Brain'
Perhaps best known as the author of 'The War of the Worlds', futurist H.G Wells foresaw the advent of the internet in a 1936 collection of essays: " The time is close at hand when any student, in any part of the world, will be able to sit with his projector in his own study at his or her own convenience to examine any book, any document, in an exact replica."

And that wasn't the only prediction of Wells that came true - he also anticipated genetic engineering, lasers, and Meryl Streep as the next James Bond. Okay, maybe not that last one.
1969: ARPANET is switched on
In an event that is widely regarded as the web's 'first breath', Leonard Kleinrock and his team succeeded in sending the first computer to computer message from UCLA to Stanford on September 2, 1969. The intended message was the word "login" but only the first two letters made it through before the system crashed.
1971: Birth of the computer virus
Written by Bob Thomas of BBN Technologies, Creeper was a self-replicating program that copied itself to computers connected to the ARPANET to display the message: "I'm the creeper, catch me if you can!". It was eventually caught by Reaper - the first antivirus program.
1985: The first domain name
Symbolics.com was registered on March 15, 1985. Since then, over 359.8 million domain names have been registered - including Voice.com, which was sold for a record-breaking $30 million in 2019.
1991: The World Wide Web begins
Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist working at CERN, invents the "World Wide Web" as an easy way to share information. Though we often use the "Internet" and the "Web" interchangeably, they don't actually refer to the same thing. The Internet hosts the Web, which was Berners-Lee's breakthrough.
1990: Online searching gets easier
While many of us spent our days at university avoiding lectures and frequenting the pub, Alan Emtage developed a software called Archie, which was the world's first search engine. Clearly the guy you wish you had for your final group project.
1992: "Surfing The Internet" is invented
Jean Armour Polly coined the phrase in an article for the Wilson Library Bulletin, a monthly magazine for professional librarians. You can still read the original online here.
1994: First Online Order
A large pepperoni, mushroom, and extra cheese pizza from Pizza Hut is ordered online, becoming the first transaction on the Web. No word on how many have been ordered since (but we think it's at least 5).
2001: Wikipedia opens to the world
The beginning of the end for encyclopedia salesmen. Wikipedia launched with its first edit on January 15, 2001, and fast became the go-to source of information. By 2006, the site had published over 1 million articles.
2004: Facebook makes (a lot) of friends
Before it became a platform for your distant family members to comment on your profile picture, Facebook began as a way for college students to connect with people at the same school. It went live on February 4, 2004 and gained 1,000 registered users in its first night.
2007: Apple reinvents the phone
With 91% of internet use conducted through mobile, we couldn't have a greatest hits list without mentioning smartphones. The birth of the modern smartphone began in 2007 on a stage in California as Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone. It was a revolutionary design, swapping a stylus and keypad with a touchscreen.
2009: The Labor Government announces the NBN
The aim was to replace the nation's ageing copper network with optic fibre to give Australian's everywhere a fast, future-proof connection. Here at Internode, we're proud to offer a wide range of great-value NBN plans for all needs.
2014: The ALS ice bucket challenge
The ice bucket challenge was a phenomenon in the summer of 2014 in which people filmed themselves dumping a bucket of iced water over their heads in order to promote awareness for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). More than 17 million people posted photos online and over $100m was raised worldwide in a 30-day period. A great example of the internet as a force for good.
2019: 'Influencer' joins the dictionary
The internet has even changed the way we speak. 'Influencer' is a term used to describe individuals with a large following on social media. Other words in the dictionary that originated online include 'selfie', 'srsly', 'LOL', and 'OMG'.
Today:
As of November 2020, there were 4.66 billion active internet users worldwide - almost 59 percent of the global population. Ask any of them what life would be like without the net and the answer will likely be either 'unimaginable' or 'very, very boring'. We think both apply.

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Internode Blog " 15 moments that shaped the internet

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The internet turns 52 this year with no grey hairs in sight. Talk about ageing well! It's given us half a century of delight and distraction with online shopping, instant communication, viral dance moves, memes, and more - forever changing the way we live, work, and play.

# data[].attributes.body
Link: https://blog.internode.on.net/2021/01/21/15-moments-that-shaped-the-internet/

In an event that is widely regarded as the web’s ‘first breath’, Leonard Kleinrock and his team succeeded in sending the first computer to computer message from UCLA to Stanford on September 2, 1969. The intended message was the word “login” but only the first two letters made it through before the system crashed

- Anandpreet Kaur

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The internet turns 52 this year with no grey hairs in sight. Talk about ageing well!

It's given us half a century of delight and distraction with online shopping, instant communication, viral dance moves, memes, and more - forever changing the way we live, work, and play.

So, in celebration of the invisible information superhighway, we've picked out a list of its pivotal moments. Follow along on our nostalgic stroll through the internet's history and, in the comments below, let us know which events you think we've missed.
1936: H.G Wells predicts the 'World Brain'
Perhaps best known as the author of 'The War of the Worlds', futurist H.G Wells foresaw the advent of the internet in a 1936 collection of essays: " The time is close at hand when any student, in any part of the world, will be able to sit with his projector in his own study at his or her own convenience to examine any book, any document, in an exact replica."

And that wasn't the only prediction of Wells that came true - he also anticipated genetic engineering, lasers, and Meryl Streep as the next James Bond. Okay, maybe not that last one.
1969: ARPANET is switched on
In an event that is widely regarded as the web's 'first breath', Leonard Kleinrock and his team succeeded in sending the first computer to computer message from UCLA to Stanford on September 2, 1969. The intended message was the word "login" but only the first two letters made it through before the system crashed.
1971: Birth of the computer virus
Written by Bob Thomas of BBN Technologies, Creeper was a self-replicating program that copied itself to computers connected to the ARPANET to display the message: "I'm the creeper, catch me if you can!". It was eventually caught by Reaper - the first antivirus program.
1985: The first domain name
Symbolics.com was registered on March 15, 1985. Since then, over 359.8 million domain names have been registered - including Voice.com, which was sold for a record-breaking $30 million in 2019.
1991: The World Wide Web begins
Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist working at CERN, invents the "World Wide Web" as an easy way to share information. Though we often use the "Internet" and the "Web" interchangeably, they don't actually refer to the same thing. The Internet hosts the Web, which was Berners-Lee's breakthrough.
1990: Online searching gets easier
While many of us spent our days at university avoiding lectures and frequenting the pub, Alan Emtage developed a software called Archie, which was the world's first search engine. Clearly the guy you wish you had for your final group project.
1992: "Surfing The Internet" is invented
Jean Armour Polly coined the phrase in an article for the Wilson Library Bulletin, a monthly magazine for professional librarians. You can still read the original online here.
1994: First Online Order
A large pepperoni, mushroom, and extra cheese pizza from Pizza Hut is ordered online, becoming the first transaction on the Web. No word on how many have been ordered since (but we think it's at least 5).
2001: Wikipedia opens to the world
The beginning of the end for encyclopedia salesmen. Wikipedia launched with its first edit on January 15, 2001, and fast became the go-to source of information. By 2006, the site had published over 1 million articles.
2004: Facebook makes (a lot) of friends
Before it became a platform for your distant family members to comment on your profile picture, Facebook began as a way for college students to connect with people at the same school. It went live on February 4, 2004 and gained 1,000 registered users in its first night.
2007: Apple reinvents the phone
With 91% of internet use conducted through mobile, we couldn't have a greatest hits list without mentioning smartphones. The birth of the modern smartphone began in 2007 on a stage in California as Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone. It was a revolutionary design, swapping a stylus and keypad with a touchscreen.
2009: The Labor Government announces the NBN
The aim was to replace the nation's ageing copper network with optic fibre to give Australian's everywhere a fast, future-proof connection. Here at Internode, we're proud to offer a wide range of great-value NBN plans for all needs.
2014: The ALS ice bucket challenge
The ice bucket challenge was a phenomenon in the summer of 2014 in which people filmed themselves dumping a bucket of iced water over their heads in order to promote awareness for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). More than 17 million people posted photos online and over $100m was raised worldwide in a 30-day period. A great example of the internet as a force for good.
2019: 'Influencer' joins the dictionary
The internet has even changed the way we speak. 'Influencer' is a term used to describe individuals with a large following on social media. Other words in the dictionary that originated online include 'selfie', 'srsly', 'LOL', and 'OMG'.
Today:
As of November 2020, there were 4.66 billion active internet users worldwide - almost 59 percent of the global population. Ask any of them what life would be like without the net and the answer will likely be either 'unimaginable' or 'very, very boring'. We think both apply.

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Internode Blog " 15 moments that shaped the internet

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The internet turns 52 this year with no grey hairs in sight. Talk about ageing well! It's given us half a century of delight and distraction with online shopping, instant communication, viral dance moves, memes, and more - forever changing the way we live, work, and play.

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Email was developed in 1971 by Ray Tomlinson, who also chose to use "@" to differentiate usernames.

https://www.webfx.com/blog/web-design/the-history-of-the-internet-in-a-nutshell/#:~:text=On%20October%2029%2C%201969%2C%20computers,on%20the%20letter%20%E2%80%9Cg%E2%80%9D.

- Bernadine Castro

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One significant event on the internet was the discovery and introduction of "Napster," which allowed services to access and share files, such as music, without restriction or limitation.

https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/web/g29622347/greatest-moments-internet-history/

Jan Ayla Del Valle

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The 50 Greatest Moments in Internet History

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From llamas on the loose to the colors of a dress that nobody could agree on, here are the most memorable moments since the inception of the Internet.

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It was in 1994 when Dan Kohn, a 21-year-old entrepreneur ran a website based in New Hampshire called NetMarket. He made the first online transaction when he sold a CD of Sting’s Ten Summoner’s Tales album to a friend in Philadelphia.

https://www.fastcompany.com/3054025/youll-never-guess-what-the-first-thing-ever-sold-on-the-internet-was

- Ramona Motos

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'Tis the time of year when the primary function of the Internet switches from being a communication or information gathering tool to being a shopping tool. And this year we'll be shopping online-and spending more than ever before, according to Adobe's holiday shopping forecast. Starting with Black Friday and continuing until Christmas Eve it's projected we'll spend $83 billion buying online goods this holiday season, with $3 billion alone spent on Cyber Monday.

Those dollars will be spent on everything from iPhones to cat-scratching DJ decks, as we snap up deals from behind our screens in the comfort of our PJs and near a plate of leftovers. But what was the first actual encrypted online transaction?

A new video made by Shopify, an e-commerce software company, delves into this bit of Internet history to track down the first official e-commerce transaction. The trail begins on the ARPANET, with a 1971 deal between computer science students at Stanford and MIT to buy some pot. But, explains the narrator, that technically didn't count because money wasn't exchanged online: they only used the network to arrange a meeting place.

Next, the trail leads to 1984, when a 74-year-old British grandmother named Jane Snowball used a Videotex-essentially a TV connected to telephone lines-to order provisions from her local grocery store: margarine, eggs, cornflakes. However, the groceries were delivered by hand, and Snowball paid for them in cash. That's not exactly e-commerce.

The first true e-commerce transaction didn't happen until 1994 with the advent of the Internet as we more or less know it today. Though Pizza Hut often gets credit for the first e-commerce transaction (they started selling pizzas online in late August 1994) the actual credit goes to Dan Kohn, a 21-year-old entrepreneur who ran a website based in New Hampshire called NetMarket.

On August 11, 1994, Kohn sold a CD of Sting's Ten Summoner's Tales album to a friend in Philadelphia, who used his credit card to spend $12.48, plus shipping costs, in a transaction that, for the first time ever, was protected by encryption technology.

"Even if the NSA was listening in, they couldn't get his credit card number," Kohn told Peter Lewis of the New York Times in an article the following day about NetMarket-what Lewis called "a new venture that is the equivalent of a shopping mall in cyberspace."

The site required that customers download a special browser that ran only on Unix in order to conduct secure transactions. Philip Zimmermann, the creator of the PGP encryption standard that NetMarket relied on, told the Times that the technology was a significant stepping stone toward digital currencies. "I think it's an important step in pioneering this work, but later on we'll probably see more exciting things in the way of digital cash... a combination of cryptographic protocols that behave the way real dollars behave but are untraceable."

Not everyone agrees on the NetMarket milestone. The Internet Shopping Network, which began selling computer equipment online in 1994, beat NetMarket by about a month, the site's former CEO, told CNet in 2004. (The Internet Shopping Network was later acquired by the Home Shopping Network, while NetMarket lives on under a subsidiary of hotel and rental car company Cendant.) And CDconnection.com claims on its home page to have been selling CDs online since 1990.

Meanwhile, a form of non-secure online shopping was already happening in Europe in the 1980s, thanks to a slew of terminal-based services like France's Minitel and Germany's Bildschirmtext, which offered banking, stock prices, and weather reports, as well as air and train tickets. In the U.S., early Internet users could use services like Prodigy, CompuServe, and AOL to conduct transactions.

This year, market research firm eMarketer projects consumers worldwide will spend $1.672 trillion online, a figure that represents 7.3% of overall global retail sales, which are expected to reach $22.82 trillion in 2015.

More than twenty years later, it's ironic that e-commerce as we know it today all started with a CD, a format that e-commerce subsequently decimated, becoming the dominant- and uneasy -distribution method for music.

For a partial rundown of this long, strange trip, "Proceed to Checkout: The Unexpected Story of How E-commerce Started," is well worth a watch.
This article has been updated to include the Internet Shopping Network, CDconnection.com, and other early online services.

