| 1980 |
ARPANET grinds to a complete halt on 27 October because of an accidentally-propagated virus.
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| 1981 |
BITNET, the "Because It's Time NETwork" or "Because It's There NETwork."
CSNET (Computer Science NETwork). First split between ARPANET (government defense funded computing) and broader access for general adademics.
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| 1982 |
TCP/IP becomes part of the definition of "Internet."
Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, and UK develop own network.
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| 1983 |
1st name server developed at U. Wisc.
CSNET / ARPANET gateway put in place.
ARPANET split into ARPANET and MILNET.
Desktop workstations come into being.
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| 1984 |
Domain Name System (DNS) introduced.
Number of hosts breaks 1,000.
Japan Unix Network; NetNorth Network; Neuromancer; Moderated newsgroups introduced on USENET.
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| 1985 |
Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (WELL) started.
Symbolics.com is assigned on 15 March to become the first registered domain.
Other firsts: cmu.edu, purdue.edu, rice.edu, ucla.edu (April); css.gov (June); mitre.org, .uk
100 years to the day of the last spike being driven on the cross-Canada railroad, the last Canadian university is connected to NetNorth in a one year effort to have coast-to-coast connectivity.
'Twas the Night Before Start-up
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| 1986 |
NSFNET created (backbone speed of 56Kbps.
NSF establishes 5 super-computing centers to provide high-computing power for all (Princeton, Pittsburgh, UCSD, UIUC, Cornell).
The first Freenet (Cleveland) comes on-line 16 July.
Network News Transfer Protocol (moderated newsgroups); Mail Exchanger (MX) allow non-IP network hosts to have domain addresses.
New England gets cut off from the Net as AT&T suffers a fiber optics cable break. Yes, all seven New England ARPANET trunk lines were in the one severed cable.
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| 1987 |
NSF signs a cooperative agreement to manage the NSFNET backbone with Merit Network, Inc.. (This was *us*, folks!)
Email link established between Germany and China, with the first message from China sent on 20 September.
Number of hosts breaks 10,000; Number of BITNET hosts breaks 1,000.
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| 1988 |
2 November - Internet worm burrows through the Net, affecting ~6,000 of the 60,000 hosts on the Internet.
CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) formed by DARPA in response to the needs exhibited during the Morris worm incident.
NSFNET backbone upgraded to T1 (1.544Mbps).
Internet Relay Chat (IRC) developed by Jarkko Oikarinen.
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| 1989 |
Number of hosts breaks 100,000.
MCI Mail and Compuserve!
Cuckoo's Egg by Clifford Stoll tells the real-life tale of a German cracker group who infiltrated numerous US facilities.
UCLA sponsors the Act One symposium to celebrate ARPANET's 20th anniversary and its decomissioning.
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