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1945
- Vannevar Bush (Science Advisor to president Roosevelt during WW2)
proposes Memex conferencing system. His 1945 Atlantic.
- Monthly article, "As we may think" uses a hypertext like model
for the human thought process.
1957
- Department of Defense establishes the Advanced Research Projects Agency
(ARPA) to boost science and technology in the U.S. in response to Sputnik
the first artificial satellite.
1960 -
- Project Xanadu - A Theodore Holm Nelson idea which was based on non-sequential text
structures. It was expanded to the concept of a World Publishing Repository
with interconnected documents. See also The Curse of Xanadu | WIRED.
1962
- Distributed Communications - The idea for packet switched networks,
proposed in a 1962 Rand report proposing a packet-switching network by
Paul Baran.
- Douglas Englebart, "Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual
Framework". Englebart invented electronic mail, the mouse,
graphical user interfaces, windows, word processing, on-line help,
etc. etc.
1963 - Ivan Sutherland develops Sketchpad using a light pen to make CAD like
drawings on a computer screen as part of his PhD thesis at MIT.
-
1965
- Hypertext - Coined by Theodore Nelson in 1965.
- Hypermedia - Another term coined by Nelson and popularzied with Apple's HyperCard.
- Global Village - Coined by Marshal McLuhan to refer to the effect of Media (TV)
on society.
1967
- Original plan for the Internet distributed at an Association for Computing
Machinery (ACM) Symposium on Operating Principles in Gatlingberg, Tennessee.
- Andries van Dam et al at Brown Univ. built the Hypertext Editing System,
one of the first visual word processors, and FRESS.
1968
- As part of the Augment Project, primarily designed for office automation,
Doug Engelbart of SRI developed a system called NLS (oN Line System) which
had hypertext-like features.
- RAND presents its decentralized network communications concept to ARPA.
1969
- Network Control Protocol (NCP) developed by BBN under contract to ARPA
1970
- UCLA, UCSB, Stanford and U. of Utah connected via initial ARPANet.
- Xerox Corp. assembles a worldclass team of experts in information and
physical sciences to become "the architects of information", establishing the
Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) to create the office of the future.
1971
- In 1971 Ray Tomlinson of BBN came up with an way of sending messages on a
distributed network (E-mail).
1972 ARPANET expanded to 50 hosts
- Alan Kay, at Xerox PARC, envisions a book-sized computer that could be used in place
of paper, after visiting Seymour Papert, at the MIT artificial intelligence lab.
1973 ARPANET establishes the first international connections to England and Norway.
- The Xerox Alto was born. The first personal computer with a graphical user interface.
1974
- Internet Protocol (IP) proposed by Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn at UCLA.
- BBN started Telenet, now Sprintnet, as a commercial version of ARPANET.
1975
- ZOG (now Knowledge Management System (KMS)) at CMU.
1976
- uucp developed by Mike Lesk and Dave Nowitz at Bell Labs.
1978
- Aspen Movie Map, first hypermedia videodisc, created at MIT.
1979
USENET (NetNews) University of North Carolina Steve Bellovin & Tom Truscott
CSNet funded by NSF for institutions that couldn't afford ARPANet connections
1980
Media Lab established at MIT with Nicholas Negroponte as director.
Enquire-WIthin-Upon_Everything, a notebook program allowing links between
arbitrary nodes written by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN.
1982
ARPA enacts TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) and Internet Protocol (IP)
and the DOD adopts it as its standard.
1983
CSNet linked with TCP/IP Gateways to ARPANet forming the Internet.
Transition to TCP/IP completed, MILNET split off.
1984
Filevision from Telos: hypermedia database for Macintosh
Cyberspace - William Gibson coined the word in his 1984 book Neuromancer
after watching kids in video arcades hunch over their games as if
caught up in an imaginary space beyond the screen.
DNS (Domain Name System), introduced by NSF.
1985
OWL introduces Guide, first widely available hypertext program.
1986
NSFNet (56Kbps) backbone started
NoteCard HyperText project - Xeorx PARC
1987
Apple introduces Hypercard, B. Atkinson.
1988
- First T1 (1.5Mbps) links for the Internet
- Robert Morris (a grad student at Cornell) injects his Internet worm
(a self-replicating, self-propagating program) into the Internet
exploting a feature of some UNIX mail systems. It affect more
than 6,000 hosts before it's stopped.