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You'll Never Guess What The First Thing Ever Sold On The Internet Was

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'Tis the time of year when the primary function of the Internet switches from being a communication or information gathering tool to being a shopping tool. And this year we'll be shopping online-and spending more than ever before, according to Adobe's holiday shopping forecast.

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1991, a group of researchers in a computer lab at the University of Cambridge wanted a tracker that did not require much. They rigged a camera to monitor their work. The webcam would take 3 live images of the area in every minute and would then send to a shared server. By '93, more world wide webcams came to connect to the world. (via https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/652246/most-important-moments-internet-history)

AYS. Blanco

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The internet is a wonderful thing, isn't it? Believe it or not, it's been around in the form that we now take for granted since the mid-1980s, and more primitive versions existed for two decades before that. All of which is to say, its evolution, and its ups and downs, are full of some fascinating details, detours, and events. Check out this list of the 20 most important moments in internet history.

The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network ( ARPANET) was a precursor to the internet that allowed computers across the country to interact with each other and share information on a single network via telephone lines. It was funded by the U.S. Department of Defense early on, according to History, and was mainly intended for communication within government agencies and universities. On October 29, 1969, the first ARPANET message was sent from a computer at UCLA to one located at Stanford University-well, part of a message, anyway. The computer at UCLA managed to get an "L" and an "O" to Stanford before a bug crashed the network-in a more perfect world, the first message from ARPANET would have been "LOGIN." Though comparatively simple compared to today's tech, ARPANET served a purpose until 1990, when it was officially decommissioned.

On March 15, 1985, the first .com domain name was registered to a computer company out of Massachusetts named Symbolics. As Venture Beat points out, Symbolics.com planted its flag in the ground a year before HP and IBM and two years before Apple decided to take the .com plunge for themselves. Today, there are well over 150 million .coms registered online. Symbolics went out of business in 1993, but its historic domain has since been purchased and now acts as a quaint online museum dedicated to the history of the internet.

First proposed by British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 to find a better way for scientists to share data, the World Wide Web is a collection of web pages that are accessible through the network of computers called the internet ( World Wide Web and internet aren't interchangeable terms). To achieve it, Berners-Lee wrote three technologies-URL, HTML, and HTTP-that would help create a user-friendly interface for the internet that allowed it to enter everyday use within two or three years. In 1991, Berners-Lee published the first-ever webpage, which was basically just filled with instructions on how to actually use the World Wide Web. You can still view it here.

In 1991, when a group of researchers working in the computer lab at the University of Cambridge wanted a hands-off way to keep track of whether or not the community coffeepot was full, they rigged up a camera to monitor it for them. The rudimentary webcam-along with some programming wizardry-would take three live images of the pot every minute and send the 128x128 grayscale pics to a shared server that all the researchers could access from their computer network. By 1993, as the World Wide Web was beginning to connect the globe, the live coffee pot feed gained its own website, and by 1998, more than 2 million people had visited to see if the researchers were being properly caffeinated. When the live stream was shut down in 2001, it was featured on the front page of The Washington Post. As for the coffee pot itself, it was sold at auction that same year for £3350, or about $4700.

To get the country hooked on the internet for life, executives at AOL knew they first had to offer a taste to let people know what they were missing. That's exactly why the company printed untold millions of internet trial CDs starting in 1993, allowing people to go online for hundreds or thousands of hours, free of charge. It was an absolutely massive undertaking by the company-CDs were mailed to homes, included with purchases at Barnes & Noble and Best Buy, and even stuffed into cereal boxes. But despite many of these disks winding up as coasters, Frisbees, or landfill fodder, the campaign helped AOL turn into a $150 billion company with more than 25 million users within a decade.

Electrical engineering students Jerry Yang and David Filo created a human-edited web directory they initially dubbed "Jerry and David's guide to the World Wide Web" in January 1994. Two months later, they shrewdly renamed it "Yahoo," an abbreviation of "Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle," and a new way to browse the web was born. Yahoo's directory offered a hand-chosen list of sites for users to head to, broken down by categories like sports, art, news, and more. In the days when people were feeling their way around the web, Yahoo's personal touch was invaluable. Though Google firmly rules the roost now, back in 1998, Yahoo's sites were getting nearly 100 million hits per day as users decided which virtual destinations they wanted to head to next.

Billed as one of the world's first free web-based email providers back in 1996, Hotmail gave users an opportunity to access their inbox anywhere in the world. It wouldn't be long before Microsoft acquired the company in December 1997 for $400 million-and by 1999, the service registered more than 30 million active members. The brand itself was on borrowed time after the sale, though: By the early 2010s, Hotmail was rebranded as Outlook.com, which now boasts more than 400 million users.

When Wi-Fi first became commercially available to consumers in 1997, it gave people a look at a world without pesky cables tethering them to their modems whenever they wanted to browse the web. Simply put, the technology allows digital devices to exchange data via radio waves, according to Scientific American, and it's now a standard feature on everything from tablets and phones to video game consoles and robot vacuums. Unsurprisingly, it was Apple that really catapulted Wi-Fi into the public consciousness by using it in their 1999 iBook laptops. (To get a sense of how big this tech was, just listen to the applause Steve Jobs got when he demonstrated wireless internet browsing to a crowd in 1999.)

The music industry would never again be the same after Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker created Napster, the peer-to-peer internet software that allowed users to share digital audio files for free. Although the company was eventually done in by a plethora of lawsuits over copyright issues, millions of consumers flocked to the service, fundamentally changing the way people valued their favorite music. Physical record sales were forever impacted by the program, but Napster did offer an early blueprint for (legal) digital storefronts like iTunes and Google Music.

On January 15, 2001, Wikipedia began as a free online encyclopedia for people looking to research new topics, cram before a big test, or just settle a bar bet. But the very same open-platform nature that allows the information to be accessible for all also means people can add their own revisions and edits to pages, without the rigorous fact-checking you get from a traditional encyclopedia. While it's credited with helping democratize knowledge, getting a second source for all of that newfound trivia can't hurt, either.

On February 4, 2004, Facebook debuted as Thefacebook, an online directory created by Mark Zuckerberg strictly for Harvard students that became the most powerful social network in the world. Not only has it connected people across the globe and, more importantly, reunited high school friends who share a love for cat videos, but it precipitated an ongoing reckoning about the harmful effects of social media on individuals, politics, and societies around the globe.

Though other search engines beat it to market, Google has outlasted pretty much all of them, (sorry, Ask Jeeves) and has since morphed into an all-encompassing tech company that includes mapping technology, email systems, a music service, a streaming video game platform, and almost anything else you can imagine. And much of this success can be traced back to the company's decision to go public on August 19, 2004. Back then, The New York Times wrote that Google was valued at $27 billion-today, the conglomerate (now technically known as Alphabet, Inc.) has a market cap of more than $2 trillion.

If not for the Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake Super Bowl halftime show that culminated in an infamous wardrobe malfunction, we might not have YouTube today. In an interview with , company co-founder Jawed Karim revealed that this event is partly what spurred a group of ex-Paypal employees to create the video-streaming platform in 2005. Their goal was to allow people to capture and upload moments like that-we'd later call them "viral moments"-and spread them across the web for people to watch without needing a TV. The platform has attracted viewers by the billions in the years since, not just to watch existing content but to create and share their own, eventually prompting an entire generation to turn to their computers instead of other technologies for entertainment, news, and more.

It's hard to pinpoint the first viral video, but one possibility that gets thrown around is 2006's comedy sketch "Shoes" by Liam Kyle Sullivan, about a disappointed young woman and her search for footwear. Though it seems almost quaint in comparison to the stuff that gets sent around now, it racked up more than 68 million views on its official channel alone, offering the world a glimpse into the future of overnight viral sensations.

Uniquely engineered for engagement and use on the go (at least in comparison to Facebook and its predecessor, MySpace), Twitter would change the way we react to world events, both large and small, by enabling us to comment in real-time and eliminating our collective need to "think before we speak." It simultaneously elevated meme creation to an art form and created a platform to validate everyone's voice equally, from marginalized communities to hate groups. But before it went on to impact the globe, Twitter-originally known as Twttr-was just in the prototype stage in March 2006 when creator Jack Dorsey sent out the first published tweet, which read: "just setting up my twttr." A few months later, Twitter launched to the public.

In early 2007, Netflix started offering a small selection of TV shows and movies online for its users to stream straight from their devices, in addition to the DVDs-by-mail rental service that first put the company on the map. Today, Netflix is a full-fledged TV and movie studio with a $300 billion market cap that pumps out original dramas, blockbuster movies, and addictive documentaries that regularly earn critical acclaim and viral clout across social media. The company's success hasn't just changed the way we all consume content-it's altered the direction of studios like Warner Bros., Paramount, and Disney, leading to an influx of competing streaming platforms like HBO Max and Disney+.

Apple's release of the first iPhone on June 29, 2007, more or less transformed the way we engage with the internet-and everyone else-overnight. Its sleek portability and continuously expanding list of features made it possible to talk, work, shop, and do just about everything else with a swipe of the finger. The iPhone has continued to advance its capabilities with each new iteration, further making the internet something that dominates our moment-to-moment existence.

By 2010, the social media world had migrated from Friendster to MySpace to Twitter, so Instagram-a new image-based platform co-founded by former Google employee Kevin Systrom-felt like a reduction in services when it launched on October 6, 2010. But in its infancy, Instagram allowed people to share photos (mostly of food and cats) without all of the more detailed interactions of those other platforms, which is probably why it has become one of the most popular social media apps of all time, leading to its $1 billion sale to Facebook in 2012.

Over the course of two or three days in February 2015, everyone on social media, and then everyone on the planet, saw a photo of a dress that either looked black and blue or white and gold, based on some viral-friendly physiological phenomenon. According to The Guardian, the photo began its life as a simple social post about a dress that a woman in Lancashire, UK, was planning to wear to her daughter's wedding. Arguments about the color broke out on the wedding participants' private pages, and the photo soon found its way onto Buzzfeed's Tumblr page, where more than 25 million people viewed it within 24 hours. And it only got bigger from there. There actually is an explanation behind the color confusion that's too long to go into here, but the bottom line is that half of the world thought that dress was white and gold, and those people were wrong.

Building on the premise of the long-running animated series, gaming company Niantic created using augmented reality that placed the iconic Pokémon into the real world (viewed through a smartphone) for players to capture as they went about their daily business. Faster than you can say "Pac Man fever," this became everyone's obsession, whether they were taking the dog for a walk or coming home from work. Within a month of its July 6, 2016, release, the app had been downloaded 100 million times, on its way to grossing around $950 million in revenue by year's end. It also became a shared experience, with fans taking to social media to share Pokémon gym locations and organize meet-ups for in-game events (though there are some places you definitely shouldn't play it).

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20 of the Most Important Moments in Internet History

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From its first steps out of the primordial sludge of the ARPANET days to its current role as a vessel for cat videos and Netflix, we're taking a look at just some of the most important moments in internet history.

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The world's first spam mail was sent in May 1978 by Gary Thuerk, who sent a message to hundreds of ARPA users. "I thought of it as e-marketing," Thuerk has said of his mass unsolicited email promoting a new product rollout.

Thuerk made his company millions with sales resulting from the spam, but also noted that "complaints started coming in almost immediately."

https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/web/g29622347/greatest-moments-internet-history/

Lescano, Stacey

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The 50 Greatest Moments in Internet History

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From llamas on the loose to the colors of a dress that nobody could agree on, here are the most memorable moments since the inception of the Internet.

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In the year 1978, the Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol were created, otherwise known as TCP/IP.

When a user sends or receives information, the first step is for TCP on the sender's machine to break that data into packets and distribute them. Those packets travel from router to router over the Internet.

During this time the IP protocol is in charge of the addressing and forwarding of those packets. At the end, TCP reassembles the packets to their original state.

Throughout the '80s this protocol was tested thoroughly and adopted by many networks. The Internet just continued to grow and scale at a rapid speed.

Lemonaki, D. (2020).

A Brief History of the Internet – Who Invented It, How it Works, and How it Became the Web We Use Today.

https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/brief-history-of-the-internet/

- Jhazzen Mateo

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Let's start by clearing up some mis-conceptions about the Internet. The Internet is not the Web. The Internet is not a cloud. And the Internet is not magic.

It may seem like something automatic that we take for granted, but there is a whole process that happens behind the scenes that makes it run.

So...The Internet. What is it?

The Internet is actually a wire. Well, many wires that connect computers all around the world.

The Internet is also infrastructure. It's a global network of interconnected computers that communicate through a standardised way with set protocols.

Really, it's a network of networks. It's a fully distributed system of computing devices and it ensures end to end connectivity through every part of the network. The aim is for every device to be able to communicate with any other device.

The Internet is something we all use everyday, and many of us can't imagine our lives without it. The internet and all the technological advances it offers has changed our society. It has changed our jobs, the way we consume news and share information, and the way we communicate with one another.

It has also created so many opportunities and has helped helped humanity progress and has shaped our human experience.

There is nothing else like it - it's one of the greatest inventions of all time. But do we ever stop to think why it was created in the first place, how it all happened, or by whom it was created? How the internet has become what it is today?

This article is more of a journey back in time. We'll learn about the origins of the Internet and how far it has come throughout the years, as this can be beneficial in our coding journeys.

Learning about the history of how the Internet was created has made me realise that everything comes down to problem solving. And that is what coding is all about. Having a problem, trying to find a solution to it, and improving upon it once that solution is found.

The Internet, a technology so expansive and ever-changing, wasn't the work of just one person or institution. Many people contributed to its growth by developing new features.

So it has developed over time. It was at least 40 years in the making and kept (well, still keeps) on evolving.

