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| 1990 |
ARPANET ceases to exist.
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is founded by Mitch Kapor.
Archie; Hytelnet; the Internet Toaster (Pictures: Internode, Invisible).
The World comes on-line (world.std.com), becoming the first commercial provider of Internet dial-up access.
Choosing a Name for Your Computer
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| 1991 |
First connection takes place between Brazil, by Fapesp, and the Internet at 9600 baud.
Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS); Gopher; PGP (Pretty Good Privacy).
US High Performance Computing Act (Gore 1) establishes the National Research and Education Network (NREN).
NSFNET backbone upgraded to T3 (44.736Mbps).
World-Wide Web (WWW) released by CERN!
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| 1992 |
Number of hosts breaks 1,000,000.
First MBONE audio multicast (March) and video multicast (November).
Veronica; Internet Hunt; Zen and the Art of the Internet
The term "surfing the Internet" is coined by Jean Armour Polly.
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| 1993 |
InterNIC created by NSF.
United Nations (UN) and US White House come on-line (http://www.whitehouse.gov/).
Worms of a new kind find their way around the Net - WWW Worms (W4), joined by Spiders, Wanderers, Crawlers, and Snakes ...
US National Information Infrastructure Act; corporate interest in Internet. Internet Talk Radio!
Mosaic takes the Internet by storm; WWW proliferates at a 341,634% annual growth rate of service traffic. Gopher's growth is 997%.
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| 1994 |
ARPANET/Internet celebrates 25th anniversary.
Shopping malls arrive on the Internet. Yes, it's true - you can now order pizza from the Hut online.
1st "spam" from AZ law firm and resulting flame war.
WWW edges out telnet to become 2nd most popular service on the Net (behind ftp-data).
Governments explode onto the Web. First Virtual, the first cyberbank, open up for business.
Top 10 Domains by Host #: com, edu, uk, gov, de, ca, mil, au, org, net.
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| 1995 |
Hong Kong police disconnect all but 1 of the colony's Internet providers in search of a hacker. 10,000 people are left without Net access.
Sun launches JAVA on May 23. RealAudio follows shortly.
AOL and Compuserve begin to offer Web access.
Thousands in Minneapolis-St. Paul (USA) lose Net access after transients start a bonfire under a bridge at the Univ of MN causing fiber-optic cables to melt (30 July).
Netscape goes public (IPO); Registration of domain names no longer free.
The Vatican comes on-line (http://www.vatican.va/).
The first official Internet wiretap.
Operation Home Front connects, for the first time, soldiers in the field with their families via the Internet.
Richard White becomes the first person to be declared a munition, under the USA's arms export control laws, because of an RSA file security encryption program tattooed on his arm.
The birth of the search engine; Mobile code (JAVA, JAVAscript), Virtual environments (VRML), Collaborative tools ...
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| 1996 |
US Communications Decency Act (CDA) becomes law in the US.
Domain name tv.com sold to CNET for US $15,000.
New York's Public Access Networks Corp (PANIX) is shut down after repeated SYN attacks by a cracker using methods outlined in a hacker magazine (2600)
A malicious cancelbot is released on USENET wiping out more than 25,000 messages.
Year of the browser wars.
Restrictions on Internet use around the world:
- China: requires users and ISPs to register with the police
- Germany: cuts off access to some newsgroups carried on Compuserve
- Saudi Arabia: confines Internet access to universities and hospitals
- Singapore: requires political and religious content providers to register
with the state
- New Zealand: classifies computer disks as "publications" that can be censored
and seized
- source: Human Rights Watch
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| 1997 |
71,618 mailing lists registered at Liszt.
101,803 Name Servers in whois database.
Longest hostname registered with InterNIC: CHALLENGER.MED.SYNAPSE.UAH.UALBERTA.CA
The Naming of Hosts
Hacks of the Year: Indonesian Govt (19 Jan, 10 Feb, 24 Apr, 30 Jun, 22 Nov), NASA (5 Mar), UK Conservative Party (27 Apr), Spice Girls (14 Nov)
i>Emerging Technologies: Push, Streaming Media
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| 1998 |
Web size estimates range between 275 (Digital) and 320 (NEC) million pages for 1Q.
Electronic postal stamps become a reality, with the US Postal Service allowing stamps to be purchased and downloaded for printing from the Web.
ABCNews.com accidentally posts test US election returns one day early (2 November).
CDA II and a ban on Net taxes are signed into US law (21 October).
Hacks of the Year: US Dept of Commerce (20 Feb), New York Times (13 Sep), China Society for Human Rights Studies (26 Oct), UNICEF (7 Jan)
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| 1999 |
US State Court rules that domain names are property that may be garnished.
IBM becomes the first Corporate partner to be approved for Internet2 access.
MCI/Worldcom, the vBNS provider for NSF, begins upgrading the US backbone to 2.5GBps.
The Web becomes the focal point of British politics as a list of MI6
agents is released on a UK Web site. Though forced to remove the list
from the site, it was too late as the list had already been replicated
across the Net. (15 May)
Hacks of the Year: Star Wars (8 Jan), .tp (Jan), USIA (23 Jan),
E-Bay (13 Mar), US Senate (27 May), NSI (2 Jul), Paraguay Gov't
(20 Jul), AntiOnline (5 Aug), Microsoft (26 Oct), UK Railtrack (31 Dec)
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