1989
HyperText Project proposed (Tim Berners-Lee at CERN - a collective
of European high-energy physics researchers)
1990
- T1 (1.5Mbps) backbone complete
- ARPANet shut down
- Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) developed by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN
1991
- First World Wide Web (WWW) Servers (Tim Berners-Lee at CERN)
- NSFNet upgrades to T3 (45Mbps)
- Gopher - a UNIX based information system introduced by the U. of Minnesota.
1992
- Commercial Internet eXchange (CIX)
- MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) - Nathaniel Borenstein at Bellcore
- Graphical Web Browsers (Mosaic - Marc Andreessen at NCSA)
1993
- HTML formalized
- Electronic Communities started by Douglas Crockford, Chip Morningstar and Randall Farmer
- InterNIC is created by NSF to provide specific Internet services
including DNS registration, directory service and Database service.
1994
- U.S. National Information Infrastructure (NII) Act passes.
- Jim Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics and Marc Andreessen, inventor of
Mosaic form Netscape Communications Corp. (initially called Mosaic Comm. Corp.)
- Kevin D. Mitnick, an infamous hacker, launches an "IP spoofing attack"
against a computer lab in San Diego. Tsutomu Shimomura, a computer security
expert, at the lab and others helped the FBI track him down.
- The Arizona law firm of Canter & Siegel "spammed" the Internet with E-mail
advertising green card lottery services.
1995
- Transition to a Commercial Internet completed.
- NFS shifts focus to vBNS starting at OC-3 (155Mbs).
- HotJava language released by Sun
1996
- President Clinton and Vice President Gore announce "Next Generation Internet" initiative.
- The Internet II Project started.
See also: Timeline at hpcc.gov.[Baran 1962]. Paul Baran; "On Distributed Communications" Rand Corporation report . [Berners-Lee 1992]. T. Berners-Lee, R. Caillau, J. Groff, and B. Pollerman; World-Wide Web: the Information Universe, Electronic Networking: Research, Applications, Policy, 1, (2), pp. 52-58 (1992). [Berk 1991] "A Hypertext Timeline", in "Hypertext/Hypermedia Handbook", edited by Emily Berk and Joseph Devlin, McGraw-Hill, 1991. [van Bussel 1995] Hypertext [Bush 1945]. Vannevar Bush; As We May Think, Atlantic Monthly 176 (1) pp. 101-108 (1945). On the Internet at www.isg.sfu.ca/~duchier/misc/vbush/ and several other sites. [Egan 1991]. D. E. Egan, M. E. Lesk, R. D. Ketchum, C. C. Lochbaum, J. R. Remde, M. Littman, and T. K. Landauer; Hypertext for the Electronic Library? CORE sample results, Proc. Hypertext '91 299-312, San Antonio, Texas (15-18 Dec. 1991). [Fox 1995]. Ed Fox; "Special issue on digital libraries.," Communications of the ACM, New York (April 1995). [Fuller ]. Richard Buckminster Fuller, Synergetics - Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking [Lesk 1992]. Michael Lesk, "Pricing electronic information," Serials Review, 18, (1-2), pp. 38-40 (Spring-Summer 1992). [Lesk 1994a]. M. Lesk, "Experiments on Access to Digital Libraries: How can Images and Text be Used Together?" Proc. 20th VLDB Conference, pp. 655-667, Santiago, Chile (September, 1994). [Licklider 1965]. Licklider, J. C. R. Libraries of the Future. MIT Press, 1965 [Licklider 1978]. Licklider, J. C. R. and Vezza, Albert. (1978). Applications of Information Technology. Proceedings of the IEEE 66(11) 1330-1346. [McLuhan 1964]. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The extensions of Man, McGraw-Hill, 1964 (london: Sphere Books 1967?) McLuhan, Marshall. (1989). The Global Village: transformations in world life and media in the 21st Century. NY: Oxford University Press. [Negroponte 1970]. Nicholas Negroponte, The Architecture Machine. Cambridge: MIT, 1970 [Nelson 1974]. Theodore Holm Nelson; Compuer Lib/Dream Machines Self published. Re-issued in 1975 and updated and published by Tempus Books in 1987. [Toffler 1970]. Alvin Toffler; Future Shock [Toffler 1980]. Alvin and Heidi Toffler; The Third Wave [Westin 1967]. Alan F. Westin, Privacy and FreedomSee Also: Data Rates
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10/22/95. Send comments and suggestions to mcbride@cc.bellcore.com