And it wasn't created just for the sake of creating something. The Internet we know and use today was a result of an experiment, ARPANET, the precursor network to the internet.

And it all started because of a problem.

Scared of Sputnik

It was in the midst of the Cold War, October 4 1957, that the Soviets launched the first man made satellite into space called Sputnik.

As it was the world's first ever artificial object to float into space, this was alarming for Americans.

The Soviets were not only ahead in science and technology but they were a threat. Americans feared that the Soviets would spy on their enemies, win the Cold War, and that nuclear attacks on American soil were possible.

So Americans started to think more seriously about science and technology. After the Sputnik wake up call, the space race began. It was not long after that in 1958 the US Administration funded various agencies, one of them being ARPA.

ARPA stands for Advanced Research Project Agency. It was a Defence Department research project in Computer Science, a way for scientists and researchers to share information, findings, knowledge, and communicate. It also allowed and helped the field of Computer Science to develop and evolve.

It was there that the vision of J.C.R. Licklider, one of the directors of ARPA, would start to form in the years to come.

Without ARPA the Internet would not exist. It was because of this institution that the very first version of the Internet was created - ARPANET.

Creating a Global Network of Computers

Although Licklider left ARPA a few years before ARPANET was created, his ideas and his vision laid the foundation and building blocks to create the Internet. The fact that it has become what we know today we may take for granted.

Computers at the time were not as we know them now. They were massive and extremely expensive. They were seen as number-crunching machines and mostly as calculators, and they could only perform a limited number of tasks.

So in the era of mainframe computers, each one could only run a specific task. For an experiment to take place that required multiple tasks, it would require more than one computer. But that meant buying more expensive hardware.

The solution to that?

Connecting multiple computers to the same network and getting those different systems to speak the same language in order to communicate with one another.

The idea of multiple computers connected to a network was not new. Such infrastructure existed in the 1950's and was called WANs (Wide Area Networks).

However, WANs had many technological limitations and were constrained both to small areas and in what they could do. Each machine spoke it's own language which made it impossible for it to communicate with other machines.

So this idea of a 'global network' that Licklider proposed and then popularised in the early 1960's was revolutionary. It tied in with the greater vision he had, that of the perfect symbiosis between computers and humans.

He was certain that in the future computers would improve the quality of life and get rid of repetitive tasks, leaving room and time for humans to think creatively, more in-depth, and let their imagination flow.

That could only come to fruition if different systems broke the language barrier and integrated into a wider network. This idea of "Networking" is what makes the Internet we use today. It's essentially the need for common standards for different systems to communicate.

Building a Distributed Packet Switched Network

Up until this point (the end of the 1960's), when you wanted to run tasks on computers, data was sent via the telephone line using a method called "Circuit switching".

This method worked just fine for phone calls but was was very inefficient for computers and the Internet.

Using this method you could only send data as a full packet, that is data sent over the network, and only to one computer at a time. It was common for information to get lost and to have to re-start the whole procedure from the beginning. It was time consuming, ineffective, and costly.

And then in the Cold War era, it was also dangerous. An attack on the telephone system would destroy the whole communication system.

The answer to that problem was packet switching.

It was a simple and efficient method of transferring data. Instead of sending data as one big stream, it cuts it up into pieces.

Then it breaks down the packets of information into blocks and forwards them as fast as possible and in as many possible directions, each taking its own different routes in the network, until they reach their destination.

Once there, they are re-assembled. That's made possible because each packet has information about the sender, the destination, and a number. This then allows the receiver to put them back together in their original form.

This method was researched by different scientists, but the ideas of Paul Baran on distributed networks were later adopted by ARPANET.

Baran was trying to figure out a communication system that could survive a nuclear attack. Essentially he wanted to discover a communication system that could handle failure.

He came to the conclusion that networks can be built around two types of structures: centralised and distributed.

From those structures there came three types of networks: centralised, decentralised, and distributed. Out of those three, it was only the last one that was fit to survive an attack.

If a part of that kind of network was destroyed, the rest of it would still function and the task would simply be moved to another part.

At the time, they didn't have rapid expansion of the network in mind - we didn't need it. And it was only in the years to come that this expansion started to take shape. Baran's ideas were ahead of his time, however, they laid the foundation for how the Internet works now.

The experimental packet switched network was a success. It led to the early creation of the ARPANET architecture which adopted this method.

How ARPANET Was Built

What started off as a response to a Cold War threat was turning into something different. The first prototype of the Internet slowly began to take shape and the first computer network was built, ARPANET.

The goal now was resource sharing, whether that was data, findings, or applications. It would allow people, no matter where they were, to harness the power of expensive computing that was far away, as if they were right in front of them.

Up until this point scientists couldn't use resources available on computers that were in another location. Each mainframe computer spoke its own language so there was lack of communication and incompatibility between the systems.

In order for computers to be effective, though, they needed to speak the same language and be linked together into a network.

So the solution to that was to build a network that established communication links between multiple resource-sharing mainframe supercomputers that were miles apart.

The building of an experimental nationwide packet switched network that linked centers run by agencies and universities began.

On October 29 1969 different computers made their first connection and spoke, a 'node to node' communication from one computer to another. It was an experiment that was about to revolutionize communication.

The first ever message was delivered from UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) to SRI (the Stanford Research Institute).

It read simply "LO".

What was meant to be "LOGIN" was not feasible at first, as the system crashed and had to be rebooted. But it worked! The first step had been made and the language barrier had been broken.

By the end of 1969 a connection had been established between four nodes on the whole network which included UCLA, SRI, UCSB (University of California Santa Barbara) and the University of Utah.

But the network grew steadily throughout the years and more and more universities joined.

By 1973 there were even nodes connecting to England and Norway. ARPANET managed to connect these supercomputing centers run by universities together into its network.

One of the greatest achievements of that time was that a new culture was emerging. A culture that revolved around solving problems via sharing and finding the best possible solution collectively via networking.

During that time scientists and researchers were questioning every aspect of the network - technical aspects as well as the moral side of things, too.

The environments where these discussions were taking place were welcoming for all and free of hierarchies. Everyone was free to express their opinion and collaborate to solve the big issues that arose.

We see that kind of culture carrying over to the Internet of today. Through forums, social media, and the like, people ask questions to get answers or come together to deal with problems, whatever they may be, that affect the human condition and experience.

As time passed, more independent packet switched networks emerged that were not related to ARPANET (which existed on an international level and started to multiply by the 1970's) . That was a new challenge.

These different networks had their own dialects, and their own standards for how data was transferred. It was impossible for them to integrate into this larger network, the Internet we know today.

Getting these different networks to speak to one another - or Internetworking, a term scientists used for this process - proved to be a challenge.

A Need for Common Standards

Now our devices are designed so that they can connect to the wider global network automatically. But back then this process was a complex task.

This worldwide infrastructure, the network of networks that we call the Internet, is based on certain agreed upon protocols. Those are based on how networks communicate and exchange data.

From the early days at ARPANET, it still lacked a common language for computers outside its own network to be able to communicate with computers on its own network. Even though it was a secure and reliable packet-switched network.

How could these early networks communicate with one another? We needed the network to expand even more for the vision of an 'global network' to become a reality.

To build an open network of networks, a general protocol was needed. That is, a set of rules.

Those rules had to be strict enough for secure data transfer but also loose enough to accommodate all the ways that data was transferred.

TCP/IP Saves the Day

Vint Cerf and Bob Khan began working on the design of what we now call the Internet. In 1978 the Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol were created, otherwise known as TCP/IP.

The rules for the Interconnection were:

The independent networks were not required to change

There was an effort to achieve communication

Internal networks would exist in addition with gateways that would connect these networks. Their job would be to translate between the networks. There would be one universal, agreed upon protocol for that.

There would be no central control, no one person or organization in charge.

As Cerf explained:

The job of TCP is merely to take a stream of messages produced by one HOST and reproduce the stream at a foreign receiving HOST without change.

The Internet Protocol (IP) makes locating information possible when looking among the plethora of machines available.

So how does data travel?

So how does a packet go from one destination to another? Say from the sending destination to the receiving one? What role does TCP/IP play in this and how does it make the journey possible?

When a user sends or receives information, the first step is for TCP on the sender's machine to break that data into packets and distribute them. Those packets travel from router to router over the Internet.

During this time the IP protocol is in charge of the addressing and forwarding of those packets. At the end, TCP reassembles the packets to their original state.

What Happened Next with the Internet?

Throughout the '80s this protocol was tested thoroughly and adopted by many networks. The Internet just continued to grow and scale at a rapid speed.

The interconnected global network of networks was finally starting to happen. It was still mainly used widely by researchers, scientists, and programmers to exchange messages and information. The general public was quite unaware of it.

But that was about to change in the late '80s when the Internet morphed again.

This was thanks to Tim Berners Lee who introduced the Web - how we know and use the Internet today.

The internet went from just sending messages from one computer to another to creating an accessible and intuitive way for people to browse what was at first a collection of interlinked websites. The Web was built on top of the Internet. The Internet is its backbone.

I hope this article gave some context and insight into the origins of this galaxy of information we use today. And I hope you enjoyed learning about how it actually all started and the path it took to becoming the Internet we know and use today.

If you read this far, tweet to the author to show them you care. Tweet a thanks

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A Brief History of the Internet - Who Invented It, How it Works, and How it Became the Web We Use Today

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Let's start by clearing up some mis-conceptions about the Internet. The Internet is not the Web. The Internet is not a cloud. And the Internet is not magic. It may seem like something automatic that we take for granted, but there is a whole process that happens behind the scenes

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https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/652246/most-important-moments-internet-history

-Rrisa Tengco

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The internet is a wonderful thing, isn't it? Believe it or not, it's been around in the form that we now take for granted since the mid-1980s, and more primitive versions existed for two decades before that. All of which is to say, its evolution, and its ups and downs, are full of some fascinating details, detours, and events. Check out this list of the 20 most important moments in internet history.

The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network ( ARPANET) was a precursor to the internet that allowed computers across the country to interact with each other and share information on a single network via telephone lines. It was funded by the U.S. Department of Defense early on, according to History, and was mainly intended for communication within government agencies and universities. On October 29, 1969, the first ARPANET message was sent from a computer at UCLA to one located at Stanford University-well, part of a message, anyway. The computer at UCLA managed to get an "L" and an "O" to Stanford before a bug crashed the network-in a more perfect world, the first message from ARPANET would have been "LOGIN." Though comparatively simple compared to today's tech, ARPANET served a purpose until 1990, when it was officially decommissioned.

On March 15, 1985, the first .com domain name was registered to a computer company out of Massachusetts named Symbolics. As Venture Beat points out, Symbolics.com planted its flag in the ground a year before HP and IBM and two years before Apple decided to take the .com plunge for themselves. Today, there are well over 150 million .coms registered online. Symbolics went out of business in 1993, but its historic domain has since been purchased and now acts as a quaint online museum dedicated to the history of the internet.

First proposed by British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 to find a better way for scientists to share data, the World Wide Web is a collection of web pages that are accessible through the network of computers called the internet ( World Wide Web and internet aren't interchangeable terms). To achieve it, Berners-Lee wrote three technologies-URL, HTML, and HTTP-that would help create a user-friendly interface for the internet that allowed it to enter everyday use within two or three years. In 1991, Berners-Lee published the first-ever webpage, which was basically just filled with instructions on how to actually use the World Wide Web. You can still view it here.

In 1991, when a group of researchers working in the computer lab at the University of Cambridge wanted a hands-off way to keep track of whether or not the community coffeepot was full, they rigged up a camera to monitor it for them. The rudimentary webcam-along with some programming wizardry-would take three live images of the pot every minute and send the 128x128 grayscale pics to a shared server that all the researchers could access from their computer network. By 1993, as the World Wide Web was beginning to connect the globe, the live coffee pot feed gained its own website, and by 1998, more than 2 million people had visited to see if the researchers were being properly caffeinated. When the live stream was shut down in 2001, it was featured on the front page of The Washington Post. As for the coffee pot itself, it was sold at auction that same year for £3350, or about $4700.

To get the country hooked on the internet for life, executives at AOL knew they first had to offer a taste to let people know what they were missing. That's exactly why the company printed untold millions of internet trial CDs starting in 1993, allowing people to go online for hundreds or thousands of hours, free of charge. It was an absolutely massive undertaking by the company-CDs were mailed to homes, included with purchases at Barnes & Noble and Best Buy, and even stuffed into cereal boxes. But despite many of these disks winding up as coasters, Frisbees, or landfill fodder, the campaign helped AOL turn into a $150 billion company with more than 25 million users within a decade.

Electrical engineering students Jerry Yang and David Filo created a human-edited web directory they initially dubbed "Jerry and David's guide to the World Wide Web" in January 1994. Two months later, they shrewdly renamed it "Yahoo," an abbreviation of "Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle," and a new way to browse the web was born. Yahoo's directory offered a hand-chosen list of sites for users to head to, broken down by categories like sports, art, news, and more. In the days when people were feeling their way around the web, Yahoo's personal touch was invaluable. Though Google firmly rules the roost now, back in 1998, Yahoo's sites were getting nearly 100 million hits per day as users decided which virtual destinations they wanted to head to next.

Billed as one of the world's first free web-based email providers back in 1996, Hotmail gave users an opportunity to access their inbox anywhere in the world. It wouldn't be long before Microsoft acquired the company in December 1997 for $400 million-and by 1999, the service registered more than 30 million active members. The brand itself was on borrowed time after the sale, though: By the early 2010s, Hotmail was rebranded as Outlook.com, which now boasts more than 400 million users.

When Wi-Fi first became commercially available to consumers in 1997, it gave people a look at a world without pesky cables tethering them to their modems whenever they wanted to browse the web. Simply put, the technology allows digital devices to exchange data via radio waves, according to Scientific American, and it's now a standard feature on everything from tablets and phones to video game consoles and robot vacuums. Unsurprisingly, it was Apple that really catapulted Wi-Fi into the public consciousness by using it in their 1999 iBook laptops. (To get a sense of how big this tech was, just listen to the applause Steve Jobs got when he demonstrated wireless internet browsing to a crowd in 1999.)

The music industry would never again be the same after Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker created Napster, the peer-to-peer internet software that allowed users to share digital audio files for free. Although the company was eventually done in by a plethora of lawsuits over copyright issues, millions of consumers flocked to the service, fundamentally changing the way people valued their favorite music. Physical record sales were forever impacted by the program, but Napster did offer an early blueprint for (legal) digital storefronts like iTunes and Google Music.

On January 15, 2001, Wikipedia began as a free online encyclopedia for people looking to research new topics, cram before a big test, or just settle a bar bet. But the very same open-platform nature that allows the information to be accessible for all also means people can add their own revisions and edits to pages, without the rigorous fact-checking you get from a traditional encyclopedia. While it's credited with helping democratize knowledge, getting a second source for all of that newfound trivia can't hurt, either.

On February 4, 2004, Facebook debuted as Thefacebook, an online directory created by Mark Zuckerberg strictly for Harvard students that became the most powerful social network in the world. Not only has it connected people across the globe and, more importantly, reunited high school friends who share a love for cat videos, but it precipitated an ongoing reckoning about the harmful effects of social media on individuals, politics, and societies around the globe.

Though other search engines beat it to market, Google has outlasted pretty much all of them, (sorry, Ask Jeeves) and has since morphed into an all-encompassing tech company that includes mapping technology, email systems, a music service, a streaming video game platform, and almost anything else you can imagine. And much of this success can be traced back to the company's decision to go public on August 19, 2004. Back then, The New York Times wrote that Google was valued at $27 billion-today, the conglomerate (now technically known as Alphabet, Inc.) has a market cap of more than $2 trillion.

If not for the Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake Super Bowl halftime show that culminated in an infamous wardrobe malfunction, we might not have YouTube today. In an interview with , company co-founder Jawed Karim revealed that this event is partly what spurred a group of ex-Paypal employees to create the video-streaming platform in 2005. Their goal was to allow people to capture and upload moments like that-we'd later call them "viral moments"-and spread them across the web for people to watch without needing a TV. The platform has attracted viewers by the billions in the years since, not just to watch existing content but to create and share their own, eventually prompting an entire generation to turn to their computers instead of other technologies for entertainment, news, and more.

It's hard to pinpoint the first viral video, but one possibility that gets thrown around is 2006's comedy sketch "Shoes" by Liam Kyle Sullivan, about a disappointed young woman and her search for footwear. Though it seems almost quaint in comparison to the stuff that gets sent around now, it racked up more than 68 million views on its official channel alone, offering the world a glimpse into the future of overnight viral sensations.

Uniquely engineered for engagement and use on the go (at least in comparison to Facebook and its predecessor, MySpace), Twitter would change the way we react to world events, both large and small, by enabling us to comment in real-time and eliminating our collective need to "think before we speak." It simultaneously elevated meme creation to an art form and created a platform to validate everyone's voice equally, from marginalized communities to hate groups. But before it went on to impact the globe, Twitter-originally known as Twttr-was just in the prototype stage in March 2006 when creator Jack Dorsey sent out the first published tweet, which read: "just setting up my twttr." A few months later, Twitter launched to the public.

In early 2007, Netflix started offering a small selection of TV shows and movies online for its users to stream straight from their devices, in addition to the DVDs-by-mail rental service that first put the company on the map. Today, Netflix is a full-fledged TV and movie studio with a $300 billion market cap that pumps out original dramas, blockbuster movies, and addictive documentaries that regularly earn critical acclaim and viral clout across social media. The company's success hasn't just changed the way we all consume content-it's altered the direction of studios like Warner Bros., Paramount, and Disney, leading to an influx of competing streaming platforms like HBO Max and Disney+.

Apple's release of the first iPhone on June 29, 2007, more or less transformed the way we engage with the internet-and everyone else-overnight. Its sleek portability and continuously expanding list of features made it possible to talk, work, shop, and do just about everything else with a swipe of the finger. The iPhone has continued to advance its capabilities with each new iteration, further making the internet something that dominates our moment-to-moment existence.

By 2010, the social media world had migrated from Friendster to MySpace to Twitter, so Instagram-a new image-based platform co-founded by former Google employee Kevin Systrom-felt like a reduction in services when it launched on October 6, 2010. But in its infancy, Instagram allowed people to share photos (mostly of food and cats) without all of the more detailed interactions of those other platforms, which is probably why it has become one of the most popular social media apps of all time, leading to its $1 billion sale to Facebook in 2012.

Over the course of two or three days in February 2015, everyone on social media, and then everyone on the planet, saw a photo of a dress that either looked black and blue or white and gold, based on some viral-friendly physiological phenomenon. According to The Guardian, the photo began its life as a simple social post about a dress that a woman in Lancashire, UK, was planning to wear to her daughter's wedding. Arguments about the color broke out on the wedding participants' private pages, and the photo soon found its way onto Buzzfeed's Tumblr page, where more than 25 million people viewed it within 24 hours. And it only got bigger from there. There actually is an explanation behind the color confusion that's too long to go into here, but the bottom line is that half of the world thought that dress was white and gold, and those people were wrong.

Building on the premise of the long-running animated series, gaming company Niantic created using augmented reality that placed the iconic Pokémon into the real world (viewed through a smartphone) for players to capture as they went about their daily business. Faster than you can say "Pac Man fever," this became everyone's obsession, whether they were taking the dog for a walk or coming home from work. Within a month of its July 6, 2016, release, the app had been downloaded 100 million times, on its way to grossing around $950 million in revenue by year's end. It also became a shared experience, with fans taking to social media to share Pokémon gym locations and organize meet-ups for in-game events (though there are some places you definitely shouldn't play it).

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20 of the Most Important Moments in Internet History

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From its first steps out of the primordial sludge of the ARPANET days to its current role as a vessel for cat videos and Netflix, we're taking a look at just some of the most important moments in internet history.

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The invention of transistor ( nov. 11, 1947 )

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The invention of transistor ( nov. 11, 1947 )

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The transistor significantly improved computers. It was intended to serve as a transmitter, transforming sound waves into electrical ones. Additionally, this aids in electronic current regulation

source: https://www.timetoast.com/timelines/10-most-important-inventions-for-computers

-Hannah Salvatierra

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10 most important inventions for computers timeline.

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Most computers before and during that time where the size of refrigerators. They also took up a whole room until the desktop computer was made. It could fit on a desk and still was just as fast. The first one made was called the HP 9800. It was the begining of smaller computers.

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Google being invented prioritized a website's popularity over its relevance. This led to websites becoming more connected to each other, popular websites coming up more often during Google searches and unpopular ones promptly dying off. (Sep. 2, 2008)

# data[].attributes.subject
Google being invented prioritized a website's popularity over its relevance. This led to websites becoming more connected to each other, popular websites coming up more often during Google searches and unpopular ones promptly dying off. (Sep. 2, 2008)

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The browser was first publicly released, officially as a beta version, on September 2, 2008, for Windows XP and newer, and with support for 43 languages, and later as a "stable" public release on December 11, 2008. Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/google-turns-20-how-one-search-engine-changed-the-world-1.4079053?cache=rhbqjymgiwnvkzqr#:~:text=Google%20changed%20that%20by%20using,unpopular%20ones%20promptly%20dying%20off.

- Jackie Antonia Quirante

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"Google it" wasn't always synonymous with "find it online." Google wasn't even the first search engine.

The company, founded 20 years ago, has revolutionized the way we use the internet.

Back on Sept. 4, 1998, the internet was a loose collection of millions of websites which were a relative nightmare to sift through.

When Google became a registered domain in 1997, it was competing with other search engines like Yahoo Search, AltaVista and AskJeeves but they all used algorithms that rarely gave users exactly what they were looking for. Google changed that by using a PageRank algorithm which prioritized a website's popularity over its relevance.

This led to websites becoming more connected to each other, popular websites coming up more often during Google searches and unpopular ones promptly dying off. Now, most websites work together and link to each other in what's called backlinking, a process that contributed to Google's rise.

"They really just found a new way of ranking pages, it used to be just done on keywords ... (now) it's all about backlinking and it changed the world completely," researcher and futurist speaker Nikolas Badminton told CTV's Your Morning Tuesday.

Futurist Nikolas Badminton tells CTV's Your Morning how Google "changed the world completely" in the way it organizes website searches.

Online ad revenue, the primary way to make money on the internet today, was an untapped resource during theweb's infancy. But Google was one of the first companies to realize the potential of building a business model around that. Companies now rely on this method to make money and use Google itself to make their products, services and voices easily searchable online.

During the internet's nascent era, Hotmail and Yahoo Mail both competed for email traffic; virtual calendars were unconnected on different platforms, and mapping websites like MapQuestweren't tailored to changing road conditions. But by creating similar products and services of their own, like Gmail and Google Maps, Google arguably became the most centralized hub on the internet to get all those services in single place.

In the past several years, Google has leaned into that description by expanding into online communication with Google Hangouts and online storage like the Google Cloud. Products like Google Docs, Google Sheets and the Android operating system for mobile devices have also helped Google become a "lifestyle brand," Badminton said.

Humble beginnings

The company was founded by Stanford University PhD students Sergey Brin and Larry Page and like a lot of internet startups at the time, it began out of a garage. As Google grew, it bought smaller startups and other companies to integrate their technology into its products. For example, Google bought the video streaming service YouTube for US$1.65 billion in 2005, which catapulted it into popularity.

Google also bought music-streaming service Songza and incorporated it into its own music service, Google Play in 2014.

The company quickly began expanding the number of services it offered by releasing its own web browser, Google Chrome, in 2008, to compete with Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer. In 2010, Google delved into the world of smartphones with its Nexus brand that was eventually replaced by Pixel in 2016.

Android P, Google's latest operating system, coming in the "Pixel 3," was unveiled at the Google I/O 2018 conference. (Google Google I/O 2018)

In October 2015, a corporate restructuring of Google formed a conglomerate called Alphabet Inc., with Google still being its leading subsidiary. With offices around the world, including New York City, Sydney, London, and Toronto, the company boasts more than 85,000 employees as of March 2018.

But Google's overarching power and integration into our lives has led to a flurry of concerns of privacy intrusion and data mining over the years, which some activists have argued are far cries of the company's initial motto of: "Don't be evil."

"People believe in the mantra of making the world a better place, not being evil and doing good in the world through technology," Badminton said.

As for Google's future, Badminton said it'll be about "dominance."

"They've already got 75 per cent of search traffic and 90 per cent of mobile search traffic. They're going to be everywhere-they're going to be in sensors and in (self-driving) cars."

view larger image

The company, founded 20 years ago, has revolutionized the way we use the internet. (AFP PHOTO / LIONEL BONAVENTURE)

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Google turns 20: How one search engine changed the world

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"Google it" wasn't always synonymous with "find it online." Google wasn't even the first search engine. The company, founded 20 years ago, has revolutionized the way we use the internet. Back on Sept. 4, 1998, the internet was a loose collection of millions of websites which were a relative nightmare to sift through.

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Billed as one of the world’s first free web-based email providers back in 1996, Hotmail gave users an opportunity to access their inbox anywhere in the world. It wouldn't be long before Microsoft acquired the company in December 1997 for $400 million—and by 1999, the service registered more than 30 million active members. The brand itself was on borrowed time after the sale, though: By the early 2010s, Hotmail was rebranded as Outlook.com, which now boasts more than 400 million users.

- Tisha Paryani

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The internet is a wonderful thing, isn't it? Believe it or not, it's been around in the form that we now take for granted since the mid-1980s, and more primitive versions existed for two decades before that. All of which is to say, its evolution, and its ups and downs, are full of some fascinating details, detours, and events. Check out this list of the 20 most important moments in internet history.

The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network ( ARPANET) was a precursor to the internet that allowed computers across the country to interact with each other and share information on a single network via telephone lines. It was funded by the U.S. Department of Defense early on, according to History, and was mainly intended for communication within government agencies and universities. On October 29, 1969, the first ARPANET message was sent from a computer at UCLA to one located at Stanford University-well, part of a message, anyway. The computer at UCLA managed to get an "L" and an "O" to Stanford before a bug crashed the network-in a more perfect world, the first message from ARPANET would have been "LOGIN." Though comparatively simple compared to today's tech, ARPANET served a purpose until 1990, when it was officially decommissioned.

On March 15, 1985, the first .com domain name was registered to a computer company out of Massachusetts named Symbolics. As Venture Beat points out, Symbolics.com planted its flag in the ground a year before HP and IBM and two years before Apple decided to take the .com plunge for themselves. Today, there are well over 150 million .coms registered online. Symbolics went out of business in 1993, but its historic domain has since been purchased and now acts as a quaint online museum dedicated to the history of the internet.

First proposed by British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 to find a better way for scientists to share data, the World Wide Web is a collection of web pages that are accessible through the network of computers called the internet ( World Wide Web and internet aren't interchangeable terms). To achieve it, Berners-Lee wrote three technologies-URL, HTML, and HTTP-that would help create a user-friendly interface for the internet that allowed it to enter everyday use within two or three years. In 1991, Berners-Lee published the first-ever webpage, which was basically just filled with instructions on how to actually use the World Wide Web. You can still view it here.

In 1991, when a group of researchers working in the computer lab at the University of Cambridge wanted a hands-off way to keep track of whether or not the community coffeepot was full, they rigged up a camera to monitor it for them. The rudimentary webcam-along with some programming wizardry-would take three live images of the pot every minute and send the 128x128 grayscale pics to a shared server that all the researchers could access from their computer network. By 1993, as the World Wide Web was beginning to connect the globe, the live coffee pot feed gained its own website, and by 1998, more than 2 million people had visited to see if the researchers were being properly caffeinated. When the live stream was shut down in 2001, it was featured on the front page of The Washington Post. As for the coffee pot itself, it was sold at auction that same year for £3350, or about $4700.

To get the country hooked on the internet for life, executives at AOL knew they first had to offer a taste to let people know what they were missing. That's exactly why the company printed untold millions of internet trial CDs starting in 1993, allowing people to go online for hundreds or thousands of hours, free of charge. It was an absolutely massive undertaking by the company-CDs were mailed to homes, included with purchases at Barnes & Noble and Best Buy, and even stuffed into cereal boxes. But despite many of these disks winding up as coasters, Frisbees, or landfill fodder, the campaign helped AOL turn into a $150 billion company with more than 25 million users within a decade.

Electrical engineering students Jerry Yang and David Filo created a human-edited web directory they initially dubbed "Jerry and David's guide to the World Wide Web" in January 1994. Two months later, they shrewdly renamed it "Yahoo," an abbreviation of "Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle," and a new way to browse the web was born. Yahoo's directory offered a hand-chosen list of sites for users to head to, broken down by categories like sports, art, news, and more. In the days when people were feeling their way around the web, Yahoo's personal touch was invaluable. Though Google firmly rules the roost now, back in 1998, Yahoo's sites were getting nearly 100 million hits per day as users decided which virtual destinations they wanted to head to next.

Billed as one of the world's first free web-based email providers back in 1996, Hotmail gave users an opportunity to access their inbox anywhere in the world. It wouldn't be long before Microsoft acquired the company in December 1997 for $400 million-and by 1999, the service registered more than 30 million active members. The brand itself was on borrowed time after the sale, though: By the early 2010s, Hotmail was rebranded as Outlook.com, which now boasts more than 400 million users.

When Wi-Fi first became commercially available to consumers in 1997, it gave people a look at a world without pesky cables tethering them to their modems whenever they wanted to browse the web. Simply put, the technology allows digital devices to exchange data via radio waves, according to Scientific American, and it's now a standard feature on everything from tablets and phones to video game consoles and robot vacuums. Unsurprisingly, it was Apple that really catapulted Wi-Fi into the public consciousness by using it in their 1999 iBook laptops. (To get a sense of how big this tech was, just listen to the applause Steve Jobs got when he demonstrated wireless internet browsing to a crowd in 1999.)

The music industry would never again be the same after Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker created Napster, the peer-to-peer internet software that allowed users to share digital audio files for free. Although the company was eventually done in by a plethora of lawsuits over copyright issues, millions of consumers flocked to the service, fundamentally changing the way people valued their favorite music. Physical record sales were forever impacted by the program, but Napster did offer an early blueprint for (legal) digital storefronts like iTunes and Google Music.

On January 15, 2001, Wikipedia began as a free online encyclopedia for people looking to research new topics, cram before a big test, or just settle a bar bet. But the very same open-platform nature that allows the information to be accessible for all also means people can add their own revisions and edits to pages, without the rigorous fact-checking you get from a traditional encyclopedia. While it's credited with helping democratize knowledge, getting a second source for all of that newfound trivia can't hurt, either.

On February 4, 2004, Facebook debuted as Thefacebook, an online directory created by Mark Zuckerberg strictly for Harvard students that became the most powerful social network in the world. Not only has it connected people across the globe and, more importantly, reunited high school friends who share a love for cat videos, but it precipitated an ongoing reckoning about the harmful effects of social media on individuals, politics, and societies around the globe.

Though other search engines beat it to market, Google has outlasted pretty much all of them, (sorry, Ask Jeeves) and has since morphed into an all-encompassing tech company that includes mapping technology, email systems, a music service, a streaming video game platform, and almost anything else you can imagine. And much of this success can be traced back to the company's decision to go public on August 19, 2004. Back then, The New York Times wrote that Google was valued at $27 billion-today, the conglomerate (now technically known as Alphabet, Inc.) has a market cap of more than $2 trillion.

If not for the Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake Super Bowl halftime show that culminated in an infamous wardrobe malfunction, we might not have YouTube today. In an interview with , company co-founder Jawed Karim revealed that this event is partly what spurred a group of ex-Paypal employees to create the video-streaming platform in 2005. Their goal was to allow people to capture and upload moments like that-we'd later call them "viral moments"-and spread them across the web for people to watch without needing a TV. The platform has attracted viewers by the billions in the years since, not just to watch existing content but to create and share their own, eventually prompting an entire generation to turn to their computers instead of other technologies for entertainment, news, and more.

It's hard to pinpoint the first viral video, but one possibility that gets thrown around is 2006's comedy sketch "Shoes" by Liam Kyle Sullivan, about a disappointed young woman and her search for footwear. Though it seems almost quaint in comparison to the stuff that gets sent around now, it racked up more than 68 million views on its official channel alone, offering the world a glimpse into the future of overnight viral sensations.

Uniquely engineered for engagement and use on the go (at least in comparison to Facebook and its predecessor, MySpace), Twitter would change the way we react to world events, both large and small, by enabling us to comment in real-time and eliminating our collective need to "think before we speak." It simultaneously elevated meme creation to an art form and created a platform to validate everyone's voice equally, from marginalized communities to hate groups. But before it went on to impact the globe, Twitter-originally known as Twttr-was just in the prototype stage in March 2006 when creator Jack Dorsey sent out the first published tweet, which read: "just setting up my twttr." A few months later, Twitter launched to the public.

In early 2007, Netflix started offering a small selection of TV shows and movies online for its users to stream straight from their devices, in addition to the DVDs-by-mail rental service that first put the company on the map. Today, Netflix is a full-fledged TV and movie studio with a $300 billion market cap that pumps out original dramas, blockbuster movies, and addictive documentaries that regularly earn critical acclaim and viral clout across social media. The company's success hasn't just changed the way we all consume content-it's altered the direction of studios like Warner Bros., Paramount, and Disney, leading to an influx of competing streaming platforms like HBO Max and Disney+.

Apple's release of the first iPhone on June 29, 2007, more or less transformed the way we engage with the internet-and everyone else-overnight. Its sleek portability and continuously expanding list of features made it possible to talk, work, shop, and do just about everything else with a swipe of the finger. The iPhone has continued to advance its capabilities with each new iteration, further making the internet something that dominates our moment-to-moment existence.

By 2010, the social media world had migrated from Friendster to MySpace to Twitter, so Instagram-a new image-based platform co-founded by former Google employee Kevin Systrom-felt like a reduction in services when it launched on October 6, 2010. But in its infancy, Instagram allowed people to share photos (mostly of food and cats) without all of the more detailed interactions of those other platforms, which is probably why it has become one of the most popular social media apps of all time, leading to its $1 billion sale to Facebook in 2012.

Over the course of two or three days in February 2015, everyone on social media, and then everyone on the planet, saw a photo of a dress that either looked black and blue or white and gold, based on some viral-friendly physiological phenomenon. According to The Guardian, the photo began its life as a simple social post about a dress that a woman in Lancashire, UK, was planning to wear to her daughter's wedding. Arguments about the color broke out on the wedding participants' private pages, and the photo soon found its way onto Buzzfeed's Tumblr page, where more than 25 million people viewed it within 24 hours. And it only got bigger from there. There actually is an explanation behind the color confusion that's too long to go into here, but the bottom line is that half of the world thought that dress was white and gold, and those people were wrong.

Building on the premise of the long-running animated series, gaming company Niantic created using augmented reality that placed the iconic Pokémon into the real world (viewed through a smartphone) for players to capture as they went about their daily business. Faster than you can say "Pac Man fever," this became everyone's obsession, whether they were taking the dog for a walk or coming home from work. Within a month of its July 6, 2016, release, the app had been downloaded 100 million times, on its way to grossing around $950 million in revenue by year's end. It also became a shared experience, with fans taking to social media to share Pokémon gym locations and organize meet-ups for in-game events (though there are some places you definitely shouldn't play it).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
20 of the Most Important Moments in Internet History

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From its first steps out of the primordial sludge of the ARPANET days to its current role as a vessel for cat videos and Netflix, we're taking a look at just some of the most important moments in internet history.

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LOPEZ, Maika Anthonet

Netflix was founded in 1997 by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph in a small California city called Scotts Valley in Santa Cruz county.

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Netflix, the top video streaming service in the world, started out by shipping DVDs to customers by mail. Now it consumes more than 15 percent of the world's internet bandwidth and has subscribers in more than 190 countries.

How did it achieve such staggering success? It has been a long road of trial and error, luck, and incredibly good timing. This article covers everything, including how Netflix started, when Netflix began streaming titles online, plus all the key milestones in the company's journey to becoming one of the best streaming services.

The Early Days of Netflix

Netflix was founded in 1997 by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph in a small California city called Scotts Valley in Santa Cruz county. Reed Hastings has said the idea was sparked by a $40 fine he got for renting the movie Apollo 13 from long-dead Blockbuster and returning it six weeks late. While working out at the gym one day, the sting of the fine inspired him to think up a service that allowed one to order a movie online and get it by mail.

According to Marc Randolph, however, this story is not true and was just a marketing gag. Instead, in early 1997, Reed was the CEO of the company they worked for (Pure Atria), and Marc was its VP of Corporate Marketing. Because a looming merger with another firm would leave them both out of a job, Marc says Reed had told him, "Let's come up with an idea and you can run it and I'll fund it."

As they carpooled to work every day from their homes in Santa Cruz to Silicon Valley, Marc, who wanted to start something like Amazon.com, pitched all sorts of e-commerce ideas to Reed: surfboards, custom-built baseball bats, personalized dog food, and home-delivery shampoo. To all of them, Reed's reply was simply, "that will never work."

Then, Marc heard of a hot new product invented in Japan called the DVD. He realized DVDs would soon replace VHS Cassettes as the home viewing standard. After a bit of brainstorming in the car on Highway 17, Reed was sold on the idea.

On a hot summer day in 1997, Marc and Reed walked into Logos Books & Records in Santa Cruz, bought a CD of Patsy Cline's greatest hits, and mailed it to Reed's house a few blocks across the town. When the CD arrived intact, they knew they had found their ticket to e-commerce glory.

On August 29, 1997, Netflix was registered and set up using at least $1.9 million from Reed Hastings. Other investors later supplemented this capital. Reed Hastings, 37, became Chairman with 70% ownership, and Marc Randolph, 39, the CEO and a minority owner.

After a few iterations in its first few years, Netflix eventually crafted a successful business model: a subscription-based service with no due dates or late fees and unlimited access to content at $19.95. It also had a "Queue" that subscribers use to specify the order in which DVDs should be mailed to them and a delivery system that automatically mails out a DVD as soon as the previous DVD is returned.

At first, Netflix would pack the DVDs in white envelopes, and it wasn't until 2000 that Netflix changed them to yellow envelopes. But it only took the company one year to switch to the iconic red envelopes we're more familiar with. The DVDs arrived in a thin package with a postage-paid return sleeve inside, and Netflix covered all postage costs.

This formula proved a hit, and Netflix steadily added subscribers. Within five years of launch, Netflix was shipping millions of DVDs daily.

Key Netflix Milestones

August 29, 1997: Netflix is registered in Scotts Valley, California. The service is called Kibble in beta testing, a kind of dog food, to remind the team of the old advertising adage that "It doesn't matter how good your dog food advertising campaign is if the dogs won't eat the dog food."

April 14, 1998: The website launches as Netflix at 9 am. The video library has approximately 900 titles. Marc orders the movie Casino as a test, and it works. Within 15 minutes, the website crashes as other orders start coming in, forcing them to run to the store to buy more servers. At the end of the first day, they booked 137 orders.

1999: 239,000 subscribers sign up. Netflix's video library expands to 3,100 titles. After a meeting between Marc and Sony goes bad, and growth becomes sluggish, Reed demotes Marc to President and takes over as CEO.

2000: Reed Hastings approaches former Blockbuster CEO John Antioco and asks him to buy Netflix for $50 million. During the meeting, John turns him down and laughs at Reed and the Netflix team.

2001: Netflix hits one million subscribers and continues to grow.

2002: Netflix goes public in May. The IPO raises $82.1 million and values Netflix at $309.7 million. Reed has 500,000 shares, and Marc has 166,000 shares.

Netflix opens regional warehouses, bringing overnight delivery in response to subscriber complaints that it took too long to get their DVDs.

2003: Marc Randolph leaves Netflix and sells his shares.

2006: Netflix finally becomes profitable, generating more than $80 million. Subscribers rise to 6.3 million.

2007: Netflix begins streaming content, delivering directly to TVs, computers, and tablets through its Watch Now service. The first trial is in Canada. The service launches with 1,000 titles and is included free in Netflix's $5.99 per month physical DVD subscription tier.

2010: Netflix changes its focus to streaming and introduces it to the United States. Reed tells investors, "Three years ago we were a DVD by-mail company that offered some streaming. We are now a streaming company which also offers DVD by mail."

Blockbuster files for bankruptcy.

2011: Netflix splits its streaming business and its DVD rental business into two distinct subscription packages: Netflix for streaming and Qwikster for DVD rentals. Reed reverses the unpopular decision in less than a month after 800,000 subscribers abandon Netflix.

2012: Netflix starts making original shows. Its first show is Lilyhammer, followed by House of Cards in 2013. Since then, it has produced over 1,900 originals (becoming one of the best streaming services for original content), many of which, like Squid Game and The Crown, have gone on to be tremendously popular and won many awards.

2013: Netflix introduces user-profiles and rolls this feature out to all Netflix subscribers in August.

2015: Netflix is present in 50 countries.

2016: Netflix goes live in 130 countries simultaneously and adds local languages to its user interface, subtitles, and dubbing.

2017: Netflix officially hits 100 million subscribers worldwide.

2021: Netflix hits 209 million subscribers in over 190 countries. Notable exceptions are North Korea, Syria, China, and Iran. It has more than 15,000 titles across all its international libraries and earns over $25 billion in annual revenues. The company introduces mobile games, allowing users to play games on Netflix.

2022: Netflix loses 200,000 subscribers in the first quarter, the first time in over ten years.

The Future of Netflix

Netflix is aggressively creating original content for local audiences. According to Dorothy Ghettuba, the head of African Programming, it is no longer necessary to go to Hollywood. With Netflix, one can be a superstar in their backyard and export their content to the world.

Over the years, Netflix has gained competitors, including Disney+, Hulu, ESPN+, Prime Video, HBO Max, and YouTube TV. These competitors invest heavily in different ways to entertain their audiences. To stay ahead of the pack, Netflix may have to embrace new emerging technologies and try to keep its content fresh.

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How and When Did Netflix Start? A Brief History of the Company

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Netflix, the top video streaming service in the world, started out by shipping DVDs to customers by mail. Now it consumes more than 15 percent of the world's internet bandwidth and has subscribers in more than 190 countries. How did it achieve such staggering success?

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2001: Wikipedia opens to the world

The beginning of the end for encyclopedia salesmen. Wikipedia launched with its first edit on January 15, 2001, and fast became the go-to source of information. By 2006, the site had published over 1 million articles.

https://blog.internode.on.net/2021/01/21/15-moments-that-shaped-the-internet/

- Louise R. Francisco

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The internet turns 52 this year with no grey hairs in sight. Talk about ageing well!

It's given us half a century of delight and distraction with online shopping, instant communication, viral dance moves, memes, and more - forever changing the way we live, work, and play.

So, in celebration of the invisible information superhighway, we've picked out a list of its pivotal moments. Follow along on our nostalgic stroll through the internet's history and, in the comments below, let us know which events you think we've missed.
1936: H.G Wells predicts the 'World Brain'
Perhaps best known as the author of 'The War of the Worlds', futurist H.G Wells foresaw the advent of the internet in a 1936 collection of essays: " The time is close at hand when any student, in any part of the world, will be able to sit with his projector in his own study at his or her own convenience to examine any book, any document, in an exact replica."

And that wasn't the only prediction of Wells that came true - he also anticipated genetic engineering, lasers, and Meryl Streep as the next James Bond. Okay, maybe not that last one.
1969: ARPANET is switched on
In an event that is widely regarded as the web's 'first breath', Leonard Kleinrock and his team succeeded in sending the first computer to computer message from UCLA to Stanford on September 2, 1969. The intended message was the word "login" but only the first two letters made it through before the system crashed.
1971: Birth of the computer virus
Written by Bob Thomas of BBN Technologies, Creeper was a self-replicating program that copied itself to computers connected to the ARPANET to display the message: "I'm the creeper, catch me if you can!". It was eventually caught by Reaper - the first antivirus program.
1985: The first domain name
Symbolics.com was registered on March 15, 1985. Since then, over 359.8 million domain names have been registered - including Voice.com, which was sold for a record-breaking $30 million in 2019.
1991: The World Wide Web begins
Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist working at CERN, invents the "World Wide Web" as an easy way to share information. Though we often use the "Internet" and the "Web" interchangeably, they don't actually refer to the same thing. The Internet hosts the Web, which was Berners-Lee's breakthrough.
1990: Online searching gets easier
While many of us spent our days at university avoiding lectures and frequenting the pub, Alan Emtage developed a software called Archie, which was the world's first search engine. Clearly the guy you wish you had for your final group project.
1992: "Surfing The Internet" is invented
Jean Armour Polly coined the phrase in an article for the Wilson Library Bulletin, a monthly magazine for professional librarians. You can still read the original online here.
1994: First Online Order
A large pepperoni, mushroom, and extra cheese pizza from Pizza Hut is ordered online, becoming the first transaction on the Web. No word on how many have been ordered since (but we think it's at least 5).
2001: Wikipedia opens to the world
The beginning of the end for encyclopedia salesmen. Wikipedia launched with its first edit on January 15, 2001, and fast became the go-to source of information. By 2006, the site had published over 1 million articles.
2004: Facebook makes (a lot) of friends
Before it became a platform for your distant family members to comment on your profile picture, Facebook began as a way for college students to connect with people at the same school. It went live on February 4, 2004 and gained 1,000 registered users in its first night.
2007: Apple reinvents the phone
With 91% of internet use conducted through mobile, we couldn't have a greatest hits list without mentioning smartphones. The birth of the modern smartphone began in 2007 on a stage in California as Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone. It was a revolutionary design, swapping a stylus and keypad with a touchscreen.
2009: The Labor Government announces the NBN
The aim was to replace the nation's ageing copper network with optic fibre to give Australian's everywhere a fast, future-proof connection. Here at Internode, we're proud to offer a wide range of great-value NBN plans for all needs.
2014: The ALS ice bucket challenge
The ice bucket challenge was a phenomenon in the summer of 2014 in which people filmed themselves dumping a bucket of iced water over their heads in order to promote awareness for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). More than 17 million people posted photos online and over $100m was raised worldwide in a 30-day period. A great example of the internet as a force for good.
2019: 'Influencer' joins the dictionary
The internet has even changed the way we speak. 'Influencer' is a term used to describe individuals with a large following on social media. Other words in the dictionary that originated online include 'selfie', 'srsly', 'LOL', and 'OMG'.
Today:
As of November 2020, there were 4.66 billion active internet users worldwide - almost 59 percent of the global population. Ask any of them what life would be like without the net and the answer will likely be either 'unimaginable' or 'very, very boring'. We think both apply.

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Internode Blog " 15 moments that shaped the internet

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The internet turns 52 this year with no grey hairs in sight. Talk about ageing well! It's given us half a century of delight and distraction with online shopping, instant communication, viral dance moves, memes, and more - forever changing the way we live, work, and play.

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https://youtu.be/QB7qWQ9fn1k

https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/web/g29622347/greatest-moments-internet-history/

Sophia Rodrigo

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https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/652246/most-important-moments-internet-history#:~:text=17.%20Apple%20Releases,to%2Dmoment%20existence.

- Carmela Arce

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20 of the Most Important Moments in Internet History

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From its first steps out of the primordial sludge of the ARPANET days to its current role as a vessel for cat videos and Netflix, we’re taking a look at just some of the most important moments in internet history.

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In October 2010, Instagram launched and quickly became one of the most prolific social media platforms in existence.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/web/g29622347/greatest-moments-internet-history/

- Katherine Livelo

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The 50 Greatest Moments in Internet History

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From llamas on the loose to the colors of a dress that nobody could agree on, here are the most memorable moments since the inception of the Internet.

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Jerry Yang and David Filo, electrical engineering students, created a human-edited web directory in January 1994. It was originally named "Jerry and David's guide to the World Wide Web" however, after two months, they renamed it "Yahoo." Yahoo is an abbreviation of "Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle." This has provided a hand-chosen list of sites for users to head to, broken down by categories such as sports, art, news, and more.

- Patricia Lopez

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The internet is a wonderful thing, isn't it? Believe it or not, it's been around in the form that we now take for granted since the mid-1980s, and more primitive versions existed for two decades before that. All of which is to say, its evolution, and its ups and downs, are full of some fascinating details, detours, and events. Check out this list of the 20 most important moments in internet history.

The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network ( ARPANET) was a precursor to the internet that allowed computers across the country to interact with each other and share information on a single network via telephone lines. It was funded by the U.S. Department of Defense early on, according to History, and was mainly intended for communication within government agencies and universities. On October 29, 1969, the first ARPANET message was sent from a computer at UCLA to one located at Stanford University-well, part of a message, anyway. The computer at UCLA managed to get an "L" and an "O" to Stanford before a bug crashed the network-in a more perfect world, the first message from ARPANET would have been "LOGIN." Though comparatively simple compared to today's tech, ARPANET served a purpose until 1990, when it was officially decommissioned.

On March 15, 1985, the first .com domain name was registered to a computer company out of Massachusetts named Symbolics. As Venture Beat points out, Symbolics.com planted its flag in the ground a year before HP and IBM and two years before Apple decided to take the .com plunge for themselves. Today, there are well over 150 million .coms registered online. Symbolics went out of business in 1993, but its historic domain has since been purchased and now acts as a quaint online museum dedicated to the history of the internet.

First proposed by British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 to find a better way for scientists to share data, the World Wide Web is a collection of web pages that are accessible through the network of computers called the internet ( World Wide Web and internet aren't interchangeable terms). To achieve it, Berners-Lee wrote three technologies-URL, HTML, and HTTP-that would help create a user-friendly interface for the internet that allowed it to enter everyday use within two or three years. In 1991, Berners-Lee published the first-ever webpage, which was basically just filled with instructions on how to actually use the World Wide Web. You can still view it here.

In 1991, when a group of researchers working in the computer lab at the University of Cambridge wanted a hands-off way to keep track of whether or not the community coffeepot was full, they rigged up a camera to monitor it for them. The rudimentary webcam-along with some programming wizardry-would take three live images of the pot every minute and send the 128x128 grayscale pics to a shared server that all the researchers could access from their computer network. By 1993, as the World Wide Web was beginning to connect the globe, the live coffee pot feed gained its own website, and by 1998, more than 2 million people had visited to see if the researchers were being properly caffeinated. When the live stream was shut down in 2001, it was featured on the front page of The Washington Post. As for the coffee pot itself, it was sold at auction that same year for £3350, or about $4700.

To get the country hooked on the internet for life, executives at AOL knew they first had to offer a taste to let people know what they were missing. That's exactly why the company printed untold millions of internet trial CDs starting in 1993, allowing people to go online for hundreds or thousands of hours, free of charge. It was an absolutely massive undertaking by the company-CDs were mailed to homes, included with purchases at Barnes & Noble and Best Buy, and even stuffed into cereal boxes. But despite many of these disks winding up as coasters, Frisbees, or landfill fodder, the campaign helped AOL turn into a $150 billion company with more than 25 million users within a decade.

Electrical engineering students Jerry Yang and David Filo created a human-edited web directory they initially dubbed "Jerry and David's guide to the World Wide Web" in January 1994. Two months later, they shrewdly renamed it "Yahoo," an abbreviation of "Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle," and a new way to browse the web was born. Yahoo's directory offered a hand-chosen list of sites for users to head to, broken down by categories like sports, art, news, and more. In the days when people were feeling their way around the web, Yahoo's personal touch was invaluable. Though Google firmly rules the roost now, back in 1998, Yahoo's sites were getting nearly 100 million hits per day as users decided which virtual destinations they wanted to head to next.

Billed as one of the world's first free web-based email providers back in 1996, Hotmail gave users an opportunity to access their inbox anywhere in the world. It wouldn't be long before Microsoft acquired the company in December 1997 for $400 million-and by 1999, the service registered more than 30 million active members. The brand itself was on borrowed time after the sale, though: By the early 2010s, Hotmail was rebranded as Outlook.com, which now boasts more than 400 million users.

When Wi-Fi first became commercially available to consumers in 1997, it gave people a look at a world without pesky cables tethering them to their modems whenever they wanted to browse the web. Simply put, the technology allows digital devices to exchange data via radio waves, according to Scientific American, and it's now a standard feature on everything from tablets and phones to video game consoles and robot vacuums. Unsurprisingly, it was Apple that really catapulted Wi-Fi into the public consciousness by using it in their 1999 iBook laptops. (To get a sense of how big this tech was, just listen to the applause Steve Jobs got when he demonstrated wireless internet browsing to a crowd in 1999.)

The music industry would never again be the same after Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker created Napster, the peer-to-peer internet software that allowed users to share digital audio files for free. Although the company was eventually done in by a plethora of lawsuits over copyright issues, millions of consumers flocked to the service, fundamentally changing the way people valued their favorite music. Physical record sales were forever impacted by the program, but Napster did offer an early blueprint for (legal) digital storefronts like iTunes and Google Music.

On January 15, 2001, Wikipedia began as a free online encyclopedia for people looking to research new topics, cram before a big test, or just settle a bar bet. But the very same open-platform nature that allows the information to be accessible for all also means people can add their own revisions and edits to pages, without the rigorous fact-checking you get from a traditional encyclopedia. While it's credited with helping democratize knowledge, getting a second source for all of that newfound trivia can't hurt, either.

On February 4, 2004, Facebook debuted as Thefacebook, an online directory created by Mark Zuckerberg strictly for Harvard students that became the most powerful social network in the world. Not only has it connected people across the globe and, more importantly, reunited high school friends who share a love for cat videos, but it precipitated an ongoing reckoning about the harmful effects of social media on individuals, politics, and societies around the globe.

Though other search engines beat it to market, Google has outlasted pretty much all of them, (sorry, Ask Jeeves) and has since morphed into an all-encompassing tech company that includes mapping technology, email systems, a music service, a streaming video game platform, and almost anything else you can imagine. And much of this success can be traced back to the company's decision to go public on August 19, 2004. Back then, The New York Times wrote that Google was valued at $27 billion-today, the conglomerate (now technically known as Alphabet, Inc.) has a market cap of more than $2 trillion.

If not for the Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake Super Bowl halftime show that culminated in an infamous wardrobe malfunction, we might not have YouTube today. In an interview with , company co-founder Jawed Karim revealed that this event is partly what spurred a group of ex-Paypal employees to create the video-streaming platform in 2005. Their goal was to allow people to capture and upload moments like that-we'd later call them "viral moments"-and spread them across the web for people to watch without needing a TV. The platform has attracted viewers by the billions in the years since, not just to watch existing content but to create and share their own, eventually prompting an entire generation to turn to their computers instead of other technologies for entertainment, news, and more.

It's hard to pinpoint the first viral video, but one possibility that gets thrown around is 2006's comedy sketch "Shoes" by Liam Kyle Sullivan, about a disappointed young woman and her search for footwear. Though it seems almost quaint in comparison to the stuff that gets sent around now, it racked up more than 68 million views on its official channel alone, offering the world a glimpse into the future of overnight viral sensations.

Uniquely engineered for engagement and use on the go (at least in comparison to Facebook and its predecessor, MySpace), Twitter would change the way we react to world events, both large and small, by enabling us to comment in real-time and eliminating our collective need to "think before we speak." It simultaneously elevated meme creation to an art form and created a platform to validate everyone's voice equally, from marginalized communities to hate groups. But before it went on to impact the globe, Twitter-originally known as Twttr-was just in the prototype stage in March 2006 when creator Jack Dorsey sent out the first published tweet, which read: "just setting up my twttr." A few months later, Twitter launched to the public.

In early 2007, Netflix started offering a small selection of TV shows and movies online for its users to stream straight from their devices, in addition to the DVDs-by-mail rental service that first put the company on the map. Today, Netflix is a full-fledged TV and movie studio with a $300 billion market cap that pumps out original dramas, blockbuster movies, and addictive documentaries that regularly earn critical acclaim and viral clout across social media. The company's success hasn't just changed the way we all consume content-it's altered the direction of studios like Warner Bros., Paramount, and Disney, leading to an influx of competing streaming platforms like HBO Max and Disney+.

Apple's release of the first iPhone on June 29, 2007, more or less transformed the way we engage with the internet-and everyone else-overnight. Its sleek portability and continuously expanding list of features made it possible to talk, work, shop, and do just about everything else with a swipe of the finger. The iPhone has continued to advance its capabilities with each new iteration, further making the internet something that dominates our moment-to-moment existence.

By 2010, the social media world had migrated from Friendster to MySpace to Twitter, so Instagram-a new image-based platform co-founded by former Google employee Kevin Systrom-felt like a reduction in services when it launched on October 6, 2010. But in its infancy, Instagram allowed people to share photos (mostly of food and cats) without all of the more detailed interactions of those other platforms, which is probably why it has become one of the most popular social media apps of all time, leading to its $1 billion sale to Facebook in 2012.

Over the course of two or three days in February 2015, everyone on social media, and then everyone on the planet, saw a photo of a dress that either looked black and blue or white and gold, based on some viral-friendly physiological phenomenon. According to The Guardian, the photo began its life as a simple social post about a dress that a woman in Lancashire, UK, was planning to wear to her daughter's wedding. Arguments about the color broke out on the wedding participants' private pages, and the photo soon found its way onto Buzzfeed's Tumblr page, where more than 25 million people viewed it within 24 hours. And it only got bigger from there. There actually is an explanation behind the color confusion that's too long to go into here, but the bottom line is that half of the world thought that dress was white and gold, and those people were wrong.

Building on the premise of the long-running animated series, gaming company Niantic created using augmented reality that placed the iconic Pokémon into the real world (viewed through a smartphone) for players to capture as they went about their daily business. Faster than you can say "Pac Man fever," this became everyone's obsession, whether they were taking the dog for a walk or coming home from work. Within a month of its July 6, 2016, release, the app had been downloaded 100 million times, on its way to grossing around $950 million in revenue by year's end. It also became a shared experience, with fans taking to social media to share Pokémon gym locations and organize meet-ups for in-game events (though there are some places you definitely shouldn't play it).

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20 of the Most Important Moments in Internet History

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From its first steps out of the primordial sludge of the ARPANET days to its current role as a vessel for cat videos and Netflix, we're taking a look at just some of the most important moments in internet history.

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On February 4, 2004, a Harvard sophomore named Mark Zuckerberg launches The Facebook, a social media website he had built in order to connect Harvard students with one another. By the next day, over a thousand people had registered, and that was only the beginning.

-Brittany Gaudiel

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In 2004, a group of friends at college created an innovative new social media platform with the aim of connecting Harvard students through an online community.

14 years later, Facebook is one the most influential social networks in the world, boasting approximately 2.2 billion monthly users.

So how did a social network created in the confines of a Harvard dorm room go from being a student trend to an unprecedented, worldwide phenomenon?

It all began in 2003, when Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg created an online programme called "Facemash", which allowed users to objectify fellow students by comparing photos of their faces and selecting who they deemed as "hotter".

While Zuckerberg faced punishment from the Harvard administration and narrowly escaped expulsion from the college altogether for his actions, "Facemash" provided the framework for what was to become Facebook.

Online "face books" already existed at Harvard at the time. These were online directories that featured photos of students alongside some information about them.

There wasn't a single "face book" for the whole student body of Harvard university, which is why Zuckerberg came up with the idea to create one.

On February 4 2004, the first iteration of Facebook was born, then known as thefacebook.com and made available exclusively to Harvard students.

However, the truth about how Facebook came about isn't altogether clear, due to the involvement of three Harvard seniors.

Six days after "TheFacebook" was made live by Zuckerberg and co-founders Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes, they faced accusations by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narendra that the idea for the site had been stolen from them.

According to the Winklevoss twins and Narendra, they had approached Zuckerberg asking for his assistance in creating a social network for Harvard students called "HarvardConnection".

This claim was explored in the 2010 Oscar-winning film The Social Network, which depicted Zuckerberg meeting with the Winklevoss brothers and Narendra to discuss their idea before creating his own without their knowledge.

Following a lawsuit filed against Zuckerberg, eventually all three received a settlement in 2008 that included 1.2 million shares in the company each.

Facebook proved extremely popular with Harvard students when it was first launched, so much so that the site was soon also made available to students at Stanford, Yale and Columbia before expanding to numerous other colleges.

By September 26 2006, anyone in the world could make themselves a Facebook account, as long as they were at least 13 years old and had a valid email address.

One year prior, the social media platform had officially become "Facebook", as opposed to "TheFacebook" as it'd formerly been known.

As the number of people becoming members of Facebook grew, so did the number of people working for the company.

In 2004, Napster co-founder Sean Parker was named president of Facebook. He'd come across the site while browsing the computer of a student at Stanford and had become acquainted with Zuckerberg and Saverin soon thereafter.

At this point, Facebook had moved its headquarters to Palo Alto in California.

Zuckerberg's issues with co-founder and former close friend Saverin were also explored in The Social Network.

Having been chief financial officer and business manager for Facebook since its conception, Saverin was reportedly cut from Facebook by Zuckerberg in 2005 and had his shares in the company diluted.

This led to Saverin filing a lawsuit against Facebook, which was settled outside of court.

Lately, Facebook has become embroiled in controversy concerning the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States and Brexit.

It was recently revealed that personal data from 87 million Facebook accounts had been wrongfully shared with Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm.

This allowed Cambridge Analytica to target Facebook users with political advertisements during the 2016 US presidential elections and the UK referendum, which in turn could have swayed their stance on either topic.

So what does the future hold for Facebook?

In July, it was reported that the company had lost more than $100bn (£78bn) in value, with its share price dropping by nearly 20 per cent.

While Facebook has acquired various other companies such as Instagram to maintain their users' interest, the question of whether its popularity will rise yet again remains uncertain.

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The story of how Facebook was created in a Harvard dorm room

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In 2004, a group of friends at college created an innovative new social media platform with the aim of connecting Harvard students through an online community. 14 years later, Facebook is one the most influential social networks in the world, boasting approximately 2.2 billion monthly users.

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Internet Explorer, the first web browser launched by Microsoft (1995)

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Internet Explorer, the first web browser launched by Microsoft (1995)

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Internet Explorer (IE), World Wide Web (WWW) browser and set of technologies created by Microsoft Corporation, a leading American computer software company. After being launched in 1995, Internet Explorer became one of the most popular tools for accessing the Internet. There were 11 versions between 1995 and 2013.
- Nica Isabela Santiago

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Table of Contents

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Internet Explorer (IE), World Wide Web (WWW) browser and set of technologies created by Microsoft Corporation, a leading American computer software company. After being launched in 1995, Internet Explorer became one of the most popular tools for accessing the Internet. There were 11 versions between 1995 and 2013.

In July 1995 Microsoft released Internet Explorer 1.0 as an add-on to the Windows 95 operating system. By November the company had produced IE 2.0 for both Apple Inc.'s Macintosh and Microsoft's Windows 32-bit operating systems. This release featured support for the virtual reality modeling language (VRML), browser " cookies" (data saved by websites within the user's browser), and secure socket layering (SSL). The success of IE and the rapidly expanding online world led Microsoft to produce several editions of the program in rapid succession. In August 1996 IE 3.0, designed for use with Windows 95, added important components such as Internet Mail and News (an e-mail and newsgroup client) and Windows Media Player, a computer graphics program that allowed users to view GIF (graphics interchange format) and JPEG (joint photographic experts group) files; IE 3.0 also supported MIDI (musical instrument digital interface) sound files. (Although new IE versions for the Macintosh often lagged behind Windows releases, Microsoft never discontinued its support for the Macintosh.)

Microsoft integrated IE 3.0 into its Windows operating system (that is, it came "bundled" ready-to-use within the operating system of personal computers), which had the effect of reducing competition from other Internet browser manufacturers. One of its competitors, Netscape Communications Corporation, the maker of the Navigator Web browser, complained to the federal government, which in May 1998, along with 20 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, sued Microsoft for being an unlawful monopoly under the Sherman Antitrust Act. In April 2000 Judge Thomas Jackson found Microsoft guilty and ordered its breakup. On appeal, however, the breakup order was overturned, but the appeals court did agree that Microsoft was an illegal monopoly.

IE 4.0, which came out in 1997, was tightly integrated into the company's main operating systems, Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows NT. This incarnation replaced Internet Mail and News with Outlook Express, a freeware version of Microsoft Office Outlook, the company's commercial e-mail and newsgroup client. IE 5, released in September 1998, expanded Web design capabilities and allowed for further personalization. IE 6, released in 2001 and designed to work with the Windows XP operating system, featured more privacy and security options. IE 6 was Microsoft's primary Web browser until the 2006 development of IE 7, which was compatible with the Windows Vista operating system. IE 8, which was released in 2009, added more support for Web 2.0 features.

IE 9 was released in 2011 and featured increased speed and compliance with the HyperText Markup Language ( HTML) 5 standards for video and audio. Later that same year, IE 10 brought the browser further into complete adherence to the HTML 5 standards. IE 11, released in 2013, had features built for touch screens such as those on smartphones and tablets. In January 2016 Microsoft discontinued its active technical support for all other versions of Internet Explorer except IE 11. Microsoft Edge replaced Internet Explorer as the company's preferred browser in 2016. Microsoft ended support for IE 11 in June 2022 and announced that the browser would be disabled in a future update of Windows.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica Adam Augustyn.

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Internet Explorer | Browser, Downloads, Versions, & Facts

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Internet Explorer (IE), World Wide Web (WWW) browser and set of technologies created by Microsoft Corporation, a leading American computer software company. After being launched in 1995, Internet Explorer became one of the most popular tools for accessing the Internet. There were 11 versions between 1995 and 2013.

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YouTube's History and Its Impact on the Internet

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YouTube's History and Its Impact on the Internet

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YouTube was founded on Valentine's Day in 2005. It was the brainchild of Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, who were all former employees of Paypal.

The platform, like so many others in Silicon Valley, began as an angel-funded enterprise with makeshift offices in a garage.

- Elysha Gloria

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A brief timeline of YouTube's history and its impact on the internet

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YouTube has come a long way since its inception in 2005. Join us as we take a whistle-stop tour through some key events in YouTube's history.

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https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/twitter-launchesOn July 15, 2006, the San Francisco-based podcasting company Odeo officially releases Twttr—later changed to Twitter.

Chua, Alaris
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/twitter-launches

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On July 15, 2006, the San Francisco-based podcasting company Odeo officially releases Twttr-later changed to Twitter-its short messaging service (SMS) for groups, to the public. Born as a side project apart from Odeo's main podcasting platform, the free application allowed users to share short status updates with groups of friends by sending one text message to a single number ("40404").

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- Luisa Cosare

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The internet turns 52 this year with no grey hairs in sight. Talk about ageing well!

It's given us half a century of delight and distraction with online shopping, instant communication, viral dance moves, memes, and more - forever changing the way we live, work, and play.

So, in celebration of the invisible information superhighway, we've picked out a list of its pivotal moments. Follow along on our nostalgic stroll through the internet's history and, in the comments below, let us know which events you think we've missed.
1936: H.G Wells predicts the 'World Brain'
Perhaps best known as the author of 'The War of the Worlds', futurist H.G Wells foresaw the advent of the internet in a 1936 collection of essays: " The time is close at hand when any student, in any part of the world, will be able to sit with his projector in his own study at his or her own convenience to examine any book, any document, in an exact replica."

And that wasn't the only prediction of Wells that came true - he also anticipated genetic engineering, lasers, and Meryl Streep as the next James Bond. Okay, maybe not that last one.
1969: ARPANET is switched on
In an event that is widely regarded as the web's 'first breath', Leonard Kleinrock and his team succeeded in sending the first computer to computer message from UCLA to Stanford on September 2, 1969. The intended message was the word "login" but only the first two letters made it through before the system crashed.
1971: Birth of the computer virus
Written by Bob Thomas of BBN Technologies, Creeper was a self-replicating program that copied itself to computers connected to the ARPANET to display the message: "I'm the creeper, catch me if you can!". It was eventually caught by Reaper - the first antivirus program.
1985: The first domain name
Symbolics.com was registered on March 15, 1985. Since then, over 359.8 million domain names have been registered - including Voice.com, which was sold for a record-breaking $30 million in 2019.
1991: The World Wide Web begins
Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist working at CERN, invents the "World Wide Web" as an easy way to share information. Though we often use the "Internet" and the "Web" interchangeably, they don't actually refer to the same thing. The Internet hosts the Web, which was Berners-Lee's breakthrough.
1990: Online searching gets easier
While many of us spent our days at university avoiding lectures and frequenting the pub, Alan Emtage developed a software called Archie, which was the world's first search engine. Clearly the guy you wish you had for your final group project.
1992: "Surfing The Internet" is invented
Jean Armour Polly coined the phrase in an article for the Wilson Library Bulletin, a monthly magazine for professional librarians. You can still read the original online here.
1994: First Online Order
A large pepperoni, mushroom, and extra cheese pizza from Pizza Hut is ordered online, becoming the first transaction on the Web. No word on how many have been ordered since (but we think it's at least 5).
2001: Wikipedia opens to the world
The beginning of the end for encyclopedia salesmen. Wikipedia launched with its first edit on January 15, 2001, and fast became the go-to source of information. By 2006, the site had published over 1 million articles.
2004: Facebook makes (a lot) of friends
Before it became a platform for your distant family members to comment on your profile picture, Facebook began as a way for college students to connect with people at the same school. It went live on February 4, 2004 and gained 1,000 registered users in its first night.
2007: Apple reinvents the phone
With 91% of internet use conducted through mobile, we couldn't have a greatest hits list without mentioning smartphones. The birth of the modern smartphone began in 2007 on a stage in California as Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone. It was a revolutionary design, swapping a stylus and keypad with a touchscreen.
2009: The Labor Government announces the NBN
The aim was to replace the nation's ageing copper network with optic fibre to give Australian's everywhere a fast, future-proof connection. Here at Internode, we're proud to offer a wide range of great-value NBN plans for all needs.
2014: The ALS ice bucket challenge
The ice bucket challenge was a phenomenon in the summer of 2014 in which people filmed themselves dumping a bucket of iced water over their heads in order to promote awareness for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). More than 17 million people posted photos online and over $100m was raised worldwide in a 30-day period. A great example of the internet as a force for good.
2019: 'Influencer' joins the dictionary
The internet has even changed the way we speak. 'Influencer' is a term used to describe individuals with a large following on social media. Other words in the dictionary that originated online include 'selfie', 'srsly', 'LOL', and 'OMG'.
Today:
As of November 2020, there were 4.66 billion active internet users worldwide - almost 59 percent of the global population. Ask any of them what life would be like without the net and the answer will likely be either 'unimaginable' or 'very, very boring'. We think both apply.

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Internode Blog " 15 moments that shaped the internet

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The internet turns 52 this year with no grey hairs in sight. Talk about ageing well! It's given us half a century of delight and distraction with online shopping, instant communication, viral dance moves, memes, and more - forever changing the way we live, work, and play.

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October 29, 1969 - ARPANET launched the first iteration of the internet

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October 29, 1969 - ARPANET launched the first iteration of the internet

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Relator, Jen Leann Meziah

https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/tech-takes/how-does-the-internet-work#:~:text=It%20works%20by%20using%20a,where%20you're%20using%20it.

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As you're reading this article, you're contributing to history. Over the last fifty years, technology and the functionality of the internet have transformed to become the convenient systems we use in our daily lives.

But as you might have guessed, the internet didn't always look this way, nor was it so popular. In fact, in the year 2000, only 52% of US adults said they used the internet; but in 2018, that number jumped to 82% [1].

From the query that got you here in the first place: "how does the internet work?" to shopping online and communicating with family and friends, the internet has completely changed the way we live, collaborate, and learn. But where did this all get started? And how did the internet evolve into the ubiquitous system we know it as today?

The internet plays a significant role in our daily lives

In the year 2000, only 52% of US adults used the internet [1]

In 2018, that number jumped to 89%

In 2013, US adults who didn't use broadband internet at home but owned smartphones was just 8%

In 2018, that number increased to 20%

To fully understand how the internet works and how we got here, we'll need to start from the beginning.

A Brief History of the Internet

On October 29, 1969, an organization called ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency) launched the first iteration of the internet (also known as ARPANET) connecting four major computers at The University of Utah, UCSB, UCLA, and Stanford Research Institute [2].

When this network of computers was connected, universities were able to access files and transmit information from one organization to the other, as well as internally.

As researchers developed the system, they continued to connect computers from other universities, including MIT, Harvard, and Carnegie Mellon. Eventually, ARPANET was renamed "internet."

Who used the internet in this stage?

In its earliest days, the internet was only used by computer experts, scientists, engineers, and librarians who had to learn a complicated system in order to use it, but as the technology improved and consumers adapted, it became an essential tool for people around the globe.

How and when did the functionality of the internet change?

The 1970s was a serious time of transition for the internet. Email was introduced in 1972, libraries across the country were linked, and above all, information exchange became more seamless thanks to Transport Control Protocol and Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) architecture.

The invention of these protocols helped to standardize how information was sent and received over the web, making the delivery more consistent, regardless of where or how you're accessing the internet.

When did the internet become user-friendly?

Then in 1986, the National Science Foundation took the development of the internet to the next echelon by funding NSFNET, a network of supercomputers throughout the country.

These supercomputers laid the groundwork for personal computing, bridging the gap between computers being used exclusively for academic purposes and computers used to perform daily tasks.

In 1991, The University of Minnesota developed the first user-friendly internet interface, making it easier to access campus files and information. The University of Nevada at Reno continued to develop this usable interface, introducing searchable functions and indexing.

When did consumers begin using the internet?

As the internet's development continued to evolve and shift focus, the National Science Foundation discontinued its sponsorship of the internet's backbone (NSFNET) in May of 1995.

This change lifted all commercial use limitations on the internet and ultimately, allowed the internet to diversify and grow rapidly. Shortly after, AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy joined Delphi to offer commercial internet service to consumers.

The debut of WiFi and Windows 98 in the late nineties marked the tech industry's commitment to developing the commercial element of the internet. This next step gave companies like Microsoft access to a new audience, consumers (like yourself).

What does internet usage look like today?

Flash-forward to today. It's estimated that three billion people now use the internet, many of whom use it on a daily basis to help them get from Point A to Point B, catch up with loved ones, collaborate at work, or to learn more about important questions like how does the internet work? [3]

As technology changes and the internet weaves its way into just about every aspect of our lives, even more people are expected to use it. In 2030, researchers project there will be 7.5 billion internet users and 500 billion devices connected to the internet [4].

How does the internet work?

Now that you have some background on the evolution of the internet, let's tackle the question at hand: "how does the internet work?"

The internet is a worldwide computer network that transmits a variety of data and media across interconnected devices. It works by using a packet routing network that follows Internet Protocol (IP) and Transport Control Protocol (TCP) [5].

TCP and IP work together to ensure that data transmission across the internet is consistent and reliable, no matter which device you're using or where you're using it.

When data is transferred over the internet, it's delivered in messages and packets. Data sent over the internet is called a message, but before messages get sent, they're broken up into tinier parts called packets.

These messages and packets travel from one source to the next using Internet Protocol (IP) and Transport Control Protocol (TCP). IP is a system of rules that govern how information is sent from one computer to another computer over an internet connection.

Using a numerical address (IP Address) the IP system receives further instructions on how the data should be transferred.

The Transport Control Protocol (TCP) works with IP to ensure transfer of data is dependable and reliable. This helps to make sure that no packets are lost, packets are reassembled in proper sequence, and there's no delay negatively affecting the data quality.

Wondering how the internet works from browser launch to search results? Let's go over the process step-by-step [7] [8] [9].

When you type in a web address into your browser...

Step 1: Your PC or device is connected to the web through a modem or router. Together, these devices allow you to connect to other networks around the globe [6].

Your router enables multiple computers to join the same network while a modem connects to your ISP (Internet Service Provider) which provides you with either cable or DSL internet.

Step 2: Type in a web address, known as a URL (Uniform Resource Locator). Each website has its own unique URL that signals to your ISP where you want to go.

Step 3: Your query is pushed to your ISP which connects to several servers which store and send data like a NAP Server (Network Access Protection) and a DNS (Domain Name Server).

Next, your browser looks up the IP address for the domain name you typed into your search engine through DNS. DNS then translates the text-based domain name you type into the browser into the number-based IP address.

Example: Google.com becomes 64.233.191.255

Step 4: Your browser sends a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) request to the target server to send a copy of the website to the client using TCP/IP.

Step 5: The server then approves request and sends a "200 OK" message to your computer. Then, the server sends website files to the browser in the form of data packets.

Step 6: As your browser reassembles the data packets, the website loads allowing you to learn, shop, browse, and engage.

Step 7: Enjoy your search results!

The future of the internet

Whether you're searching for information on how the internet works, streaming your favorite movie, or browsing the internet for travel deals, it's undeniable that the internet takes us places, and it's going to continue to do so!

While it might not seem like the internet is changing now, chances are, we'll look back and see how far we've come, the differences in how we use this technology, and ultimately, we'll find that we, too, are a part of the internet's history.

A brief history of the internet

Philosophers and authors have conceptualized a shared repository of world knowledge for centuries. How did we get to the internet we know today?

Major breakthroughs [2]

October 29, 1969: ARPANET (later renamed internet) created a successful connection between University of California Los Angeles and the Stanford Research Institute.

Late 1960s: Libraries automate and network catalogs independent of ARPANET.

1970s: Transport Control Protocol and Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) is established, allowing for internet technology to mature. The invention of these protocols helped to standardize how information was sent and received over the web.

1986: National Science Foundation funded NSFNET, which is the 56 Kbps backbone of the internet. There were commercial restrictions in place at this time because federal funds were being used to run and maintain it.

1991: User-friendly internet interface was created.

July 1992: Delphi became the first national commercial online service to offer internet access.

May 1995: All commercial use limitations on the internet disappear. This allowed the internet to diversify and grow rapidly.

1997: WiFi was invented.

1998: Windows 98 hit the market.

2007: Widespread smartphone adoption.

2009: 4G network is introduced.

Today: 3 billion people use the internet. [3]

2030: 7.5 billion projected internet users and 500 billion devices connected to the internet. [4]

How does the internet work?

The internet is a worldwide computer network that transmits a variety of data and media across interconnected devices. It works by using a packet routing network that follows Internet Protocol (IP) and Transport Control Protocol (TCP). [5]

Messages + Packets

Data sent over the internet is called a message

Before messages get sent, they're broken up into tiny parts called packets

Internet Protocol (IP)

Rules that govern how information is sent from one computer to another computer over an internet connection

Specifies how computers should send information to other computers by sending data with an attached numerical address (IP Address)

Public IP Address: Accessible over the internet

Private IP Address: Assigned to a device on a closed network such as a home or business network that's not accessible over the internet

Transport Control Protocol (TCP)

Works with IP to ensure transfer of data is dependable and reliable

No packets lost, no delay negatively affecting data quality, packets reassembled in proper sequence

What happens when you surf the internet...

Step 1: Your PC or device is connected to the web through a modem or router, which allows it to connect to other networks around the globe. [6]

A router allows for multiple computers to join the same network while a modem connects to your Internet Service Provider (ISP) which provides either cable or DSL internet.

Your personal PC is called a client as opposed to a server.

Client computers connect to the internet through an ISP.
Example: Your phone connected to a mobile network or your laptop connected to WiFi.

Servers are computers directly connected to the internet.
Example: Computers that store web pages, sites, or applications.

Step 2: Type in a web address, known as a URL. URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator.

Step 3: Your query is processed and pushed to your ISP. Your ISP has multiple servers which store and send data like a NAP Server (Network Access Protection) and a DNS (Domain Name Server).

Your browser looks up the IP address for the domain name you typed into your browser through DNS.

DNS translates the text-based domain name you type into the browser into the number-based IP address.
Example: Google.com becomes 64.233.191.255

Step 4: Browser sends a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) request to the target server to send a copy of the website to the client using TCP/IP.

HTTP: Language used for internet communication.

HTTPS: Secure version of HTTP, all communications between your browser and website are encrypted.

Step 5: Server approves request and sends a "200 OK" message to client computer. Then, the server sends web page files to browser in the form of data packets.

Step 6: Web page loads as your browser reassembles packets.

Step 7: Enjoy browsing the internet! [7] [8] [9]

Infographic sources:

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How Does the Internet Work (Infographic) | HP® Tech Takes

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As you're reading this article, you're contributing to history. Over the last fifty years, technology and the functionality of the internet have transformed to become the convenient systems we use in our daily lives. But as you might have guessed, the internet didn't always look this way, nor was it so popular.